National Post (National Edition)
Winning, then losing, AFGHANISTAN
Our soldiers killed the enemy and won the battles. And then they stayed for nine years as the Taliban regrouped
Along war is petering out in Afghanistan. Military equipment worth millions is being scrapped. The exercise is calculated, not wasteful. Valuable as the material may be, transporting it would cost more than it’s worth. Abandoning a battlefield entails economic as well as a military and political choices, and it can be more complex to exit a theatre of operations than it was to enter it. It’s rarely as glorious, but then only fools fight for glory.
Were we such fools? I don’t think so — at least, not in the beginning. We’ll get to later, later.
Now the war in Afghanistan is coming to an end the way the poet W. B. Yeats wrote the world would end, not with a bang but a whimper, and it seems to me we’re doing the whimpering. And well we might, because it’s a war we lost after winning, for no other reason that we didn’t end it after we won.
“There he goes again,” some readers will say. True, I’ve been making this argument for years, in relation to Iraq as well as Afghanistan, but here I will concentrate on Afghanistan.
Like most observers, I believe that Operation Enduring Freedom, set in motion on Oct. 7, 2001, was an appropriate use of military force. The Western coalition launched an eminently justifiable war to defend itself against the aggressively hostile jihadist regime of the Taliban Emirate. This fanatically religious sect, then under the leadership of oneeyed cleric named Sheikh Omar, having brought Afghanistan under its control during the 1990s, sheltered and provided training grounds for al-Qaeda before 9/11. The Taliban regime was a marsh teeming with terrorism’s leeches that needed to be drained. Even some of the anti-war population of bleeding hearts who normally put all their eggheads into one pacifist basket supported it.
The coalition had a well-defined military objective and achieved it in a relatively short time. Having unseated the Taliban, its forces cleansed and occupied the major population centres and much of the Afghan countryside. They continued combing the inhospitable terrain for Osama bin Laden and his scattered acolytes, maintaining sufficient law and order for the country to function until the election of Hamid Karzai’s government in 2004.
For the military forces of the West, the morning after Karzai assumed office would have been the right time to start packing up and pulling out, just as they’re doing now, nine years and thousands of casualties later. Then they would have done so in victory; now they’re doing so in defeat.
My reason for this view in 2004 wasn’t due to any illusion of Afghanistan’s civil war being over. I didn’t think that the Taliban was necessarily defeated and militant Islam no longer held any sway, and I certainly didn’t see a Western-style democracy assured in a region that had never known anything but corruption and tyranny. No; I thought our forces should pack up and go home because they no longer had a military objective. The remaining task, important as it was, wasn’t for foreign soldiers but for Afghan civilians. They alone could build a nation in Oxiana, as it used to be called.
Our soldiers did what soldiers are trained, equipped and motivated to do. They defeated the enemy. After the foe’s attack on Sept. 11, 2001, our soldiers pursued him to his own mountains, engaged him, routed him, and deposed his hostile leaders. They did their duty and left the battlefield victorious. We should have given them a hero’s welcome, decorated them, thanked them for a job well done, and sent them home.
Instead, we extended their tour of duty by nine years, and without a military objective. Helping other people to build nations for themselves isn’t a military objective, even if it is the incidental result of some military action. Maybe one can describe it as a collateral benefit, but it’s not what troops do. Soldiers aren’t social workers, missionaries, or nation builders. Soldiers are warriors and should be used for war.
People say: “If you pack up and go, the Taliban will be back.” Yes. Well, the Taliban is back, in case you haven’t noticed. They never left. Coming back while we’re still there only gives them more credibility.
For the West to stay in Afghanistan for nine years after Karzai’s election would have made sense only if we had ambitions to colonize the region. If, like various empires from the Persian to the British, we had imperial designs, it would have made sense to stay. As it was, we assumed the empire’s cost without having either the taste or the stomach for its benefits. A combination of brave soldiers and blundering generals makes for good poetry, as in the Charge of the Light Brigade, but lousy wars.