I think you should probably read Rafi Khetab’s exposition at RealClearDefense on why the U. S. should not withdraw its troops from Afghanistan as President Trump had agreed:
There are five national security reasons why the U.S. should keep a strong residual force in Afghanistan. There is also an important moral argument why America should not abandon the Afghan people and leave them in the clutches of the world’s most savage terrorists. In a highly controversial withdrawal deal signed in February 2020 between the Trump administration and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, U.S. troops are to be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by May 2021. Such a premature withdrawal will trigger a chain of events that will ultimately expose the U.S. homeland to major terrorist attacks.
He gives five reasons:
- Withdrawal emboldens Global Terror
- Withdrawal Portrays U.S. Military A Defeated Force
- Withdrawal Destabilizes a Nuclear Armed Region
- Withdrawal Exposes U.S. Homeland and Europe to Attacks
- Taliban Violating Peace Deal
I won’t respond to each of those points but I will respond to his moral argument. By the end of President Biden’s first term we will have been in Afghanistan for 23 years. Is there no time limit on a moral obligation to do something we can only accomplish by remaining in Afghanistan? I’ll stipulate that we can prevent the outcomes he points to in his argument on the morality as long as we maintain a force presence in the country. Can we not also agree that as soon as we leave, whether that’s in five years or ten years or a century that everything he points to will still happen and there’s practically nothing we can do about it?
What a load of garbage. The rotten cherry on that pile of steaming poo is invoking Martin Luthor King Jr. and asserting he would support staying in Afghanistan.
On the merits, such as they are of his points (as you’ve summarized them):
1. Staying also emboldens global terror
2. Everyone with a brain except a few dolts like Khetab, knows that there isn’t a military solution in Afghanistan. How some may portray a US withdrawal is of little concern.
3. No it doesn’t.
4. That might happen in the future. But nothing prevents us from acting on intelligence and blowing shit up there if we need to. We have a lot of carrots and sticks to incentivize Pakistan to keep that to a minimum. And it’s just dumb to take a zero-risk posture and be willing to pour blood and treasure into the Afghan drain for eternity in an attempt to avoid that potential.
5. Of course they will violate any peace deal. Staying in Afghanistan doesn’t change that. That’s not our problem.
The King reference is weird, not the least because its basically a parable told by Jesus. The author might as well have said Jesus wants the United States to stay the course in Afghanistan. I wonder how that would have went over.
Well, we were in Somalia almost 30 years (our longest war), and we’ve been in Germany and Japan for 75 years, 28 years after the USSR disappeared. We’re still fighting in a dozen countries west of Somalia all the way to Nigeria. And we have troops operating in Indonesia and the Philippines. And NATO, of all things, still exists.
The real issue is the one identified by Eisenhower, lots of oligarchs are making real money off all these wars. They won’t give up any of that money until they’ve bled the American people dry. Our troops won’t come home until they are defeated by the locals.
We should never have had troops in Somalia. Within ten years of the beginning of our occupations of Japan and Germany both countries had already recovered very nearly fully and were well on their way to becoming two of the largest economies in the world.
We could stay in Afghanistan for 30 years, 50, a century and nothing would change. There is one way to change Afghanistan which is what Alexander did. Settle a population there. Since we don’t plan to colonize Afghanistan, we should leave.