The NYT’s About-Face

The editors of the New York Times, reversing their previous position, say that it’s time to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan:

This page has been supportive of the war in Afghanistan since it began. We criticized NATO countries in Europe for not sending enough soldiers. And we were critical of the Bush administration for its lack of postwar planning and for diverting resources to the war in Iraq.

Events have shown us to have been overly optimistic regarding the elected Afghan government, though we were rightly critical of its deep dysfunction. We have raised concerns about military tactics that cost civilians their lives and been skeptical of the Pentagon’s relentlessly rosy assessments of the progress made and the likelihood of success.

[…]

It is time to face the cruel truth that at best, the war is deadlocked, and at worst, it is hopeless. The initial American objective — bringing Bin Laden to justice — has been achieved. And subsequent objectives, to build an Afghan government that can stand on its own, protect the population and fight off its enemies, may not be achievable, and certainly aren’t achievable without resources the United States is unwilling to invest.

Walking away from a war is not a strategy. But an orderly withdrawal of NATO forces can be organized and executed before the year is out and more lives are lost to a lost cause. Two Americans have been killed in combat already in 2019. No American soldiers should be fighting and dying in Afghanistan in 2020.

President Trump should seize the opportunity. If he does not, we may be stuck in a futile stalemate for years, decades, spending money and wasting American lives.

There is nothing the editors point out other than Bin Laden’s assassination that was not true in 2009 or in 2005 and every sign tells us that they will be true in 2020 and 2024 as well. What assurance do we have that, if a Democrat is elected in 2020, the NYT will not reconsider its editorial position again and decide that the stalemate in Afghanistan was a consequence of feckless Republican bungling of the war in Afghanistan rather than the intrinsic character of the conflict itself? Time to withdraw or, at the very least, change from the present counter-insurgency strategy to a strategy of counter-terrorism.