Our Military’s Sacrifice in Afghanistan Was Not in Vain

In December 2001, when I worked in the Pentagon, I traveled with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to a country neighboring Afghanistan, where we met an incredible group of Americans — the US Special Operations forces who had just days earlier led the battle to liberate Mazar-e Sharif and set in motion the Taliban’s fall from power.

In a tent at a secret air base, they told us their story — how they had connected with anti-Taliban forces, who taught them to ride special horses trained to run into machine gunfire. Many of the soldiers had never been on a horse before, but they soon found themselves riding through some of the most terrifying terrain in the world in darkness, along narrow mountain trails so steep that, one soldier told us, “it took me a week to ease the death-grip on my horse.”

When they reached their target, a team of US forward air controllers slipped into the city and hid behind enemy lines — ready to “paint” their targets for the US bombers flying in the skies above. They told the Afghans that when the bombs started falling on the enemy, that was the sign to charge. Suddenly, bombs began to land. “The explosions were deafening, and the timing so precise that, as the soldiers described it, hundreds of Afghan horsemen literally came riding out of the smoke, coming down on the enemy in clouds of dust and flying shrapnel,” Rumsfeld later recounted in a speech at the National Defense University (disclosure: I was his chief speechwriter).

The US military launched the first war of the 21st century with a cavalry charge — and drove the Taliban and al-Qaeda from the sanctuary where the terrorists planned the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

On Monday, the last US forces departed Afghanistan, after President Biden handed the country back to the Taliban regime those courageous Americans had deposed two decades earlier. In the wake of Biden’s surrender — and, yes, that is the right word — many veterans of the Afghan war are asking whether their sacrifice was in vain.

It was not. And the proof is there for all to see: For 20 years, we have not suffered another catastrophic terrorist attack on the US homeland. Their service and sacrifice helped purchase two decades of safety and security for the American people. Many Americans take that safety and security for granted, as if the terrorists had simply lost interest in attacking us. But the terrorists didn’t lose interest; they were stopped by the selfless courage of a generation of Americans who volunteered to fight our enemies halfway across the world so we did not have to face them at home.

In so doing, they also bettered the lives of millions of Afghans — particularly women and girls. But their mission in Afghanistan was not to turn it into a Western democracy. It was to ensure that Afghanistan had a government whose leaders did not wake up every morning thinking the United States must be destroyed, or provide sanctuary for terrorists determined to deliver that destruction to American cities and streets.

That mission was succeeding. When Biden took office, US forces in Afghanistan were not nation-building, policing the country, or even fighting a war. They were training, equipping and enabling Afghan forces to fight our enemies for us. In January 2015, we transferred the combat mission to the Afghan security forces. US troops were providing their Afghan allies with intelligence, mission planning and air cover — and with that support, the Taliban were unable to make significant military gains. As former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker told me, even with just 2,500 US troops on the ground, the Taliban was unable to take back a single regional capital — until that last modicum of support was withdrawn. We had fewer troops in Afghanistan than we have stationed in Spain. But that small contingent of US forces, together with some 7,000 NATO forces, was preventing the Taliban from overthrowing a flawed but pro-US government, and turning the country into a terrorist sanctuary again.

Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines didn’t fail. Their leaders did. The new administration can try to shift blame to the agreement negotiated by its predecessor all it wants, but it was Biden who made the decision to carry out an unconditional withdrawal and hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban. But as former Obama defense secretary Leon E. Panetta recently explained, that won’t be the end of the story in Afghanistan. “We’re going to have to go back in to get ISIS. We’re probably going to go have to go back in when al-Qaeda resurrects itself, as they will, with this Taliban,” Panetta said. “The bottom line is, we can leave a battlefield, but we can’t leave the war on terrorism.”

When we do send them back, as we inevitably will, they will salute and carry out the mission once again — just like they did in Mazar-e Sharif two decades ago.