SHIFTING THE SALAFI FROM THE fAR WAR TO THE nEAR WAR WAS THE POINT:

The ineffectiveness and collapse of Afghanistan's military and governing institutions largely substantiates Biden's skepticism that US-led efforts to prop up the government in Kabul would ever enable it to stand on its own feet. The international community has spent nearly 20 years, many thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars to do good by Afghanistan - taking down al-Qaeda; beating back the Taliban; supporting, advising, training, and equipping the Afghan military; bolstering governing institutions; and investing in the country's civil society.

Significant progress was made, but not enough. As the Taliban's speedy advance has revealed, even two decades of steady support failed to create Afghan institutions capable of holding their own.

That is because the mission was fatally flawed from the outset. It was a fool's errand to try to turn Afghanistan into a centralized, unitary state. The country's difficult topography, ethnic complexity, and tribal and local loyalties produce enduring political fragmentation. Its troubled neighborhood and hostility to outside interference make foreign intervention perilous.

These inescapable conditions ensured that any effort to turn Afghanistan into a modern state would fail. Biden made the tough and correct choice to withdraw and end a losing effort in search of an unattainable goal.

The case for withdrawal is also buttressed by the reality that even if the United States has fallen short on the nation-building front, it has achieved its primary strategic goal: preventing future attacks on America or its allies from Afghan territory. The US and its coalition partners have decimated al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The same goes for the Afghan branch of the Islamic State, which has demonstrated no ability to carry out transnational attacks from Afghanistan.

In the meantime, the US has built a global network of partners with which to fight terrorism worldwide, share relevant intelligence, and jointly boost domestic defenses against terrorist attacks. The US and its allies are today much harder targets than they were on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda has not been able to carry out a major overseas attack since the bombings in London in 2005.

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