President Donald Trump is meeting with his national security team at Camp David today to consider a thorny question: What course should the United States pursue for the conflict in Afghanistan, its longest-running war?
The White House is weighing whether to increase our military presence to increase support for the Afghan military (the generals’ recommendation) or to reduce or even remove completely conventional forces there.
In the Atlantic today, foreign policy expert Vance Serchuk argues America should focus on winning the war rather than just searching for an off-ramp:
To an unusual degree, the debate over the future of the Afghan war is really about its past: specifically, why a decade and a half of military operations has failed to turn the tide. It is a fair question, and President Trump has been correct to press for answers before deciding on a way ahead. Some argue the problem has been America’s unrealistic ambitions in Afghanistan—undertaking a costly nation-building campaign in the hopes of transforming a broken country—and that the best course, therefore, is to scale back military involvement and minimize further entanglement in this graveyard of empires. The problem with this argument is that it inverts the history of what has actually happened in Afghanistan since 2001. In fact, the consistent theme of U.S. Afghan policy for 15 years has not been nation-building, but exit-seeking. From nearly the moment the first U.S. forces arrived in the wake of 9/11, Washington has been trying to hand off responsibility for the country and draw down its military presence. In doing so, it has inadvertently thrown a lifeline to the enemies it went to Afghanistan to defeat, encouraged regional powers to hedge against it, and needlessly compounded the difficulty of this mission. The key question now is whether Trump recognizes this mistake, or repeats it.
Read the rest of the piece here.
