Here’s something I noticed just before the Fourth of July: On June 29, Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO announced, after meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, that NATO would be sending additional forces back to Afghanistan to provide training for Afghanistan’s special operations forces and air force.
What was different this time, however, was this (from The Wall Street Journal):
“Mr. Stoltenberg refused to put a timetable on the 16-year-long Afghanistan war.
‘I don’t put timelines on war, it is that simple, war is a fundamentally unpredictable phenomenon. Every effort to create a pat answer to that is probably going to fail,’ Mr. Mattis said. ‘You can’t say I got tired of it so I am going to come home and wonder why you get hit again.’”
In other words, both Secretary General Stoltenberg and Defense Secretary Mattis understand that you can’t unilaterally decide when a war will end and that you can’t say when you are going to withdraw your troops until you know what is actually happening on the ground. The idea is, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, “U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan for as long as they are needed.”
This is something Barack Obama never seemed to understand. Even when he sent extra troops to Afghanistan, he announced when they were going to start coming home at the same time he announced they were going. That is not how things work. And it’s especially not how counterinsurgency operations work, which is what we were trying to do in Afghanistan at the time. COIN is about winning the people over to your side. How can you do that if you tell them, before you even get there, that you are going to leave in 18 months (or less)? That’s not even worth trying.
President Obama did much the same thing when he said the Iraq war was over just because we were leaving. Well, it wasn’t over, and even he had to send troops back. In Afghanistan, President Obama declared in December of 2014 that our combat mission was over. Oops. Maybe President Obama’s wordsmiths would try to claim that what we are doing in Afghanistan now isn’t combat operations. I bet the troops over there, and the extra ones we have to send now because we apparently pulled out too early, would disagree.
The point is that you can’t saw when a war is over unless the enemy agrees – or unless you’re willing to leave regardless of what happens after you leave. We weren’t willing to do that in either Iraq or Afghanistan, so now we’re back. And now it’s going to be harder than if we hadn’t tried to leave too early. The enemy has regained strength. Probably more importantly, you have to assume the Iraqis and Afghanis aren’t going to trust us as much. Why should they? We already quit on them once. They’d be fools if they didn’t wonder if we were going to quit on them again.
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