So says Eugene Robinson in a piece entitled A plan for Afghanistan: Declare victory — and leave. Being of the age I am, I am reminded of similar words from Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont, who said of Vietnam “Let's declare victory and get out.”
The conclusion of the piece by Robinson, the whole of which I urge you to read, goes like this:
We wanted to depose the Taliban regime, and we did. We wanted to install a new government that answers to its constituents at the polls, and we did. We wanted to smash al-Qaeda’s infrastructure of training camps and havens, and we did. We wanted to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and we did.
Even so, say the hawks, we have to stay in Afghanistan because of the dangerous instability across the border in nuclear-armed Pakistan. But does anyone believe the war in Afghanistan has made Pakistan more stable? Perhaps it is useful to have a U.S. military presence in the region. This could be accomplished, however, with a lot fewer than 100,000 troops — and they wouldn’t be scattered across the Afghan countryside, engaged in a dubious attempt at nation-building.
The threat from Afghanistan is gone. Bring the troops home.
While there is not much that can be added to this, allow me to offer a few thoughts of my own below the fold.
Robinson says the 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan cost us $10 billion /month. That's $120 billion /year. We cannot afford to spend that money on an endeavor that neither eliminates the Taliban and what remnants of Al Qaeda are in that nation, nor makes us any safer. One could argue that our continued massive presence in Afghanistan is destabilizing to the entire region, and there should be no doubt that the way we have used drones and bombs have alienated large portions of the Afghan people against us - there is far too much "collateral damage" of death to civilians.
And that again reminds me of another time. In Vietnam we were obsessed with body counts of supposed Viet Cong insurgents. I know of several cases where the counts included cows, and far too many cases where anyone killed was counted as a dead enemy - as a member of the Post Band at Quantico I remember playing for a medal ceremony for a real jerk getting a bronze star for killing two enemy. He did kill two people. He was also a general's driver, so - from what people In Country at the time of the incident - they did not really check on the background of the deceased. Our willingness to kill inevitably led to the tragedy at My Lai. And the daily Saigon press briefings about our successes became known as the Five O'Clock Follies.
Perhaps, as Robinson writes, it is appropriate that some of the harshest questioning of Ambassador Ryan Crocker before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was by a highly decorated Vietnam vet, Jim Webb. It is worth mentioning that Webb still, as of his campaign in 2006, thought Vietnam had been worth fighting even as he noted that most of us in the core of the volunteer group disagreed with him on that. His skepticism of what we are doing is well grounded - we have insufficient force to pacify the entire nation, and the result is the best we can do attempting to use that force is play whack-a-mole.
I have for many months been critical of the Karzai regime. I have no doubt of its corruption, especially given the role of the brother of the President, someone involved both in drugs and in cooperation with the Taliban (despite their avowed opposition to drugs on moral grounds). President Karzai himself has made public comments about finding a modus vivendi with the Taliban. And since we cannot prevent military and intelligence forces in Pakistan from continuing to support the Taliban, perhaps that is the best we can do, with a "central" government controlling Kabul and perhaps a number of other urban areas, but being unable to maintain control over more remote territories still in the hands of various warlords.
Of course there are the politics. And there are the influences of key officials. Let's look at both.
The only candidate on the Republican side who would agree with withdrawing from Afghanistan now is Ron Paul. It is highly doubtful that the Obama political operation would in any way be willing to take the risk of allowing the Republicans to use a "weak on terrorism" line of attack by announcing withdrawal now.
Also a problem is the position of people like David Petraeus and Leon Panetta, neither of which seem inclined to admit that our military and intelligence apparatus cannot succeed in the task on which they are embarked. In a sense, what is happening in Afghanistan is parallel to what is happening in our domestic economics where Tim Geithner rules supreme - the advisers/officials are driving the policy and anyone offering a different point of view is shouted down and perhaps forced out.
There are serious consequences to our continuing in Afghanistan as we do. First there are the opportunity costs from the money we spend. There is also a cost of not having the military force necessary to address issues elsewhere in the world at an appropriate level - that lack is frightening, considering what is happening in the Arab world. Further, our continued occupation of a Muslim nation greatly complicates our ability to help with possible change in the Arab world.
There is the physical, psychological and spiritual cost to those who engage in operations on our behalf. The broken bodies and minds continue to flow back to the United States. And because we are doing this with an all-volunteer force somehow one party is able to continue the ridiculous idea that we can cut taxes in the middle of a military conflict - the American people are not seeing any of the costs of this war in a way that would make them realize we need to pay those costs or better not incur them.
Because this is justified as part of a greater war on terror, some of the violations of civil liberties in this nation continue - I'm sorry, but the renewal of the USA Patriot Act with almost no meaningful debate is to my mind an abandonment of the principles of the Bill of Rights. Perhaps it is because as a teacher of government I know the Constitution would not have been ratified in Virginia without a commitment to a Bill of Rights that I find any whittling away of its basic principles to be unacceptable.
We should not be surprised at Obama's continued support of Afghan operations. After all, in the speech that first thrust him into national view, he told us he was not against all wars, only against dumb wars. He supported operations in Afghanistan, as he has from time to time reminded us.
Perhaps it is time for us to remind Mr. Obama about his unwillingness to support dumb wars. Afghanistan has been, for some time now, a dumb war.
We cannot "win" in a conventional sense any more than we could in Vietnam. At some point we must leave it to the people there to decide their future.
We can provide some logistical support. We can train people. We can even provide some arming of the central government. That does not require 100,000 American troops to be in country, it does not require ongoing military operations by Americans.
George Aiken was right in his famous statement about Vietnam. Eugene Robinson is right in what he writes in today's Washington Post.
We as a nation cannot afford to continue as we are in Afghanistan. It is not merely an issue of finances, although by itself that should be sufficient reason.
It is, or at least it should be, a matter of morality.
It is, or at least it should be, a matter of faithfulness to the principles of our nation.
There is really only one right course of action in Afghanistan, and Eugene Robinson speaks my mind about it:
Declare victory — and leave
Peace