Our 20-year tenure in Afghanistan always brings to mind this classic tune by The Clash:
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay, it will be double…
So you gotta let me know,
Should I stay or should I go?
Well, Uncle Joe now says it’s time to go. And because our endless war is the very definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result – the president is probably right. I say “probably” because in statecraft, and particularly with respect to Afghanistan, there’s no such thing as 100 percent certitude.
“We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal and expecting a different result,” Biden said yesterday. “It is time for American troops to come home. I am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.” Makes sense to me. Afghanistan has confounded empires for centuries – the British, the Russians, Alexander the Great, us – and the choice is to either expend more blood and treasure on that sinkhole or to finally rethink our global priorities.
After thousands of soldier deaths and trillions of dollars down the drain, the public is on board with Biden’s decision. A recent Pew poll reports that 59 percent of Americans – including 58 percent of military veterans – believe that Afghanistan is not a worthy war. A sizeable contingent of Republicans has long felt the same way; if memory serves, Donald Trump railed against what he called “endless wars,” and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared on a debate stage, referring to Afghanistan, that “our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.”
Indeed, way back in 2009, veteran foreign policy operative Richard Holbrooke – President Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan – said something that encapsulated our futility: “The specific goal of the United States is really hard for me to address in specific terms. But I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan…We’ll know it when we see it.”
But all we see today is the same old quagmire. We went to war after 9/11 to clean out al Qaeda and punish the locally-based Taliban extremists who’d hosted Osama bin Laden. Some of those goals were achieved. But 20 years later the Taliban still threatens the fragile Afghan government that we support in Kabul, in part because we’re understandably reluctant to widen the war by fighting the Taliban in its bases across the border in Pakistan. That’s never going to change. The “conditions on the ground” will never be good. Which means that if “conditions on the ground” continue to guide our decisions, we’ll stay in Afghanistan forever and sacrifice more bodies and billions.
Biden is essentially breaking with Obama, who once called Afghanistan “a war of necessity.” But the quest to keep the Taliban out of power doesn’t qualify as one of America’s top global challenges; perhaps that was true in 2001, but not in 2021. China and Russia are bigger threats and competitors than they were 20 years ago. The terrorist threat to our homeland is more diffuse today than it was when al Qaeda camps were concentrated in Afghanistan 20 years ago. Therefore, Biden said yesterday, “Rather than return to war with the Taliban, we have to focus on the challenges that will determine our standing and (global) reach in the years to come.”
Granted, his decision isn’t perfect. (As often happens in foreign policy, it may well be the least bad choice.) The GOP’s neoconservative wing says that Biden is putting America’s security at risk, and a new U.S. intelligence report warns that “the Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay, if the (western) coalition withdraws support.” Dicey moral questions also intrude. Do we walk away from the Afghan people whom we pledged to defend? Are the reforms we’ve nurtured these past 20 years – such as Afghan women’s rights – strong enough to withstand the Taliban’s fundamentalism? And are neocons like Liz Cheney correct when they warn that a total troop withdrawal will hand the terrorists a propaganda victory?
Well, guess what: Bogging down America for 20 years has long been a propaganda victory. At least Biden and his team are trying to change the paradigm. Tom Nichols, a national security and nuclear deterrence specialist at the U.S. Naval War College, is correct when he tweets: “I think Biden making a decision is better than the paralysis and lack of attention that overtook us these past 20 years…And if the American public isn’t going to commit one way or another – as it hasn’t now for years – than risking the lives of our citizens there is pointless.”
And rest assured, we’ll maintain some sort of clandestine presence in Afghanistan, to monitor the worst of the bad guys. We’ll have our drones, although they need to fly a lot farther than before. We won’t know for a while whether the new paradigm trumps the old quagmire. For now, all we can say with certitude is that supposedly “Sleepy” Joe is actually one gutsy guy. And that when he declared three years ago that “it is past time to end the forever wars,” it was a promise he intended to keep.