By Andrew Doris

Last summer’s tragedy in Afghanistan amplified criticism of President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces. Critics argued the United States should have sustained a light footprint to support American allies, just as it does all over the world.[1]

Rory Stewart claimed U.S. forces “could have remained there indefinitely, in the way that we do in Germany, Japan, South Korea.”[2] Max Boot agreed, noting “U.S. forces are still present in far larger numbers” in those countries “after more than 70 years.”[3] Richard Haass made the same comparison, as did Robert Kagan, again noting troops in “Korea for 70 years.”[4] Condoleezza Rice extended the Korean analogy, and Ryan Crocker said it exemplified the “strategic patience” lacking in Afghanistan.[5] Framed in this way, continued presence seemed an innocuous alternative to the horror in Kabul.

But such comparisons cheapen war, by conflating it with wildly different forms of “support.” Reducing ground combat forces did not render U.S. presence in Afghanistan peaceful, and the prolonged violence these operations inflicted is not a feature of U.S. relationships with other longtime allies. By drawing false analogies to peacetime military garrisons, withdrawal critics understate important costs of unending intervention in a foreign civil war.

This article contrasts war and peace to more fully account for those costs along five dimensions: fiscal, human, soft power, legitimacy, and development. Weighing these costs against what they purchased, it concludes by refuting accusations that Biden’s decision was Trumpian, noting its alignment with broad bipartisan values.

War and Peace

Broad terms like “presence” and “support” euphemize the true nature of American warfare.In Afghanistan, it was predominantly air support—which is military speak for dropping bombs and firing missiles to kill people and blow stuff up. When Stewart maintains that “there haven’t been [U.S.] combat operations in Afghanistan” since 2016, he refers only to ground combat, omitting that the end of ground combat required a massive uptick in air support.[6] In 2018 and 2019, U.S. forces dropped 7,362 and 7,423 munitions a year, respectively—about 20 per day—compared to just 957 bombs in 2015.[7] Fighting from the air instead of the ground reduced risk to U.S. service members and protected allied partners, but it did not make U.S. involvement any less warlike.

Service members themselves know well the difference. As an Army officer, I served in South Korea from 2016–18: the peak of peninsular tensions in recent memory. Even then, I assure you there were no bullets whizzing past my head; no mortars falling on my base; no IEDs on roads around me. We did not take casualties, engage the enemy, or kill civilians in the crossfire. I received no deployment pay. By any meaningful definition, we were at peace—just as we are in Germany and Japan.

Raining bombs on the Taliban was fighting a war. No other allies receive America’s direct participation in a war of such scale, intensity, and duration – and for good reason. War costs more than peace in at least five ways, which affect the wisdom and ethics of indefinitely waging it.

War is More Expensive

The most quantifiable difference is financial cost. Maintaining 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea from 2016–2019 cost taxpayers some $3 billion a year.[8] Presence in Japan, with 55,000 troops, cost $5 billion a year over the same time period.[9] The cost of the war in Afghanistan over this period was more than $40 billion a year, even to support just 9,000 - 13,000 troops.[10]

Following the Doha agreement, President Trump reduced troop levels to 2,500, which presumably reduced the costs for 2021. But as the East Asian comparisons show, the number of troops in the country was not the primary driver of increased costs. Besides, this lighter footprint was only possible because of the agreement to withdraw. Had Biden chosen to stay, such levels would not have sufficed moving forward. A United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Afghanistan study group concluded in February that “around 4,500 troops are required to secure U.S. interests under current conditions”—and conditions were likely to change for the worse once the Taliban launched their summer offensive.[11] Any effective presence beyond 2021 would again have cost taxpayers much more than peacetime garrisons elsewhere.

Critics may prefer to compare these costs against the first twenty years of U.S. involvement in Korea, which featured a larger American footprint than remains today.[12] But this historical version of the analogy is irrelevant to the strategic decision Biden faced. Instead of weighing competing priorities in the same budgetary, domestic, and geopolitical context, it compares the price of containing communism in 1950 or 1970 to the price of disrupting terrorism in 2021. The importance and efficacy of each project can be debated separately—but their costs are incomparable. The only relevant comparison is forward-looking, wherein continued fighting in Afghanistan would be much more expensive.

War is Deadlier

More important than financial cost is the human cost of prolonged war. Here, withdrawal critics were tempted by a disingenuous argument: that there had been no American combat deaths for over a year. This, too, was only possible thanks to the withdrawal agreement, which explicitly shielded U.S. troops from Taliban targeting. Reneging on the agreement would have lifted that protection, and likely returned U.S. casualties to 2015–2019 levels.

In fairness, these levels were still low—but only on the U.S. side. The war killed roughly 240,000 people, and more than 71,000 civilians since 2001.[13] And unlike American fatalities, overall fatalities had markedly increased since 2015, approaching 15,000 Afghan soldiers and civilians each year.[14] Focusing only on American casualties inverts the reality on ground, which was trending towards more death rather than less.

For perspective, more civilians were dying from combat each year than Americans who perished on 9/11. This made continued U.S. presence difficult to justify on counterterrorism grounds, especially given the war’s overall failure to reduce the spread or number of terrorists threatening the United States.[15] Likewise, any humanitarian case for remaining in Afghanistan had to overcome terrible loss of life among those it intended to help. This is not the case for remaining in Germany, Japan, or South Korea, which have no active hostilities and only occasional training casualties.

War Damages American Soft Power

Kill enough people, and you start to get blamed for it. Continued war maligns America’s reputation in ways peacetime presence does not, which has strategic repercussions in the war on terror and great power competition.

However noble the interventionists’ intentions, most of the world does not see U.S. bombing as benevolent. The Eurasia Group’s annual survey of how foreign publics perceive the United States found “[d]isapproval of America’s continuation of the war in Afghanistan was a significant driver of anti-American sentiment” this March.[16] This is especially so in Muslim-majority nations, which largely perceive the United States as an imperialist aggressor.[17] Airstrikes do not seem a “light footprint” to those living beneath their predation.[18]

This negative perception hampers U.S. grand strategy, which “depends to a great degree on how other states compare the United States with its rivals.” That’s according to the Emeritus Chair in Strategy at CSIS, who added that places where the United States now competes most directly with China and Russia include Central and Southeast Asia, MENA, and the Gulf—that is, most of the Muslim world.[19] Muslim opinion is even more crucial in the war on terror, where anecdotes abound of airstrikes driving terrorist recruitment.[20] Retired General Stanley McChrystal once warned drones were “hated on a visceral level,” and worried this hatred exacerbates a “perception of American arrogance.”[21]

Many hands have been wrung over the withdrawal’s alleged damage to U.S. credibility. Some fret American allies now see the United States as an unfaithful friend, unable to honor its commitments. Credibility research suggests otherwise; allies understand that willingness to fight is highly contextual.[22] But either way, this concern is out of touch with what truly besmirches Americanism.[23] The graver danger to U.S. standing and influence is the widespread perception that it meddles too much and kills too many policing faraway conflicts. Prolonging war in Afghanistan would deepen this perception, losing crucial hearts and minds.

War Demands a Mandate

Fighting (as opposed to mere presence) overseas has particular legal and ethical needs for public approval at home. Yet war in Afghanistan became less popular the longer it dragged on. This strained the legitimacy of plans to fight indefinitely, and intensified their soft-power cost. The further the mission drifted from what Congress initially intended, the steeper this cost became, subverting the very principles America hoped to proliferate.

Democracies must strike a balance between following experts on empirical questions, and empowering voters on values-based questions. Foreign policy necessarily involves both—but war should incline toward the latter. Determining who and why the government kills is not like setting interest rates at the Federal Reserve. Everyday people deserve a say, especially when so much of the fighting falls to them. The U.S. Constitution was designed accordingly. The President commands the armed forces, but only Congress—the people’s more direct representatives—can take the weightier step of declaring war.

In such a system, leaders cannot strategize as if their constituents’ will to fight were inexhaustible. Resolve is a scarce resource, and one long since expended in Afghanistan. Even twelve years ago, President Obama’s surge was only politically feasible when paired with a withdrawal timeline. He explicitly rejected calls for “open-ended escalation” that “would commit us to a nation building project of up to a decade.”[24] More than a decade later, Americans were even less enthused about fighting indefinitely. Over 70 percent supported withdrawal at the time of Biden’s decision, and strong majorities continued to support it even during the unsightly evacuation.[25]

Critics point out these views were weakly held, and unlikely to swing election outcomes.[26] Biden probably could have continued the war without losing many votes. But is it wise to war for so long by the passive indifference of the governed? Should Americans’ understandable fatigue at two decades of Afghanistan updates be used to marginalize their objections, or normalize war waged quietly by technocrats eluding referendum?

To treat public apathy as a green light for “forever war” confuses acquiescence with consent. It inverts the constitutional default from peace until Congress clamors for war, to war until voters are impacted enough to care. This is as perverse strategically as it is ideologically. A wary and divided home front is ill-positioned to prevail in sustained conflicts abroad, as the Vietnam War illustrated. And warring against Americans’ wishes suggests ulterior motives for promoting democracy elsewhere.

Warring with such an expired mandate again undermines American soft power. Wherever the United States and China compete for hearts and minds, the meaning of “self-determination” is precious rhetorical turf. Is it synonymous with liberal democracy, as the West imagines? Or, as China argues, with non-interference in other states’ internal affairs? Much depends on how the rest of the world will answer that question. But an American example that interferes abroad against the wishes of its own people violates both conceptions, gifting Chinese foreign relations the esteem of comparative legitimacy. In nine of ten nations surveyed by the Eurasia Group, a plurality of respondents who disliked American democracy chose as their main reason: “the U.S. idea of democracy is hypocritical – ordinary voters don’t actually have power.”[27] The more we abrogate our principles at home, the more we’ll struggle to promote them abroad.

War Impedes Sustainable Development

A final cost of indefinite war is the heavy drag on development prospects. Upheaval in Afghanistan will undoubtedly unwind progress, and anyone with a heart should feel anguish at the hardship that creates. But if Afghan welfare weighs heavily in our moral calculus, we cannot focus only on the immediate impact. Also of concern is setting Afghanistan on a sturdy path to long-term progress. Continued war may have done more to impede than promote this progress, by locking a nation that wasn’t ours to govern in perpetual limbo and dependency.

I will not trivialize the humanitarian fallout of Taliban takeover. A return to their 2001 style of governance would amount to sharp reductions in health, education, infrastructure, human rights, and civil society. Unless aid resumes, up to one-third of Afghans may near starvation by winter’s end—a crisis underscoring the urgency of unfreezing Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and resuming international aid.[28] Millions of women will lose rights to education and employment, perhaps even to go outside unaccompanied by a man. Millions of refugees will flee these conditions, further destabilizing the country and region. This suffering is admittedly more concrete than long-term predictions in either direction. Preventing it was the strongest argument for remaining in Afghanistan.[29]

But that argument assumed such tragedies were preventable, as opposed to merely postpone-able. Truly preventing them would require either staying forever, or staying for long enough to make progress “stick” without Americans holding it up. The first twenty years did not make progress much stickier, and there are reasons to doubt whether twenty more years would have either.

First, military spending made Afghan democracy less responsive to its citizens than it was to foreign funders. A 2020 report from the Afghanistan Analysts Network detailed how the predictable incentives of a “rentier state”—a state with a budget and GDP dominated by outside income—conspired to stagnate progress in Afghanistan, entrenching inequality and corruption while weakening accountability.[30] Farah Stockman described the consequences:[31]

“[War] became the Afghan economy. At least Iraq had oil. In Afghanistan, the war dwarfed every other economic activity, apart from the opium trade… Over two decades, the U.S. government spent $145 billion on reconstruction and aid and an additional $837 billion on war fighting, in a country where the G.D.P. hovered between $4 billion and $20 billion per year.[32] Economic growth has risen and fallen with the number of foreign troops in the country.…

[Such] surreal amounts of cash poisoned the country…embittering those who didn’t have access to it and setting off rivalries among those who did… Why build a factory or plant crops when you can get fabulously wealthy selling whatever the Americans want to buy? Why fight the Taliban when you could just pay them not to attack?”[33]

This is a frequent problem with waging war to build peace: “the short-term tactical needs of the former consistently trump and undermine the longer-term processes needed to achieve the latter.”[34]

Second, U.S. presence poisoned progress by framing it as foreign. The irony of external efforts to inspire national identity is that nothing so animates Afghan nationalism as deeply ingrained resistance to foreign domination. Lingering U.S. forces tarred democracy with the smudge of occupation, whereas fighting un-Islamic invaders and their perceived puppet state only legitimized the Taliban.[35] Over time, the United States may have built a nation after all, of exactly the opposite sort it intended.

No wonder, then, that the war was going poorly long before the withdrawal. By 2019, the Taliban held more territory than at any point since 2001.[36] A Brookings report this January concluded “the Taliban is ascendant in Afghanistan and…the United States does not have the capacity, at any reasonable cost, to reverse that trend, even with a sustained military presence.”[37]

Finally, Afghanistan’s development was hampered by a growing sense that the order upheld by U.S. support was necessarily impermanent. This is not a circular argument for withdrawal, but a recognition of realities a sustained presence could not have changed.

At a different moment in American history—fresh off the triumph of WWII, with the Red Scare rallying Americans behind a strategy of containment—the United States could credibly commit to staying in South Korea indefinitely. This was especially so once the armistice was signed, for all the reasons listed above: peace is less costly than war. But in the present moment, U.S. leaders could not convince Afghans that American troops would remain for decades if they could not even say so to Americans without inciting public outcry. This not only undercut negotiating leverage, but inclined Afghans to short-term thinking, unhelpful to building enduring institutions. Far from laying conditions for peace, U.S. presence kept the country in limbo, obscuring pathways to organic growth that could only emerge in its absence.

Nothing Biden decided could change this reality. If he did not withdraw, the next president might. In fact, his likely 2024 opponent already tried to do so. Polls showed Americans in both parties wanted out, and the enemy knew this. Time was necessarily on their side.

Given these obstacles, U.S. presence could only plausibly be called “sustainable” (as it was time and again by withdrawal critics) in terms of what intervention cost—never in terms of what it bought.[38] This weakens the case for buying Afghan rights one year at a time. The purchase was not watering a seed, but inflating a bubble of liberalism in an ocean of Islamist theocracy. With infinite determination, the United States could pump in bombs and money for twenty or forty more years, and perhaps delay the bubble from popping. But this would prolong a war killing dozens of innocents per day, without making democracy any likelier to self-sustain. That’s a fundamentally different model than postwar Germany, Japan, or South Korea, in which the U.S. military deterred external threats to quickly enable decades of peace.

In these ways, withdrawal critics undersold the costs of continued war in Afghanistan. War is more than just presence or support. It is more dangerous to civilians, to our soldiers, to our reputation, and to our strategic attention. It costs more money, and has more stringent constitutional requirements. Naturally, it gets a shorter leash than mere deterrence, or a Marshall Plan, or anything we do in Japan. Peace can last for seventy years; war should not.

This does not prove that the costs of war were not worth it. Perhaps decreased soft power, $40 billion and nearly 15,000 deaths per year was a reasonable price to pay to forestall the tragedy now underway. Perhaps Afghanistan’s long-term future will deteriorate even further without us. Perhaps we incurred an obligation to clean up our own mess, which matters more than abstract principles of democratic legitimacy. Perhaps an increased risk of attacks from al-Qaeda outweighs all other considerations. Decent people of clear-eyed empathy can disagree on these questions.

But they should at least be straight with the American people about what realistic alternatives looked like. There is no reason to believe U.S. forces would have brought things closer to resolution over the next decade of their involvement than they did over the prior decade. Biden’s options were to withdraw last summer, or triple down on war in Afghanistan for a very long time, with no articulable roadmap for how peace would come of it. He decided that roadmap was not his to provide.

Dissenters should also avoid miscasting that decision as nativist isolationism.[39] Calls to withdraw did not begin with Donald Trump, and Biden’s decision was not based in Trumpism. Rather, Biden heeded a growing chorus of realists and “Global Ambassadors” who’ve long distrusted military intervention, while supporting other forms of global engagement.[40] Where Trumpers are convinced of enduring American greatness, restrainers are convinced of its lingering overambition. Their opposition to inessential war is not born of callous indifference to the outside world, but of keen sensitivity to the harm U.S. overreach brings, and the resentment that harm inspires. It’s born of anger at two decades of foreign policy that inflicted tremendous suffering, and resolve not to be walked over by the same unshakeable hawks who orchestrated that policy. It’s born of humility about American primacy; of yearning to lead the world by example, not bully it by force.

Americans under thirty—hardly fans of Trump—overwhelmingly share such sentiments.[41] The old guard of liberal interventionists should expect their arrival.

History’s judgment may depend on which of a wide range of paths Afghanistan follows from here, and how that path compares to the depressing stalemate perpetuated by U.S. presence. Things will surely get worse before they get better, and that is our government’s fault. But over time, perhaps the only path to a better Afghanistan was for foreigners to stop appointing themselves uninvited arbiters in local disputes, and leave the country’s future to the Afghans.

About the Author

Andrew Doris is a Non-Resident Fellow at Defense Priorities, and an M.A. student at Yale's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. A former Army officer, he holds a B.A. in Political Science from The Johns Hopkins University.

Endnotes

1. Rory Stewart, “America was finally using Biden’s Afghanistan strategy. Then he pulled the plug.”, The Washington Post, August 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/08/16/afghanistan-biden-withdrawal-military/.

2. Rory Stewart, “Failure, and the Villains of the Western Campaign in Afghanistan,” Western Way of War podcast, Episode 60, quoted at 22:30, https://rusi.org/podcasts/western-way-of-war/episode-60-rory-stewart-failure-and-villains-western-campaign-afghanistan.

3. Max Boot, “Twenty years of Afghanistan mistakes, but this preventable disaster is on Biden,” The Washington Post, August 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/15/twenty-years-afghanistan-mistakes-this-preventable-disaster-is-biden/.

4. Richard Haass (@RichardHaass), “The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not “endless occupation” but open-ended presence.  Occupation is imposed, presence invited.  Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea.  And yes, withdrawal was the problem.”, Twitter, August 26, 2021, https://twitter.com/RichardHaass/status/1431055016492617728; Robert Kagan, “It wasn’t hubris that drove America into Afghanistan. It was fear.”, The Washington Post, August 26, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/robert-kagan-afghanistan-americans-forget/.

5. Condoleezza Rice, “The Afghan people didn’t choose the Taliban. They fought and died alongside us.”, The Washington Post, August 17, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/17/condoleezza-rice-afghans-didnt-choose-taliban/; Ryan Crocker, “Why Biden’s Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster,” The Washington Post, August 21, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/opinion/us-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban.html?referringSource=articleShare.

6. Stewart, Western Way of War podcast, quoted at 22:20.

7. Neta C. Crawford, “Afghanistan’s Rising Civilian Death Toll Due to Airstrikes, 2017-2020”, Brown University Costs of War Project, December 7, 2020, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2020/Rising%20Civilian%20Death%20Toll%20in%20Afghanistan_Costs%20of%20War_Dec%207%202020.pdf.

8. Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee, “Factbox: U.S. and South Korea's security arrangement, cost of troops”, Reuters, March 7, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-usa-alliance/factbox-u-s-and-south-koreas-security-arrangement-cost-of-troops-idUSKBN2AZ0S0.

9. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Burden Sharing: Benefits and Costs Associated with the U.S. Military Presence in Japan and South Korea,” GAO-21-270, March 17, 2021, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-270.

10. BBC News Reality Check Team, “Afghanistan: What has the conflict cost the US and its allies?”, BBC News, September 3, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47391821.

11. Afghanistan Study Group, “Afghanistan Study Group Final Report,” United States Institute of Peace, February 3, 2021, https://www.usip.org/publications/2021/02/afghanistan-study-group-final-report-pathway-peace-afghanistan.

12. Stephen Daggett, “Costs of Major U.S. Wars,” Congressional Research Service, 7-5700, 29 June 2010, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf.

13. “Afghan Civilians,” Brown University Costs of War Project, accessed October 8th, 2021, page updated as of April 2021, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan.

14. The Economist, “The week in charts: Afghanistan, Haiti, the coronavirus and more,” August 20, 2021, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/20/the-week-in-charts-afghanistan-haiti-the-coronavirus-and-more.

15. BBC News, “What has the conflict cost the US and its allies?”

16. Mark Hannah and Caroline Gray, “Democracy in Disarray: How the World Sees the U.S. and Its Example,” Eurasia Group Foundation, May 2021, https://egfound.org/2021/05/modeling-democracy-democracy-in-disarray/#full-report.

17. Pew Research Center, Global Indicators Database, “Opinion of the United States,” 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/database/indicator/1/; Luke Baker, “Research explores what 1.3 billion Muslims think,” Reuters, April 7, 2008, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-religion-islam-book/research-explores-what-1-3-billion-muslims-think-idUSL0768852020080407.

18. Anand Gopal, “The Other Afghan Women,” The New Yorker, September 6, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women; International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan,” 2012, https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Stanford-NYU-Living-Under-Drones.pdf; Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, “The Drone Paradox: Fighting Terrorism with Mechanized Terror,” The Independent Review 23, no. 1 (2018): 51–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26591799.

19. Anthony H. Cordesman, " Strategic Competition and Foreign Perceptions of the United States," Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 14, 2021, https://www.csis.org/analysis/strategic-competition-and-foreign-perceptions-united-states.

20. Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Why Drones Fail," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2013-06-11/why-drones-fail.

21. David Alexander, "Retired general cautions against overuse of 'hated' drones," Reuters, January 7, 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-mcchrystal-idUSBRE90608O20130107.

22. Daryl Grayson Press, Calculating credibility: How leaders assess military threats, Cornell University Press, 2005, https://books.google.com/books?id=jecGSD9PSh0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false; Stephen M. Walt, " Afghanistan Hasn’t Damaged U.S. Credibility," Foreign Policy, August 21, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/21/afghanistan-hasnt-damaged-u-s-credibility/.

23. New American Engagement Initiative and Caroline Gray, "Future Foreign Policy: Global perceptions of the United States," Webinar from Atlantic Council, June 16, 2021, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event/future-foreign-policy-global-perceptions-of-the-united-states/.

24. Barack Obama, “Transcript of Obama Speech on Afghanistan,” December 2, 2009, https://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/01/obama.afghanistan.speech.transcript/index.html.

25. Dina Smeltz and Emily Sullivan, "US Public Supports Withdrawal from Afghanistan," Chicago Council on Global Affairs, August 9, 2021, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/us-public-supports-withdrawal-afghanistan; Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin, " Americans support Afghanistan pullout — but not the way it was done, a Post-ABC poll finds," The Washington Post, September 3, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/post-abc-poll-biden-afghanistan/2021/09/02/5520cd3e-0c16-11ec-9781-07796ffb56fe_story.html; Ted Van Green and Carroll Doherty, " Majority of U.S. public favors Afghanistan troop withdrawal; Biden criticized for his handling of situation," Pew Research Center, August 31, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/31/majority-of-u-s-public-favors-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-biden-criticized-for-his-handling-of-situation/.

26. Madiha Afzal and Israa Saber, " Americans are not unanimously war-weary on Afghanistan," Brookings Institute, March 19, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/03/19/americans-are-not-unanimously-war-weary-on-afghanistan/; Paul Miller, "Afghanistan Didn't Have to End This Way," The Dispatch, August 13, 2021, https://thedispatch.com/p/afghanistan-didnt-have-to-end-this; Kevin Baron, " Petraeus Trashes Biden Decision to Quit Afghanistan," Defense One, April 14, 2021, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/04/petraeus-trashes-biden-decision-quit-afghanistan/173359/.

27. Caroline Gray and Mark Hannah, "Modeling Democracy," Eurasia Group Foundation, May 18, 2021, https://egfound.org/2021/05/modeling-democracy-democracy-in-disarray/.

28. Matthew Low, " UN's World Food Programme says 14 million people in Afghanistan are 'marching toward starvation' if no aid is provided," Insider, August 25, 2021, https://www.insider.com/world-food-program-14-million-afghans-starve-without-aid-afghanistan-2021-8; Marc Santora, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Christina Goldbaum, " A Million Afghan Children Could Die in ‘Most Perilous Hour,’ U.N. Warns," New York Times, September 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/world/asia/afghanistan-united-nations-crisis.html.

29. Stewart, " America was finally using Biden’s Afghanistan strategy."

30. Kate Clark, "The Cost of Support to Afghanistan: New special report considers the reasons for inequality, poverty and a failing democracy," Afghanistan Analysts Network, May 29th 2020, https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/special-reports/the-cost-of-support-to-afghanistan-new-special-report-considers-the-reasons-for-inequality-poverty-and-a-failing-democracy/.

31. Farah Stockman, "The War on Terror Was Corrupt from the start," New York Times, September 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/opinion/afghanistan-war-economy.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article.

32. Courtney Bublé, " Afghanistan Watchdog to Brief Lawmakers on Tuesday," Government Executive, August 30, 2021, https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2021/08/afghanistan-watchdog-brief-lawmakers-tuesday/184951/; Trading Economics, "Afghanistan GDP," 2021, https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/gdp.

33. Clark, "The Cost of Support to Afghanistan."

34. Andrew Wilder, Review of “When More is Less,” by Astri Suhkre, 2011, https://www.cmi.no/publications/4094-when-more-is-less.

35. Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History, (New York: Oxford Scholarship Online), 2021, 10.1093/oso/9780197550779.001.0001.

36. Daniel L. Davis, "Debunking the Safe Haven Myth," Defense Priorities, May 2020, https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/debunking-the-safe-haven-myth.

37. Vanda Felbab-Brown, “In Afghanistan, different priorities means vastly different policies," Brookings Institute, January 15, 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/01/15/in-afghanistan-different-priorities-means-vastly-different-policies/.

38. BBC Newsnight, Twitter post, August 6th, 2021, 5:55pm, https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/1423764602823786501; Miller, "Afghanistan Didn't Have to End This Way."; Isaac Chotiner, "David Petraeus on American Mistakes in Afghanistan," The New Yorker, August 20, 2021 https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/david-petraeus-on-american-mistakes-in-afghanistan.

39. Mark Hannah, Caroline Gray, Lucas Robinson, "Vox Populi," Eurasia Group Foundation, September 28, 2021, https://egfound.org/2021/09/inflection-point/?te=1&nl=the-interpreter&emc=edit_int_20211001#generations.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.