We're heading for the exits in Afghanistan, as we made clear a week ago:
President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed on Friday to speed up the handover of combat operations in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, raising the prospect of an accelerated U.S. withdrawal from the country and underscoring Obama's determination to wind down a long, unpopular war.
Here's our president under the Mission Responsibly Ended banner:
"By the end of next year, 2014, the transition will be complete," Obama said at a news conference with Karzai standing at his side. "Afghans will have full responsibility for their security, and this war will come to a responsible end."
The responsible end seems elusive in Iraq:
Insurgents unleashed a string of bomb attacks mainly targeting Shiite Muslim pilgrims across Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 24 people and extending a wave of deadly bloodshed into a second day.
Walking away is no way to win a war. It is indeed good to turn over primary responsibility to locals to fight. That's Counter-Insurgency 101. But we still need to provide enough help for our allies to win. Have we really committed to that?
At the force level the administration has suggested, the U.S. would be able to keep only two bases in Afghanistan, most likely for logistical reasons at Bagram and either Kabul or Kandahar. They are not close enough to support counterterrorism operations where most needed—in the eastern provinces of Kunar, Nuristan, Khost and Paktika.
Neither would there be enough U.S. forces to assist the Afghan army. There would be no more American soldiers fighting alongside Afghans, as in the past, and not even embedded U.S. trainers in their units. The Afghans would not be able to call in U.S. air, artillery or medical support. These are the enablers that have given the Afghans both the confidence and the combat power to stand and fight for the past three years, taking casualties several times as numerous as the coalition. Brave as the Afghan soldiers are, they simply cannot stand and fight without U.S. support.
Is victory even in the vocabulary of this administration?
I don't have high aspirations for Afghanistan. I never had. But if we want to win in Afghanistan rather than achieve a decent interval before Afghans lose the war, we need to stay committed:
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
And we stick around this time, unlike after the Soviets left Afghanistan when we ignored the place, for a generation or two to see if we can move Afghanistan into the 19th century (hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves).
Hopefully our military surge recedes by the end of 2011 and we can get down to a single combat brigade plus air power that function as a fire brigade and a hammer for the central government should a local difficulty exceed Afghan military capabilities.
Oh, and of course the anti-war side will stop seeing Afghanistan as the "good war." The Left will start advocating defeat there, too.
I was overly optimistic about the timeline of getting down to a force based around a single conventional brigade, of course. But we have gotten there. And that single Army brigade plus logistics, security, air power, advisers and trainers, and special forces will require more than the 3,000 to 9,000 troops the Obama administration is willing to commit.
We need this post-surge force to reduce the risk of losing. It is too difficult to judge whether the Afghans can fight on their own while we are still there in strength. Are we measuring the right things? Are we reporting data in a way that supports the president's wishes rather than to guide his decisions?
I sometimes get nostalgic for the left's commitment to winning the Afghanistan War.
When did it stop being the good war of necessity? Oh yeah, right when victory in Iraq became evident and increased threats in Afghanistan led us to focus on the previously secondary theater of Afghanistan.
