The U.S. foreign policy establishment is pushing the administration of Joe Biden to reconsider the landmark 2020 U.S.-Taliban deal, which requires the United States to withdraw its remaining military forces from Afghanistan by May 2021.
Since Biden’s victory in last year’s presidential election, multiple officials have urged the new President to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past the upcoming May 2021 deadline. Some are insisting on changes to the 2020 deal.
“We hope that they’ll be able to negotiate the extension of the May deadline,” said Kelly Ayotte, a co-chair of the Afghanistan Study Group and a former U.S. senator, during an online discussion earlier this month.
The United States and the Taliban forged the landmark deal in February 2020, creating a basis for ending the nearly two-decade-long war in Afghanistan. Under the terms of the deal, the United States is committed to fully withdrawing its military forces from Afghanistan.
In exchange, the Taliban pledged to sever its ties with terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base to threaten the United States and its allies.
Although the implementation of the deal has been slow, both sides have taken steps to fulfil their obligations. Over the past year, the United States has reduced its force level to 2,500 troops, the lowest level since the start of the war in 2001. Meanwhile, the Taliban has refrained from attacking coalition forces.
According to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Taliban has been working alongside the United States against al-Qaeda.
“There are fewer than 200 al-Qaeda fighters left inside of Afghanistan today,” Pompeo said in January. “That’s real progress.”
For the past two decades, the United States has maintained a continuous military occupation of Afghanistan. After invading Afghanistan in October 2001 to oust the then-ruling Taliban regime, which it blamed for hosting al-Qaeda, the United States installed a new Afghan government and began working with it to prevent the Taliban from regaining power.
The seemingly endless war has been devastating for the Afghan people. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the war has resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 Afghan combatants and more than 40,000 Afghan civilians. An estimated 6,000 U.S. military personnel and contractors have lost their lives in the fighting.
In recent years, U.S. officials have grown more critical of the war, with some demanding that the United States end its involvement. Last year, U.S. Senators Rand Paul and Tom Udall called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
“We have soldiers who are heading to fight in this war who weren’t even born when it began,” then-Senator Udall said last July. “Most of the soldiers I have talked to who have come home from Afghanistan believe we should be out of there.”
The past two U.S. administrations both claimed that they wanted to end the war. In May 2014, then-President Barack Obama declared that he was ending the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan and bringing the troops home. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly said that he wanted to withdraw all U.S. forces, insisting that he was moving to end U.S. military involvement.
Despite these broken promises, the February 2020 peace agreement has created a new opening for an end to the war. Several officials have portrayed the agreement as a first step toward a peace deal.
“We sympathize and empathize with the people of Afghanistan,” chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said last year. “I know that they are tired of war, they want the war to end, and we stand with them.”
But the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including current and former officials, academics and media commentators, has remained one of the biggest obstacles to peace. Never fully supporting the terms of the deal, many officials have been mobilizing their forces to prevent a full U.S. withdrawal by the May deadline.
This past November, some establishment leaders implored Congress to maintain some minimal U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. Career U.S. diplomat Ryan Crocker called for “strategic patience” and dismissed ongoing negotiations between the United States and the Taliban as “surrender negotiations.”
Earlier this month, the Congressionally-mandated Afghanistan Study Group issued a major report in which it called on the Biden Administration to embark on “an immediate diplomatic effort to extend the current May 2021 withdrawal date.”
The study group’s report noted that the Afghan people “continue to suffer immeasurably” and that the U.S. people “generally agree that it is time to end this war,” but the group insisted that the United States must maintain a military presence in Afghanistan beyond the May 2021 deadline.
“Expert consultations indicated that around 4,500 troops are required to secure U.S. interests under current conditions and at an acceptable level of risk,” the report said.
As part of the establishment’s growing push to maintain a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, numerous officials have been arguing the Taliban has not upheld its commitments under the deal. They insist that the United States must not withdraw its forces from Afghanistan until the Taliban meets additional conditions.
But additional conditions are not required by the deal. If the United States keeps U.S. troops in Afghanistan past the May 2021 deadline, it will be reneging on its commitments.
Critics of the war hope that President Biden will fulfil the pledges he made during his presidential campaign to end U.S. involvement in endless wars. As a presidential candidate, Biden repeatedly said that he would end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
“I would bring our combat troops home from Afghanistan during my first term,” Biden said in a 2019 interview. “We can end the war responsibly.”
But since then, Biden has sometimes qualified his remarks by saying he wants to maintain a “residual U.S. military presence” in Afghanistan. Recently, administration officials acknowledged that they are reviewing the terms of the deal, apparently looking for ways to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan past the May deadline.
With the Biden Administration now wavering, critics of the war are worried that the new administration will backtrack on the commitment to withdraw U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the May 2021 deadline.
“Nothing has changed about the fact that we continue to review the status of the agreement and the degree of compliance by parties, and no decisions have been made on force structure,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said during a February 12 press conference. “If and when that happens, that’s a decision for the Commander in Chief.”
