Eighteen years, five months, two weeks, and four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States waved the white flag of surrender to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. Austin Miller, great Americans, no doubt secured the best deal they could after Secretaries Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper pulled the plug on what was unironically christened Operation Enduring Freedom. President Trump’s partisans will polish this turd of an agreement best they can, to help his reelection. But this war now likely ends like Vietnam did: enemy tanks crashing through our embassy gate and a CIA officer slugging a liaison partner trying to board the last helicopter out.
Withdrawal conditions will be interpreted with a view toward getting out fast. The Taliban did not even follow through on its promised weeklong ceasefire, quickly rebranded as a “reduction in violence.” The Taliban will break its agreements, al Qaeda will return, literally with a vengeance, and terror attacks will be launched to kill people in the U.S.
Those who say we can manage this threat from the air forget how that worked out between 1996-2001, while those who say from barstools that we can “carpet bomb” the enemy forget we have not done that since 1945. The military experience of those who say we can simply parachute in a handful of special forces may be limited to watching Rambo.
If the Taliban and al Qaeda could be easily eliminated from over the horizon, they would have been. Instead, an irreducible minimum of infantry, trainer/advisers, and combat service/support enablers are needed to facilitate even limited strikes at discrete targets. These troops will be gone.
President John F. Kennedy said victory has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. But with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, let’s establish some paternity here.
Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan should have vetted Afghan allies more carefully after the 1979 Soviet invasion. President George H.W. Bush should have kept a closer eye on Afghanistan after the Red Army retreated in 1989. President Bill Clinton, distracted by his infidelity and impeachment, missed opportunities for decapitation strikes against al Qaeda even after it attacked U.S. forces in Yemen, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia, car-bombed the World Trade Center, destroyed U.S. embassies in Africa, nearly sank U.S. warships, and almost blew up Los Angeles International Airport. President George W. Bush paid insufficient attention to Afghanistan before Sept. 11.
After Sept. 11, Bush skillfully rallied the country and world against al Qaeda and the Taliban. But he failed to ask the people for shared sacrifices, calling for consumer spending rather than reinstituting the draft. This therefore became a conflict of repeated tours for America’s warrior classes, not an all-out push for victory by her citizens. Meanwhile, Bush’s counterterrorism policies indubitably prevented further major attacks at home during the remainder of his presidency, a cure with a side effect of keeping Afghanistan out of sight and mind for the public.
Within a month, Bush had CIA and military personnel inside Afghanistan. Two months later, the Taliban fell while al Qaeda took tremendous combat losses. Fog-of-war failures in coordination between conventional and special operations forces, CIA paramilitaries, and local warlords let enemy leaders escaped across the Durand Line into Pakistan in December 2001.
This was when things went sideways.
Rather than ruthlessly pursue Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar on the ground into the Northwest Frontier Provinces and Federally Administered Tribal Areas, killing them and destroying their organizations, Bush had our military pursue nation-building and then counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, while the CIA hunted al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Nation-building was misguided. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Afghanistan, one of the poorest, least literate, most backward countries in the world, would never become Switzerland in the Hindu Kush. To paraphrase Full Metal Jacket, inside every Afghan, there was not an American trying to get out. U.S. leaders at all levels failed to grasp the nettle and decisively address with Afghan counterparts the problems of corruption and narcotics that kept the Kabul government from achieving legitimacy and competence, much less popularity.
The counterinsurgency needed as the Taliban revived was not resourced, especially once Bush invaded Iraq without expanding the “rifle strength” of our Army and Marines. In 2009-2010, Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus convinced President Barack Obama to support a surge in forces in Afghanistan. But with an eye on reelection, Obama announced in advance a time limit to the operation, vitiating any good it might do.
Taliban sanctuaries, especially the near-inviolable one around Quetta, ensured that the enemy, aided by Pakistan’s treacherous Inter-Services Intelligence, could bleed U.S. forces and sneak south across the border at little risk to themselves. Al Qaeda-inspired “green-on-blue” insider attacks on our forces and intelligence officers, downplayed by politically correct U.S. officials, undermined relationships designed to build friendly Afghans’ capacities.
America lost 2,352 dead and 20,148 wounded in Afghanistan, as well as dozens of intelligence officers. Allies such as the British Commonwealth lost 1,221 more dead and a proportionally large number of wounded. Afghan losses are classified yet vastly higher. These patriots, again in Kipling’s words, went to their God-like soldiers. Their sacrifices prevented any attack as bad as Sept. 11 coming from Afghanistan for over 18 years.
By 2020, domestic political support for our Afghan campaign is gone, more from boredom than exhaustion, as comparatively few American families sent sons or daughters to fight there. Support cannot now be rallied by Trump, even though a modest-sized U.S. force could keep the Taliban from seizing power and reempowering al Qaeda with manageable (although individually heartbreaking) casualties.
We will regret this weekend’s bad agreement when, on some future, gloriously bright morning, murderous enemies once again approach an American city from out of the east.
Kevin Carroll was senior counselor to the secretary of Homeland Security and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, law clerk to a U.S. district judge, and served as a CIA and Army officer (including two tours in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2010). He is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
