In 2001, less than a month after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush announced the beginning of American military action against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. The war began with broad public support and a nearly unanimous vote from Congress.
On Sunday, the NATO mission in Afghanistan officially came to an end. U.S. withdrawal comes only a few months after it became clear that one of its main missions, to deny terrorists a safe haven, had failed.
It failed because Washington has allowed a new safe haven for Islamist terrorists to be firmly established further west, in Syria and Iraq. That error renders the mission in Afghanistan almost moot. America has thus ended a decade of war with the worst possible outcome — a sustained and expensive commitment that bore no fruit in the long run.
Bush originally announced that the invasion of Afghanistan was intended primarily “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations.” He argued that “[b]y destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans.”
For a time, that worked, but America’s interest in Afghanistan all but disappeared in 2014 with the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its spin-offs need no longer depend upon sympathetic regimes such as the Taliban for safe harbor. They now enjoy an even better patron — a government they actually control, and a regime run according to the same principles in whose name they have killed so many and destroyed so much.
America’s defeat in Afghanistan can be traced back to President Obama’s decision to abandon Iraq without any residual American force to help keep the peace and stabilize the country. Obama’s own former defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has attributed it to Obama’s complete lack of interest in following through and ensuring a long-term peace in the wake of a war he had never supported and had promised to end.
Obama had the leverage he needed in the form of reconstruction funds to get a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq’s government, but instead he used Iraqi objections as an excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway, which was to bail out.
Perhaps Obama was right that the Iraq War should not have been started. But bell cannot be un-rung once struck, and presidents are elected to deal with events as they are rather than as they wish they had been. Obama’s disregard and carelessness in Iraq has squandered not only the gains made in the war there, but also in Afghanistan.
Despite an entire decade having passed and all of the lives lost and money spent, terrorist groups, far from being “on the run,” now have their own country from which to operate. American military action following 9-11 to suppress terrorism will now go down in history as a grand failure thanks to Obama’s decisions. America’s third war in Iraq has gotten off to a shaky start. It will probably be up to the next president to start all over again and derive a strategy for the safety of this country and its allies.
