It is not getting nearly as much attention as it should in the midst of the coronavirus threat, stock market crashings, and the escalating Democratic presidential primary — but news this weekend that the United States has signed a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan within 14 months is remarkable. The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has been a vast and ultimately indefensible catastrophe, second only to the invasion of Iraq in its folly and infliction of suffering and death on literally millions of people. As tragic as the deaths of more than 3,500 U.S. and coalition troops have been, this tragedy has been multiplied many times more among Afghan soldiers, civilians, and insurgents. Then there is the $2 trillion cost of the war, over decades during which the American people were told, by politicians of both parties, that this country could not afford health care for more people, could not provide more assistance with college tuition, could not solve our homeless crisis.
And yet we are now at a point where we could have been nearly two decades ago — signing a deal with the Taliban, whose good faith still cannot be trusted. Apart from the withdrawal of troops, the deal lays out a framework for the Taliban and Afghan government to negotiate during the withdrawal period; as The Washington Post notes, the “agenda for the talks is massive, including a comprehensive cease-fire, the role of the Taliban in a future government, and rights for women and civil society.” It is still possible the deal will fall apart; Secretary of Defense Mark Esper stated that the “United States will not hesitate to nullify the agreement” if the Taliban does not maintain its commitments. Indeed, critics are already noting that the Taliban will never adhere to its commitments during this negotiation period, and will eventually take over the country again once the United States leaves. And yet, absent a World War II-style mobilization to occupy Afghanistan that we never undertook and will never undertake, this was always the inevitable endpoint: a crappy deal that to a great degree would yield Afghanistan’s destiny largely back to its warring factions.
It is too soon for definitive answers as to why the U.S. is withdrawing now, but it seems that President Trump’s willingness to do so is the primary driver. And since Trump is president, there is no outcry of treason from the right that would have met a Democrat’s decision to do the same — vaguely akin to staunch anti-communist Richard Nixon having the credibility to launch direct relations with China. We have yet to learn the tenor of the advice that Trump has been receiving from the military and his advisors, and to what extent this decision has broader institutional support.
The New York Times writes that, “The Trump administration has framed the deal as the long-awaited promise made to war-weary Americans, for whom the Afghan war has defined a generation of loss and trauma but has yielded no victory.” But are Americans really war-weary? The Times, and indeed President Trump, suggest they are ready for our Afghanistan involvement to end, but is this really the case? To the contrary, this war has been conducted increasingly far from the consciousness or concern of most Americans. Yet this lack of caring has been going on arguably since the first few years of the conflict, as Iraq and its aftermath occupied the national dialogue. And the notion that this war “has defined a generation of loss and trauma” badly misstates the impact it’s had on the United States. An extremely narrow segment of the population has served in Afghanistan, to the point that many Americans don’t know anyone who has actually been deployed there, let alone killed or wounded. Yes, there has been much loss and trauma, but it has been largely invisible to the great majority of Americans, and experienced by a small subset of our population and their families.
Most startling of all is that major news sources are reporting on this withdrawal plan and the history of the Afghanistan War this weekend without noting that it has for most of its duration constituted a fraud perpetrated on the American people. A few months ago, The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers reporting project laid out the serial incompetence, lack of credible strategy, and self-delusion that have constituted the American experience in Afghanistan. Most damningly, the Afghanistan Papers also laid out the great degree to which the government, including administration officials of both parties and the military, consistently lied to the American people about how badly and how fruitlessly our efforts were going, and suppressed vital knowledge that the conflict was fundamentally un-winnable. Afghanistan has been a terrible war; but it has also been a scandal and cover-up of historic proportions, for which the American and Afghan people have paid the price. For the United States, this incompetence abetted by mendacity has denied the American people the ability to make informed decisions about the United States’ war in Afghanistan. In this sense, the war has been a tragedy of democracy as well as of human life.
Instead, the U.S. continued fighting, not simply out of bureaucratic inertia, or the stated goal to prevent another 9/11, but as an insurance policy to protect the current administration, whether George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, from political damage should another large terrorist attack occur on U.S. soil. In this sense, American soldiers have figured as sacrificial figures, the spilling of their blood required to show that we were “doing something,” even if that something no longer had any rational relationship to decreasing the threat of terrorism against the United States. The Afghan people have similarly been sacrificed for U.S. politics, though invisibly.