US to Cut and Run in Afghanistan

Apparently, staying the course is not an option for the Bush administration when it comes to America’s military commitment to the government and people of Afghanistan. The Pentagon has announced that 4,000 US troops are leaving Afghanistan in the spring. That will bring the total down to 16,000, and Washington plans on further withdrawals later in the year. NATO, and especially British, troops are being demanded to take over some of the duties left undone. For example, the Taliban is still around, Usama bin Laden is still hiding in the region, and the drug lords of Afghanistan now provide 80% of the world’s heroin. It looks like “cut and run” is the Bush administration’s unnamed policy for Afghanistan.

After the Al Qaeda attack on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration insisted that the Afghan government turn over Usama bin Laden and the rest of those who planned and aided in the mass murders. The government of Afghanistan, the knuckle-dragging Taliban, refused and was removed by indigenous forces (the North Alliance and others) aided by US troops, especially aircraft and special forces. This was legal, just, and above all prudent.

However, Afghanistan was never the war this White House wanted. The initial instinct at the White House was to go for Iraq. Hours after the planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the five-sided building (and thanks to the people on flight 91, a field in Pennsylvania and not the Capitol or White House), Secretary of Defense Field Marshall Donald von Rumsfeld said the US should attack Iraq because there weren’t enough good targets in Afghanistan – it’s in Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack.

This White House doesn’t do nation building, largely through disinterest and a demonstrated inability. Condoleezza “Mushroom Cloud over America” Rice told George Bush during his first election campaign, “We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” The idea has always been “Imperialism Lite.” Go in with quick-moving forces and air assets, knock out the bad guys and leave. There aren’t enough US forces, even counting the allied cohorts, to control the areas needed, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, and barely in Louisiana. But any military man (a rare bird in this Chickenhawk administration) knows that the only way to hold territory is to put teenagers in the mud.

So, four years or so from the victory over the Taliban, President Karzai’s writ barely runs to the suburbs of Kabul. The US is pulling out 25% of its troops, and it is hoping the Brits and NATO fill in the gap. Afghanistan is not stable, it is democratic only as far as the tribal warlords and drug barons let it be, and the people who protected Usama bin Laden are still carrying weapons hoping for a comeback. Whatever happened to “staying the course,” to “staying as long as it takes,” to “honoring the memory of the fallen by completing the mission?” Who would have thought the War President was a peacenik?


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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