In an unsurprising turn of events, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has found it necessary to spend more blood and treasure in the defense of Afghanistan.
After the Biden administration facilitated a precipitous troop withdrawal from the region, the situation deteriorated rapidly, forcing the Pentagon to announce that it will send an additional 3,000 troops back into Afghanistan in order to evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan interpreters from Kabul.
The move was no shocker given that the Taliban are a major threat in the region that refuses to compromise with a moderate government.
In his book Battlegrounds former general H.R. McMaster critiqued the supreme naivete of those who want to make peace with the Taliban. He sarcastically asked whether a peace deal would only allow the Taliban to bulldoze girls’ schools every other week. The fact of the matter is that no peace deal can legitimize or civilize the Taliban
The new troop deployment is supposedly being sent exclusively for evacuation measures but it is quite clear that this will not be the case for long. Part of the rationale for troop withdrawal in the first place was the assumption that the Taliban would not be able to rapidly gain control. A month ago, Biden claimed that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
Despite this, the AP reported that the Taliban has captured “12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals as part of a weeklong sweep that has given them effective control of about two-thirds of the country.”
The White House is also sending conflicting messages. State Department Spokesman Ned Price stated that “This is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not a wholesale withdrawal. What this is is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint.” This, despite the fact that President Biden has been adamantly in favor of an end to the mission in Afghanistan.
It seems that those in power are realizing an age old cliche; you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
When fighting a group as savage and powerful as the Taliban, producing a lasting and successful peace necessitates the obliteration of the enemy.
Artificial cease fires merely prolong the conflict and allow the enemy to regain control. The world-renowned military strategist Edward Luttwak argues that UN imposed ceasefires are ineffective and merely intensify wars when the incentives for war remain in place. In his book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace– which is required reading at U.S. military institutions- Luttwak writes that
Unless further diplomatic interventions directly ensue to impose peace negotiations as well, cease-fires merely relieve war-induced exhaustion, favoring the reconstitution and rearming of the belligerents, thus intensifying and prolonging the fighting once the cease-fire comes to an end. That was true of the Arab-Isreali war of 1948-49 which might have ended in a number of weeks by sheer exhaustion, if two successive ceas-fires ordained by the UN Security Council had not allowed the belligerents to recuperate till they were ready to resume fighting.
This is certainly the case in Afghanistan where a weakened Taliban was allowed to recuperate after American morale was weakened.
The Biden administration must be forced to make a choice. Either it must make the decision to withdraw and deal with the fallout or it must choose to pursue an effective military strategy to eliminate the threat. Both entail serious costs but it beats the alternative of allowing a wound to fester while remaining in the region for another twenty years.
