Last night, President Obama announced his plans for ending the war in Afghanistan and bringing our troops home. Unfortunately, these plans will be carried out at a sluggish pace, and the war may not truly be over until 2014. According to his plan, the "surge" troops, which were deployed to Afghanistan in early 2010, will all leave the country by the end of 2012. 10,000 troops will leave by the end of this year, and another 23,000 will leave by the end of 2012. However, that still leaves about 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2014, when all security and governing responsibilities will be handed over to the Afghan people. In other words, get ready for four more years of what has become a pointless conflict. That's not to say that it always was pointless. After the 9/11 attacks, we realized that we had to invade Afghanistan in order to clear out Al Qaeda's major operation center. The organization had become a jihadist juggernaut thanks to the save haven provided to them by the Taliban. But after a few years of cave clearing and bunker busting, our objectives shifted from counter terrorism operations to nation building. Recent reports state that less than 100 Al Qaeda fighters are still operating in Afghanistan, and most of the organization's remnants have fled into neighboring Pakistan, along with some other unstable nations. Yet we have more troops in Afghanistan now than we did in 2002. Most politicians and military commanders admit that fighting Al Qaeda is no longer our primary goal in Afghanistan. Now, we are working to create a free, democratic, and secure nation that will never again be a safe haven for Al Qaeda. This is where I take issue with our current state of affairs.
This idea that we, the United States of America, can somehow project our democratic principles onto a nation that has known of no such thing for thousands of years is absurd. Many Islamic nations, particularly the ones found in Asia, live in a bubble. They follow strict Islamic law because it is all they have ever known, and the outside world is practically nonexistent to them. In fact, most Afghanis don't know anything about 9/11, so technically they have no idea why we are in their country, and some probably don't even know what the U.S. is. In order for a nation to become truly democratic, the citizens of that nation must first realize the injustices being carried out upon them by their government, and then they must work to end those injustices and establish a fair, free, and flourishing society. More modernized and globally aware Islamic nations such as Egypt and Tunisia have recently engaged in this process, and more nations, such as Libya and Syria, may soon follow. But Afghanistan is a completely different story altogether. To put it bluntly, they are a generally backwards and tribalistic people. They are most likely generations away from establishing a stable, modern society, and no amount of foreign intervention can speed up that process. The Soviets tried to model Afghanistan in their own Leninist image in the 1970's, and failed miserably. Our current misadventure will end no differently.
The truth of the matter is that the War on Terror cannot be one by conventional means, a fact that none of the military bigwigs can seem to wrap their minds around. Even in a hypothetical world, in which the Afghan people were to openly embrace American democracy and establish a strong economy that is not based around the drug trade, there will always be another lawless wasteland for terror organizations to move their base of operations to. Already, Al Qadea is becoming increasingly active in failed states such as Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan (which hasn't failed yet, but probably will sometime in the near future). It is just plain stupid for us to believe that we can invade and occupy all of these nations in the name of national security. Too many lives would be lost, and the financial cost would be through the roof. Right now, the war in Afghanistan is costing us $3 billion dollars a week. Now imagine similar occupations occurring in the aforementioned nations. We would end up spending trillions of dollars a year to fund those wars.
I believe that the way in which we took down Osama bin Laden should be the way we conduct all of our missions in the War on Terror. Rather than carrying out broad, far reaching invasions in order to take out a select group of people, we need to sharpen our focus on the targets themselves. This means more counter-intelligence operations, more Predator drone strikes, and more Special Operations missions. These types of activities will cost us far less in lives, money, and resources than an invasion will, and they produce viable, visible results. Towards the end of his speech last night, the President said "America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home." In order to do so, however, we need to stop spending so much money on attempting to build the impossible in other countries. It doesn't matter how much time and money we invest in Afghanistan, because we will only yield disappointing results.
33,000 troops is not enough, Mr.President. This war needs to definitively end now, not in four years.
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