Structured description, foreign policy analysis, and policy quality during the Biden decision to withdraw from Afghanistan

Abstract

This article develops a descriptive study of the Biden administration’s 2021 decision process regarding whether to withdraw US military forces from Afghanistan. It addresses a practical question for both scholars and practitioners. How can outside observers assess a major foreign policy decision based upon contemporary public information? Observers regularly seek to determine whether a security strategy was ‘good or bad,’ and many have a vested interest in addressing such questions as or shortly after the policy decision occurred. Unfortunately, most assessments of a foreign policy decision process incorporate known outcomes, which can distort the analysis. Descriptive research provides a solution by allowing researchers to depict a decision case as it occurred. The following article describes the Biden administration’s strategic and political deliberations behind the Afghanistan withdrawal decision. It relies upon information publicly available within a year of that process. In turn, it evaluates this decision by directly comparing several major assessment ideal types: procedural, substantive, and outcome-oriented. It ends with mixed findings but argues that structured description paired with comparison across those ideal types allows scholars to identify categories and observe patterns that are often invisible both to contemporary commentary and to causal theory. Such findings are useful for contemporary judgments as well as for developing further empirical scholarship.