For the past several years, the US military involvement in Afghanistan was rarely an issue that your average American thought about. Troop numbers were relatively low. Thankfully, so were US casualties. Since 2015, the Afghans have been leading day-to-day combat operations. The US carried out a training mission and provided close air support. The war was rarely discussed in the media and the political establishment focused on other major geopolitical issues. All of this changed when President Donald Trump made Afghanistan a political issue during his 2016 presidential campaign as part of his effort to end the so-called “forever wars.” Even though Trump wanted to pull US forces out of the country immediately, his administration first undertook a detailed review of the situation there. Ultimately, he decided to maintain a US military presence that would run parallel to a peace process between the US, the Afghan government and the Taliban. However, while Trump kept US forces in Afghanistan, he did slash troop numbers. When he entered office in 2017, there were about 19,000 American troops in the country. When he left office in January, there were less than 2,000. His successor in the White House, Joe Biden, has never liked the idea of a long-term US military presence in Afghanistan. When President Barack Obama carried out his Afghan strategy review in 2009, then-Vice President Biden argued for the US to maintain a downsized counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan. He was overruled. Instead, Obama surged tens of thousands of US troops into the country. So it is not surprising that Biden, upon entering office, decided to continue where Trump left off and complete the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. According to reports, all American forces will be out of the country by the end of July. This rapid withdrawal has allowed the Taliban to make advancements but the Afghan government is far from defeated. The coming months will be crucial for the country. While what the immediate future holds remains to be seen, there are several geopolitical observations that can be made right now. Firstly, as with Iran and the nuclear deal, Biden’s decision to withdraw hastily from Afghanistan is another example that his administration’s foreign policy looks like an extension of Obama’s. In 2011, Obama withdrew US forces from Iraq, only to send them back into the country in 2014 after Daesh captured huge swaths of territory, including the second-largest city Mosul. At the time of the withdrawal, Obama’s critics called on him to leave a small force behind. He did not. It is clear that the lessons of Iraq have not been learned. Rather than maintaining just a few thousand US troops in Afghanistan, Biden is repeating the same mistake that Obama did in Iraq. Secondly, in the coming months, expect the de facto partition of Afghanistan to solidify. There are some regions in the country that naturally sympathize with the Taliban. If the Afghan government was unable to sway these regions to their side even with US military support, it is unlikely to be able to do so now. So, in the coming weeks, the Taliban and the government will be consolidating areas already under their respective control. However, it is important to put the recent Taliban advances into perspective. While districts have been captured by the group, it should be remembered that there are more than 400 districts in Afghanistan. The Taliban has not been able to capture and hold a provincial capital since 2001, much less control a whole province. Even with the uptick in fighting, President Ashraf Ghani thought the situation was still stable enough to leave the country when he visited the White House last week. Thirdly, the Central Asians are nervous. In recent years, the countries of this region have strived to improve economic relations with Afghanistan, especially when it comes to connecting the Afghan economy to global markets using regional transport links. With the security situation deteriorating in northern Afghanistan, the main focus in Central Asia has shifted from economics to security. Afghan forces are finding themselves spilling over into neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan during clashes with the Taliban. Neither country wants the Taliban on their border. However, neither wants to become a cross-border safe haven for the Afghan military either. In the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see how Central Asia responds to the developing situation in Afghanistan. So where does this leave US policy in Afghanistan? There has been no detailed strategic assessment of what Washington’s goals in Afghanistan or Central Asia are — or how to best achieve them. Instead, Biden is going into this blind. The reasonable and responsible approach would have been to conduct a review and then design a strategy based on its conclusions. Instead, Biden wants out. There is a certain hypocrisy too. Many of the Democrats that were quick to criticize Trump’s desire to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan are silent now that Biden is doing it. Rather than maintaining just a few thousand US troops in Afghanistan, Biden is repeating the same mistake that Obama did in Iraq. Luke Coffey Notwithstanding all the talk of “nation-building” that dominated most of the discourse over the past two decades regarding the US military presence in Afghanistan, America did achieve its strategic goals in the country. One should not forget that, on Sept. 10, 2001, the Taliban controlled 90 percent of the country, the entire Afghan government, and every major urban population center including the capital of Kabul. The Taliban was quickly ousted by the US for not handing over Osama bin Laden and has since not even come close to regaining the power it had in 2001. Secondly, Al-Qaeda no longer uses Afghanistan as a safe haven to launch and coordinate transnational terrorism. And there has not been a single successful terrorist attack on American soil that has emanated from Afghanistan since the attacks on 9/11. While the situation in Afghanistan is far from perfect, the US has done a reasonably decent job in ensuring its broader strategic interests there. This is why Biden‘s insistence on fully withdrawing the remaining few thousand US troops is irresponsible and nonsensical. The Afghan people will pay dearly. The region will suffer. America and its allies will be less safe. Luke Coffey is the director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Twitter: @LukeDCoffey Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view