Withdrawing from Afghanistan is the top U.S. priority; today's Iraq reveals the flawed assumptions behind U.S.-directed regime change.
HALT MISSION CREEP
Don't confuse nation building in Afghanistan for U.S. counterterrorism goals
On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a video conference with the Taliban's chief negotiator to spur on the Afghan peace process. [Reuters / Jonathan Landay]
After a five-month delay, both the Afghan government and the Taliban have signaled intra-Afghan peace talks may commence shortly. [Guardian / Emma Graham-Harrison]
But the talks still might not occur due to disagreements over prisoner exchanges. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is opposed to releasing 400 Taliban prisoners—those whose crimes he says he lacks authority to forgive. [AP / Tameem Akhgar and Kathy Gannon]
Despite a Kabul-Taliban cease-fire over the weekend to mark the Eid holiday, other forces in Afghanistan continue to stoke violence. On August 2, the "Islamic State" entity in the country attacked a prison in Jalalabad, killing at least 30 people before Afghan security forces retook control. [AFP / Noorullah Shirazada and Usman Sharif]
The civil war in Afghanistan will take years to resolve, at best, and may continue indefinitely. Kabul and the Taliban remain far apart on key issues. Conditioning a U.S. military withdrawal on intra-Afghan talks is a recipe for never leaving. The good news is Afghan reconciliation is unnecessary to defend against anti-U.S. terrorist threats. [DEFP / Gil Barndollar]
The original U.S. mission in Afghanistan was justified and direct—to shatter Al-Qaeda and punish the Taliban. This mission was largely achieved by 2002, but instead of declaring victory, Washington policymakers embarked on a costly and foolish campaign of nation building and counterinsurgency—neither of which are directly connected to keeping Americans safe. [DEFP / Daniel Davis]
The top U.S. priority is swift, full military withdrawal. That would extricate the U.S. military from a civil war that is separate from U.S. counterterrorism goals and potentially encourage Afghan bargaining. [DEFP / Benjamin Friedman]
VERBATIM
"The BRI poses no real threat to the U.S. position on the world stage. In fact, certain facets of the BRI may indirectly enhance U.S. diplomatic options by reducing instability and nurturing development in parts of the world where U.S. influence is limited."
[Survival / Christopher Mott]
COSTLY RAMIFICATIONS
What the road to war in Iraq can teach us—hubris has consequences [NYT Magazine / Robert Draper]
It has been 17 years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a war meant to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and replace his regime with a representative democracy. Robert Draper’s new book, To Start a War, reveals new details of the internal U.S. policy deliberations in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Draper's book emphasizes the terribly flawed assumptions that drove the Bush administration to launch the war. Saddam Hussein did not have an alliance with Al-Qaeda. U.S. troops were not welcomed by the Iraqi people thanks to powerful nationalist forces. Building a competent government from the ground-up proved unworkable. It should come as no surprise: Forced regime change predictably fails to produce stable government, let alone liberal democracy.
Draper's book comes on the 30th anniversary Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. response, Operation Desert Storm, began three decades of permanent U.S. military deployments in the Middle East.
Today, 80,000–90,000 U.S. servicemembers remain in the Middle East. More than 5,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq, where they regularly take rocket fire from Shia militia groups. In Eastern Syria, hundreds of U.S. troops operate in a tense environment consisting of Russian soldiers, pro-Syrian government militias, Turkish troops, Kurdish fighters, and various rebel groups—and all with no clear objective or justifying U.S. security rationale.
Since 2001, U.S. wars have cost $6.4 trillion (including future obligations). So far, more than 7,000 Americans have lost their lives, and many more have been grievously wounded. These are the costs of mistaken assumptions, bias for intervention, and threat inflation which predominate in Washington.
The Middle East—with just 4 percent of the world's GDP and a shrunken share of global oil production—holds limited and diminishing geopolitical importance. An offshore posture would serve U.S. interests far better than permanent garrisons.
TRENDING
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