Is the United States right to pull out of Afghanistan? by Stephen Wertheim

 

Kabul’s fall to the Taliban is a horrific event — one that augurs more horrors to come. The United States betrayed the Afghans it protected, particularly women and girls, by promising them a Taliban-free future that it could never fulfill.

What is unfolding in Afghanistan is so tragic that it ought to represent the worst possible outcome. And yet, one alternative was worse still: continuing the US war effort. That would have meant sending more US service members to kill and be killed for the sole purpose of slowing the Afghan government’s defeat. Such a course would have hurt Americans without ultimately helping Afghans. For US President Joe Biden, it was unacceptable.

Biden made a correct and important decision to withdraw US ground troops, even though the immediate humanitarian impact has been even worse than anticipated. For most of the two-decade-long conflict, the United States fought an unnecessary war for an unachievable objective. It aimed to build a centralised, Western-style state in a country that had no such thing, and it tried to make that state, despite being dependent on external support, somehow become independent. The swift collapse of the Afghan security forces confirms what the administration had concluded: no further amount of time or effort would have produced a substantially better result.

As the Afghan army melted away, some in Washington pleaded that Biden reverse the withdrawal and mount a new offensive. Others argued that the war had been a sustainable, low-cost affair before former president Donald Trump and then Biden opted to quit.

Because of that war, however, nearly 2,500 US service members are no longer alive to register an opinion on the matter. Nor would the immediate satisfaction of hitting the Taliban once more produce a plan to achieve what two decades, US$2.3 trillion, and a peak of 100,000 US troops could not.

The United States still faces two major problems in Afghanistan. The first is how to rescue vulnerable Afghans who wish to leave their country and settle in the United States or elsewhere. The second is how to drive a wedge between Afghanistan’s new government and al-Qaeda so as to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States. These are significant challenges, but they do not diminish the decision to withdraw.

For Americans, a third challenge may prove most important of all: coming to terms with defeat instead of indulging the fantasy that somehow, in some way, an unwinnable war could have been won.

Only by accepting defeat can the country mourn the precious lives lost and resources squandered. Only by accepting defeat can US leaders level with the American public, which strongly supports withdrawal, and begin to repair decades of mistrust. This was a grievous defeat for which responsibility must be assigned, not evaded.

A vacuum of meaning will be filled by the least responsible among us, whose ranks are growing amid the country’s political dysfunction. Recall that even in the less polarised era after Vietnam, not everyone accepted defeat. A myth circulated that pusillanimous leaders had forced American soldiers to fight with “one hand tied behind their backs”. 

This myth, promoted by unsuccessful generals like William Westmoreland, led some observers to conclude that the real problem with US war-making lay with the public and politicians for supporting too little of it. To neoconservatives, the “Vietnam syndrome” needed to be kicked. After 11 September 2001, they found their opportunity to demonstrate that American power could remake Afghanistan and Iraq and redeem the world.

By failing to learn, by choosing to forget, the country moves from one unwinnable war to the next. To accept defeat, however, would put America on a different course, at a time when it can ill afford to repeat destructive mistakes.

-ABC Religion and Ethics

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. You can hear him discuss the crisis in Afghanistan and the future of American hegemony with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield.