Should Trump pull America out of Afghanistan?
America’s 16-year war in Afghanistan is the longest conflict in its history, said Andrew Bacevich in the Los Angeles Times – and it’s now clear that it’s not going to end any time soon. Donald Trump had long argued that the US should walk away from the campaign. “Afghanistan is a complete waste,” he tweeted back in 2012. “Time to come home!” But last week the president announced that he had had a change of heart. Having conferred with generals, he has decided that withdrawing from Afghanistan at this point would create a dangerous vacuum. The US will instead send additional troops. Although Trump didn’t specify numbers, Pentagon officials are talking of an extra 4,000 personnel (the US currently has about 8,000 in the country, down from a peak of 100,000 in 2011). “In the end,” Trump insisted, “we will win.”
Enough of this madness, said Kevin D. Williamson in National Review. The US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 because Osama bin Laden was “holed up there” under Taliban protection. But he’s long dead, so why are we still in the country? What are we hoping to achieve? Trump insists the campaign is not about “nation building”, but about “killing terrorists”. In other words, it’s “an eternal game of Whac-a-mole using US forces as the toy mallet”. Congress should cut off funding for the Afghan war until our leaders can explain exactly what they want to accomplish. Because right now, they don’t know what they’re doing, “but they are sure that we should keep doing it – forever”.
Trump’s “modest” troop injection is not going to transform the situation in Afghanistan, said James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander, in Foreign Policy. But his strategy should “achieve the basics: a weak but functional central government; reasonable border control” and security; and an economy that continues to grow at 3-5% annually. Over time, the country’s “mineral wealth (estimated at $1trn, including lithium and rare earths) may give Afghanistan a chance to become an important trading partner in the region and with the US”. The best argument for Trump’s Afghan strategy, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post, is that “it avoids losing, and at a relatively low cost”. The extra troops should at least prevent the Taliban, who control about half of the countryside, from advancing any further. They will also reduce the chances of the Kabul government collapsing over the next two or three years. That’s what success looks like in Afghanistan. “No victory parades, but no defeat either.”