The Taliban launched a major attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Monday, killing dozens and injuring more than 100 people, nearly half of whom were reportedly children. This attack, combined with each side’s frustration at the other’s inflexibility, makes the likelihood of any substantive progress in the ongoing U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations very small. Meanwhile, two Americans soldiers and a special forces medic were killed in Afghanistan just within the last week.
After nearly two decades of war and amid the stalemate at the negotiating table, it is increasingly clear these peace talks, however nice and potentially beneficial for the people of Afghanistan, should not be used as a pretext for prolonging American military involvement. We do not need a formal peace accord to guarantee our security, and U.S. involvement in Afghanistan should have ended years ago.
It can end now. The Trump administration should make good on President Trump’s repeated promises to withdraw troops from Afghanistan: a desire he reiterated on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show this week.
After all, involvement in peace talks has not kept the Taliban from continually carrying out attacks on Afghan security forces and civilians. Counterintuitively, the negotiations may unintentionally make matters worse, incentivizing the Taliban to use violence in an attempt to gain leverage and shock an increasingly war-weary United States into a faster exit.
There appeared to be some superficial progress earlier this year, with reports of a draft agreement to remove U.S. troops in exchange for Taliban assurances to not allow terrorists to operate in Afghanistan. But little else has been accomplished since then.
The Taliban have been firm in its demand for a full U.S. withdrawal within six months. Meanwhile, Washington wants a year to 18 months, plus a ceasefire and an intra-Afghan dialogue — but these are security goals for Afghans, not Americans. Furthermore, the Taliban have thus far refused to negotiate with the Afghan government, indicating it will begin talks with fellow Afghans only after an announcement of a U.S. withdrawal, while outright refusing to “talk with the Kabul administration as a government.”
Neither side is budging, and there is no reason to believe the Taliban are acting in good faith. But even if they were, we don’t need the Taliban’s cooperation to ensure our security. The logic justifying our exit doesn’t rest on trust in the Taliban. The United States doesn’t need anyone’s permission to leave.
It is true that al Qaeda was able to operate freely in Afghanistan in the 1990s, hosted by the Taliban, but that was not the determining factor of their success on 9/11. More responsible was U.S. ignorance of the threat al Qaeda posed and bureaucratic intransigence in the intelligence community. Interagency mistrust between the CIA and the FBI allowed the 9/11 hijackers to pass through U.S. border security 68 times, attending domestic flight schools and operating in nine states. The intelligence community had 23 opportunities to stop the attacks.
In short, there is no straight line from a secure base of operations in Afghanistan to the horror witnessed on 9/11: The role of weak states and ungoverned spaces has been greatly exaggerated in the post-9/11 security environment.
9/11 was a unique historical moment in which a lot of chips fell into place for al Qaeda in just the right way: Those who carried out the attacks had to obtain visas and passports, learn English, attend and pass flight school, open bank accounts, and buy cars and rent apartments — all inside the United States, not Afghanistan, with the help of friends and broader networks of contacts. Long-term U.S. occupation and nation-building in Afghanistan is not the tool to ensure a similar attack never happens again. It’s merely political insurance for our elected leaders who refuse to acknowledge reality.
That doesn’t mean another 9/11 is impossible, but we don’t need to stay in Afghanistan any longer to prevent it. In 2019, unlike in 2001, we are hyperaware of the threat of terrorism, and reforms made in the wake of 9/11 enable classic methods of police and intelligence work to do the heavy lifting to keep us safe. Endless war is neither necessary nor effective. If anything, it diverts limited resources away from more productive security methods.
If all those measures fail, we can still conduct small-scale operations to disrupt terrorist activity. In a world where America is actively pursuing global terror threats, few places can offer the refuge needed to establish pre-9/11 conditions. The usual claptrap insistence that we “need to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” is a slogan, not a national security policy. It’s better for U.S. security and prosperity to finally drop the pretense and bring our troops home.
Jerrod A. Laber is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a senior contributor for Young Voices. Follow him on Twitter: @JerrodALaber.
