Biden to Pull Troops from Afghanistan
Image Courtesy of Stars and Stripes
By Chris Carey
When Osama bin Laden orchestrated and executed the deadly 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, many Catholic University students were no more than two or three years old. Some had not yet been born. Nearly twenty years later, the United States is still involved in the often elusive fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and its surrounding regions.
On Wednesday, April 14, President Biden assured Americans that his presidency would be the last to oversee a long and difficult war in that region, vowing to pull all troops out of Afghanistan, presumably with a timeline that would be swift yet with a mind to the lasting consequences of too quick of a withdrawal from the strategic and volatile area.
President Biden established this plan, saying, “I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”
He also hearkened back to the reasons that brought about the conflict in the first place.
“We went to Afghanistan in 2001 to root out al Qaeda, to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan,” President Biden said. “Our objective was clear. The cause was just.”
The decision to finally remove all United States troops from Afghanistan was met with some resistance from military personnel who either voted for Biden or did not as reported in the BBC.
The article states, “supporters of Mr Biden’s historic decision contend that it is a long overdue end to a ‘forever war’ … but critics fear it could create a dangerous power vacuum in the region.”
This falls in line with the widely divisive domestic stances on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq that have fought for policy directives over the past twenty years. According to Brookings, 38% of Democrats and 34% of Republicans would be in favor of keeping the current presence of troops in Afghanistan when the poll was conducted in 2019.
The report goes on to explain that possible lack of vast partisan opinion in favor or against the war, with a minority thinking the current level of military force being sufficient, could be due to the very small number of congressmen and women who initially voted against the war.
Regardless of sentiments of Americans through the past 20 years, President Biden is not blind to the struggles that American soldiers, and by extension the American homefront, have gone through with thousands of casualties.
Biden claimed, “We already have service members doing their duty in Afghanistan today whose parents served in the same war. We have service members who were not yet born when our nation was attacked on 9/11.” He also spoke of his own son Beau and the pride he felt in seeing him in service of his country. The Biden Administration aims to have a more detailed withdrawal timeline, but according to the press conference given by Press Secretary Psaki afterward, this was not a hastily made decision and was done in accordance with the most realistic assumptions and advice of military officials.
