Goodbye Afghanistan

Sometime soon President Obama is going to tell us what he intends to do about Afghanistan; in particular, whether he intends to commit additional U.S. troops to the cause of defeating the Taliban and flushing al qaeda from the country.

I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulty of the decision since he probably has a hundred times as much information as me, and it has taken me many months to come to my own conclusion about the right course of action. I’m not going to get into them here, but it is actually pretty easy to make a case for why we should continue fighting there, but in my mind, the case for disengaging is even stronger.

The arguments most often offered for leaving Afghanistan focus on the cost side of the cost/benefit equation, and there is no question that the cost of being there is very high. We’ve already lost over 900 men and women, and the pace of our loss is accelerating rapidly. It is unbearably sad to read their names, ages, and home towns each morning in the newspaper.
On top of this ultimate sacrifice, the country is draining the treasury of something like $67 billion per year at the current pace, which would certainly rise as additional troops are committed. Imagine how many bridges that money could repair here at home. You, no doubt, have your own wish list of projects better suited for the U.S. taxpayers’ money – or maybe we could just pay the minimum on the national MasterCard debt one of these months.

The list of negatives is long: we’re propping up a government so corrupt that the only credible alternative candidate decided to give up rather than go through another sham election even though it was the final run-off for the presidency. We all know the history of defeats suffered by global powers that have sought to conquer this vast and forbidding country. And the longer and more visibly we occupy the land of Allah, the more effectively we confirm the argument made by our enemies that we are the 21st century Knights of the Templar come to reclaim Jerusalem. Every soldier we send and every Afghan we kill only serves to recruit more Muslims to fight against us. Twas ever thus.

But ultimately it is the lack of substance on the benefit side of the equation that persuades me that it is time to exit Afghanistan. What exactly do we “win” if we win? The chief reason offered for fighting is the need to prevent al qaeda from having a safe haven there, but the core power of that organization is their ability to operate across borders, behind borders, and without borders. Most of the planning for 9/11 took place in Germany. The pilots trained in the United States. If we drive them from Afghanistan they will regroup in Pakistan, Yemen, the jungles of Indonesia, or the burned out shells of houses in Detroit.

We will be fighting these people for decades no matter what we do. We need a strategy and tactics appropriate to the challenge. Better intelligence, more and better drones, targeted humanitarian aid, and a better class of friends will serve us better than tens of thousands of soldiers bogged down in a hostel land for God knows how long.