The American and allied military presence in Afghanistan peaked between late 2010 and mid 2011. For the next ten years, the major debate in Washington was how many troops to withdraw, how quickly. The announced unilateral American withdrawal was the defining fact of the war for its final decade. Policymakers treated the debate over troop numbers as a proxy for a debate over larger goals. But there are other aspects of strategy, like reconstruction and diplomacy, that simply cannot be subsumed within a debate about troop numbers, aspects that went unaddressed during the US’s gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan. Withdrawing troops without achieving the other objectives is how the United States gradually abandoned the rest of its war aims as slowly and expensively as possible.