This is timely - I just had a dinner table conversation about the war in Afghanistan last night.
I told them, the war is bout 16 years old. That means that someone who was 2 years old when 9/11 happened could be over there fighting right now. I did say that people from that country attacked us, so we destroyed their country. That not all the people that lived there attacked us, but it was their country that we destroyed too, and we have an obligation to help them fix it. The country is made up of lots of individuals who may want different things, some of them may want our help, and some don’t. Some hate us because we destroyed their country. There’s no easy solution. I had a difficult time justifying that after that point.
Would a new Marshall Plan be possible for Afghanistan?
Instead of walking away, or keeping our military there forever, let’s give them what they need to rebuild and improve the nation to the point that they won’t need our soldiers over there.
We spent $13B on the Marshall Plan. Assuming that’s worth about 10x today, that would be $130B. I think we’ve spent 10x even that amount on Afghanistan already.
The Marshal Plan worked because you were restoring what had once been a civil society. That has never existing in most of Afghanistan. I would argue that it’s never actually been a nation, either, so the idea of nation building doesn’t make that much sense.
You are several years out of date then. They are now inside Afghanistan sitting pretty in several provinces they control. And there is no longer one monolithic Taliban. You have various groups, the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan, the Sajna Group, the Haqqani Group, the various factions who have gone to Daesh. Each with different agendas and enemies.
This is my quandary with respect to the generals and U.S. intelligence and security agencies. They appear to know the history as well as anybody and understand the situation on the ground better than anybody. Why stay? It can’t just be that they are willing to callously spend American blood and treasure on a 16 year mission with no end in sight if it does not provide some valuable benefit to US interests, right?
There is no simple or straightforward answer to this issue. Afghanistan has been a problem for everyone who has been involved there throughout history, and we stirred up the hornet’s nest by supporting insurgency in the area to draw in the Soviet Union, a plan suggested by Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, which worked insofar as further hobbling the fiscally struggling USSR but ultimately resulted in blowback when we left the region to its own devices after the end of the Cold War. If we leave, it becomes even more fertile ground for recruiting and training people for fundamentalist Islamic terror; if we stay, our costly presence becomes a never-ending thorn in our national conscience. The awaiting humanitarian disaster is just around the corner, most sustinance farming in the region has turned to opium as the only profitable crop, and global climate change will no doubt cause problems in a region already prone to cyclical droughts.
The most viable strategy would be to enjoin an international effort to contain terrorism in the region and attack training camps as necessary. Unfortunately, most of our “partners” in this effort are either eschewing international interventions or are actively hostile to US interests. What Afghanistan needs is a generation of men and women who are literate and principled toward developing and supporting sustainable industry, and the infrastructure, security, and economy to support it. Getting from here to there does not seem viable in the foreseeable future.
I honestly think that everyone knows it’s going to disintegrate again eventually, but they think the can do just enough to prop it up long enough so that the inevitable happens when some future administration is in charge. Realistically, that is what I expect will happen going forward.
You’re right. I was sloppy and tried to take a short cut in summarizing the situation.
It makes no sense to continue to kick the can down the road. If ever there was a time for both the administration and the military to call for a full withdrawal, it’s now. Congress has no desire for more war. I believe the majority of American voters don’t want it either.
I keep thinking there is some calculated strategic advantage to continuing to stay (in Afghanistan of all places!) beyond the optics of not wanting to declare a military/political loss. If that’s all it is, why add 4,000 more soldiers?
I’m sure it’s my irrational attachment to sense and reason.
The one big issue that I don’t think people have addressed (unless I’ve missed it) is the loss of US ability to project power. If the US went all in against a relatively small time enemy but that enemy was able to stick it out and eventually defeat the US, then that emboldens others to have a try at that same thing. And then you lose much of your ability to pressure others to do (what you think is) the right thing, and more importantly to respect your interests.
Of course that’s only one part of the picture, and there’s a limit to how much the country should be willing to pay in life and limb, not to mention financially, for this. But it’s a factor.
One really big lesson to take is that the US needs to be very very cautious about setting red lines or promising “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if they can’t or won’t deliver, or in general entering into fights if it’s not certain that the US is willing to do what it takes to win, whatever the cost. But the temptation to talk and act big seems to be pretty strong across the board, and I’m not optimistic that this can/will be done.
The only “calculated strategic advantage” I can think of is that we get to maintain airbases that are relatively close to Iran, and perhaps the missions with live ordnance to keep skills sharp, but Syria is providing us plenty of that too.
I’m not claiming that is the reason for staying. Your post was pondering if “there is some calculated strategic advantage to continuing to stay”. Those are a couple of options that come to mind. I’m just a civilian, with no particular insight into the minds of our leaders and their reasoning, but I pointed out a couple of possibilities that came to mind.
It would be nice if the US could share what exactly it’s interests are. Correction, if the US knew what its interests were. It its “can we support the absolute worst people in the world”, then there seems to be progress in that score. I mean, Dostum as a VP? Seriously? And a parade of boy buggerers.
The partial pullout of Afghanistan in 2015 is also what facilitated the creation and rapid growth of ISIS-K. The Taliban is not the biggest threat, nor the biggest military concern in Afghanistan right now.
I don’t buy this ‘We’re losing’ talk. If the Joint Chiefs defined the conflict as building up an Afghan government able to not lose to the Taliban, that’s a victory, to echo earlier points, the Taliban is not a monolithic group, and I would say not really a popular group either, no average Afghan wants to go back to when the Taliban took power, but what they do want from the Afghan government is more effective institutions and a less tenous adherence to the rule of law, invest heavily in those areas and we’re on the way to getting out with heads held high.