The case for leaving Afghanistan, the notorious “graveyard of empires,” is relatively straightforward.
As United States troops enter the 20th year in the war-torn country, America has spent nearly $2 trillion and suffered thousands of casualties, including 2,311 killed and another 20,666 wounded.
The U.S., NATO, and other partner nations have built and backed an Afghan force of 350,000, but the fighting continues.
While a succession of U.S. commanders over the years has issued upbeat pronouncements that the Afghan government forces had “turned the corner” in the fight against the Taliban, the truth is that for at least the last five years, neither side has been winning.
“We have been in a condition of strategic stalemate, where the government of Afghanistan was never going to militarily defeat the Taliban and the Taliban, as long as we were supporting the government of Afghanistan, was never going to militarily defeat the regime,” admitted Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Brookings Institution event this month.
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Milley noted that the U.S. goal in Afghanistan was never to create a fully functioning Western-style democracy in a country with no history of a central government or strong institutions.
Instead, it was plainly and only to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a haven from which terrorists could launch attacks against U.S. interests abroad or in the homeland.
“We believe that now, after 20 years, two decades of consistent effort there, we’ve achieved a modicum of success,” Milley said.
When President Trump took office in 2017, he was briefly convinced, against his gut instincts, to send more troops to Afghanistan to convince the Taliban that it couldn’t win and had no choice but to sue for peace.
But his heart wasn’t in it. Eventually, he overruled his generals and civilian advisers and directed special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to cut a deal with the Taliban that would bring all U.S. troops home.
The Feb. 29 agreement was heralded as a peace deal. Still, it contained only vague, undisclosed promises from the Taliban to reduce violence while beginning peace talks with the Afghan government in return for a prisoner swap and the withdrawal of all U.S. and coalition forces by May.
Emboldened, the Taliban stepped up assaults against Afghan forces while avoiding attacks against U.S. troops as they left.
The Taliban now believes its goals are in reach, namely a return to political power and an end to foreign troops on Afghan soil.
And only President-elect Joe Biden stands in its way.
As he takes over, Biden is getting the same advice Trump rejected, namely that leaving Afghanistan now, absent a real peace deal, will only make the U.S. less safe in the long run.
“So the first thing the generals tell you when you want to pull out, they say, ‘Sir, I’d rather fight them over there than fight them over here,'” Trump told journalist Bob Woodward, as quoted in his book Rage.
“I’ve had four generals say almost the exact same words,” Trump recounted. “But I then say, ‘Well, does this mean we’re going to be there for the next 100 years?'”
Well, maybe.
America has often left troops behind after a significant war ends to maintain stability.
The U.S. has 50,000 troops in Europe today and almost 30,000 troops in South Korea.
There should be no problem sustaining 5,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to preserve the gains of the last two decades and keep the pressure on the Taliban, argue former Afghanistan commanders, including retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former supreme commander for NATO.
“We’re kind of on the 5-yard line here in terms of getting a peace deal. We have already done all the hard work,” he told CNN last month. “It makes sense. Keep terrorism out. We won’t have to go back. Preserve gains. Keep Afghanistan as a democratic partner. There are a lot of very positive reasons to stay in there at relatively low cost.”
In 2009, Biden, then the vice president, vigorously opposed former President Barack Obama’s decision to a surge of 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan instead of pressing for a much smaller footprint focused on hunting al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Now that Trump has ordered all but 2,500 troops out of the country, Biden faces an almost immediate decision to rebuild the force to the point it can ensure the Afghan government won’t collapse and, if the U.S. has sufficient force, for counterterrorism missions.
“It would be far better if we just held at the 4,500,” said retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff and informal adviser to Trump, who calls 2,500 an “arbitrary number, not based on any informed analysis.”
But Keane gives the president credit for not abandoning the mission before Biden takes over.
“He had people telling him, largely the new people brought into the Pentagon, telling him that we can get down to zero. And certainly, he was inclined to do that, but he didn’t do it,” Keane said in a podcast interview.
Now, it’s up to Biden to follow Trump’s lead or pull the plug.
“I think President Trump has put them in a bad position,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican and a former Air Force pilot.
“I think 2,500 troops is almost untenable. At that point, you’re really just in a posture of protecting yourself,” Kinzinger told CNN. “I think the message that sends to our enemies, that we’re eager to retreat, is a good recruiting tool for them.”
Within weeks of Biden’s inauguration, NATO and other partners will want an answer. Because if the U.S. goes, NATO goes.
“This will be a hard and difficult decision, and there is no way to try to deny that,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who expects the future of the Afghanistan mission to be determined at a February meeting of alliance defense ministers.
“We face a difficult dilemma: whether to leave and risk that Afghanistan becomes once again a safe haven for international terrorists, or stay and risk a longer mission with renewed violence,” he said.
There is no shortage of doomsayers.
The Afghanistan Study Group, a 15-member bipartisan commission appointed by Congress, which includes the most recent former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, warns that an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops would undermine the fragile peace process just as it is gaining some traction, forfeiting the leverage that could produce a sustainable political compromise.
“It would embolden the Taliban, destabilize the Kabul government, and allow terrorist groups to reconsolidate. A civil war could result, provoking a wider regional conflict and an inevitable humanitarian and migration crisis,” the group’s leaders wrote in a recent op-ed.
Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, called the withdrawal plan “a travesty” that essentially has the U.S partnering with the Taliban against the Afghan government.
“I mean, if we were going to leave, just leave. But don’t force the Afghan government to release 5,000 of the most heinous people on earth,” McMaster told CBS last month. “I mean, what does power-sharing with the Taliban look like? Does that mean every other girls’ school is bulldozed? Does that mean there are mass executions in the soccer stadium every other Saturday? I think it’s abhorrent what we’re doing.”
Milley said: “Now, that’s very odious for many people to think that we’re going to negotiate with someone like the Taliban. But that is, in fact, the most common way that insurgencies end, is through a negotiated power-sharing settlement.”
“After nearly 20 years of armed conflict, Americans and Afghans alike are ready for the violence to end,” said Rep. Adam Smith, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, after Trump’s latest withdrawal order.
“It is clear that groups like ISIS-K and the Taliban will continue to fight and sow chaos, but ultimately, it is up to the Afghans to find a sustainable path to peace,” he said.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
