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Americas forever war in Afghanistan is an investment of kinds, albeit one ofblood and treasure. To put things in financial terms, that investment is being written offabandoned, essentiallywith President Joe Bidens decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaedas terror attacks on the U.S. A war that was described as necessaryis now said to be unnecessary. Thatsbound to deepen the pain of families of fallen American and Afghan soldiers,who now have a new reason to askwhether their loved ones died in vain.

Its tempting to say that the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan to protect its huge investment there. Some have argued precisely that. In an op-edin the Washington Post in 2015 directed at President Barack Obama, retired GeneralDavid Petraeus and Brookings Institution scholar Michael OHanlon wrote,The right approach is for Obama to protect our investment in Afghanistan and to hand off to his successor military forces and tools that will still be critically needed in 2017 and beyond. They added that the cost of staying was small in comparison to wellover 2,000 American livesand nearly$1trillion in expense as well as the risk of future attacks on the U.S.emanating from Afghanistan.

Lost investment was also the subtext on April 14, when SenatorLindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina, said, This has been a very long war. The bottom line is they died in defense of their nation. Not in some endless war. They died to make sure this never happens again. That seems like an implicitargument for staying in Afghanistan to make sure their sacrifice was not in vain.

But economists advise us to forget about sunk costshow much has already been investedwhen deciding to go forward with a project (or a war). The logic is that whats done is done, for better or worse, andshould have no bearing on the decision of what to do next. The only thing worse than making a bad investment is stubbornly sticking with it, throwing good money after bad.

Of course a war isnt any ordinary investment.In an age when human sensibility is finely tuned to all the nuances of despair, it still seems important to say of those who die in war that they did not die in vain, the political theorist and philosopher Michael Walzer writes in his 2015 book, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations(italics in the original).

Thats the tragedy of pulling out of Afghanistan now, after so much blood has been spilled. Walzer writes, A just war is one that is morally urgent to win, and a soldier who dies in a just war does not die in vain. By that token, if the war in Afghanistan is no longer judged morally urgent to win, does that imply that a soldier who died in itdied in vain?

A 2009 article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution byWilliam A. Boettcher III and Michael D. Cobb of North Carolina State University found that framing the war in Iraq as an investment to be protectedincreased support for itamong people who supported it already but decreased support for it among those who feltthe U.S. should have stayed out.

Whether Biden made the right decision about withdrawal isnt the questionhere. There are no great options:Staying would have bad consequences and so would leaving. Theres a reason Afghanistan iscalled the graveyard of empires.

The questionis what Biden should have considered inmaking hisfateful stay-or-go decision. He should have focusedand apparently didon the pros and cons of withdrawal while looking aheadrather than looking back on whathappened over the past 20 years. As economists put it: Ignore sunk costs.

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America's War in Afghanistan Is the Mother of All Sunk Costs - Bloomberg