Surge Withdrawal from Afghanistan About to Begin

With Iraq reduced to 47,000 American troops scheduled to leave by year-end, the drawdown of 10,000 troops from Afghanistan announced by President Obama marks the beginning of the end of a decade of intervention. A mission begun after 9/11 meant only to destroy al Qaeda’s base was handily accomplished, but we then started a second war, a “war of choice” in Iraq (a diversion that allowed al Qaeda and the Taliban to reconstitute in Afghanistan and Pakistan) which removed Hussein but broke Iraq along its sectarian fault lines, and that in turn dragged us into the nation building in both countries we had originally sought to avoid.

The cost (so far): 4500 lives in Iraq, 1500 in Afghanistan, tens of thousands wounded — many disfigured with burns and lost limbs, many with mental damage – and a cost of $1.3 trillion and most likely double that with weapon replacement and decades of ongoing care of harmed troops.

The result: Moderate change in those countries, with governments only charitably defined as democracies. In Iraq, a Shiite government with a president who lost a close election but somehow kept his office, a country increasingly under the influence of Shiite Iran, a country that blocks Sunnis from government while bombings continue (three explosions in a public market killing at least 21 on the day this is written).

In Afghanistan, the decided possibility that the irrepressible Taliban will re-emerge the moment we leave, a country with runaway corruption from the top down and a president in office from a rigged election (a country now on the verge of a constitutional crisis as a court invalidates 62 members of the Afghan Parliament on the day this is written).

The wars have been a costly lesson, but congealed attitudes are finally beginning to melt. Even some older Republicans, members of the party that traditionally has been populated by hawks, have decided that we’ve had enough, helped along by anger at an Afghanistan president who holds his post because of the U.S. intervention, yet says Americans are “occupiers” and “here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that”.

Younger Republicans, swept into office by the Tea Party surge and more concerned with the national debt than a war that is costing over $2 billion a week, $120 billion this year, are pushing against a party that insists the defense budget not be touched even though it is triple that of 1999.

There are certainly risks to leaving Afghanistan (and “leaving” is an overstatement: the 33,000 surge troops will not all be removed until the end of next year, leaving 68,000 that won’t leave until 2014). The misgivings are that the Afghan Security forces, which the U.S. is training (at an annual cost greater than the entire budget of the Afghan government) will not be up to the task of halting the Taliban’s resurgence and preventing the country from again becoming a terrorist enclave. That concern at least returns us to the core reason why the United States finds itself at that end of the world in the first place – al Qaeda, not nation-building.

To justify the pullback, the administration is telling itself that al Qaeda may be crippled. Bin Laden is dead. His replacement, Zawahiri, is uninspiring, disliked and bereft of charisma. Suddenly Arab nations are taking a path toward self-determination rather than blaming their troubles on the West and thinking terrorism is a solution. Al Qaeda's latest video seemed to acknowledge that the cause is not going so well. In it, an American turncoat from California implores followers around the world to hatch terror plots on their own, urging them on with “What are you waiting for?”.

Hopefully, we will not become complacent and assume that al Qaeda is on life support. But the alternative would be never to leave Afghanistan. The expensive policy of staying on would be multiplied by every failed state to which nomadic al Qaeda may migrate next — Pakistan now, then Yemen, Somalia, Libya? The U.S. cannot hope to plant itself everywhere.

We are about to enter a period in history when we cheer for freedom from the sidelines but leave it to others to sort out their problems. An increasingly familiar refrain is that it is time we gave up spending hundreds of billions nation-building elsewhere when the nation that needs rebuilding is our own.