2,500 + 3,000 = 0
Just 2,500 troops. That’s all we have had the past few years in Afghanistan. You would not know that from press coverage. The Biden Administration, with the announcement of its withdrawal, has now had to send in 3,000 troops to help evacuate people. In other words, to reduce to zero, we have increased by 3,000.
For what?
Paul Miller has a very solid read this morning. Much of what we tell ourselves about Afghanistan is based on a mythology that sprung up over hard years. It has been more than a year since an American soldier was killed in Afghanistan. Our presence held it together.
We gave up. And I am on the side that said we should withdraw in large part because our political and military leaders have been signaling our surrender in advance for several years. But there are a few things we need to keep in mind as so many of us consider the collapse of Afghanistan a failure.
For twenty years, we have kept the Taliban out. For twenty years, we have kept the Taliban from using Afghanistan to plot terrorist attacks on us or anyone else. For twenty years, our troop presence in Afghanistan has helped keep our homeland safe. For twenty years, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorists had to be more worried about drones than the details of terror plots. For twenty years, there’s been no safe haven for them to go to plan large-scale attacks.
During those twenty years, the rate of literacy in Afghanistan has increased. The rate of education for girls has skyrocketed. The lifespan of the Afghani people has increased. Our presence did them good and us good.
But…
At some point, it seems we lost focus on the mission. We never eradicated the Taliban. Starting with Barack Obama, we kept saying we were going to pull our troops out. So the Taliban just waited us out and built up to take it back.
We signaled our future surrender starting with Obama. The Taliban took us at our word. And now they are sweeping back through the land and will have all of Afghanistan under their control probably by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11.
2500 American troops have held that country together without a casualty in over a year. Now, to accomplish his surrender, Joe Biden has sent in 3000 more to evacuate the remnant of American personnel as the Taliban sweep in.
On July 8, 2021, in answering questions about Afghanistan, Joe Biden said this:
Well, first of all, the mission hasn’t failed — yet. There is in Afghanistan, in all parties, there’s been corruption. The question is can there be an agreement on unity of purpose? What is the objective? For example, it started off, there were going to be negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan National Security Forces and the Afghan government. That didn’t come to — didn’t come to fruition. So the question now is: where do they go from here? That — the jury is still out, but the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
He was wrong.
The problem is not that we are leaving Afghanistan. Given our unwillingness to destroy the Taliban and our incompetence at nation-building, we probably should.
The problem is not that we are leaving, but the inevitability of our having to one day go back and do it all over again. The Taliban will not be tamed. They will only be killed or kill us.
President Trump drew down our US forces in Afghanistan from 5,000 to 2,500, and was planning a complete withdrawal. I simply believe that he would have done a better job of leaving than Biden has. I cannot understand why our generals would allow sophisticated weaponry to be left there for the Taliban and the Chinese!
In 1991, we essentially obliterated the Iraqi military and freed Kuwait. The doctrine we used, developed by then-Army Chief of Staff and later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, remembered one thing from the Vietnam experience that we conveniently, and much to our loss, forgot after 9/11; namely that no matter how justified the military action is, the people whom you are freeing HAVE TO WANT WHAT YOU ARE OFFERING. In 1991, The Kuwaitis, the Saudis, the other Gulf Arab states, the UN, NATO , and the US Congress agreed that that obliteration was called for. The late President George H.W. Bush also successfully resisted the temptation to engage the U.S. in an exercise in "nation building", a temptation to which his son fell victim in 2003.
We have now discovered that we have tried, and failed, in a similar exercise in Afghanistan, which like Iraq is far less a coherent nation than it is a colored space on the map. In both places, tribal, ethnic and in Iraq, religious sect affiliations matter far more than do any notion of "nationhood" as we understand it. When I talk with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, a group which as a retired military vet, I feel comfortable doing, I am struck by a recurring theme among all these men and women, namely that as far as the idea of nationhood goes, neither country has that in their national experience. They also note that any attempt of "nation building" as was proposed by then-President George W. Bush and pursued by President Obama, is truly a fool's errand.
Obama, and later Trump, both talked about withdrawal from both places, but the legacy of the neocons who counseled Bush 41 persisted, and we kept being strung along for another 6 months, or a year, or.... what's different now is that Biden has decided to just leave without any assurance that the present status quo would be maintained. In Iraq, this isn't a problem, as the present Iraqi government seems committed in its own way to making something work. But Afghanistan remains a feudal collection of tribes and city-states, with no hope that any central authority can ever change things. Enter the Taliban, whose vision of Afghanistan, while horrid, remains perversely comfortable to the majority of the people.
The lesson is what Colin Powell could have predicted: One can't build a nation if the people of that nation are unwilling to have it built. We'll just have to live with the prospect of dealing with whatever terror group the Taliban invites in. The Party of Endless War has, sadly, won.