Follow us on social

Afghanistan-checkpoint

Trump demands Afghan withdrawal and Washington panics. But it’s time to leave, now.

No serious person believes that the war is winnable in any meaningful sense, and staying at this point is counterproductive.

Analysis | Asia-Pacific

With metronomic regularity, Washington discovers Afghanistan and then forgets it, a pattern that has continued for over three decades since the Soviet invasion of that country in 1979. Rarely has U.S. policy there reflected a realistic appraisal of actual American interests. That pattern continues to the present day as the Trump administration, with one foot out the door, is expected to order the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, as well as Iraq and Somalia, before he leaves office in January.

According to the New York Times on Monday, the number of troops in Afghanistan would be halved from its current level of 4,500.

The legacy of the war in Afghanistan for Americans and for Afghans is somewhere between dismal and horrifying. Over 2,300 U.S. military personnel and at least 65,000 Afghan soldiers and police have been killed. As of 2019, the death toll for Afghan civilians was approximately 43,074 and 2020 is on track to add 3,000 more. From 2001 to 2015, there were 833 major limb amputations of U.S. military personnel serving in Afghanistan. Suicide rates among modern veterans is nothing short of a public health emergency. Despite this massive sacrifice, around 40 percent of Afghan territory remains contested or completely under Taliban control. The 2014 presidential election was contested and required U.S.-led and U.N.-backed mediation that only put a temporary bandage on a deeply dysfunctional system. The 2019 elections again required a political settlement negotiated behind closed doors. Corruption is so endemic in the Afghan government that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found $19 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse in the last decade alone. Afghanistan remains the world’s number one producer of opium which is turned into heroin.  

Even as the dysfunction that has characterized the war is widely recognized, few in the foreign policy establishment are willing to consider the possibility that its continuation no longer serves the interests of the United States. Indeed, rumors that the outgoing Trump administration might pull the plug on the war evoke a panicky response. A group of Obama and Bush era diplomats recently warned that such a withdrawal is an “impetuous, damaging, and risky course of action.” To them, a hasty withdrawal from a war that has cost the American people $778 Billion, over 2,000 lives, and reputational damage from an era of torture and strategic impotence will lead those who wish the U.S. harm to “toast with champagne or tea.” Even as our coalition partners have largely watched from the sidelines since 2014, these former diplomats worry that a quick exit may prevent allies from joining future security efforts. 

Granted,  the Trump administration’s withdrawal plan is less a plan than an aspiration. The logistical challenges in pulling out the remainder of U.S. forces by year’s end are daunting. But the only alternative offered by critics is to indefinitely hold our troops hostage to the outcome of a “peace agreement” that Washington cannot control. This replaces the unattainable objective of militarily defeating the Taliban with an equally evasive goal of a perfect peace deal in a country with complex ethnic, religious, and tribal cleavages. It is a prescription for remaining in Afghanistan forever. 

In a letter published last year, some of the same former diplomats advocated against a date for a U.S. withdrawal, explaining that “[a] fundamental mistake of the Obama administration was the constant repetition of dates for departure.” Ever-changing and dubiously credible withdrawal announcements aside, this assessment ignores the Obama administration’s three-year long surge which saw as many as 100,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan, leaving 1,044 killed in action, 13,622 injured, and 8,693 Afghan civilians killed in the crossfire. A web of forward operating bases and combat outposts created the illusion of coalition control over large swaths of Afghanistan, but as soon the surge ended, the Taliban took back these gains. The obvious question is: When is enough, enough?

The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board argues that “[a] complete withdrawal all but guarantees a Taliban-ISIS assault on Kabul, and a 1975 Saigon-style defeat and humiliation is possible.” For the Editorial Board, 47,434 American combat deaths in Vietnam falls short of what suffices as enough. Reducing Afghanistan to a regional chess match, with our troops and Afghan civilians as pawns, they assert that the “only beneficiaries of a U.S. withdrawal now would be the Taliban, Iran and Islamic terrorists.” 

The overall U.S. record in Afghanistan is not entirely without successes, which include driving the Taliban from most major cities and weakening al-Qaeda. By 2017, around 33 percent of Afghan girls attended school and in 2020, 27 percent of parliamentarians are women. The uncomfortable reality is these gains are enabled by unsustainable U.S. security guarantees rather than an inclusive and organic process of transitional justice and development. Washington chose to implement rapid advancements in a Kabul bubble rather than sustainable ones country-wide. Progress in urban centers was underwritten by a brutally violent counterinsurgency campaign waged in the countryside where the majority of Afghans live — including 76 percent of Afghan women. To decouple Afghanistan’s advancements from such human suffering is willful blindness. 

U.S. commanders pepper their speech with sanguine depictions of American and Afghan soldiers fighting “shoulder to shoulder.” While true for Afghanistan’s most elite units that display exemplary bravery, the trust deficit on the ground is palpable. In 2012, three years into the U.S.-led surge, green-on-blue attacks by Afghan soldiers accounted for 62 Coalition deaths, 35 of them American personnel, with nearly one-in-six U.S. casualties resulting from hostile actions of our Afghan partners. As Washington transitioned greater responsibility to the Afghans, green-on-blue attacks were replaced by outright fratricide within the Afghan ranks. In 2017, there were 68 insider attacks, 62 involving Afghan personnel killing other Afghans. Corruption and attrition within the Afghan military also led to the Pentagon to remove 30,000 “ghost” soldiers from the books. 

Perhaps this military impasse is what led General Austin Miller, current U.S. commander in Kabul,  to acknowledge, “[t]his campaign will not be resolved by military means alone.” Other senior U.S. military officers concur.  When in 2019, then-CENTCOM commander General Joseph Votel was asked what winning looks like, he replied, “it looks like a negotiated settlement and it looks like safeguarding our national interests.” It is incumbent on our elected leaders — not our generals — to have the courage to recognize that continuous war in Afghanistan is no longer in America’s national interest. 

Proponents of remaining in Afghanistan aver that the United States loses very little by staying the course. But an indefinite presence in Afghanistan assumes without evidence that the presence of U.S. troops advances peace in the region. Worse, it prevents Washington from properly assessing and addressing the hierarchy of threats that face the United States — a reality that is more apparent than ever during the COVID-19 era. 

The war in Afghanistan has included a counterinsurgency campaign, a counterterrorism mission, and a nation-building exercise. In none of the three has the United States succeeded.  No serious person believes that the war is winnable in any meaningful sense. To persist in this misbegotten enterprise is merely to throw good money after bad.    

President-elect Biden promises to “build back better.” A first step toward doing so will be to liquidate wars that no longer serve the interests of the United States. If Trump succeeds in ending this particular “endless war,” he will be doing Biden a favor.


U.S. Army Soldiers from 1st Platoon, Company A, 1st Battalion, 2nd Infantry Brigade, Task Force Blackhawk, search travelers at a check point outside Combat Outpost Yosef Khel in Afghanistan in 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Ken Scar, 7th MPAD)
Analysis | Asia-Pacific
Trump and Keith Kellogg
Top photo credit: U.S. President Donald Trump and Keith Kellogg (now Trump's Ukraine envoy) in 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Trump's silence on loss of Ukraine lithium territory speaks volumes

Europe

Last week, Russian military forces seized a valuable lithium field in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, the latest success of Moscow’s grinding summer offensive.

The lithium deposit in question is considered rather small by industry analysts, but is said to be a desirable prize nonetheless due to the concentration and high-quality of its ore. In other words, it is just the kind of asset that the Trump administration seemed eager to exploit when it signed its much heralded minerals agreement with Ukraine earlier this year.

keep readingShow less
Is the US now funding the bloodbath at Gaza aid centers?
Top photo credit: Palestinians walk to collect aid supplies from the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/File Photo

Is the US now funding the bloodbath at Gaza aid centers?

Middle East

Many human rights organizations say it should shut down. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have killed hundreds of Palestinians at or around its aid centers. And yet, the U.S. has committed no less than $30 million toward the controversial, Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

As famine-like conditions grip Gaza, the GHF says it has given over 50 million meals to Palestinians at its four aid centers in central and southern Gaza Strip since late May. These centers are operated by armed U.S. private contractors, and secured by IDF forces present at or near them.

keep readingShow less
mali
Heads of state of Mali, Assimi Goita, Niger, General Abdourahamane Tiani and Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traore, pose for photographs during the first ordinary summit of heads of state and governments of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in Niamey, Niger July 6, 2024. REUTERS/Mahamadou Hamidou//File Photo

Post-coup juntas across the Sahel face serious crises

Africa

In Mali, General Assimi Goïta, who took power in a 2020 coup, now plans to remain in power through at least the end of this decade, as do his counterparts in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. As long-ruling juntas consolidate power in national capitals, much of the Sahelian terrain remains out of government control.

Recent attacks on government security forces in Djibo (Burkina Faso), Timbuktu (Mali), and Eknewane (Niger) have all underscored the depth of the insecurity. The Sahelian governments face a powerful threat from jihadist forces in two organizations, Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM, which is part of al-Qaida) and the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP). The Sahelian governments also face conventional rebel challengers and interact, sometimes in cooperation and sometimes in tension, with various vigilantes and community-based armed groups.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.