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Obviously, we are yet to read the departed Secretary of Defence Esper's Afghanistan memorandum to the White House that apparently precipitated his firing. But judging by the Washington Post account, Esper made one alarming claim, that unilateral withdrawal would damage alliances.
Let's linger on that point: for fear of credibility damage, the U.S. must only accept "conditions based" withdrawal, presumably by trying for an elusive settlement with parties who have incentives to run out the clock, thus staying there and taking casualties for longer.
Firstly, its doubtful whether NATO or Asian allies base their commitment to their alliance on whether the US is willing to fight a peripheral war for yet more years. But more to the point, what kind of ally insists on that?
Alliances are means, not ends, and they do not strategically or morally oblige one party to sustain without limit injuries it would otherwise not accept, for the sake of reputation. This is another case where the equation should run the other way.
If America's allies, or some of them, do require an ongoing presence and casualties and expenditure of effort in Afghanistan, then they are unreasonable allies who ask too much. America is not obliged to bleed in Afghanistan to make the rest of us believe it is reliable.
Not least because it has been bleeding there for almost twenty years, and sunk much cost into it. Further evidence that the president-elect would be well advised not just to reaffirm the value of alliances, but to revise the conditions and expectations they entail.
