Now that the Afghan elections are over and have taken place in an atmosphere of relative stability—which was the true, if unarticulated, purpose of President Obama’s 21,000-strong surge last spring—it would seem that the time for setting a deadline for a U.S. troop withdrawal is here.
An elected president will soon take office for a term to last five years. The government in Kabul is in no more disarray than the government in Baghdad was when we first started talking of a troop withdrawal there.
One of the more dispiriting television clips about Afghanistan was aired recently on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” It depicted a small unit of American troops in Nuristan Province. They were deployed in a remote bunker, subject to sniper fire from the outside and utterly unable to reach the population they were supposed to separate from the Taliban.
One may ask, what is the objective of this lonely, hapless activity?
It is useful to remind ourselves that the Taliban is not our historic enemy. It is Al Qaeda, which is no longer even in Afghanistan. They are across the border in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The myth that Al Qaeda could reestablish itself in Afghanistan is just that—a myth.
In 1996-2001, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the United States tolerated it—even to the extent of bargaining with the Taliban in a vain attempt to get them to hand over Osama bin Laden. What, then, is the purpose of our being in Afghanistan? The main enemy—Al Qaeda—remains largely out of harm’s way across the border. And the Afghan president, although a member of the leading ethnic group, the Pashtuns, has a government whose key military and intelligence organizations are dominated by the Tajik-based Northern Alliance, which was recently pointed out by Selig Harrison in a recent New York Times op-ed.
In brief, while we have elaborated a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq and have implemented the initial phase by leaving the cities as of June 30, why is there no talk of planning in similar terms for Afghanistan—if for nothing else than to give ourselves a “cover” for pulling out?
In my view, the one mistake of the Obama administration’s foreign policy so far is the decision to augment the U.S. forces in Afghanistan by 21,000 personnel. This has been accompanied by a civilian “surge,” including the assignment of five American diplomats of ambassadorial rank to Kabul. Afghanistan is simply not that important in the global scheme of things.
If the Taliban were to resume power in Kabul after a U.S. withdrawal, we could be back to the situation that prevailed from 1996-2001, with the exception that Washington surely would not allow Al Qaeda to roam free in Afghanistan, as was the case in that earlier period. In the event that the United States could not establish an accommodation with a Taliban government, and if that government were to allow Al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan and set up training camps, Washington would not have the inhibitions that it had then.
U.S. forces could attack these camps from other countries in the region or from offshore. And if the Taliban reverted to some of its medieval practices, who are we to blow against this action in the name of religion? In fundamental terms, it is not our business how foreign cultures comport themselves.
The time is right for a deadline for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a war now second only to Vietnam in its duration.
Charles G. Cogan was chief of the Near-East South-Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from 1979 to 1984. It was this division that directed the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He is now a historian and an associate of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.