No to ‘Forever Wars,’ but Yes to ‘Forever Forward Deployed’
“It’s time to end the forever war,” declared President Biden in his Apr. 14, 2021, announcement that he is withdrawing all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan.
No one wants to say that we should be in Afghanistan forever, but they insist now is not the right moment to leave…
So when will it be the right moment to leave? …War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking.
Of course no sane American wants to fight a “forever war”—that is, an indeterminable conflict with no end in sight, only a mounting list of U.S. casualties. But the President is wrong when he argues that the only alternative to “endless war” is military retreat and withdrawal.
In fact, there is a third and much better option: forever forward deployed as a garrison force, in country, that works closely with our allies—in this case, the legitimately elected government of Afghanistan—to protect vital U.S. interests in the region.
This was the option strongly recommended to Mr. Biden by his own military advisers, as well as the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group.
A small residual force of 4,500 U.S. troops, they argued, would be enough “for training, advising, and assisting Afghan defense forces; supporting allied forces; conducting counterterrorism operations; and securing our embassy.”
U.S. troops, after all, have been forward deployed in Germany, Japan, and South Korea for more than half a century. True, Afghanistan is a far cry from being remotely like any of these three countries; it remains wracked by armed conflict and civil war.
Progress. Nonetheless, with American military help, Afghanistan has made tremendous strides forward—socially, politically, economically, and militarily. U.S. casualties, meanwhile, have steadily and precipitously declined. As the New York Times’ Bret Stephens reports:
Millions of girls, whom the Taliban had forbidden to get any kind of education, went to school. Some of them—not nearly enough, but impressive considering where they started from and the challenges they faced—became doctors, entrepreneurs, members of Parliament.
“There have been no American combat deaths in Afghanistan since two soldiers were killed and six wounded on Feb. 8, 2020, in a so-called insider attack in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province,” reports the Desert News.
“The U.S.,” Stephens notes “has lost fewer than 20 service members annually in hostile engagements in Afghanistan since 2015. That’s heartbreaking for those affected, but tiny next to the number of troops who die in routine training accidents worldwide.
“Our main role in recent years,” he adds, “has been to provide Afghan forces with effective air power. It is not an exorbitant price to pay to avert an outright Taliban victory.”
Strategic Ramifications. And preventing the Taliban from winning matters for reasons that extend far beyond Afghanistan. It matters in China, Taiwan, and the South China Sea. It matters in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, and Iran. And it matters in North Korea, Europe, and the Middle East.
“Our enemies will test us,” warns Bing West.
After Saigon fell [in the Vietnam War], Russia and Cuba supported proxy wars in Latin America and Africa, while Iranian radicals seized our embassy in Tehran.
The Biden administration will face similar provocations. Already, China is threatening Taiwan, Russia is massing troops on the Ukraine border, and Iran is increasing its enrichment of uranium.
“The theory of deterrence relies not just on the balance of forces, but also on reserves of credibility,” Stephens explains. “Leaving Afghanistan now does next to nothing to change the former while seriously depleting the latter.”
Diplomatic Leverage. The President disparages the notion “that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage.” Yet, he offers no evidence to refute this commonsensical and well-proven truth.
Instead, he blithely asserts:
We gave that argument a decade. It’s never proved effective—not when we had 98,000 troops in Afghanistan, and not when we were down to a few thousand.
But the failure to win in Afghanistan is a reflection of an intractable war in an antiquated tribal society; it is not an indictment of the necessary nexus between military and diplomatic power.
Recognizing that the U.S. military has failed to achieve victory in two decades of conflict and likely will never achieve victory in the classic sense does not mean that we must reject wholesale the use of military power in Afghanistan.
This is a colossal blunder and unforced error by Mr. Biden.
The President compounds his error by arguing that “our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm’s way—U.S. boots on the ground. We have to change that thinking.”
In fact, we need to understand that a forward-deployed U.S. military presence overseas is a stabilizing force for the good and a critical component of American diplomacy.
False Choice. The bottom line: the choice between so-called endless war and abject withdrawal and retreat is a false choice. We do not have to accept either of these two badly mistaken and extreme options.
Instead, we should choose to be forever forward-deployed militarily in small but strategically significant numbers to protect our interests and put America First. The President’s failure to do so in Afghanistan jeopardizes our national security.
Feature photo credit: President Biden announces that he is withdrawing all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, courtesy of ABC News.