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. [my emphasis]And they take note of the defects of the proposed withdrawal:
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. [my emphasis]And they call attention to the result of one of the worst foreign policy decisions of the Obama-Biden Administration, the "surge" in Afghanistan:
[T]he 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? [my emphasis]Their bottom-line opinion on Trump withdrawing troops from Afghanistan before the Secret Service have to escort him out of the Oval Office? "If Trump succeeds in ending this particular 'endless war,' he will be doing Biden a favor."
Sam Seder and the crew of The Majority Report react to a painfully superficial CNN discussion of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal issue in CNN Panelists Break Brains Trying To Figure Out Trump Troop Withdrawal 11/19/2020:
It's worth keeping in mind the Pakistan-India factor in this. Pakistan and India are rivals and both have nuclear weapons. The biggest point of dispute is the Muslim-majority Indian state of Kashmir, which Pakistan also claims. As long as the two countries disagree on the status of Kashmir, Pakistan wants to hold Pakistan as an ally to provide strategic depth in a potential conflict with India. The Taliban is viewed by Pakistan as an ally, the Afghan government as pro-India. One of many political complications in Afghanistan.
It was a huge missed in the immediate post-9/11 era that the US didn't undertake a major diplomatic push to get a major agreement between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. It would have been very helpful for the image of the US and the West more generally in the Muslim world. And it would have made stability in Afghanistan a more likely prospect.
But Bush and Cheney decided to invade Iraq instead. With results that are well known.
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