Reality and Afghanistan: It’s time to leave.
A wounded soldier from the 10th Mountain Division is evacuated from Afghanistan in August. (David Goldman/AP)
For decades historians have argued whether, had he lived, President John F. Kennedy would have sent the nation full tilt into Vietnam the way President Lyndon B. Johnson did.
Today, President Barack Obama is facing the kind of decision Kennedy never got to make: Whether to heed his military advisers and double down on U.S. military involvement against an indigenous force in an Asian country run by a corrupt government, or whether to limit involvement to advisers and air warfare only, some mixture of both options or to pull out entirely.
The parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan are not precise: In Vietnam, there was no retribution factor against an enemy that harbored terrorists. To our knowledge, the CIA is not planning a coup against Afghan President Hamid Karzai the way it was against South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. The Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan doesn’t have an entire Soviet-backed army to fight alongside it the way the Viet Cong did with the North Vietnamese.
No one is promoting a domino theory in Afghanistan, but there is the question of the allegiance of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s Islamist-dominated army just across the Afghanistan’s eastern border. There is the question of nuclear-armed India and its distrust of Pakistan. And there is the larger question of the Muslim world as a whole.
Mr. Obama, who was only 2 years old in 1963, isn’t obsessed with Vietnam like many older Americans. He seems intent on making his Afghanistan decision free of the shadow of Vietnam, which for too long has dominated U.S. military and foreign policy discussions. It should be free, too, from the neo-con jingoism that got us into Iraq.
But it would be foolish to ignore the principal lesson both misadventures taught us: Unless we’re fighting for and alongside a strong, honest and widely accepted central government, counter-insurgency warfare can’t succeed. We can’t win when the people we’re fighting for don’t believe in the cause.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan whose assessment of the conflict in September has been seriously misread as simply “send more troops,” acknowledged that.
“The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials and ISAF’s [International Security Assistance Force, i.e., the United States and its allies] own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust GIRoA [the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice and basic services….
“A foreign army alone cannot beat an insurgency; the insurgency in Afghanistan requires an Afghan solution….”
But Gen. McChrystal argued that with enough troops and civilian experts acting as nation-builders, and with the cooperation of an honest and recommitted Afghan government, success still was achievable. But he emphasized that time was running short.
Outbound flights only, please.
On Wednesday, it was disclosed that one of Gen. McChrystal’s predecessors, former Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, now the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, last week had expressed his own strong reservations to the president about deploying additional troops to the country.
The reasons for Mr. Eikenberry’s caution were not revealed. But he has been critical of corruption in the Karzai government in general and the virulent fraud in Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 presidential election in particular.
The U.S. government, over Mr. Karzai’s strident objections, leaned on Mr. Karzai to agree to a run-off election Nov. 7 with former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Then Mr. Abdullah backed out, saying that there was no reason to believe the run-off would be any less fraudulent.
So now the United States — and worse, the Afghan people — are stuck with Mr. Karzai. Hoping that a leopard will change its spots is a weak foundation for military intervention.
With twice that number of troops and a clean government in Kabul and the willingness to spend years at the task, Gen. McChyrstal indicated, success might — might — be possible in Afghanistan. It can’t be done with conventional warfare — it has no beaches to storm, no dams or harbors to bomb. It can’t be done from above with drone aircraft and smart bombs, which often create so many civilian casualties that it turns the population further from the cause.
The United States doesn’t have 80,000 more troops to send. Under the best possible scenario, 160,000 troops will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, but right now, the most we can muster is about 30,000. The brigades most likely to be ticketed for Afghanistan — three from the 101st Airborne and one from the 10th Mountain — would all be pulling their fourth or fifth combat tours since 2003. That’s too much to ask of too few soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen.
As to cost and duration, the Pentagon reported recently that it costs the equivalent of about $1 million a year to deploy each soldier, Marine, sailor and airman to Afghanistan. About half of that is in fuel costs — sometimes as much as $1,000 to get each gallon of fuel to a truck or plane.
Thirty thousand more troops could cost as much as $30 billion a year. We already have 62,000 troops there. So figure $100 billion a year times however many years. And still, without a committed Afghan government, they can’t succeed.
Better to send no one at all than not enough. Even 80,000 would not be enough without popular support for the central government. That’s the reality Mr. Obama and the nation must face.
We’re aware of what U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam did to our supporters who were left behind. Our eventual departure from Iraq may well destabilize its fragile and feckless democracy. Leaving Afghanistan in a hurry probably would result in similar human tragedies, particularly for its women.
But it is time to begin making plans for leaving, not making plans for sending more troops. Good intentions cannot win a war of counterinsurgency, regardless of how many troops are sent or how much money is spent. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
We keep going into countries we don’t understand, stuffing them, then running away because we keep ignoring the fact that many countries do not want freedom. Okay, the little people do, but the powers that run things do not. When a supporting army’s goals run counter to the local power structure’s goals, failure is inevitable.
Let’s see, From the get-go, Obama screamed that Afganistan was the “good war”, the one America must fight and win……….so, this is the Obama definition of winning? Must have been those ‘no keeping score’ ballgames he played as a kid! No, it is just that Obama and TRUTH have never met, on this or for that matter, ANYTHING! Joe Wilson said it best;”You lie”
The reason NATO is in Afghanistan is to destroy Al Quaida. The Taliban are a target because they harbored AL Quaida. The Taliban culture is deplored in the West, particularly its treatment of females. NATO could leave a Taliban controlled Afghanistan free of AL Quaida influence. The problem with leaving Afghanistan now is AL Quaida is still active in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Whether it takes 8 years or an entire generation, the mission is to deny AL Quaida freedom to plan and act by denying them sanctuary. Learning from the history of 9/11, the cost of counter insurgency fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan by drone, both in blood and money, will always be less than allowing AL Quaida free reign. As far as your editorial’s Vietnam Comparison, this is truly a cause where the phrase “it is better to fight them over there than over here” rings true. Any cost to deny AL Quaida sanctuary anywhere in the world, including Afghanistan is worth it. The time to make plans to leave Afghanistan is when the Taliban no longer offer AL Quaida sanctuary.
“We can’t win when the people we’re fighting for don’t believe in the cause.” We could win if the people we’re fighting were completely demoralized.
This country has not learned from history. You cannot impose your will on people who don’t wish your influence. We can stop these attacks on the United States by simply announcing to the world we will no longer support a brutal, facist, regime in Israel. This is the root of our problems-our support of Zionism in the middle east. Take Bin Laden at his word, we are the enemy of Islam because of our support of the Israeli. By adopting a neutral stance, we remove the hatred these people have for the United States. We should not be involved in other countries problems. We can’t solve problems that have existed for thousands of years and will continue long after we have gone.
It is time to either fight to win or get out. It is obvious neither our President nor the public has the will to win this. Pull the troops out. To leave troops there, under-manned and under-eqipped is inexcusable. Pull the troops out now, but be prepared for to pay the cost down the road.
Everyone is pre-occupied with nation-building. Hell, we went there to kill those who attacked us and anyone who harbors them. There, President “Dithers” Obama is the stategy that you have been looking for. Go kill the enemy. When they are all dead or have given up….bring the army home. Hmmmmmmmmm. Remember the comic strip “Blondie” Dagwood had a boss named Mr. Dithers…………an appropriate name for Obama….dithering on Afganistan, Economy, Employment,Healthcare…..everything except his socialism agenda
The video game “Modern Warfare 2″ has $310,000,000 of sales in it’s first 24 hours, and may set new records for sales. It’s not very hard to imagine how we fall into these never ending worldwide military adventures, we clearly think that war and killing make good entertainment.
If you had to pick the last place on earth to fight a war, this would probably be it. Maybe that’s why terrorists settled there. Jesus turned water into wine, but to expect to turn that place into a democracy would take similar divine intervention. I saw George Bush speak in St. Louis shortly after the bombing began shortly after 9-11. He said, “some of the terrorists are surprised we are bombing them. What did they think? That we were going to sue them?” Everyone cheered. Today, not only are we taking them to court we are, as your editorial reports, pouring money we don’t have down the rat hole trying to rebuild the place. Anyone who thinks we can sustain our way of life and continue to borrow billions to rebuild that place is smoking some of Afghanistan’s chief export. During the cold war, we and the Russians had the MAD doctrine. Mutually Assured Destruction. You nuke us, we nuke you, the world ends. It worked. I am suggesting our country a new policy. The BAD doctrine. You screw with us, you harbor those who do and we will BOMB AND DESTROY your country. No invasion. No occupiers. Just bombers and cruise missiles. We will obliterate your economy, smash your government command and control, wipe out your public utilities, refineries, (heroin factories and fields), etc. When we’re done, we will fly home and leave you to deal with the rubble. No schools. No power plants. No water facilities. Rubble. There’s a thing about those in government be they elected or dictators. They get addicted to the job. They will do anything to keep their jobs. The BAD doctrine would make them think twice before allowing anyone using their territory to attack the U.S. Or, I guess we could sue them.
These wars are the tragedy of the Bush administration. The man meant well, but either didn’t read or understand history. It would have been correct to shock the Afghanistan Taliban, as we did, immediately after 9/11, then pull out quickly (trade terror for terror - it’s all they understand). The Soviets learned long ago that these indigenous tribes just don’t care about life or death, which makes “winning” a matter of completely wiping them out, which is simply not possible.
The Iraq war was also unwinnable, for the same reasons. If you have mulitple factions who believe they have a moral imperative to kill each other, only a tyrant can rule. Saddam was that tyrant. Also, even had Saddam had WMDs, he could not have deployed them. The no fly zone worked from the end of the elder Bush administration through the Clinton years. There was no reason to change that policy. It was a dumb, and unjustifiable mistake.