Afghanistan: Time for a Western exit

This appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

One more lethal, multi-casualty bomb attack in the centre of Kabul, the Afghanistan capital, marked on Wednesday the approaching 16th anniversary of America’s war in that country.

At the same time that Wednesday’s attack occurred, the Trump administration was trying to decide whether to send another 5,000 or so American troops there to bolster the Afghan forces’ shaky efforts to defend the country from the Taliban and other resistance to the rule of President Ashraf Ghani and his government.

The Taliban have denied involvement in the Kabul attack, but they sometimes do try to dissociate themselves from actions that kill a lot of civilians, as this one did. It is being suggested that this truck bomb assault was carried out by the Haqqani network, loosely associated with the Taliban, accused of being run by the Directorate for Military Intelligence of neighbouring Pakistan. It is also sometimes common to blame things that go wrong in Afghanistan on Pakistan, much as disturbances in Lebanon used to get blamed regularly on Syria.

Islamic State forces are also now active in Afghanistan. There are already 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. There are also, easy to forget, a thousand German troops there, under the NATO banner. The U.S. commander, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., has been beating the drums for months now, including in testimony before the Congress, for thousands more U.S. forces. So far, Trump has not pulled the trigger.

After nearly 16 years, and some $1 trillion, currently a billion dollars a week in U.S. aid and 2,350 dead Americans, it seems time for Trump, a real estate man by background, to stop putting into Afghanistan good money after bad.

One reason U.S.-trained and equipped Afghan troops have not been successful in defending the country is high desertion rates. Another is corruption on the part of their leaders.

It is probably time for the Afghans to decide themselves if they want to be ruled again by the Taliban, and, if they don’t, or if they want some sort of coalition in Kabul that includes the Taliban, to take appropriate action themselves to bring the fighting and bombings to an end, without NATO and the Americans.