President Trump is currently playing Hamlet over the fate of Afghanistan. He is divided between repeating the Obama mini-surge and cutting America’s losses in the graveyard of empires.
But the consequences of unilateral withdrawal have not been considered. To borrow from one of Donald Rumsfeld’s 2003 “snowflakes,” will withdrawal help deter or dissuade “more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?” Past experience suggests it is unlikely.
Proponents of withdrawal operate under four incorrect assumptions. The first is that occupations, not ideology, drive terrorism. End the occupation, the theory goes, and you drain the swamp of support for terrorists. The second is that we can cut a deal with the Taliban to prevent them from harboring a new generation of terrorists because it will be in their best interest. The third is that even if more terrorists emerge, they can easily be deterred. And the fourth is that we have nothing to fear but threat inflation itself. (John Mueller, for example, purports to demonstrate that the threat of terrorism has been exaggerated.)
As attractive as these contrarian ideas might seem, sometimes conventional wisdom is conventional precisely because it is wise. In the real world, a multitude of factors account for terrorism, from anger over occupations to disenchantment among lonely, educated, middle-class young men. The removal of just one will not fix anything. There’s no guarantee that it will be in the Taliban’s interest to keep any commitment to the West. There are no good answers as to how to deter terrorists by denial or punishment. And terrorism is just as terrifying as it seems.
Unilateral withdrawals have an abysmal record of unrequited failure. Rather than draining the swamp of support for terrorists, unilateral withdrawals produce a new species of mosquito or strain of malaria. Call it the “March of Dimes” model.
After Jonas Salk found a cure for polio, the March of Dimes shifted its fundraising efforts to curing birth defects. Terrorist organizations want to live on in the same fashion as any other organization. After one mission has been completed, they look for a new one, or face being pushed out by another group of thugs.
Ehud Barak’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 illustrates precisely this. Barak had campaigned in 1999 promising to withdraw from southern Lebanon. He had hoped that this would “drain the swamp” of support for Hezbollah. He could not have been more wrong. Instead of drying up support for Hezbollah, the terrorist organization perpetuated its survival by looking for new issues, starting with the dispute over Shebaa Farms.
Again, groups like Hezbollah don’t just go away when they achieve their goals. They find new goals in order to justify their continued existence.
Ariel Sharon made the same mistake when he withdrew all Israeli settlers from Gaza. Facing domestic problems over corruption allegations as well as the unexpected popularity of the Geneva 2003 summit, Sharon faced potent domestic political incentives to restart the peace process, with unilateral concessions being the most popular.
What happened next demonstrated his folly. First, Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections. Then, it kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Shalit. In 2008, Israel fought Operation Hot Winter to compel Hamas to stop firing rockets into Israel. Israel also fought Operation Cast Lead, combatted cross-border attacks in 2010 and 2011, Operations Echo and Pillar of Defense in 2012, and finally, the 50-day Gaza War in 2014. There is nothing in this sequence of events that suggests unilateral withdrawal from Gaza helped drain the swamp of support for Hamas.
Making accurate predictions in international relations and learning the right lessons from the past can both be thankless tasks. However, the evidence suggests that unilateral withdrawal from terrorist havens does not discourage or even dampen enthusiasm for more terrorism.
Dr. Albert B. Wolf is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University of Afghanistan. He previously served as a Legislative Assistant for Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives.
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