You can put Afghanistan down as yet another issue that seems to divide neatly along party lines, with Democrats backing President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the remaining U.S. and NATO partner forces after 20 years of war and Republicans warning it’s a blunder that will once again allow Afghanistan to become a haven for terrorists and require the United States to return in greater numbers and at a greater cost at some future date. First up, we asked Washington Examiner national security reporter and senior writer Jamie McIntyre to present the positive case for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Separately, Washington Examiner defense reporter Abraham Mahshie presents the case for why withdrawal from Afghanistan is a mistake.
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The Trump-Biden view: ‘Enough is enough’
It was Trump’s plan: Former President Donald Trump, convinced the advice of his defense secretary and national security advisers had been wrong all along, did everything he could in his last year in office to lock in place his plan to bring all U.S. troops home by this year. When President Joe Biden was elected, Trump began a furious effort to box in the new president, including an additional troop cut, and likely would have pulled all the forces out by Inauguration Day, had not then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other cooler heads persuaded him that it would be a logistical nightmare and a political disaster. The Taliban, believing the February 2020 peace deal was a full surrender by the United States, vowed to resume attacks against U.S. and foreign troops, ending a yearlong period without a single U.S. casualty. “It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself,” Biden said when announcing his decision to follow Trump’s lead. “It was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something.” Biden knew that while the Taliban deal was not set in stone, it was set in quick-drying cement.
Twenty years is enough: “All wars must end,” said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last year as he worked to execute Trump’s withdrawal plan. In the two decades the U.S. has been in Afghanistan, 2,488 Americans have been killed, and another 20,722 have been wounded, many with life-changing injuries. The U.S. has spent $825 billion on the war effort since the first troops were sent to topple the Taliban in October 2001, according to the Pentagon. The U.S. has trained, equipped, and paid the salaries of Afghan security forces that now number 350,000, along with an Afghan air force capable of carrying out offensive airstrikes. The U.S. goal has always been to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base from which terrorists can launch another 9/11-scale attack on the U.S., not to install a Western democracy in Kabul. “We did that. We accomplished that objective,” Biden said. “We already have service members doing their duty in Afghanistan today whose parents served in the same war. We have service members who were not yet born when our nation was attacked on 9/11. War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking.” His predecessor agrees. “Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long,” Trump said. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do.”
The threat has moved: The world has changed in 20 years. Afghanistan is no longer the epicenter of anti-U.S. terrorist activities. “We’re looking at the world now. We have to look at it through the prism of 2021, not 2001,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on ABC. “The terrorism threat has moved to other places, and we have other very important items on our agenda.” Two decades of sustained counterterrorism operations have degraded the ability of both al Qaeda and the Islamic State to the point that the latest intelligence community report on worldwide threats concluded that neither group is positioned to conduct attacks against the West. “The most concerning threat to us for the homeland and attacks in the United States really come from and out of Somalia and Syria and Yemen. Those are the key areas that you’d see for al Qaeda,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the nation’s top spymaster, told Congress. “And the primary threat from ISIS really stems from Iraq and Syria.”
US can still target terrorists: A key provision of the withdrawal agreement negotiated by the Trump administration on Feb. 29 requires the Taliban to ensure that no one, including al Qaeda, would use Afghanistan as a base to “threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” It’s highly doubtful that the Taliban has the will or the wherewithal to deliver on that promise, so Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, is working on plans to reposition forces in the region for a mission he says is difficult but doable. “Actually, I think that’s the easiest part of the problem here,” said retired Adm. William McRaven, the former head of U.S. Special Operations Command who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “If I were the commander and given the task of ensuring that al Qaeda did not have safe haven in Afghanistan again, I think we could do that from over the horizon. Now, again, would it be challenging? Sure. But we would have the ability to have drones in the air. If we have some sort of intelligence apparatus on the ground, we’ll have a sense of how al Qaeda is growing.”
Lessons from Vietnam: The Vietnam War was a very different war, and drawing parallels with Afghanistan can be facile and misleading. But as in Afghanistan, the war preceded the dispatch of the first U.S. combat troops in 1965 and continued after their departure in 1973. For the U.S., Vietnam lasted less than half as long and was more than 20 times as deadly, with more than 58,000 deaths. In both wars, the U.S. came to the realization that the only way internecine civil conflict can be fought is for local forces to do the fighting, with perhaps the U.S. training and backing its favored side. President Richard Nixon called this “Vietnamization.” In Afghanistan, the strategy was called “by, with, and through” local fighters. The U.S. got out of Vietnam by negotiating a separate peace with North Vietnam and promising to help South Vietnam as the war continued without U.S. combat power, just as the Trump agreement with the Taliban cut the Afghan government out of the process. Saigon fell two years later when Congress refused to approve $1 billion in military and humanitarian aid for what it saw as a lost cause. As Henry Kissinger, who negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, famously said, “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” The Taliban has not lost.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
