Bring the Troops Home’ Is a
Dream, Not a Strategy
A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is a costly blunder
and failure of leadership.
BY JOHN BOLTON
| APRIL 19, 2021,
2:00 PM
This article is part of Foreign
Policy’s ongoing coverage of U.S. President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office,
detailing key administration policies as they get drafted—and the people who
will put them into practice.
U.S. Army
soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division retrieve their duffel bags at Fort
Drum, New York, after returning home from Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2020. JOHN
MOORE/GETTY IMAGES
U.S.
President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the United States’ remaining
military forces from Afghanistan rests far more on domestic politics than on
national security strategy. In 2020, he campaigned on the issue. He said last
week, “It’s time to end the forever war.” We should “be focused on the reason
we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base
from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that
objective.”
Biden sounds
like his predecessor, Donald Trump, whom I served as national security advisor.
That’s no surprise, as Biden is carrying out Trump’s policy with only slight
modifications. Media coverage of Biden’s April 14 announcement has noted
widespread public support for bringing the troops home. The American people are
tired of foreign military engagements, or so the pundits tell us; they’re tired
of Afghanistan, tired of Iraq, tired of Syria, tired of terrorism, tired of the
Middle East—just plain tired. The chattering classes agree, academics agree,
Democrats almost unanimously agree, and even some Republicans agree.
They are all
wrong.
The basic
national security goal that all U.S. leaders must pursue is to define their
country’s strategic interests and how to protect them. Politicians must then
justify how they propose to defend the country against external threats and to
muster the necessary resources. When leaders do not explain hard realities,
public resolve flags, which politicians then use to justify their own hesitancy
to make hard decisions. In effect, weak politicians switch cause for effect,
levying responsibility on the people instead of themselves. Under Trump and
former President Barack Obama, and now perhaps Biden, it wasn’t the public that
was weak but its leaders, who were unwilling or unable to do their job.
Afghanistan
proves the point. If the Taliban return to power in all or most of the country,
the almost universal view in Washington today is the near certainty that al
Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will resume using Afghanistan as a base of
operations. On April 14, Biden said that terrorism had evolved since the 2001
assault on the Taliban and that “the threat has become more dispersed,
metastasizing around the globe.” Of course it has. That’s because the United
States and its NATO allies have substantially denied al Qaeda its preferred
safe haven for 20 years. Terrorists had to go elsewhere, seeking Middle Eastern
or African zones of anarchy, because they had no choice. But make no mistake:
Afghanistan, more remote particularly from the United States, is their
preferred staging ground.
Washington
didn’t create the threats, and the withdrawal won’t make them disappear.
In Biden’s
own words, the United States obviously cannot “ensure” that terrorists will not
again use a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan as a base to strike the U.S.
homeland. Biden recognizes this danger by saying the United States will
maintain “our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the
region” to guard against a future strike. Blunt geography, however, shows Biden
is wrong to think that the United States can have comparably effective
counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering assets after departing Afghanistan.
After all, Osama bin Laden settled there after being expelled from other
countries precisely because its remoteness made it attractive. The map hasn’t changed.
And what
exactly is the United States doing today in Afghanistan? To the proponents of
withdrawal, it has been 20 years of endless, daily, bloody combat. But this
narrative is false, especially during the last seven years following the
transition of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force into Operation
Resolute Support. Afghanistan remains extraordinarily dangerous, and there have
been casualties, but the last U.S. combat death occurred in February 2020.
Moreover, there is no proof of real financial savings from withdrawing the
approximately 3,500 remaining U.S. military personnel; the costs for Washington
may well increase after the withdrawal because of the greater distances that
must be overcome for any future operations.
Moreover,
U.S. allies are performing a key mission in Afghanistan: training, advising,
and assisting the Afghan National Army and other security forces. This is not
combat. The roughly 10,000 troops from NATO members and nonmembers deployed as
part of Resolute Support are a much-reduced presence from the International
Security Assistance Force’s peak of 130,000. Their departure alongside that of
U.S. troops is a severe blow to a free Afghanistan.
Concededly,
the United States has spent enormous sums on so-called nation-building
activities in Afghanistan, with precious little to show for it. It never should
have been the United States’ objective to create a Central Asian Switzerland,
even if it had the ability to do so, which it does not. But it is an even
graver mistake to conclude that because Washington wasted resources on the
wrong objective before, withdrawal is now justified. The United States hasn’t
engaged in nation-building for many years and has long moved beyond these
costly mistakes.
READ MORE
Biden Just Made
a Historic Break With the Logic of Forever War
But will he really end
the United States’ other open-ended conflicts?
ARGUMENT |
From Moral
Responsibility to Magical Thinking: How Biden Changed His Mind on Afghanistan
After 9/11, Biden
embraced the idea that U.S. troops should leave the country better than how
they found it. Now, as president, he’s withdrawing them regardless.
REPORT |
A Masterful
Account of America’s Doomed Afghanistan Mission
Wesley Morgan’s “The
Hardest Place” is embedded reporting at its finest.
REVIEW |
Supporters
of withdrawal assert that the United States has tried long enough to enable the
Afghans to defend themselves and that U.S. responsibilities are over. Those
making this argument miss the key point that it is U.S. security that is at
stake, not Afghan military competence. Washington and its allies are not there
to protect Afghans against Taliban solely for their sake but to protect against
the terrorist threat to Western nations that has previously emanated from the
petri dish of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and would do so again.
To that end,
the United States concentrates on gathering information on possible terrorist
threats through a variety of mechanisms, not just the military. It is, however,
the military presence and a considerable logistical base that enable much of
this critical work. And it is in-country U.S. armed forces, which can scale up
rapidly, that provide confidence that no sustained terrorist threat can
reemerge while the United States remains. Removing the troops removes a key predicate.
Biden,
having in effect tacitly admitted that the United States has not achieved its
basic objective of safeguarding the homeland, then complains that new
objectives have been established. That is true; reality has changed since the
initial victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda. But it is hardly a radical
departure for the United States to remain overseas for long periods when it has
substantial interests there, even if those interests change dramatically. Biden
is quick to say he is restoring U.S. leadership in NATO—yet there have been no
complaints that the United States has had troops garrisoned in Germany for over
75 years since destroying the Third Reich. The same goes for Japan and South
Korea. With U.S. troops remaining in those places, Trump could say that Biden
is not following their shared rhetoric to end “forever wars.”
Long-term
deployments in dangerous places can be required by long-term threats to the
United States. Washington didn’t create the threats, and the withdrawal won’t
make them disappear. The war against terrorism is unlike 19th-century
conventional warfare not because the United States made it so but because the
terrorists did. Even conventional warfare is changing, as we are seeing in
cyberspace and the varieties of asymmetric and hybrid warfare being developed
and deployed by adversaries hoping to leverage their smaller strengths against
Western weaknesses. The war against terrorism is open-ended in the same way the
struggle against international communism was open-ended. Many of the same
people who disliked having to defend the United States in the Cold War—and
their ideological successors—dislike having to defend the country against
terrorism. Too bad the United States’ enemies won’t give it a break.
Among other
reasons to stay in Afghanistan is keeping watch on the risks emanating from
Iran and Pakistan. These are clear cases where geographic proximity has no
substitute. Iran’s continuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs;
its unwavering support for terrorist groups such as the Houthis, Hamas, and
Hezbollah; and its belligerent conventional military activity around the Middle
East all mark it as an aspiring regional hegemon whose near neighbors have
become increasingly anxious. Afghanistan is an excellent, proximate location to
keep an eye on things inside Iran. Moreover, a Taliban takeover, which could
lead to a distinctly fragmented pattern of Afghan government, would undoubtedly
increase Iran’s influence in western Afghanistan as before, to the United States’
distinct disadvantage.
Perhaps
Biden is turning into a modern-day George McGovern, the Vietnam-era Democratic
presidential nominee who made “come home, America” his mantra.
A U.S.
withdrawal may be even riskier with respect to Pakistan. If the Taliban resume
control in Kabul, this can only encourage the Pakistani Taliban and other
Islamist radicals, including within the Pakistani intelligence services. Since
Partition in 1947, Pakistan has never had a reliably stable government.
Instead, to paraphrase the famous jibe against Prussia: Where some
states have an army, the Pakistan Army has a state. If
Islamabad’s government fell to the radicals, terrorists would possess a
significant number of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, not only
threatening India and others but also risking the proliferation of nuclear
weapons to terrorists worldwide. For Washington, this is perhaps the most
dangerous consequence of the Taliban retaking power in Afghanistan, yet it
rarely receives significant attention.
Moreover,
ignoring the follow-on effects of a U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal on Iran and
Pakistan does not augur well for Biden administration’s national security
policies globally. The United States’ continuing and probably growing strategic
struggle with China and Russia, the critical need to prevent the further
accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea and Iran, and the
threat of proliferation more broadly should be matters of enormous concern.
Weakness and self-congratulation are often contagious.
Recently,
media commentators have breathlessly proclaimed that Biden is governing much
further to the left in domestic affairs than most people predicted. Perhaps the
same is coming true in the international arena—and Biden is turning into a
modern-day George McGovern, the Vietnam-era Democratic presidential nominee who
made “come home, America” his mantra. Unfortunately, that call is a dream, not
a strategy. It is not a dream that ends well.
John Bolton served as U.S. national
security advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, and was U.S. ambassador to
the U.N. in 2005-2006. He is the author of The Room Where It Happened.
TAGS: AFGHANISTAN, IRAN, PAKISTAN, TERRORISM, WAR
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