After 10 years of war, the goal of stabilizing and ultimately leaving Afghanistan the right way – that is, as a viable state in the hands of a capable, sustainable government – remains as elusive as the clear-eyed experts always predicted it would be when the United States began the war there after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
President Obama’s stubborn efforts to solve the Afghan puzzle improved on his predecessor’s quick cut-out in favor of Iraq, but they haven’t much changed that equation. Being a pragmatic political realist, however, Obama is finally ready to start America’s leave-taking, and to shift focus and resources to nation-building in America.
Frankly, there’s not much else he can do. And politically, he’s on the right path. Afghanistan’s problems are intractable. And Americans are mainly ready to get out.
Obama’s announcement Wednesday that he would pull out 10,000 of the 30,000-troop “surge” force by the end of the year – and the rest of that contingent by next summer – is a fair start on the road to leaving Afghanistan. Some 70,000 troops would still be in the country when the surge force is finally withdrawn. Further reductions, the president said, would continue at a steady pace to wind down a war, by 2014, that is costing $10 billion a month at a time when America can’t afford it.
The Pentagon’s war-planners and political critics on the right, of course, think it’s too soon to initiate an exit strategy. And critics on the left, and even some tea partiers, think the pull-out pace is not soon enough, or large enough. That fractured imbalance suggest the middle way is on target.
Obama understandably sought to cast the pull-out as a mark of the surge’s success in suppressing the Taliban, in routing it out of many of its strongholds, and in building up Afghanistan’s security capacity – 100,000 trained soldiers and roughly as many police officers – to take over its own security problems.
Progress has been made, and there is some truth to that premise. But given Afghanistan’s unyielding corruption, rampant illiteracy and unrestrained tribalism, fear logically remains that the gains are fragile and reversible. Critics of a troop drawdown understandably believe that the American endeavor in Afghanistan will begin to implode when the pullout reaches critical mass and becomes irreversible.
In fact, Obama admitted that Afghanistan would likely continue to be enmeshed by trouble – with the Taliban, with tribal warlords and with policing and security problems. He simply said that America wasn’t going to leave Afghanistan as a perfect place, and that the country would have to begin handling those problems on its own.
In acknowledging that, he essentially accepted the analysts’ wisdom that Afghanistan is not meant to be tamed except by long-term occupation and continuous fighting and nation-building initiatives – and possibly not even by all that combined.
It’s not clear where America, or Afghanistan, will stand at the end of this exit strategy, nor has a concluding chapter for the exit been revealed. It’s possible, even probable, that Washington and the Pentagon would want to leave a viable base of troops as an emergency strike force on hand to monitor and restrain the looming possibility of destabilization in neighboring Pakistan – the Pashtun Taliban safe haven – with its 90 to 100 mobile nuclear weapons in play and Islamic extremists itching to get them.
Ramping down the anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan won’t solve that more haunting problem, but it might clear the way to establish a base for the United State’s higher priority mission of interdicting terrorism and nuclear nightmare. In any case, that would more specifically address the problem that originally drew the United States into the war in Afghanistan.