It’s not official yet, but Obama is probably going to deploy some tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. This development is not particularly surprising; Obama made Afghanistan a central campaign issue, using it as a way to bludgeon McCain and Bush for being inattentive to America’s national security. Afghanistan, in the parlance of the campaign, was the “necessary” war, whereas Iraq was a foolish “war of choice.”
There’s also the commander of the international troops in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, who has requested a 40,000 troop increase on top of the total of 68,000 U.S. troops. While Obama probably won’t give McChrystal everything he wants, his personal appointment by Obama basically assured that there would some sort of increase. But is the war in Afghanistan really necessary? Should we perhaps be withdrawing our troops instead of putting more in?
More than eight years after the war in Afghanistan started, it’s worth remembering why we went there in the first place. Pretty simply, it was to destroy Al Qaeda and not allow the Taliban to continue ruling the country. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, this rationale made sense. We couldn’t allow a terrorist organization that had already shown itself capable of inflicting huge damage on our country to have free rein in a country that’s conveniently on the border of one of the most unstable and dangerous countries on earth: Pakistan.
And while we were quickly successful in removing the Taliban from power, we were never able to actually crush Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, not to mention Mohammed Omar, the head of the Afghani Taliban, are still free (probably in Pakistan), even if their capacities for inflicting harm have been diminished.
As for the efforts in turning Afghanistan into a stable country that’s more than a factitious, drug-exporting hellhole, they have been even less successful. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, “won” a recent election that was marred by accusations of fraud. After a runoff election was announced, his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the race, giving Karzai another term as president by default. Karzai not only has questionable legitimacy, he does not even have complete control of his own country; corrupt as he is, he’s still dependent on local warlords to keep the peace.
These extra troops’ mission would be to help a central government with questionable legitimacy centralize its power and hunt down and kill terrorists and Taliban who have managed to survive eight years of American and allied assault. But is this a worthwhile goal to pursue, especially at the cost of more American lives and money?
The main justification for our continued engagement in Afghanistan is that we cannot allow Al Qaeda to have a “safe haven” there. The thinking goes that, from the mid 1990s through the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was able to plan and execute attacks because they had a country whose leadership did not care about their presence. Even though the U.S. fired the occasional cruise missile into a training camp, their safe haven remained relatively unmolested.
But there’s a problem with this analysis. A terrorist group can do all the planning, funding and training they want in their landlocked, Central Asian safe haven — but in order to actually execute terrorist attacks, some of them have to to be in the United States. The 9/11 plotters, for instance, did most of their planning in Hamburg, Germany, not Afghanistan. Would occupying Hamburg make sense as a response to 9/11? They learned how to fly planes in Florida, but does that mean we should attack Florida? The point is that to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States, you have to be in the United States in the first place. And while sending more troops to Afghanistan might make things more difficult for potential terrorists and their leaders, it is simply impossible to eliminate all potential safe havens.
And it’s not like our adventure in the Graveyard of Empires is free. David Obey, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, put it best: “As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it?” In America, the political system seems to assume that money spent on wars doesn’t really count. But that’s obviously not true. Democrats in the House and Senate spent months agonizing over how to get a health care bill that had a price tag of 900 billion dollars or less over ten years, even though their final bill is deficit-neutral. An increase of troops to Afghanistan, not to mention continued engagement there at current levels, would add considerable cost to the some 223 billion dollars we have already spent there.
There are, of course, reasons to stay in Afghanistan besides the possibility of a safe haven for Al Qaeda. There are worries that if we leave Afghanistan, Pakistan could further destabilized. There are also concerns about the human rights of Afghans, especially girls and women, which could suffer a setback if we left and the Taliban was able to regain control of Afghanistan. But while these concerns are compelling, it’s unlikely for the American public to support wars unless they can be convinced that our national security vitally depends on military engagement. It’s just not at all clear if that’s the case in Afghanistan.