Editor’s note: This commentary is by David Russell, of Perkinsville, who is retired renewable energy and securities consultant and whose writing appears in venues including the The Hill and Huffington Post.
[P]resident Donald Trump talked to the nation last week about Afghanistan and told the public that he was going to follow the generals, and, in so doing, he has relegated this country to an open-ended commitment to a war 16 years in the making. He has been cheered by the Republican hawks and condemned by his nationalist base and just about everyone else. What is not being discussed is the very fundamental question of what are we fighting for. Trump has not made a clear case for a national security issue, he has not made the case for either building or sustaining a viable government, and he has not informed Americans of what withdrawal might mean in terms of the United States’ standing in the world, the stability in the region or how we will know when the terrorist have been vanquished.
If you take him at his word, the president has informed us that Afghanistan is vital to the war on terrorism. Gone are the rationales of previous administrations to drive out an ultra-conservative intolerant government that provided sanctuary for terrorists or building enduring political institutions and continuing that effort by repelling counterinsurgency.
One has to wonder in listening to this policy drivel as to what happens when a new player like Trump enters the Beltway bubble. He told us on the stump we were wasting American lives and resources on wars that were not in our interests. Is there some poisonous gas like sarin that takes over and drives motor skills so that people are rendered zombie-like in their recitation of militarism? Or is it like a religious conversion that brings the shining light of a new truth?
It is said of Afghanistan that nothing gets done because at every level of government and civil society Afghanis demand bribes. It is said that the previous president Hamid Karzai did little more than pander to his tribal and family interests and line his pockets and those of his family (Karzai’s personal wealth is estimated to be over $20 million and his family’s wealth at over $900 million). It was rumored that Karzai’s brother Mahmood was one of the largest suppliers of heroin to the West. It is said that the Afghan army, which is authorized to be 350,000 strong, loses recruits with a desertion rate of 4,000 per month. It is said that Afghani soldiers are a principal source of arms for the insurgency.
The New York Times has written that in Afghanistan, “corruption can no longer be described as a cancer on the system: It is the system.” The U.S. Agency for International Development stated in 2009 that corruption in Afghanistan had “become pervasive, entrenched, systemic, and by all accounts now unprecedented in scale and reach.”
The current government is led by a U.S.-sponsored detente that allowed two opposing factions, one headed by Ashraf Ghani and the other by Abdullah Abdullah. Neither has had a positive effect even though they promised change. Transparency International ranks Afghanistan 169 of 176 in its 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index. Investigative journalist Sibel Edmonds has drawn attention to billions of dollars of American taxpayer dollars lost to corruption and corrupt officials follow the U.S. intervention.
In a Congressional Budget Office report published in 2007, the combined costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would cost U.S. taxpayers $2.4 trillion by 2017. The Afghan portion of that cost is estimated to be $1.07 trillion as of this year. There are 33 million people in Afghanistan. We could have written every single one of these folks a check for $3,242 rather than waste lives and legitimacy on a country that has questionable strategic value to the U.S. In a country where the national income per capita is $410 those cherishing Western-style freedoms could have fled the country and the remaining warlords or religious fanatics could have had this landlocked disaster all to themselves.
We have been told in the past that the strategic value of our presence in Afghanistan is a balance to the instability of Pakistan and the fact that it being a nuclear power poses a threat to the region. It is hard to assess how viable that logic is when, as a part of the president’s address, Trump threatened Pakistan for its role in harboring and perhaps supporting the Taliban or terrorist organizations like ISIS, al-Qaida or the Haqqani network. In so doing, the president reached out to enlist India in addressing the conflict in Afghanistan. The president’s logic is elusive since both Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim countries and their opposition to India is driven, at least in part, by religious differences. India is predominantly Hindu.
There is no logic to our strategic interests. If the U.S. were to follow the advice of Richard Armitage (former under secretary of state in the Bush administration, the guys who got us into this mess) the U.S. should withdraw its troops and leave a small anti-terrorist unit to ensure there are no threats staged in the area that are transported to the U.S. and its allies.
It seems quite clear that we are fighting in Afghanistan because of inertia and the influence of military leaders who simply find it hard to give up. It is a legitimate question to ask what damage is done if we simply leave? What happens to the U.S. standing in the world? If Vietnam is any measure, the U.S. suffers the indignity of being viewed as not so good at nation-building. Since when is that news?
