Afghanistan is already America’s longest war. And there’s still no end in sight.
Indeed, it looks like we’re going to be sending more troops to Afghanistan. News reports suggest that President Donald Trump — in a move strongly supported by the Pentagon — is poised to authorize the deployment of an additional 3,000 to 5,000 military personnel to Afghanistan. Our current strength there is 8,400 troops. We may also ask our NATO allies to provide additional personnel to augment their current force of roughly 4,500.
Afghanistan policy bedeviled President Barack Obama. When he campaigned for the presidency in 2008, he drew a distinction between the Iraq War (which he supported) and the Afghanistan War (which he opposed). In 2009, Obama ordered a “surge” that would eventually lead to more than 100,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. Obama subsequently ordered a drawdown, but was unable to end our active military presence. Indeed, in 2016 he reversed his decision to reduce our troop level to 5,500, increasing it to the 8,400 that Trump has inherited.
The reasons for our inability to claim victory are many. It could be argued, for instance, that the decision to invade Iraq diverted resources when the application of more force in Afghanistan might have yielded more decisive results. The Taliban — whom we helped to topple in late 2001 — has proved a canny and resilient foe. Al-Qaeda, though seriously hurt, maintains a presence. In recent years, ISIS has emerged as yet another threat. The Afghan army, though much improved, has struggled in its fight against the Taliban. The government of President Ashraf Ghani is, by most accounts, more effective than his predecessor, Hamid Karzai, but still beset by corruption.
The situation in Afghanistan is far from catastrophic. The government still controls perhaps 60 percent of the country. (The Taliban control about 10 percent of the country; the balance — 30 percent — is contested.) We are not on the verge of seeing U.S. personnel evacuated by helicopter from the top of our embassy in Kabul. But there is a general sense that the situation on the ground is becoming a stalemate. And there is hope that bolstering U.S. forces might nudge the Taliban toward substantive peace talks with the Afghan government.
John R. Allen and Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution make a plausible case for sending more troops to Afghanistan. I urge you to read it. But it begs a fundamental question: what is our exit strategy, if any? Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, in an article written in late 2015 but still relevant, argues that we continue fighting in Afghanistan because our civilian and military leaders are simply unwilling to admit our failure in this war. I urge you to read that also. There’s surely an element of truth to Bacevich’s assertion: our policies — including the latest proposal for a build-up — seem more a response to the latest crisis on the ground than part of any broader strategy.
The decision of whether to deploy more troops may be a close judgement call. But there is no doubt that Afghanistan does in fact hold lessons for U.S. foreign policymakers. Above all, we should learn — yet again — that it is easier to get into a war than get out of one. What was conceived as a quick military strike to topple the Taliban and crush the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks has turned into a grueling 15-year conflict that has spanned three presidential administrations. The war in Afghanistan has exacted a high price. It has cost $700 billion or so in direct outlays. Throw in longer-term obligations — for instance, future care for veterans and interest on money borrowed to fund the war — and we may be talking $1 trillion or more. But the budgetary expenditures pale in comparison to the human cost. Nearly 2,400 American military personnel have died in Afghanistan, two-thirds of whom were killed during Obama’s presidency. Thousands more have been wounded, many seriously.
Despite its costs, the Afghanistan War has almost no salience in American politics. It played little role in last year’s presidential campaign. The reason is fairly straight-forward. U.S. casualties, after peaking with nearly 500 dead in 2011, have sharply declined in recent years, to only 14 killed in 2016 and four thus far this year. There was a slight uptick in public interest last month when the U.S. military dropped its largest conventional bomb on an ISIS stronghold. But debate, such as it was, centered on the kind of munition dropped, rather than on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
Let’s see if Trump goes ahead with the troop increase; it certainly runs counter to candidate Trump’s criticism of our long-term involvement there. If he does move forward, we can hope that this “mini surge” will help foster substantive talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. But I suspect that the country’s longest war will linger on, an example — if we ever have the honesty to see it — of how even “good wars” can go bad.
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.