When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
From A Young British Soldier by Rudyard Kipling
President Biden announced he would withdraw American forces from Afghanistan by September 11th. The only real question is; what took so long? Trump claimed, on several occasions, he was going to bring the troops home. It was one of the few things he said that I thought made sense. He never managed it, and there are a lot of theories regarding his decision, or indecision, none of that matters, though, he was the third president who couldn’t figure it out.
There are approximately 2,500 soldiers stationed there, a pointless force, almost cruel to the few who are forced to deploy there. The objective of any war is the “destruction of the enemy’s ability and will to fight.” After that, there are platitudes and embellishments, but it all comes down to being the last man standing. There is no way anybody could think we were going to destroy the enemy with 2,500 soldiers.
Even if we were willing to send 50,000 troops they could never reach the goals outlined to achieve success. A million troops would have just made it more expensive. We could have pounded the rocky, mountainous country into a sterile moonscape and still been bogged down in a costly war against a lightly armed, mobile indigenous force.
In the 17th and 18th century the Chinese practiced war by attrition. “I will lose a battle to you every week until you are reduced to nothing.” The Afghan people have a similar strategy, perfecting it over centuries. The Soviet Union couldn’t pacify the country and they are almost neighbors. They were bogged down and drained of the will to go on after 10 years.
To prove the old adage, the more things change the more they stay the same we jumped into that abyss and have been locked in ever since. And while we did outlast the Soviets by ten years what have we accomplished?
The Taliban are not diminished and have used American intervention as an effective recruiting tool. Radical Islam, while still present in the area, has become more entrenched and brazen in East Africa, where we have managed, more or less, to ignore it at our own peril.
Essentially this forces our troops into a situation of fighting a mostly indigenous militia who view them as colonialists, something that just hasn’t worked out very well for the past 100 or so years.
Nation-building serves as a wonderful, clichéd platitude, but, it doesn’t really work unless you have overwhelming local support and a corrupt, hopelessly incompetent regime. Look no further than the current situation in Iraq. We deposed a tyrant and the government has never coalesced into a democratic, functional entity. Buffeted by Iran and torn between Shia and Sunny it flounders between pointless and chaos. And Iraq is almost a success story compared to our other recent attempts.
Our military, an enormous, destructive, awesome agent of destruction is not designed to act as a police force in a foreign land, where they are viewed with suspicion and thought of as invaders. And it shouldn’t be.
War has gotten too expensive and the returns too meager. Diplomacy has been maligned as weak and ineffective. Intelligence has been mostly acquired through satellites and unmanned drones, and the world goes on. We haven’t even managed to find a way to stop domestic terrorists. We need to find a solution. It’s foolish to waste so much money on pointless wars and criminal to ask our children to sacrifice their lives for an outdated model of international relations.
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This post is republished on Medium
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