We basically won the war in Afghanistan, and the Taliban -- in 2002, when the Taliban fled to Pakistan.
What happened over the next three or four years is that, by using -- taking advantage of safe havens on the Pakistani side of the border, the Taliban were able to reconstitute themselves, and so the level of violence began to increase again in 2006.
We saw that. When I took this job in December 2006, I told President Bush that I thought that we had not paid enough attention to Afghanistan. And within a couple of months of taking the job, I added another American brigade. We added a further American brigade, and then the president in 2008 brought the total troop numbers from, when I arrived at about 17,000 U.S., to about 42,000. That had been authorized and a lot of those hadn’t arrived by the end of 2008.
So far, so good. We won the war when we attacked in 2001 and the Taliban fled to Pakistan in 2002. There was nobody in Afghanistan to neglect for many years.
Given that reality on the ground, why would Gates then say this?
So the reality is, both on the civilian and the military side, that Afghanistan was neglected until 2007 or so. We took our -- we did take our eye off the ball. And it gave the Taliban the opportunity to capture the momentum, and particularly in the south.
Really? The only thing we could have done to fight the Taliban from 2002 to 2006 was to send troops into Pakistan itself.
So who amongst the Distractinistas is on record advocating that course of action from 2002 to 2006? In fact, our so-called "distraction" consisted of not doing what nobody would have done.
It wasn't until 2006 that violence started going up in Afghanistan as the result of the sanctuary in Pakistan. And President Bush agreed to recommendations from the Department of Defense to do something about that. Note that we reinforced Afghanistan even before the surge in Iraq took place. Winning in Iraq also led to another boost for the Taliban by compelling al Qaeda to shift their focust to Afghanistan after 2007.
President Obama has continued the Bush-era trend of reinforcing Afghanistan, eased by the victory in Iraq that we achieved during that terrible so-called era of distraction.
Nobody should be surprised that this is how the campaigns played out. Our military--in particular our ground forces--have been sized for a couple decades now on the premise that if we are in two wars, we win in one war while we hold in the second--and turn to the second war for the win only after we win the first war and transfer the troops used in that first war.
So not only was there no point in adding more troops to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, there was no ability. And nobody on the anti-war side was getting worked up demanding we expand the ground forces to fight two wars fully at the same time. Well, other than those calling for a draft designed to erode support for the war rather than to win the wars.
The third reason it made no sense to add troops to Afghanistan in the 2002-2006 period is that the enemy was regrouping in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan (assuming nobody would use more US troops to invade Pakistan--which was also our primary line of supply for our troops in Afghanistan, remember).
We won the war in Afghanistan. And it was proper to then use our military against another threat--Saddam Hussein' Iraq--rather than keep our military uncommitted and poised for action for years just in case the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated.
We won the war in Iraq, and we fortunately won that war in time to begin sending troops to Afghanistan before the regrouped Taliban could make too many gains. And we now have Pakistani support that has seriously damaged the Pakistan-based Taliban.
Now we can try to win the war in Afghanistan with more resources, bolstered by serious Pakistani efforts to win on their side of the border. That's far closer to the reality of Afghanistan than any complaints--even by Gates--that we were distracted by Iraq.
