WITHDRAWING US TROOPS FROM AFGHANISTAN IS ONLY A START
By Phyllis Bennis, The Nation.
March 7, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: A US Predator drone flies over the moon above Kandahar Air
Field in southern Afghanistan. Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP Photo.
We Have To End The Air War Too.
The war is a failure. Continuing to wage it will only result in further
devastation.
In recent months talk of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan has increased
once again. It's not the first time during the course of the nearly
two-decades-long war that we've heard this, and at several points since the
war began in 2001, some troops have actually been withdrawn. But somehow,
almost 20 years in, there still isn't very much talk about what it will
actually take to end US actions that kill civilians. We hear talk about the
"forever wars," of which Afghanistan is of course the longest, but not much
about what their first perpetrator, President George W. Bush, named the
"Global War on Terror" (GWOT)-and the effect that that's had.
The shift in name and definition of war in Afghanistan (and related
post-9/11 wars in so many countries) away from GWOT to "forever wars"
reflects how the wars have been and continue to be fought. Bush's war in
Afghanistan, and many years of Obama's war there, and beyond, were
characterized by large troop deployments and the occupation of cities and
huge swaths of Afghanistan and its people. Arrests of thousands of Afghans
accused, often wrongly, of sympathy with the Taliban, pitched battles with
the Taliban, and deadly US air strikes, all devastated the country and the
people.
Obama began reducing ground troops only after years of escalating
deployments on his watch, during which time the emphasis of the war also
changed. It had morphed into an air war, a war of drone strikes, bombers,
and more, along with the deployment of US Special Forces for targeted
operations. US casualties dropped to near zero; by 2011, Afghan civilian
casualties had significantly escalated. That war in Afghanistan continues,
under the guise of "counterterrorism." The "forever war" in Afghanistan, the
one that involves US troops on the ground, mainly training and assisting
Afghan troops, continues today, though with dramatically reduced
deployments.
While he was in office, Donald Trump, for reasons seemingly unrelated to
actual US strategy in Afghanistan, and definitely unrelated to any concern
about the still-climbing numbers of Afghan civilian casualties, withdrew
some troops and talked about pulling out more. That withdrawal process
escalated in early 2020 after the signing of the US-Taliban peace deal,
which called for a complete US withdrawal by May 2021 in return for the
Taliban's cutting of ties with Al Qaeda, ending attacks on US troops, and
opening negotiations with the Afghan government.
When Trump actually began withdrawing troops in November 2020, despite that
commitment's being key to the US-Taliban agreement, supporters of the war,
Republicans and Democrats alike, erupted in opposition. They raged that
Trump's decision would mean betraying the US service members who had died
there, or ditching the corrupt and feckless Afghan government the United
States had installed, or forsaking our "Afghan allies" in the military our
troops continued to train, or abandoning Afghan women, or-maybe the most
iconic warning-losing the war and allowing the Taliban to win. For some
Democrats, the fact that it was Trump calling for withdrawal was all the
evidence they needed that US troops should remain.
Among all of those Washington insiders outraged at the prospect of pulling
troops out, few seemed willing to ask what the consequences would be if they
stayed. Or, for that matter, what the consequences have been of the US troop
presence in Afghanistan for almost two decades. For many people in the
States, the war in Afghanistan had largely become invisible. US casualties
had dropped to near zero, which meant that coverage of the war in the
mainstream press had dramatically fallen off.
The impact of the December 2019 Afghanistan Papers, documents published by
The Washington Post proving that "senior US officials failed to tell the
truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making
rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence
the war had become unwinnable," was short-lived. At that point, there were
about 13,000 US troops remaining in Afghanistan-20 were killed in combat
that year, and that was actually the highest number of US casualties since
Obama's 2015 reduction of combat operations and their replacement with the
train-and-assist mission that remains in place today. But the Pentagon's
separate "counterterror" war continued throughout the 44th president's
tenure and beyond, with little discussion back home. With annual American
deaths in combat barely over single digits, press coverage disappeared, and
it was much easier to keep up the deadly air war with few people paying
attention. And so the number of Afghan civilians killed, whether in funeral
processions, wedding parties, or trying to simply live their lives, has not
led to debate about the legitimacy and human costs of the war.
There are answers, of course, to the claims asserted of why the war needed
to continue.
Sending more troops to die doesn't honor those who have already died, and it
actually insults their memory. Gen. Doug Lute, who was the Afghanistan and
Iraq czar from 2007 to 2013 through both the Bush and Obama administrations,
admitted, "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan-we
didn't know what we were doing."
The Afghan government's legendary corruption, plus the chasm between the
US-installed system of nationally centralized power, and the centuries-old
legacy of local, tribal, and regional governing systems, ensured that the
government in Kabul never won enough support from the Afghan population to
remain in power without massive US military, economic, political, and
diplomatic support.
For hundreds of years Afghans have proved their fighting ability-leading to
their country's identification as the "graveyard of empires." If the current
Afghan army, after 18 years of US and NATO arms and instruction, cannot
function effectively on its own as a military force, it is unlikely that two
or 10 more years of training will solve the problem.
Women in Afghanistan continue to live incredibly difficult lives-and while
some urban women have indeed benefited from US-imposed legal protections and
promises of better access to health care, education, and jobs, those
benefits are unevenly applied and seen far more in the cities; while almost
75 percent of Afghans live in rural areas. Maternal mortality rates, once
the worst in the world, have declined in some areas, but despite 18 years of
US military occupation and war Afghanistan's infant mortality remains the
highest in the world. Afghanistan's long history of strict discrimination
against women is not limited to the Taliban, although there is no question
their rule was harsher. Women in Afghanistan continue to struggle for more
rights, but even with Taliban control of more than half the country now, in
many areas local leaders have been able to negotiate arrangements for girls'
education and women's health care. For most Afghan women, ending the
constant threat of violence and death from the US-led air war will almost
certainly have a more immediate impact than potentially increased Taliban
influence.
Vocal concerns about losing the war in Afghanistan have come far too late;
the United States lost the war years ago. Scores of ex-generals, former
diplomats, retired officials of all kinds, not to mention peace advocates
and supporters of diplomacy over war, have long acknowledged that "there is
no military solution to terrorism." They were right. And since the
Afghanistan war was nominally against terrorism-Congress specifically
authorized military force to be used against those who "planned, authorized,
committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11,
2001"-there was no way to "win" the war. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was
Obama's top Afghanistan commander in 2009-10, said, "We are going to lose
this fucking war if we don't stop killing civilians." The US-led coalition
forces in Afghanistan, he said, "had shot an amazing number of people, but
to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."
Threat or no threat, US forces have continued killing civilians.
McChrystal's strategy was supposed to move away from just killing "bad guys"
to also protecting civilians, which required more troops. His successors
during the next few years oversaw Obama's huge escalation of boots on the
ground. That didn't win the war either. By 2014, ground troop numbers were
massively reduced, but the "counterterrorism" focus on air strikes and
Special Forces remained.
That counterterrorism emphasis continues today, rarely discussed publicly
except to mention, almost in passing, that no decision to withdraw ground
troops will impact on continuing "counterterror" activities-in Afghanistan,
Yemen or elsewhere. By 2019 the United Nations reported that the United
States and its allies were responsible for more civilian deaths than the
Taliban-and that "aerial operations were the third-highest cause of civilian
casualties.. The [UN] report attributed almost all of those casualties to
American air strikes." The 2020 UN casualty report documents a slight
decline in civilian deaths, with numbers dropping after the signing of the
US-Taliban agreement but increasing again as the talks between the Taliban
and the Afghan government began. US air strikes dropped precipitously, but
those by the Afghan air force increased-with the United States still
training pilots, delivering parts for the planes, and providing the bombs.
So Washington still bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of
civilians every year.
The 2020 UN report also called on the United States and its allies to
"increase transparency of investigations into civilian casualty incidents
and communicate results to civilian victims and their relatives."
Ironically, while continuing its air war against Taliban fighters, the
United States has simultaneously partnered with the Taliban in its conflict
with ISIS, or the Islamic State, which has a small number of fighters in
Afghanistan. In the fall of 2020, as if to prove that there is no military
solution to terrorism, only a permanent game of lethal whack-a-mole, Taliban
and ISIS fighters were fighting for control of the Korengal Valley.
According to The Washington Post, "US Special Operations forces were
preparing to intervene in the fighting in Konar province in eastern
Afghanistan-not by attacking both sides, but by using strikes from drones
and other aircraft to help the Taliban."
The public text of the US-Taliban agreement does not mention CIA personnel
remaining in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of troops. But public reports
make clear that while reducing the number of such agents and perhaps moving
them to the US embassy in Kabul was discussed during the negotiations, there
is no reason to think CIA agents won't remain even when "all foreign forces"
are withdrawn.
Pulling out the ground troops is important. They're not keeping Afghans
safer. They're not building democracy. They've been there far too long, and
we signed a peace deal promising to get them out.
But pulling out the ground troops is not enough. If we're serious about
ending the US role in the war, and we must be, we need to get serious about
ending the war that's still killing Afghans almost two decades after the
United States invaded the country. Calling the air war "counterterrorism"
isn't a sufficient reason to continue military campaigns that kill
civilians.
Ending the US military role will not in and of itself bring peace to
Afghanistan, but it's a necessary precondition to end the war. Malalai Joya,
then the youngest member of the US-installed Afghan parliament and one of
very few women, was driven out of parliament by threats and attacks,
including from government supporters. "In the Taliban time," she said, "we
had one enemy: the Taliban. Now we have three: the Taliban, warlords [inside
the US-installed government and parliament] and the occupation forces.. The
US and NATO presence is making the struggle for justice and peace much
harder because they empower these reactionary terrorists, who are great
obstacles for true democratic-minded elements in my country."
Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. She is
co-author with David Wildman of Ending the US War in Afghanistan.