China and Russia Are the X-Factors in Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal

The mission to root out al Qaeda operatives who found sanctuary in Afghanistan and from there coordinated the Sept. 11 attacks was named “Enduring Freedom.” Then-President George W. Bush said it was a reflection of America’s duty to “defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.”

Nearly two decades and three U.S. presidencies later, with a war that claimed thousands of American and Afghan lives, President Biden has said he would do what none of his three immediate predecessors were able to: leave Afghanistan for good.

With 2001 now a generation in the past and the war effort recruiting soldiers born as many as three years after the attacks, Mr. Biden has opted to reprioritize American foreign policy objectives and redirect the war funding toward domestic concerns.

Among other aims, Mr. Biden is calculating that the U.S. should focus on challenges from Russia and China.

Russia’s troop buildup on the Ukrainian border is its largest since just before it invaded Crimea in 2014. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry has noted repeated incursions by China’s air force into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over the South China Sea in recent days. Monday saw the largest such incursion, the ministry said, with two dozen fighters, bombers and other aircraft entering the zone southwest of Taiwan.

For Mr. Biden, the top foreign policy priority in 2021 is the growing competition between Western democracies and autocratic nations—particularly China and Russia.

“It is clear, absolutely clear…that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” Mr. Biden said during his first news conference last month, singling out Chinese President Xi Jinping as one of the latter’s leading practitioners. “He’s one of the guys, like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future and democracy can’t function in an ever—an ever-complex world.”

In its early days, the Biden administration has taken aim at China and Russia on issues such as trade, human rights, cybersecurity and the international rules-based order. It asserts the U.S. should avoid the proactive counterterrorism and interventionist policies of the past two decades.

Mr. Biden’s focus on human rights and multilateralism contrasts with the Trump administration, which inherited several battlefronts but generally avoided involvement in the domestic affairs of other nations.

The Biden administration has opted to confront Moscow and Beijing on such matters as their human-rights records, while insisting it is looking to keep the door open for cooperation and collaboration on issues from arms control to climate change.

“We have to strengthen our alliances and work with like-minded partners to ensure that the rules of international norms that govern cyber threats and emerging technologies that will shape our future are grounded in our democratic values, not those of the autocrats,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday.

It has sanctioned the junta in Myanmar after this year’s coup, condemned human-rights atrocities and sexual violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and endorsed the Trump administration’s designation of China’s treatment of minority Uighurs as genocide. Mr. Biden himself has called out Mr. Putin as a “killer” for his attacks on political opponents.

Many officials and experts say the administration’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan goes against its stated aims. They say it will reverse two decades of progress made since the U.S. invaded in 2001, especially for women who were subject to brutal treatment by the Taliban when it governed Afghanistan.

“Once we leave, the pressure that we’ve been keeping on these elements goes away and it creates a vacuum,” said Lisa Curtis, who headed Afghanistan policy at the National Security Council for Mr. Trump until January. “The Afghan government becomes vulnerable, the women who we had worked so hard to protect and empower become vulnerable and the entire country will be threatened once again by terrorist elements.”

Russia and China have criticized the U.S. for its rhetoric as it grapples with its own domestic problems, such as protests over racism and economic inequality. Mr. Biden has tried to bolster America’s standing with allies in Europe and Asia as a leading voice on such issues.

Photo: U.S. Army soldiers returned to New York’s Fort Drum in December from a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan.
PHOTO: JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-and-russia-are-the-x-factors-in-bidens-afghanistan-withdrawal-11618418114