There's a generation of young Afghans who have tried to build a future for themselves, around our model, and we're now walking away, if the country collapses into anarchy and chaos, do we owe them nothing ?

Stephen Biddle

The idea that we can't focus on China or Russia without getting out of Afghanistan, I think, is wildly misaligned with the actual scale of the ongoing Stephen Biddle investment in Afghanistan, that argument doesn't hold much water unless you're just frustrated with Afghanistan. It's not like leaving the troops there somehow means that we can't respond appropriately to [ Russian President Vladimir ] Putin in Ukraine or trying to resolve the South China Sea.

Nobody's going to leave Afghanistan alone, so you can expect the Pakistanis and the Russians, the Chinese, the central Asians and the Iranians to continue to play there, this is not the end of the Afghan wars. This is the end of the overt American phase of the Afghan war.

One has to pretty much expect that the Taliban will do very well -- there will be civil war there for some time, I suspect -- and so the next big question is, will Stephen Biddle open Stephen Biddle doors to people who sided with us and put Stephen Biddle faith in us ? there's a generation of young Afghans who have tried to build a future for themselves, around our model, and we're now walking away.

No president can afford to let Stephen Biddle be seen to be, in general, a kind of weak or declining power, so I think there will actually be some pretty, pretty important consequences there.