By this time next month, the war in Afghanistan will be deep into its eighteenth year. The milestone will likely come and go in D.C. as a nonevent, overlooked by the daily storm of partisanship that hovers over the capital like a permanent storm cloud.
But in reality, it should serve as a significant reminder of how muddled and strategically counterproductive U.S. policy in Afghanistan has become. Indeed, the war has lasted for such a long period of time that fresh Marine recruits — some of whom were not even alive when U.S. military first pounded al Qaeda and the Taliban in the fall of 2001 — are being lectured by their drill sergeants about why the U.S. is operating in Afghanistan to begin with.
If we don’t want another generation of young American soldiers risking their lives on behalf of a fractured Afghan government, it is past time to face some hard truths about the war. Failing to ask the hard questions, review our assumptions, and reassess our strategy will produce the worst of all results — another 17 years of autopilot.
First, there is no military solution to the Afghanistan quagmire. Despite $83 billion in U.S. taxpayer money devoted to building and sustaining the Afghan national security forces, $132 billion in U.S. reconstruction assistance, and U.S. war costs totaling approximately $1 trillion, the battlefield dynamics on the ground are as discouraging as they have ever been. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joe Dunford confessed to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 15, “the general strategic situation has not changed.”
This is the same description Dunford had used to describe the situation in Afghanistan four months earlier, when he referred to the war as a “stalemate.” Dunford levied the same exact term during a press availability in May 2017, roughly three months before President Donald Trump decided to deploy an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
With the Taliban controlling more territory than the movement has ever controlled before, the current U.S. strategy has failed to create an Afghanistan that is democratic, prosperous, free of corruption, and effective in delivering for the Afghan people — objectives that were overly ambitious from the start.
Afghanistan has been mired in war since 1979, when the former Soviet Union invaded to prop up a communist client government in Kabul. It remains a state whose stability and prosperity are largely at the mercy of its neighbors, with Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and the Central Asian republics all holding considerable stakes in Afghanistan’s political trajectory.
While the United States is a player in this contest, it is a minor actor in this whole story. Defending the American people from terrorism simply does not require a perpetual military presence there at a cost of $45 billion per year. Indeed, policymakers in Washington have consistently overestimated America’s capacity to remake Afghanistan into a Central Asian democratic utopia.
Ultimately, peace in Afghanistan will not be attained through force of arms. Only a durable, comprehensive, fair political resolution between the Afghan government, the Taliban, and Afghan civil society — a settlement that allows the Afghan people to live in a state of relative peace — will be able to finally close the book on this long and bloody chapter of Afghan history.
What, then, should the United States do moving forward?
First and foremost, the Trump administration must remember why the United States was involved in Afghanistan in the first place. The core U.S. national security interest in Afghanistan is ensuring that transnational terrorists are unable to use Afghan soil as a base for external attacks against the U.S. homeland or the American people.
This is a goal that can be accomplished without maintaining 14,000 U.S. troops on the ground, allocating tens of billions of dollars every year. The U.S. can combat terrorism and encourage an Afghan political settlement to the war on a far leaner force structure and without continuing an endless war.
Rather than choosing a status-quo policy that has been ineffective and wasteful, the administration must make tough choices about the end state we want to meet and the resources required to achieve it. U.S. blood and treasure should no longer be spent seeking elusive, inconsistent, and secondary strategic objectives that have expanded far beyond our key national interests.
Second, U.S. officials in general must demilitarize American foreign policy and realize that not all international problems can be solved using the U.S. military. Although American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are the most professional, proficient, and capable in the business, they are not the fail-safe option. The Defense Department can’t be expected to plug holes in every contingency or fly to the rescue with an answer to every crisis.
The United States is the most powerful country in the world not only due to our overwhelming military superiority, but also to the diligence and dedication of our diplomats. If there are key lessons our national security leaders must extrapolate from the war in Afghanistan, it is that military deployments are a last resort and should last for the shortest possible period of time. The United States’ military power must only be executed in support of clear, consistent, achievable and finite strategic end-states that are developed and overseen by the professionals in our Foreign Service.
U.S. foreign policy must undergo a critical reevaluation. The endless war in Afghanistan is a perfect place to start.
Retired Rear Adm. Michael E. Smith is a former commander of Carrier Strike Group Three and the president of the American College of National Security Leaders.
