If Not Now, When?

Lindsey Graham and Jack Keane, serving senator and retired general, have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal opposing withdrawal from Afghanistan:

President Biden’s decision to withdraw all military forces from Afghanistan, against sound military advice, will come back to haunt the nation and the world, as it did in Iraq in 2011.

Only months away is the 20th anniversary of 9/11, when almost 3,000 Americans died at the hands of al Qaeda terrorists trained and directed by Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan. Surely we should have learned that allowing radical Islamists sanctuary to plot attacks against America and its allies isn’t wise. Had we destroyed the Afghanistan haven after attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa (1998) and the USS Cole (2000) it is unlikely that 9/11 would have happened. The military and the intelligence community understand this, which is why both recommend keeping a residual counterterrorism force in Afghanistan.

In the coming months and years, the Afghan government in Kabul will slowly but surely lose influence throughout the country. The Iranians will begin to dominate western Afghanistan, and the Taliban will start to run the country’s southern region. The old Northern Alliance will reorganize. Eastern Afghanistan will be under the control of the Haqqani network, a criminal enterprise designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. The rump ISIS and al Qaeda elements sprinkled around Afghanistan will exploit the chaos.

With no American or North Atlantic Treaty Organization military presence, it will be every group for itself. Imagine outsourcing our national security to the Taliban. To expect the Taliban to police al Qaeda and ISIS is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. It’s only a matter of time before another civil war. All of this can be avoided by keeping a small U.S.-NATO counterterrorism force in place to help the Afghan military and continue to push the parties to find political solutions to the complicated mosaic of problems in Afghanistan.

Why didn’t they advocate that five years or ten years ago? Our strategy in Afghanistan has been one of counter-insurgency, operating under the theory that viable national government in Kabul would be able to pursue counter-terrorism on its own. Sen. Graham and Gen. Keane have steadily supported our presence in Afghanistan, first under President Bush, then under President Obama and President Trump. They’ve been consistent.

And how long would such a “residual counterterrorism force” be necessary? Since the conditions they enumerate in Afghanistan have been materially the same for the last couple of millennia at least as anyone who actually knew anything about Afghanistan could have told them 20 years ago, there’s no reason to believe that force would ever be able to leave. I think that had the war in Afghanistan been advertised that way from the start there would have been no war in Afghanistan. No bombing campaign less than a “no blade of grass” strategy would have been sufficient.