The War

The editors of the New York Times speak out against the war in Afghanistan:

The Trump administration has made missteps in its efforts to scale back the sprawling global war on terrorism. Its indecision on Syria left even staunch allies puzzled about American policy. For more than four months, the administration has lacked a secretary of defense, with the acting head, Patrick Shanahan, tapped for the permanent job only last week. Peace talks with the Taliban drag on — and Taliban attacks continue.

But the least that the Trump administration can do is be more open and honest with the American public about the unvarnished reality of the situation in Afghanistan. (The Pentagon hasn’t held an on-camera briefing in nearly a year.) Americans may have given up hope of “winning” the war long ago. But that doesn’t mean the full public accounting should halt.

To place our situation with respect to Afghanistan into perspective here are the U. S. casualties by presidential administration in the war in Afghanistan:

Administration	Casualties
Bush	569
Obama	1,729
Trump	31

The number of civilian casualties has ballooned recently. Will increasing U. S. operational tempo increase, decrease, or have no effect on that? I think it will have little effect one way or another. Should Afghan civilian casualties be a factor in our calculus at all?

I voted for Obama in 2008, partially in the belief that he was a smart enough guy that he’d quickly figure out that his assessment of Afghanistan was wrong. It turned out that I was wrong. He wasn’t that smart.

No foreseeable president will ever want to be the president that lost Afghanistan. If you genuinely believe that we should leave Afghanistan, you should be eager for the conditions that will make that possible. I do not see how the passage quoted above does that.

There are multiple lessons to be learned from our experience in Afghanistan. One of them is that we should never go to war in a place in which we cannot supply our forces without transporting materials through a neighboring country that does not want us to succeed. A second is that we should not go to war to achieve the unachievable.