On March 17, Christopher Preble was quoted in a Vox article about President Biden’s foreign policy speech, warning that Biden’s comments did not portend well for the US meeting its commitments to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by May 1.
Biden noted that it won’t be much longer before he makes up his mind. But his hint that a May 1 withdrawal might not happen has already upset critics of America’s continued presence in Afghanistan.
“That isn’t very encouraging,” said Christopher Preble, co-director of the New American Engagement Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank and a proponent of military restraint. “It will be more than ‘tough’ to secure the Biden administration’s very ambitious objectives in Afghanistan” with 2,500 service members, he said, “when 100,000 US troops, plus many thousands more from NATO countries, were unable to do that.”
