If the US can’t accomplish its goal in Afghanistan by 2016, we probably won’t ever be able to accomplish them.
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The big news out of Afghanistan is that the end of America’s longest war may finally be in sight. President Obama’s new plan is to withdrawal all American combat forces by 2016, with a small contingent remaining for a few years after that. Which would be contingent on the a new long-term security agreement negotiated by Afghan President Hamid Karzi’s successor.
As you might expect Republicans, especially those associated with the neoconservative wing of the party are up in arms. Arizona Senator John McCain fired of a typical broadside typical broadside denouncing this new plan:
The President’s decision to set an arbitrary date for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is a monumental mistake and a triumph of politics over strategy…..Today’s announcement will embolden our enemies and discourage our partners in Afghanistan and the region. And regardless of anything the President says tomorrow at West Point, his decision on Afghanistan will fuel the growing perception worldwide that America is unreliable, distracted, and unwilling to lead.
I think this is pretty typical of how a lot of hawks on Iraq and Afghanistan have framed the question over the last decade. That there exists some way to achieve our overly optimistic goals of transforming Afghanistan into a modern western democratic nation state, or what Rajiv Chandrasekaran once called a “Little America“, but we just haven’t tried it yet. Indeed McCain gives away the game in his own statement when he lays out his alternative to leaving by the end of 2016:
The alternative was not war without end. It was a limited assistance mission to help the Afghan Security Forces preserve momentum on the battlefield and create conditions for a negotiated end to the conflict. The achievement of this goal, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, should be determined by conditions on the ground, not by the President’s concern for his legacy.
In other words leaving in 2016 will result in disaster but leaving a few years latter will be sure to lead to victory. But of course we know that staying longer wouldn’t, instead we’d simply be told in 2018, or whenever, that success is still just around the corner and all we need to do is stay the course for a few more years. In other words what we’ve been hearing for years now.
This reminds me of something Matt Yglesias wrote back in 2008 about the Iraq War, particularly with regards to the large number of supporters who still claimed that the Iraq War could have been a success if only it was executed better. Or in Afghanistan’s case, if we surged bigger and stayed their longer:
What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning. Suppose we were looking back on some military venture that was doomed to fail. Now suppose some supporter of that venture were arguing to us that, no, it wasn’t doomed at all — the trouble was the incompetence. The supporter can even find all these examples of incompetence — why here are all these decisions that got made! And the decisions worked out poorly! How inept! How dare you say it was doomed to fail? I mean of course a group of people who set out to do something unreasonable are going to wind up implementing their agenda poorly. What would a flawlessly-executed but doomed-to-failure war look like?
Which I think is exactly correct. There probably was some value in invading Afghanistan to disrupt Al-Qaeda, but there doesn’t appear to be much evidence that staying in Afghanistan is having much effect on the turning Afghanistan into a model society. Nor is occupying Afghanistan stopping terrorist groups from functioning. It turns out you can commit terrorist attacks out of bases in northern Nigeria too. Which means if anything, we probably should have left sooner.
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Photo by UK Ministry of Defense/Flickr
‘…transforming Afghanistan into a modern western democratic nation state.’ And when you ask how that is supposed to actually happen you get a Simon and Garfunkel type response. Unless there is an immediate threat to this country most war talk should occur in the public square. We should have left
Afghanistan about 14.5 years sooner.
Afghanistan is a country in name only. It wasn’t our responsibility in the 80s when we sent weapons to Bin Laden and the resistance and it is not now. Just like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. or any of the other Socialist
welfare states we send aid to.