They made a desolation and called it “A Good War”*

by Carl Conetta, 14 Mar 2020; Updated 5 Nov 2020

How to assess America’s adventure in Afghanistan? It’s a costly hopeless debacle – “a travesty” writes Ben Armbuster, managing editor of the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft. Libertarian icon and former congressman Ron Paul concurs – and more, calling it “the crime of the century.” Yes, it is both these things and also a lie in all essential details, as the reports summarized and linked below show. Yet we cannot manage to withdraw. Principal historical sources on the US troop presence in Afghanistan are here (PDF) and here (PDF). To review the US troop level seesaw:

• President Obama vowed to end the war but did not. He inherited it in its eighth year and soon after, following the direction of the Pentagon, surged troop levels from 30,000 to 100,000. It took the Obama administration five years to return to the troop level it had inherited. Reductions below the President Bush level occurred during 2015 and 2016.
• In Jan 2017, President Trump inherited from Obama an Afghanistan troop presence of ~8,500 troops. Although Trump also vowed to end the war, he followed his generals’ advice and soon undertook his own surge, raising troop levels back to ~15,000 within his first year. By mid-summer 2020, however, the deployment had receded to ~8,600, approximately the level adopted from Obama 3.5 years earlier.
• More recently, as the 2020 election loomed, Pres. Trump asserted that the military presence would be down to 4,500 troops by election day, and all troops would be home by Christmas. But this was contravened quickly by the Pentagon and National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, who called Trump’s declaration “aspirational.”
• According to O’Brien, the military withdrawal was still in mid-October on “a path to 4,500 this fall,” while at least 2,500 troops will remain into 2021. Moreover, the future withdrawal remains conditioned on US and Taliban satisfaction with each other’s fulfillment of the US-Taliban agreement. This means that the withdrawal process might easily stop and/or reverse.
• For his part, Vice-President Biden sees sustaining a small US troop presence in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.

In 19 years of war, 70,000 bombs have been dropped (sources in Notes) and more than 150,000 people killed. Among the 150,000 dead are more than 40,000 civilians. Most of these dead were not killed by US hands, directly, but all resulted from a war sustained for 19 years by the USA.

The cost to the United States includes 2,400 military personnel fatalities (PDF) and ~$900 billion in direct DOD expenditures. (Financial data in End Notes.) And what has this expenditure of blood and treasure gained? All the relevant detail can be found in the DOD Inspector General reports and the Washington Post‘s “Afghanistan Papers” linked below.  But to offer a summary conclusion:

What’s been gained is a dysfunctional kleptocracy, a narco-state, a warlord state, a Potemkin village on a grand scale (and existing mostly in the imagination of war proponents). Pentagon chieftains, neo-cons, neo-liberal interventionists, and standard-issue hawks share and promote various vacuous rationales for staying, including routine assertions that victory is in sight, dire warnings about the loss of American credibility, and concerns regarding “sunk costs.”

Most galling are so-called “humanitarian” rationales, which in this case ring cynical and cruel. The problem is not humanitarian goals, per se, but the conceit that these can be advanced by foreign occupation and coercive means –   bombs, bullets, and bayonets.

Given the grim death toll, “humanitarianism” as a rationale for persisting in the effort calls to mind the (possibly apocryphal) statement of a US officer during the Vietnam War about the battle for Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

It’s not just the avalanche of bombs that belie the humanitarian facade, nor the mountain of the dead. Also telling are the particulars, such as the accidental destruction of hospitals, the killing of farmers at work, the slaughter of families at home,  and repeated attacks on wedding parties and processions. These were not intentional killings, but they are the predictable collateral of war.

Even the more routine practices of “nation-building” – such as building schools – impugn the integrity of the effort. Worse has been the delegation of law enforcement to brutal warlords and militias outside Kabul. Given the centrality of concern about women and children in humanitarian efforts, the often grotesque abuse of the vulnerable by these militias is especially disconcerting.

America’s chronic, full-spectrum failure in Afghanistan, which echoes the Soviet failure during the 1980s, suggests that nations are not the type of thing that can be built according to a foreign blueprint, and especially not at the point of a gun. Outsiders lack the knowledge, indigenous roots, legitimacy, and degree of interest to prevail. And their very presence is provocative, especially given differences of language, religion, and culture. This should be abundantly clear by now, so what freezes US troops in place?

More important than any strategic rationale or cost-benefit analysis are domestic political and institutional considerations.

Once committed, no political or military leader, nor the Pentagon cares to own responsibility for failure, much less surrender; this, because of the price it would incur in votes, budgets, and legacy. So plans and promises of withdrawal are typically tied to claims of progress or intimations of pending success. But as victory proves forever elusive or ephemeral, so does withdrawal. Only crises at home or disaster overseas will bring this cycle to an end. So, in a perverse sense, it is persistent failure that keeps America mired in desultory wars.

NOTES