Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan

‘Today was hard. I can’t imagine what it was like for the families of those we left behind.’

That was an email from a friend who’d served in Afghanistan, sent as the chaos of the western withdrawal from Afghanistan played out on rolling news almost exactly two years ago.

His grief – mirrored across the military and the media establishment on both sides of the Atlantic – now feels a long time ago, at least to those detached from the 20-year fight against the Taliban. Like many a separation, however, over time it becomes clear it was the right thing to do.

The US had spent almost a trillion dollars fighting and nation building in Afghanistan. They’d lost more than 2,000 men. And as events post-withdrawal were to quickly and tragically prove, they had little more than a Potemkin village of an Afghan government to show for all that treasure and blood.

What was the war for? The same could be asked of almost every American intervention of the last few decades. As Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes has written:

Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged. Afghanistan.