During his conversation with the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley made an observation about the war in Afghanistan. It aroused a thunderbolt of feelings ranging from shock to disgust.
“We believe that after two decades of consistent effort, we’ve achieved a modicum of success,” the chairman told the distinguished Washington think tank. “I would also argue over the last five to seven years at a minimum, we have been in a condition of strategic stalemate.”
In other words, after nearly 20 years of war, at a cost of over a trillion dollars (this sum doesn’t even include the cost of healthcare for injured service members or the interest on the debt that has accumulated due to the war effort), and more than 2,300 U.S. troop fatalities, the United States has bought itself a perpetual stalemate.
Even journalists who are trained to leave emotion at the door couldn’t disguise their reactions. “Two decades of war in Afghanistan,” NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly tweeted shortly after Milley’s comments. “Two decades. So many lives, so much money. And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs assessment today is that it has achieved a ‘modicum of success.'”
Wall Street Journal Middle East reporter Dion Nissenbaum was just as baffled, writing, “‘Modicum of success’ in Afghanistan after 20 years apparently means high levels of deadly Taliban attacks on students, soldiers and civilians.” Yet, it was that other word Milley used, “stalemate,” that strikes a deeper chord.
Unfortunately, the public has become so used to “joinmate” in the context of Afghanistan that the term may well be considered ineffectual.
As far back as 2008, when the Taliban insurgency was picking up steam in Afghanistan’s south and east, senior U.S. military officers were beginning to view the entire war effort as a never-ending hamster wheel. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, admitted in the fall of 2008 that he wasn’t sure the U.S. was winning the conflict.
Roughly three years later and more than a year into America’s surge strategy in Afghanistan, the U.S. Intelligence Community wrote in a classified assessment that Washington was still mired in stalemate despite the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to the country.
In the years since, the same assessment was made in public by the top U.S. commanders responsible for the war effort. Shortly before retiring after a decadeslong career in the U.S. Army, Gen. John Campbell testified before the House Armed Services Committee that “a strategic stalemate without end is not the goal of this campaign,” a remark that all but confirmed to lawmakers that the war was, in fact, showing very little progress.
A year later, Campbell’s successor, Gen. John Nicholson, confirmed to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the conflict was still stuck in a stalemate. Nicholson delivered the same assessment nine months later in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt. Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford did, too, in November 2018 at a security conference in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia: “We used the term stalemate a year ago and, relatively speaking, it has not changed much.”
Milley’s comment is, therefore, just one more in a series of remarks over a decade where the “s” word has been uttered. In spite of each of those circumstances, the Pentagon has pushed for more troops, more resources, and more time to turn the security situation in Afghanistan around and build an Afghan national security force that can handle the country’s security challenges on its own.
It should be abundantly clear by now that those objectives are beyond the U.S. military’s capacity to achieve. Washington must finally accept the reality that the U.S. has done all it can in Afghanistan and that the costs of continued U.S. involvement in the conflict have exceeded the perceived benefits tenfold. If it doesn’t, other commanders who are next in line to direct the longest war in U.S. history will run the high risk of expressing the same depressing assessments five, 10, or 20 years into the future.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
