Bidens troop drawdown could extend far beyond Afghanistan

Afghanistan may be the first domino to fall in a much broader restructuring of America’s military footprint across the broader Middle East and Central Asia.

While both of President Biden‘s predecessors fell short in their military “pivots” toward Asia and a rising China, some foreign policy analysts say the stars have now aligned for an overhaul that’s been nearly a decade in the making. At Mr. Biden‘s direction, the Pentagon is in the midst of a landmark “global force posture review” that could lay the groundwork for a major reconfiguration of U.S. troops around the world, including the potential withdrawal of thousands of forces from bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and elsewhere across a theater that’s consumed American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era.

The document is expected to be released later this summer. A Pentagon official said it will “identify longer-term strategic considerations for future analysis,” meaning it could provide a baseline for the commander in chief to initiate a long-term shift in where U.S. troops are stationed and the level of resources allocated to specific regions.

Nowhere would such a change be more apparent than the Middle East. Some specialists argue that by taking the politically risky move of pulling forces from the region, Mr. Biden is poised to free up both manpower and materiel to focus on China and other 21st-century threats â€" though such a strategy will come with its own major foreign policy risks.

“I think there’s more of a commitment to minimizing or cutting bait on other commitments” in the Middle East, said Gil Barndollar, senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities and the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship.

“You can talk about money. You can talk about blood and treasure. That all matters,” Mr. Barndollar said. “But the biggest problem with the Middle East ulcer is that it sucks up a tremendous amount of bandwidth from decision-makers.”

Indeed, former President Obama, with Mr. Biden at his side as vice president, tried to reorient U.S. military posture toward Asia but ultimately was sucked back into the Middle East by the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. 

Former President Trump campaigned on stopping “endless wars” in the region and initiated major troop drawdowns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. But he also dispatched thousands of additional troops to Middle East bases as a check on an increasingly aggressive Iran, leaving America with a bigger presence in the theater than when he took office.

Exact U.S. manpower levels in the Middle East are somewhat murky because of troop rotations, temporary deployments, and other factors. But there are estimated to be more than 44,000 U.S. troops now in the region, according to Defense Priorities, which compiles running tallies from government databases and other sources.

The figure includes about 3,000 troops in Jordan, 2,500 in Saudi Arabia, 13,500 in Kuwait, 8,000 in Qatar, 3,500 in the United Arab Emirates, and thousands more at other locations.

There had been roughly 3,500 troops in Afghanistan, but that figure has shrunk to just several hundred Marines left behind to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the international airport. There are still about 2,500 troops in Iraq. The White House denied recent media reports that it was eyeing a withdrawal from that country, too.

At the insistence of Congress, the Pentagon is moving to set up and fund a nearly $5 billion “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” designed to give focus to the military’s new concentration on the threat from China and the need to bolster allies in East Asia. But many China critics in Congress say they are unhappy with the early ideas on how the PDI will play out and whether the administration is devoting the time and resources to make it effective over the long run.

And those current Middle East deployments, some analysts argue, could be vital in a future without well-established bases of operation in Afghanistan.

Mr. Biden and Pentagon leaders have stressed that the U.S. will maintain so-called “over-the-horizon capabilities” to strike terrorists who may find safe haven in Afghanistan. To do that, long-term staging areas elsewhere in the Middle East will be necessary, especially given that the administration so far has not secured new deals to host military assets in countries bordering Afghanistan.

If the administration pulls troops or equipment from Kuwait, for example, “It’s not certain you’d ever get back in there,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr, now the director of the Center for National Defense at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“If you anticipate ever needing to do anything in Afghanistan ever again, if you ever want to do anything in the Middle East, … you’ve got to keep a place like Bahrain. You’ve got to keep a place like Qatar,” he said. 

Furthermore, Gen. Spoehr and other specialists argue that a shift in focus from the Middle East to China is about much more than just numbers. The U.S. already has huge numbers of troops stationed in South Korea, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia.

A greater focus on China, analysts say, will involve the positioning of cutting-edge weapons systems and other assets in the Pacific, not just the shift of a few thousand ground forces from a base in the Middle East to one in Asia.

“The world is never going to be that convenient,” Gen. Spoehr said.

For his part, Mr. Biden has stressed that the U.S. will maintain the resources it needs in the Middle East, though he‘s been tight-lipped on specifics outside of the Afghan withdrawal.

“The terrorist threat has metastasized beyond Afghanistan. So we are repositioning our resources and adapting our counterterrorism posture to meet the threats where they are now significantly higher: in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa,” the president said in a speech last week defending his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. 

“But make no mistake: Our military and intelligence leaders are confident they have the capabilities to protect the homeland and our interests from any resurgent terrorist challenge emerging or emanating from Afghanistan,” he said.

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