Five reasons to leave Afghanistan

The death of Osama Bin Laden in a Navy SEALs strike deep inside Pakistan has focused new attention on the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan, which aims to enable a troop drawdown from July. Here are five reasons why President Obama should consider pulling out the 100,000 troops in Afghanistan now

1. Mission accomplished — Bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, is dead. His death brings America’s 10-year-old story with Afghanistan full circle. His al Qaeda movement today has 50 to 100 members remaining in Afghanistan, according to CIA Director Leon Panetta. We don’t need 100,000 boots on the ground to fight a rump terrorist movement. We need a new kind of warfare — the marriage of good, quality intelligence with highly mobile special forces and the drones and new weaponry that delivered bin Laden. When Obama defined the Afghanistan mission at West Point in 2009, he said the “overarching goal” was to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.” In Afghanistan, that has now happened. If U.S. troops stay until 2014 they would be caught up in nation-building, which is a course the president rejected at West Point. The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan under Obama was never about banning the burqa.

{mosads}2. Counterterrorism works — The killing of bin Laden returns us to the heart of the debate in Washington in 2009, when Gen. Stanley McChrystal won the argument in favor of counter-insurgency and Vice President Joe Biden lost. Now it looks like Biden was right. But the strategy in Afghanistan is still being driven by the author of the “surge” doctrine that brought counterinsurgency to Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus. His return to Washington should be accompanied by a U.S. military pullout; let the 285,000 Afghan security forces take the strain. 

3. Money — We can’t afford this war, which costs $100 billion per year. If there are only up to 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that’s $1 billion per suspect. More seriously, taxpayer dollars are being spent on propping up the government of President Hamid Karzai, who is not trusted by Obama. Let’s bring the troops home and shift resources to where they are needed — in nuclear-armed Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, for example. South Asia expert Michael Krepon pointed out during a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the U.S. gives a “pittance” to Pakistan, where the major threat lies, compared to Afghanistan. Surely a policy shift towards counterterrorism would be a fraction of the current cost.

4. We can’t win militarily — What has changed in recent months is not so much the situation on the ground but the narrative in order to fit a political objective to permit a gradual drawdown beginning in July. Yet most of the independent indicators point out that violence is on the increase. Consider the recent Taliban mass jailbreak from Kandahar and insurgent attacks in Afghanistan’s second city. As one seasoned Kabul-based observer put it to me: the argument that the increase in attacks reflects the record level of NATO forces, who are seizing the initiative, is pure spin. History has shown over centuries that foreign forces don’t win in Afghanistan. America’s experience is no exception. 

5. Americans want out — A majority of Americans now favor a withdrawal from Afghanistan within a year, according to two recent polls from Rasmussen and USA Today/Gallup. Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is talking about transitioning “at a greater speed,” and a bipartisan group of congressmen wrote President Obama to urge a withdrawal and a policy shift to counterterrorism. Too much blood — 1,570 dead U.S. soldiers — and treasure — $386 billion — have been spilled in Afghanistan’s mountains, where we are fighting a nationalist movement unlikely ever to pose a security threat to the U.S. homeland. Whether the U.S. troops leave now or in 2014, they will still leave a civil war behind. It is the Afghans’ war, not ours.

Penketh, former diplomatic editor of The Independent, is program director of the British American Security Information Council. She blogs on foreign-policy matters at digital-staging.thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog.