U.S. 10th Mountain Division Loading Up a Chinook | U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Kyle Davis
Afghanistan has been the longest waged war in this nation’s history- so long that an entire generation is now eligible to fight in the war they were born into. It’s hard to remember that our reason for the 2001 invasion was to eliminate Al Qaeda and to prevent Afghanistan from ever being used to plan attacks against the country. Since then, our objectives for maintaining a force in the country remained unclear as Al Qaeda spread worldwide and the perpetrators of 9/11 were either arrested or killed. The conflict has gone on for nearly 20 years, taking over 2,300 American lives to date and costing the taxpayer over $2 trillion. Yet on Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that on September 11th, on the 20th anniversary of that fateful day, our soldiers will be coming home at last. Their departure ends a chapter in American foreign policy, and opens an uncertain future for Afghanistan.
Within the establishment, much angst has been made over this decision. Some Senate Republicans, in a continued show of hypocrisy, condemned the action despite President Trump negotiating a deal with the Taliban that would have removed U.S. troops by May 1st of this year. This also goes against what many in the foreign policy community has advised for some time as the congressionally-funded Afghanistan Study Group stated that the case for the original withdrawal timeline must be extended to “create conditions for an acceptable peace agreement.” To do this, U.S. troops must remain to continue supporting the Afghan government until the Taliban is forced to negotiate a peace agreement with the government that will respect the progress made over the past 20 years.
Leaving too soon, these experts warn, could cause a return of Al Qaeda and allow the Afghan government to collapse, unending the progress made in human rights, particularly women’s rights as General Mark Milley supposedly pointed out in an “emotional” NSC meeting. There’s also the question as to whether the Afghan government can collapse, as it did when the Soviets pulled out shortly afterwards. Truth be told, there isn’t much news that would suggest whether the government can survive, given the Afghan army appears to be woefully unprepared. As soldiers start to leave Afghanistan for the last time, it’s very possible that the country will open another dark chapter with an all-too familiar Islamist group at the helm.
The Right Call
At the same time, I find such thoughts that we can still bolster the Afghan state to be laughable, especially considering the little progress we’ve made in building the country for the past 19 years. The amount of waste that has come to developing Afghanistan’s government, economy and society without much to show would make any citizen’s blood boil, especially when told there’s not enough money for domestic spending. One egregious example is where the US Air Force spent over $549m on cargo jets for the Afghan Air Force that didn’t work, selling them for scrap for just over $40,000. There is also the report that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found that out of $7.8bn spent and assessed, only $1.2bn of assets is currently being used. This is regrettably not the exception but the norm where aid was routinely misspent for decades even as presidents pledged not to pursue “nation-building.”
Granted, some of the aid was well spent towards development though such progress pales to the amount we provided, both in the United States and the international community. Foreign aid - both military and non-military - hasn’t built robust government institutions but instead has created a pseudo-NGO state where up to 40% of aid spent have gone to warlords, gangsters and even the enemy. The results have been dismal: a country where the majority are impoverished and a quarter of citizens unemployed, a government that is incapable of using foreign currency wisely, an unaccountable aid system that helps the Development-Industrial Complex, and billions thrown down the drain. Yet despite this, the official recommendation from the Afghanistan Study Group is to, “Continued basic support, with other donors, for the essential institutions of the Afghan state, including security institutions, while continuing to message our Afghan partners that this support is not open-ended and is conditioned on progress in the peace talks.”
Frankly, if we were unable to build a state with the large focus behind it for nearly 20 years, we are less likely to have more success with keeping the old course for 20 years more.
Critics of the policy also stated that leaving Afghanistan would be to admit defeat and abandon our mission’s goals. Let’s be honest: the United States lost the War in Afghanistan, but this war was lost decades ago when we made the mistake not to commit sufficient resources to ensure the Taliban couldn’t return. Instead of investing in more men and administrators to build a country, we decided to end combat operations in 2003 to focus on Iraq, allowing the Taliban to return with Pakistan’s assistance. We’ve supported a government that we knew was corrupt and allied with a country whose intelligence services and armed forces were supporting our enemy, not to mention likely hid the most wanted man in the world for nearly 10 years. Lastly, we became involved in the country so long that even officials privately wondered what we were doing there at all. In a disgraceful expose by the Washington Post dubbed “the Afghanistan Papers” there were numerous times where military leaders asked what they were doing in the country and the goals for success. When you read the full piece, you see that the reasons provided by General Milley and the interventionists are more like excuses to continue an unwinnable conflict than actual policy goals.
Lastly, leaving Afghanistan allows us to focus on the real conflicts that will shape the world and America’s future, namely the competition against China, instead of maintaining focus on a country with diminishing importance. Some may argue that this can damage our credibility, yet I agree with the viewpoint stated by Elbridge Colby, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development, argued on Twitter. Essentially, the argument boils down to credibility of focus and whether America can claim to truly be focused on a region when it is spending tens of billions propping up a country that doesn’t pose a check on China’s ambition. How can we argue we care about Taiwan when we keep fighting a peripheral war that is barely in China’s backyard? Whether we will actually focus on Asia is another question for another time, though this is a step in the right direction.
Afghanistan is a case study on what happens when mission creep sets in on what is presumably an easy objective to accomplish. It is endemic of the foreign policy and defense community where lethargy trumps original thinking. Yes, there is a risk that Afghanistan will return to Taliban rule, but the future of Afghanistan needs to truly be in the hands of Afghans instead of foreigners in over their heads. Remaining in Afghanistan “until conditions improve” is an excuse to remaining in the country indefinitely propping up a government that needs to be incentivized in actually governing. I applaud President Biden, who is the only president since H.W. Bush to truly know the personal cost of going to war, to make this action admitting that we lost and it’s time to leave.
Let’s hope Washington learned its lesson from this debacle though given the reactions from Washington proper, I doubt it.