US out of Afghanistan
By 
Biden is not going to let the Friedman Unit school of foreign policy pointlessly keep American troops in a hopeless situation:
President Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, people familiar with the plans said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that first drew the United States into its longest war.
The decision, which Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday, will keep thousands of U.S. forces in the country beyond the May 1 exit deadline that the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban, according to one person familiar with the matter, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.
While the Taliban has vowed to renew attacks on U.S. and NATO personnel if foreign troops are not out by the deadline, it is not clear if the militants will follow through with those threats given Biden’s plan for a phased withdrawal between now and September.
[…]
Biden’s decision comes after an administration review of U.S. options in Afghanistan, where U.S.-midwived peace talks have failed to advance as hoped and the Taliban remains a potent force despite two decades of effort by the United States to defeat the militants and establish stable, democratic governance. The war has cost trillions of dollars in addition to the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. service members and at least 100,000 Afghan civilians.
“This is the immediate, practical reality that our policy review discovered,” the person familiar with the deliberations said. “If we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear plan to exit, we will be back at war with the Taliban, and that was not something President Biden believed was in the national interest.”
“We’re going to zero troops by September.”
I’m not sure anyone has ever fully explained what happened to Biden’s foreign policy views during the Obama administration. For most of his career he was basically a generic Cold War liberal who would have supported (or at least not pushed back against) transparently illogical arguments like “sure, 20 years in Afghanistan and the government will allegedly crumble the second we leave, but this time another surge will totally work!” But he presciently opposed the Afghanistan surge during the Obama administration and was generally a dovish voice. I don’t know what changed for him, but I’m glad it happened.