Afghanistan is America’s longest war, and since successfully completing the original mission, arguably its most pointless.
After a decade and half, this conflict has taken more than 2,300 American lives, killed unknown tens of thousands of Afghan civilians, cost trillions in borrowed money that future generations will be forced to repay and left us only with a question about what we’re now trying to accomplish.
As of this year, the Taliban holds more ground in Afghanistan than at any point since the war began in 2001. We are risking lives and paying hand over fist to walk in strategic circles.
As a new Congress convenes and White House administration begins, ending this costly, reckless and clearly ineffective entanglement should be high on President-elect Donald Trump’s list of priorities.
From a perspective of practical politics, this would be much easier for Trump to accomplish than may be immediately obvious. After all, second only to the mess in Libya, Afghanistan is “President Obama’s war.” Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson was rightly criticized when she claimed Obama invaded Afghanistan, but the president-elect would do well to recall the point Pierson so poorly attempted to make: The outgoing president owned Afghanistan in a way he never embraced Iraq.
Early on, Obama labeled the war in Iraq a “distraction” from “the right battlefield” in Afghanistan, a war he said “has to be won.” Faulty timelines aside, that connection means Trump will have the political leeway to extract the United States from the ongoing morass in Afghanistan that he might not have with America’s many other ongoing interventions. Trump campaigned on anti-establishment fervor, and that repudiation of the Washington status quo facilitates his closure of the most status quo war of all. The new president can pull the plug on this increasingly aimless project without expending much political capital, and he should do exactly that.
A timely exit is made necessary by the sheer futility and expense by which this intervention is marked. Right now, U.S. taxpayers cover 100 percent of Afghanistan’s security expenses and roughly 80 to 90 percent of its overall governing budget. On top of that, we still maintain about 10,000 U.S. soldiers in the “graveyard of empires” – each and every one costing around $4 million per year – as well as three times as many contractors, a source of cost and manpower Washington conveniently ignores when providing troop total updates to the general public.
With 40,000 Americans currently in danger, trillions of dollars pouring down the drain and 15 years of two different presidents trying anything and everything, positive returns on this investment are slim to none. Risking and spending more has long since become indefensible – a point Trump’s years of business experience should make eminently clear.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the Washington foreign policy establishment, the United States can leave Afghanistan, as veteran and military historian Andrew Bacevich persuasively argues, because “[p]rotecting Americans from the relatively modest threat posed by the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Islamic State – or all three combined for that matter – does not require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces in the Islamic world.” Our military can deploy anywhere in the world, if needed and authorized by Congress.
As it is, we are throwing good money after bad in the face of overwhelming evidence that further intervention will gain nothing for strategic American interests. “At some point, are they going to be there for the next 200 years?” Trump once asked about Afghanistan. As president, he can and should answer that question with a resounding “no.”
This article originally appeared on www.usnews.com, 22 November, 2016. Original link.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in the article are not necessarily supported by CRSS.