Joe Biden is the fourth U.S. president to face the question of what to do about a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. After sending more troops there in 2017, the Trump administration eventually agreed to remove all U.S. forces by May 1, as part of a broader process intended to end the civil war there. Biden has to decide if he’s going to honor that commitment, back away from it entirely, or kick the can down the road a little further.
To guide his thinking, he could rely on a recent report from the congressionally mandated Afghanistan Study Group, co-directed by former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford, and Nancy Lindborg, the former president of the U.S. Institute of Peace. The bipartisan group’s 15 members are all familiar figures from the foreign-policy elite, including Michèle Flournoy, James Dobbins, Stephen Hadley, and former British Foreign Minister David Miliband. (Full disclosure: Dunford and Meghan O’Sullivan, another member of the study group, are colleagues of mine at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.) The study group also relied on insights from 26 senior advisors and the work of a staff of professional assistants.
