Biden visits Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2002, when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
There are more pressing threats to deal with in the world, including the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia, the rise of authoritarian regimes, and the fracturing of the post-WWII global order.Firstly, if the original goal in Afghanistan had been solely focused al Qaeda and bin Laden, the U.S. would have accepted the Taliban’s surrender on Dec. 7, 2001. Instead, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected that offer outright, opting instead for total military victory. In doing so, the U.
But it’s hard to tease out what Biden’s logic is exactly. Bin Laden was killed in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than 2 km from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. The Pakistani military denied it had any knowledge bin Laden was there, which is of course ridiculous. The population distribution offers a number of insights. Firstly, if you compare government and Taliban control in terms of physical space, it’s about equal. The wide gap in population density suggests that the Taliban dominate sparsely populated areas. In my experience in Afghanistan, the reason for this is that the majority of Afghans do not support the group. Where there are enough people, there is resistance to Taliban control.
That’s misleading. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the war in Afghanistan has cost a total $2.26 trillion. More than half of that, however has gone to things like running the defense department, interest on loans and veterans’ care. The actual yearly cost of the war fighting itself, according to The Balance, which based its figures on Brown University estimates, has averaged around $46.65 billion a year over the two decades of the war .
By comparison, the war playing out inside the U.S.—the one fuelled by America’s gun epidemic—is killing more people every year by multiple orders of magnitude. That is, by definition, tragic.