Image courtesy of NATO online
U.S. President Barack Obama arrives at the NATO Summit in Lisbon on Nov. 19, 2010.
Last week, NATO leaders meeting in Lisbon declared that the organization would cease combat operations in Afghanistan by 2015. The announcement comes in the wake of reports that the Obama administration realizes its original timetable for departure from Afghanistan, beginning next summer, is over-optimistic. On one level, NATO merely ratified the administration’s decision to buy more time. The announcement is nonetheless important. Our NATO allies provide perhaps 35,000 of the 130,000 members of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. (The United States supplies 90,000; other countries represent the balance.) The Lisbon declaration gives Obama’s policy a patina of international legitimacy. It may also provide domestic political cover against those, mainly on the left, who strongly oppose our continued presence in Afghanistan.
Rightly or wrongly, presidential candidate Barack Obama made much of his support for the war in Afghanistan. Rightly or wrongly, President Barack Obama “doubled down” on our Afghan policy by ordering a sharp, if temporary, increase — or surge — in our military presence. It is now very much his war — and one, moreover, with no end in sight.
NATO’s announcement is a classic example of the policy “punt.” The war in Afghanistan is not going well enough for us to declare victory, hold a parade and depart. Nor is it going badly enough to make us bite the bullet, cut our losses and scram. Not quite able to make up our mind between a strategy that focuses on the Taliban insurgency or one dedicated to eradicating the remnants of Al Qaeda, we are pursuing both with middling success. Our client in Kabul — Afghan president Hamid Karzai — presides over a corrupt and incompetent regime, though not one, apparently, sufficiently corrupt and incompetent for us to look for a replacement. Our chief regional ally — Pakistan — is characterized by weak civilian government and a military with a track record of covert support for the Taliban.
By any reasonable standard, our invasion of Afghanistan is a failure. Osama bin Laden — the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — remains at large. The leadership of Al Qaeda, denied sanctuary in Afghanistan, has moved to Pakistan or elsewhere. The Taliban, though no longer in power, remain a force to be reckoned with in the ethnic Pashtun homeland.
The cost of this failure has been high. Approximately 1,200 men and women of our armed services have died in combat in Afghanistan; perhaps four times that number have been wounded. The direct financial price for the war is approaching $400 billion and likely to reach $700 billion by the end of 2014 at the current rate of expenditure (about $100 billion per year.) None of these figures, of course, reflects the human and financial cost paid by our NATO partners, the Afghan security forces or civilians.
Our NATO allies want to get out. The Obama administration does, too. What we’re seeing now is a search for a suitable moment — some victory achieved, however transitory; some milestone reached, however modest; some agreement concluded, however tentative — that will permit us and our allies to exit with what passes for “honor.” The only questions are: a) when will that be and b) how many people — U.S., allied, Afghan — will die before we get there.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.