Afghanistan: is it time to cut our losses?

The future of Afghanistan has “never looked more uncertain” – and, as so often in the past, that “is largely the fault of the US”, said Mihir Sharma on Bloomberg. The Trump administration is negotiating a potential peace deal with the Taliban in which America could withdraw its 14,000 troops from the country, in return for a commitment from the Taliban to never again offer a haven to terrorists, as it did with al-qa’eda before 9/11. But for the US to “cut and run” in this way would be “an appalling abdication of responsibility”. The Taliban can’t be trusted to honour any pledges on terrorism – it reneged on similar assurances to the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Abandoning Afghanistan as a “lost cause” would betray all those who have worked so hard to rescue this “long-brutalised country”. As the Afghan Women’s Network has put it on behalf of those with most to lose from the return of the Taliban: “Do not choose peace without human rights.”

There’s little doubt that a US withdrawal would be painful for many Afghans, said Daniel Depetris on The Federalist. It would free the Taliban to consolidate their control of the country’s southern provinces, forcing the beleaguered Afghan army to make some very hard choices “in terms of which terrain to defend and which to cede to the insurgents”. More civilians would die. But the US can’t stay in Afghanistan forever. It has been fighting there for more than 17 years now, at a cost of 2,419 American troop deaths and about $1trn in taxpayer money (it has spent $45bn on the war in the past year alone). After all this time, it’s patently clear the US military is “incapable of resolving Afghanistan’s political problems”. Staying in an unwinnable war “doesn’t demonstrate resolve but rather a failure to grasp reality”, said Aaron David Miller, Steven Simon and Richard Sokolsky on CNN. It’s “sad and tragic that we promised more in Afghanistan than we could deliver”, but it’s time to let go.

The US Senate thinks otherwise, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. Its members recently voted 68-23 to advance a bill that criticises the administration’s plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Syria. But Donald Trump, who as president enjoys wide latitude in conducting foreign policy, looks set to shrug off these “congressional rebukes”. He believes public opinion is on his side, and he’s not alone in thinking that – “none of the Democratic senators seeking the 2020 presidential nomination wanted to go on the record opposing an early withdrawal”. Trump’s approach to Afghanistan is at odds with that of the foreign policy establishment, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times, but it’s consistent with his stated wider strategy of “disentanglement, retrenchment and realignment”. Its goal is not to cede US primacy and retreat into isolationism, but rather to put US primacy “on a more manageable footing, while focusing more energy and effort on containing the power of China”. In contrast to all the chaos and incompetence on the home front, the Trump administration is pursuing a rather calculated foreign policy – “one sufficiently coherent and plausible and forwardlooking that future presidents might reasonably imitate it”.