Now Is as Good a Time as Any for the U.S. to Quit Afghanistan

"... It isn’t new to have U.S. politicians who are disconnected from the facts on the ground in Afghanistan. In 2013, two years after President Obama announced that American troops would soon come home, we discovered that the military was still expanding its footprint in Afghanistan. Our team assumed control of a series of bases that had been enlarged in a costly engineering operation only months before. Five months later, when word finally came to withdraw, we tore down many of these newly remodeled outposts. The rest we refashioned into smaller versions of themselves, at significant additional cost, so that the outnumbered Afghan forces would have a chance of holding them in the face of the assaults we knew they would soon face.

Whether it comes this winter, next spring, or even years from now, the final U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will inevitably be a messy and destabilizing affair. Members of Congress, and America’s generally hawkish foreign policy establishment, need to reject the comforting, now decadeslong illusion that if we stay just a little longer, we can leave under better, cleaner circumstances.

The opposite is closer to the truth: Each passing month increases the odds that the small U.S. force remaining in Afghanistan eventually departs in real haste, either as a result of the collapse of the Afghan state or a dramatic Taliban military breakthrough.

Waiting for the “right time” finally to depart Afghanistan, at an annual cost of nearly $40 billion and a slow trickle of American combat deaths, is a feckless attempt to kick the can down the road. Our troops should not be held hostage to policy makers’ vain hopes for an immaculate withdrawal, or to the calamities conjured up on Capitol Hill."

I was a Peace Corps Trainee scheduled to go to Afghanistan in 1969. I was ‘deselected’ two days before departure. I learned some basic Farsi and an awful lot of Afghan history and culture during my two month’s training.

The bulk of the nation is firmly rooted in the 7th or 8th century A.D. The national sport is called buzkashi, which involves the weighted body of a dead goat and maybe a hundred men on horseback trying to pick it up and carry it to a goal line. Using knives on opponents was outlawed years ago, using whips is still OK.

The king at the time of my training was trying, like the Shah of Iran, to bring his nation, or at least parts of it, into the 20th century. Like the Shah, the mullahs in the countryside opposed him and eventually overthrew him.

If President Trump could get our troops completely out of Afghanistan in the time left to him, I’m all for it. If Biden, or Harris or whoever is running the nation after Trump wants to send them back, on their head be it.

I cannot imagine our ‘fixing’ Afghanistan.

LOL,

I think we agree.

Where I see a problem though is in entirely disengaging. You can’t do that. We live in a world where you have >3,500,000 Muslims in the US, the Internet, global mass transit of people, and easy access to materials/tech needed to make things that go boom, fly into buildings, etc. We shouldn’t be retarded and think that we live in medieval times (where they are there, and we are here and what happens there don’t concern us).

Basically, the world truly has become a lot smaller, and we can’t ignore even those places that arguably fell off the edge of the world a long time ago.

That said, nation building and modernizing this society was and remains out of scope (in all aspects: money, time, and losses).

However, it cannot be ignored either, no differently than a growing and malignant cancer. The treatment in this case is that we aid those factions in that place that are positive influences (our interests), we pay some to do our dirty work (both inside and outside of Afghanistan - example Pakistan), occasionally we go on a field trip and shoot the place up, and we routinely drone the shit out of them (good target practice). What we don’t do is waste billions trying to create a country by “forcing” people into a paradigm that they don’t want to be part of. We don’t stress our armed forces, basing large numbers there, also creating many targets of opportunity for them. This is a CIA/SF/SEAL/RNG BAT job where the only folks on the ground for any extended time are operators working with the locals (friendlies), with the other troops deploying only to conduct direct action and then leaving.

BTW- Sadly, many years back that was a huge miscalculation on our behalf. We saw many of the radical and Islamist groups as a counter weight to the commies, the Soviet expanse, so we actually aided and abetted them in places like Afghanistan. We turned a blind eye to AQ, the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups because after all, “the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” not really, but that’s how it goes.

Islam had a type of renaissance. You had Atta Turk in Turkey, the Shah of Iran, Sadat in Egypt, and even some decent leaders in Pakistan... but then instead of the inertia moving things forward it all turned around and Islam became regressive: Today Turkey has a Muslim Brotherhood leader (Erdogan), the Shah was over thrown and the Ayatollah K. seized power starting the Islamic Revolution, Sadat was killed and recently the Muslim brotherhood even seized power in Egypt (Morsi). Zia-ul-Haq put Pakistan on a permanent fundamentalist Islamic trajectory... Their renaissance did not last but rather was over shadowed by the rise of movements like Wahhabism. No one wants to admit this, it is not PC from a secular globalist egalitarian point of view and it is a scary idea, but Islam today poses a threat. The religion itself has become expansionistic and violent with 1.9 billion followers, nukes, control over vast area of the planet and resources and millions of them living in the West. Conflict is unavoidable.

But for the time being, while the West is asleep and wants to pretend it all away, we are containing the problem.

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