Trump, Afghanistan & the Messy Endings to US Wars
July 31, 2019
Any deal with the Taliban will resemble the other retreats from the
anti-colonial and counterinsurgency conflicts the U.S. has fought since
1945, writes Danny Sjursen.
By Danny Sjursen
TomDispatch.com
Could President Donald Trump end the Afghan war someday? I don't know if
such a possibility has been on your mind, but it's certainly been on the
mind of this retired U.S. Army major who fought in that land so long ago.
And here's the context in which I've been thinking about that very
possibility.
Back in the previous century, it used to be said that "only Nixon could go
to China." In other words, only a longtime Cold Warrior and red-baiter like
President Richard Nixon had the necessary tough-guy credentials to break
with a tradition more than two decades old in February 1972. It was then
that he and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger traveled to Beijing
and met with Communist leader Mao Zedong. In that way, they began a process
of reestablishing relations with China (now again being impaired by Donald
Trump) broken when the Communists won a civil war against the
American-backed nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek and came to power in
1949.
U.S. Air Force helicopters on deck of aircraft carrier USS Midway during
U.S. evacuation from Vietnam, April 1975. (DanMS, Wikimedia Commons)
By the same token, perhaps no one but Nixon could have eventually - after
hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and Americans
died - extracted the United States from what was then (but is no longer)
America's longest war, the one in Vietnam. After all, in 1973, it was hard
to imagine just about any Democrat agreeing to the sort of unseemly
concessions at the negotiating table in Paris that resulted in an actual
peace accord with a crew of Communists. But Nixon did so.
After those "peace" talks and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that land,
the corrupt, battered U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government barely held on
for another two gruesome years before a massive Communist offensive finally
took Saigon, the capital of the American-backed half of that country in
April 1975. Images of U.S. military helicopters hastily evacuating American
diplomats and others from Saigon would prove embarrassing indeed. Yet, in
the end, little could have altered the ultimate outcome of that war.
Nixon, a cynic's cynic, evidently sensed just that. Yes, he would prolong
the war to the tune of more than 20,000 additional U.S. troop deaths and
seek to create a politically palatable pause between the withdrawal of
American troops and the unavoidable Communist victory to come (at the cost
of god knows how many more dead Vietnamese). It was what he called
"breathing space." In the end, in other words, in the bloodiest way
imaginable, he finally accepted both his presidential, and Washington's,
limitations in what was, after all, a Vietnamese civil war.
Fellow TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich has referred to such realities as
"the limits of power." As a longtime military man who once carried water for
the American empire in both Afghanistan and Iraq, let me assure you that,
almost two decades into the 21st century, those limits still couldn't be
more real.
Recently, I got to thinking about Vietnam and Bacevich - himself a veteran
of that war - while following the strange pace of the Trump administration's
peace talks with the Taliban. It struck me that the president, his
negotiators, and his loyally "deplorable" backers might (gulp!) just be
America's best hope for striking a deal, 18 years late, to conclude the U.S.
military's role in Afghanistan. If so, he would end the war that replaced
Vietnam as this country's longest - and that's without even counting the
first Afghan War Washington fought there against the Red Army of the
now-defunct Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989.
An Unwinnable War
For someone like me who long ago turned his back on America's never-ending
wars on terror, it's discomfiting to imagine the process that might finally
lead to a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially one
negotiated by The Donald and his strange team of hawks. Of one thing, rest
assured: bad things will happen afterward. Afghans to whom Americans are
sympathetic, especially women, will suffer under the heel of the kind of
extreme Islamism that will be in command in significant parts of the
country. And getting there could be no less grim. After all, Trump, that
self-proclaimed "deal-maker," has so far shown himself to be anything but
impressive in striking deals. Nevertheless, he has, at least, regularly
criticized the ill-advised Afghan War for years and his instincts, when it
comes to that conflict, though unsophisticated and ill-informed, seem sound.
U.S. Marines with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit after seizing a Taliban
forward-operating base Nov. 25, 2001. (Sergeant Joseph R. Chenelly, United
States Marine Corps)
U.S. Marines with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit after seizing a Taliban
forward-operating base Nov. 25, 2001. (Sergeant Joseph R. Chenelly, United
States Marine Corps)
In a sense, the situation isn't complicated: the U.S. war in Afghanistan
cannot be won. The Kabul-based government's gross domestic product can't
even support its own military budget, leaving it endlessly reliant on aid
from Washington and its allies. Its security forces have been taking what,
last December, the American general about to become the head of U.S. Central
Command termed "unsustainable" casualties - 45,000 battle deaths since 2014.
Those security forces simply can't recruit enough new members to replace
such massive losses.
Today, the U.S.-backed regime controls less of Afghanistan than at any point
in the nearly two-decade-long war, despite all the American bombs dropped
and troops deployed these past 18 years. Rather than grapple with that
inconvenient fact, the U.S. military simply stopped counting how much of the
country the Taliban now contests or controls. For these and a plethora of
other reasons, that military and its Afghan proxies won't be able to change
the ultimate outcome of the Taliban's war in Afghanistan. Forgive me, then,
for placing some hope in Trump and his negotiators.
The disconcerting truth is that the brutal, venal, medieval Taliban movement
is popular in the ethnic-Pashtun-dominated south and the mountainous east of
Afghanistan. In 2011-2012, as a lowly company commander in a sub-district of
Kandahar, the province that birthed the Taliban, I saw firsthand just how
much sympathy villagers seemed to have for that Islamist cause. Sure, many -
so, at least, they said - were opposed to that movement's violent campaign
to control the province and the country, but culturally and religiously in
some fashion many of them seemed to agree with the group's basic agenda and
worldview.
Most of the Taliban foot soldiers I faced were little more than impoverished
farm boys with guns drawn to the movement as much by patriotic opposition to
the American military occupation of their country as by any desire for the
application of sharia law. In addition, many in the region were making at
least modest sums off Afghanistan's record-breaking opium trade, something
the U.S. was never truly capable of controlling or suppressing. The bottom
line: the American war in Afghanistan was essentially over then. It's over
now, a defeat that neither politicians in Washington nor Pentagon officials
have been able to accept to date.
Messy Wars Since 1945
The certainty of imperial failure in anti-colonial and counterinsurgency
conflicts has defined the era of war making since at least 1945. So it shall
be in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it's worth considering some of those
oft-forgotten conflicts.
In the favored American version of war, endings involve unconditional
surrender by a defeated enemy, whether Robert E. Lee at the Appomattox
Courthouse in 1865 or imperial Japanese officials on the deck of the USS
Missouri in 1945. But such moments, historically speaking, couldn't be more
rare in "the American century." After World War II, as the last colonial
wars of the European powers ended in defeat or the withdrawal of imperial
forces, the U.S. military went to war globally with Third World "Communism"
- and victory became a thoroughly outmoded word. In the Korean War
(1950-1953), which never officially ended, the U.S. finally settled for a
status quo truce with its North Korean and Chinese opponents. Tens of
thousands of American troops and millions of Koreans died in what
essentially amounted to a negotiated draw. Vietnam, as noted, ended in the
negotiated version of an outright defeat.
U.S. military devastation of North Korea. (Keystone/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the French, already booted out of Vietnam in the First Indochina
War (1954-1962), tried to torture and kill their way to victory in colonial
Algeria before accepting defeat there, too. (A coup attempt by disgruntled
right-wing military officers during that counterinsurgency almost cost
France its democracy.) Nor could a declining Great Britain kill its way out
of the last of its colonial wars, the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland
(1969-1998). That 30-year war with the quasi-socialist, nationalist Irish
Republican Army (IRA) only ended when London demonstrated a willingness to
negotiate with that group and draw it into electoral politics. Not only was
there no military victory to be had, but Britons had to swallow the
embarrassing spectacle of former IRA bombers being released from prison and
onetime IRA commanders entering parliament at Westminster.
In smaller conflicts and interventions, the American military withdrew from
Lebanon in 1983 after some 220 Marines (and 20 other service personnel) were
killed in a suicide bombing and the until-then hawkish President Ronald
Reagan realized he'd stepped into an unwinnable morass. In 1994, President
Bill Clinton did the same in Somalia after 18 U.S. troops were killed in a
chaotic shootout the previous year with a warlord militia in a local civil
war. (Twenty-five years later, however, U.S. drones and special operators
are still battling it out in that chronically war-ravaged society.)
One lesson to draw from such an abbreviated version of American and allied
morasses and military defeats at the hands of nationalist militants, left
and right, is that suppressing people's movements has historically proven
difficult indeed. Most of the insurgencies of the long Cold War era were led
by vaguely Marxist or, at least, leftist groups. In this century, however,
similar insurgencies are led by right-wing Islamist groups. Either way the
results have generally been the same. The insurgents, not the governments
the U.S. imposed and/or backed, are almost invariably seen by local
populations as the more popular, legitimate fighting forces.
Marxism (and its Soviet communist variant) ran its course in local societies
as the Cold War wound to its conclusion, but such movements were never truly
defeated by the U.S. military and its brutal right-wing proxies, even in the
Americas (as in Nicaragua in the 1980s). Islamist theocracy is undoubtedly
abhorrent, but it, too, must run its course and (hopefully) sooner or later
be defeated by forces within the societies where it's now conducting its
terror wars. Just as in Vietnam, the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan
in this century has only served as an accelerant for what might be thought
of as political and military arson.
After a Trump 'Peace' Deal
Predictions are tricky when it comes to war, but here's a safe enough bet:
in the wake of any Trump administration "peace" deal with the Taliban, like
the South Vietnamese government of the Nixon era, a corrupt, scarcely
legitimate U.S.-backed Afghan government and its badly battered security
forces will, sooner or later, find themselves back at war. And they will be
fighting an ever more confident Taliban. The Kabul-based regime could
perhaps hold onto the biggest cities (except possibly Kandahar) and
significant parts of the country's north and west where there are Tajik,
Uzbek and Hazara minority enclaves long opposed to the Islamist insurgents.
The Taliban would then dominate much of the south and east, leaving
Afghanistan divided and still violent indeed until, perhaps, like the South
Vietnamese government, the one in Kabul collapsed.
Still, it's unlikely the Taliban will ever again risk harboring large
numbers of transnational terrorists or stand by as a bin Laden-style attack
is planned in Afghanistan's mountains or valleys. After all, its goals have
always been Afghan-centric, not global. What's more, it appears that its
negotiators have tacitly promised not to protect or ally with al-Qaeda or
its newer offshoot, the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan (which, in any
case, is anything but a prospective ally of theirs).
Delta Force GIs disguised as Afghan civilians, while they searched for bin
Laden in November 2001. (Wikimedia Commons)
Delta Force GIs disguised as Afghan civilians, while they searched for bin
Laden in November 2001. (Wikimedia Commons)
Of course, transnational terrorists have never needed Afghanistan to hatch
attacks on the West. Much of the planning and logistics for the actual 9/11
attacks occurred in Germany and even in the United States itself. In
addition, partially thanks to America's never-ending war on terror, there
are increasing numbers of ungoverned spaces and tumultuous regions in dozens
of countries in a band stretching from West Africa to Central Asia. Should
the U.S. military really station tens of thousands of troops in all those
locales? Of course not. Among other things, leaving aside the expense of it
to the American taxpayer, U.S. soldiers would only inflame local passions
and empower local terror outfits.
So here we are knowing there is little the U.S. can do to change the
ultimate outcome in Afghanistan. The only question of consequence is: Could
Donald Trump be the 21stcentury's Richard Nixon? Could he do what no one in
his position over the last 18 years has had the political courage to do and
end - his phrase - a "stupid" war that has come to seem eternal? If "only
Nixon could go to China," is it possible that only Trump can extract the
U.S. military from Afghanistan? God help us, but that seems conceivable.
Brookings' Michael O'Hanlon: Sees repeat of Vietnam-style exit from
Afghanistan. (DoD/D. Myles Cullen)
Now, some in the foreign policy establishment will balk at any eventual
Trumpian peace agreement. Army General Mark Milley, the president's nominee
for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for instance, recently bucked his
boss during confirmation hearings. He told senators that withdrawing from
Afghanistan "too soon," according to The New York Times, would be a
"strategic mistake." Likewise, Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution, a typical Washington foreign policy pundit, has already
complained that the current U.S. peace talks with the Taliban in Doha will
only lead to a Vietnam-style denouement where U.S. negotiators use a
negotiated agreement as a fig leaf to save face, declaring "victory," while
essentially accepting future defeat. And, in this case, O'Hanlon is probably
right on the mark, even if wrong to reject such an approach.
Count on this: the end of the American military mission in Afghanistan will
be unfulfilling and likely tragic. Still - and here's where O'Hanlon and his
ilk couldn't be more off the mark - like Vietnam before it, the Afghan war
should never have been fought for these last almost 18 years, never could
have been won, never will be won, and should be ended in some fashion, even
a Trumpian one, as soon as possible.
Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and
former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance
units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War,
"Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge."
He lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and
check out his podcast "Fortress on a Hill," co-hosted with fellow vet Chris
'Henri' Henriksen.