The U.S. accord with the Taliban is undoubtedly imperfect, but making American military withdrawal from Afghanistan too easy is not its flaw. Yet that is exactly the foolish critique leveled by hawkish members of Congress who seem content to stay at war in Afghanistan forever.
The conditions outlined in two classified annexes accompanying the agreement, brief lists of prohibited behavior for each side and the terms under which the U.S. military will depart, are too vague, lawmakers such as Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Chris Murphy have complained. The annexes don’t give a specific metric for success, they claim, and how can the United States end this war without knowing we’ve succeeded?
The question is grimly laughable. And the pair issuing a selective demand for more details is made absurd by how the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan has been short on details for years.
We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly two decades. Tens of thousands of Americans and Afghans have been injured and killed in this conflict. We’ve spent and borrowed trillions of dollars, more than the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation, and lost much of it to waste and corruption. And after a quick initial victory, a rout of those involved in the Sept. 11 attacks accomplished mere months into the intervention, all this sacrifice and suffering has been for naught.
It has made neither the U.S. nor Afghanistan more secure. It has brought us no closer to peace.
For years, the war has fallen into a deadly cycle of ebbing and flowing deployments and insurgency. The Taliban are steadily regaining ground, and a functional democracy remains out of reach for the government in Kabul. (This very week, two rival politicians are both claiming victory following the presidential election with dueling inaugurations.)
The Washington Post’s publication of the Afghanistan Papers was merely confirmation of what had long been obvious, if not in quite such galling detail: Our government has systematically lied to the public about the war in Afghanistan. It has hidden evidence of failure, refused to collect damning data, and sent a generation of American soldiers into battle with no achievable military objective — indeed, often no clear objective at all.
Still, the Trump administration’s arrangement with the Taliban is no one’s idea of a dream deal.
For one thing, it is at least 18 years too late. For another, it will take “many months” to implement. The timeline for U.S. exit is a year and a half, far too long, and even then, the withdrawal will be incomplete, as some number of U.S. forces will remain indefinitely to combat the Islamic State and other terrorist groups “to insure they are not a threat to U.S. forces, to partner forces, or to Afghan forces or the Afghan people.”
That kind of open-ended commitment to another nation’s safety all but ensures that whatever happens with the U.S.-Taliban deal, American troops will stay in harm’s way, making reescalation likely.
In short, if there is a major problem with this deal, it’s the failure to end fully the U.S. role in Afghanistan’s conflict once and for all. It leaves open too wide a door to further intervention. It makes it all too probable that five or 20 years down the line, we will find ourselves in this same position once again. We’ll still be stuck fighting a perpetual war, recklessly spilling blood and treasure and meddling in the internal politics of a nation we demonstrably do not understand and cannot control.
We cannot leave Afghanistan quickly enough. Our military intervention there is serving no one well, and insofar as the U.S.-Taliban agreement smooths U.S. departure, that is to its credit. How can the U.S. end this war without knowing we’ve succeeded? Let me answer that question with a better one: How can we keep fighting a war knowing that we’ve already failed?
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities and contributing editor at the Week.
