Opponents of a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan have relied on many emotionally tinged arguments to make their displeasure clear.
Some, such as former national security adviser John Bolton, have called the agreement between Washington and the Taliban a sad surrender. (Bolton, of course, is reluctant to strike a deal with any of Washington’s adversaries short of full capitulation from the other side.) Others, such as Time columnist David French, have used fear over what might happen in an attempt to get President Trump to reverse course. Others blame the Trump administration for leaving the Afghan government to its own devices, as if sustaining a corrupt kleptocracy in Kabul is Washington’s eternal responsibility.
Yet one of the most emotionally satisfying but logically empty arguments frequently employed is that the White House would be disrespecting the service of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops over the last 18 years if the United States withdrew from Afghanistan.
Former national security adviser Susan Rice was one of this argument’s protagonists, writing in a New York Times op-ed that Trump is cheapening “the sacrifice of the 3,500 American and NATO service members who perished in Afghanistan” by throwing Afghanistan overboard. The Wall Street Journal editorial board ran the same play in their March 1 editorial, as did Sen. Lindsey Graham, who wrote in a statement that “we have fought too hard and sacrificed too much to allow our security gains to slip away.” Even British national security officials such as Ben Wallace, the U.K. secretary of state for defense, deploy them in public remarks.
Yet let’s be clear about what all of these fine men and women are essentially saying: that only through continued investment in blood and treasure can the hard work of U.S. and NATO soldiers be honored. In other words, only by magnifying the failure with more failure can the decadeslong U.S. experience in Afghanistan be considered worthwhile.
There’s a term for this highly dangerous reasoning: the sunk cost fallacy.
While psychologists have different definitions, the sunk cost fallacy is essentially a phenomenon where somebody continues to do something because he or she has already put so much time and effort into a project. People across a variety of industries can suffer from it.
To take one example: A CEO may decide to keep her company on life support simply to reassure herself that the years and millions of dollars she devoted to her firm were worth the trouble. Injecting more capital into the company would keep the doors open, but the CEO ultimately understands that the profit margin would still be dismal regardless of how much cash is invested. Declaring bankruptcy might be the smarter thing, but the boss refuses to do it to spare herself the emotional trauma.
The sunk cost fallacy has been a highly effective lubricant of the U.S. foreign policy machinery as well.
The most clear-cut case is the war in Vietnam, when the Johnson administration continued to deploy tens of thousands of additional soldiers to the rice patties and villages of South Vietnam each year just to hold the line and stall the appearance of defeat. After over a decade of involvement, President Richard Nixon finally saw the futility of it all, cut a deal with the Viet Cong, and got the U.S. military out of the conflict.
Afghanistan is no Vietnam, but it nonetheless suffers from a similar dose of sunk costs. Every dollar spent and every American life lost on the battlefield is used as justification to maintain a status quo that is simply not working. To quit now is spun as a tragedy. But how logical is it to honor tragedy with more tragedy?
Like the CEO who burned through more credit for a failed venture and the American president who couldn’t stomach being remembered as the commander in chief who lost a war, those counseling a reversal of full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan are merely worsening the pain. It would be imbecilic to sacrifice one more American life on behalf of a war in Afghanistan that can only be resolved politically, not militarily.
Yet on foreign policy, voters have lost patience for emotional arguments. It’s time to embrace the reality staring us in the face — the sooner Afghanistan is left to the Afghans, the better off the U.S. will be.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
