Reflections on leaving Afghanistan
I was still new to my squadron when the bombs went off in Kenya and Tanzania halfway around the world. I spent that morning in our intelligence shop — a dark and windowless room just a few hundred feet from a Navy air strip in bucolic southern Maryland — reading through military feeds and newspapers with our intel specialists.
Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qa’ida was relatively new and without much on their rap sheet. Still, their connections to Ramzi Yousef (the mastermind of the car-bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993) and their presumed involvement in the 1995 car-bombing in Riyadh (killing five Americans) made them the most obvious suspects. Two years later, when they bombed the USS Cole, it was becoming clear to those who were paying attention that we were being dragged into a new kind of war. September 11th, 2001 made that unequivocal.
The talking point that our departure from Afghanistan last week will embolden terrorists is a total fallacy. Al-Qa’ida did not strike at us in 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, and 2001 because we hastily left some other place before then. Quite the opposite, al-Qa’ida struck us specifically because of our continued presence in Saudi Arabia — bin Ladin’s homeland and the land of the two holy mosques.
No amount of “sending messages” will change terrorists’ willingness to commit terrible acts. They are terrorists, committing terrorism is what they do. Blaming the victim for it is no different than blaming the victim of any crime. Arguing that how we left Afghanistan will change anyone’s mind about whether to attack us again is misreading history and misunderstanding terrorists. Moreover, having Americans occupy a country for 20 years is, all by itself, a deterrent, no matter how we left.
Some have suggested that we dishonor those that served in Afghanistan by leaving. Let me offer you this: We do no honor to our war veterans by creating more war veterans without good cause. We successfully degraded the threat posed by al-Qa’ida operating in Afghanistan two decades ago, we spent more than a decade on nation-building, we provided support and training for several more years, and President Trump secured an agreement from the Taliban that they would prevent terrorists from operating in Afghanistan again.
Could terrorists seize the moment and begin operating from Afghanistan again in spite of this agreement, or could the Taliban find themselves needing the U.S. to help fight ISIS-K? Possibly, but a country that aspires to be a global moral leader does not occupy another country against its will because terrorists might again become a problem there.
It is far better to meet those that do us harm on the field of battle than to risk becoming an unwelcome force capriciously imposing our will on others. That is not who we are. While we believe that the Taliban is an oppressive and repugnant organization, we have proven over the last 20 years that we cannot change them or their country by force. If we want to bring them and their followers around, we will need to try more carrots and fewer sticks.
There is a group among the right who must now be suffering from whiplash, so fast was their pivot from endorsing our withdrawal when the previous president negotiated and initiated it to decrying the withdrawal when the current president completed it. Instead of posturing and saber-rattling, it would be helpful for them to remember the great Republican President Eisenhower’s example. For eight years, Eisenhower stared down the Soviets without committing troops to a major military operation. He used a combination of diplomacy and limited deployments to keep the peace while his investments in America spurred the economic expansion that made us a global leader worth emulating.
There is no arguing that more should have been done to safeguard and transport Americans and our Afghan allies before securing our own departure from Afghanistan, but I do have a problem with those who so recently wanted to prevent people from mostly Muslim nations from entering the U.S. suddenly acting enraged that we did not evacuate a large group of mostly Muslim people from Afghanistan.
While we are owed a full accounting of the withdrawal and all its missteps, we would profit much more by examining how to better use our many other, considerable means of global influence to avoid being drawn into intractable places in the first place.