By Bonnie Kristian
The one-year anniversary of the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has induced a rash of revisionist reflections on America’s longest war. It “did not have to turn out this way,” fretted former CENTCOM Commander David Petraeus in The Atlantic. If the United States had been more committed, possessed of a bottomless font of strategic patience, if we’d accepted that nation building “was not just unavoidable” but essential, he wrote, and that the one time we got “the inputs roughly right” was with 100,000 U.S. boots on the ground c. 2011, we might have pulled off a “sustained, generational” occupation.
Speaking to Politico, Gen. Frank McKenzie offered a scaled-down version of the same idea: We should have kept at least a few thousand American troops in Afghanistan “indefinitely”, he said, because it was only with American support that the government we made — shoddy workmanship, it seems — could continue to stand. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen painted a fundamentally misleading impression of pre-withdrawal Afghanistan as “a somewhat functional” American vassal which, though it “wasn’t Norway”, had made striking progress under Washington’s tutelage and needed only the permanent presence of 2,500 U.S. troops (plus ten times their number in civilian contractors and forces from NATO allies) to stick around forever.
This jostling to define the lessons America should learn from Afghanistan is to be expected, but the prominence and volume of voices still wrongly insisting this war was decades (or centuries!) too short instead of 20 years too long is alarming. Such counterfactual accounts, if they gain further sway, will be a pernicious influence in U.S. foreign policy. Instead of casting doubt on the wisdom of last year’s overdue withdrawal, we should mark this anniversary by taking steps toward more workable relations with the Taliban-run government for the sake of the Afghan people and reconsider the entire strategy of a geographically and chronologically limitless war on terror.
This piece was originally published in The Critic on August 29, 2022. Read more HERE.