By Daniel L. Davis
As incoming Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Rep. James Comer said last week he intends on holding hearings in 2023 to examine the Administration’s “botched Afghanistan withdrawal” and vowed to provide the American people “answers, transparency, and accountability.” America’s failure in Afghanistan was a two-decades-in-the-making process, however, and any effort to provide answers and accountability must include an exposure of the core problems over that timeframe and not simply how the final exit was executed.
First, it is crucial to recognize up front that the collapse that happened in August 2021 didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to the war. Major errors were detected early and a number of analysts warned the war was unwinnable early. In April 2009, just three months into Obama’s first term, I wrote in the Armed Forces Journal that unless the president was ready to wage a large-scale “existential battle to exterminate the Taliban from both Afghanistan and Pakistan, adding another 12,000 or 30,000 troops will amount to trying to put out a house fire with a garden hose.”
As it was, I continued, the United States was “fighting against the Taliban, against remnants of al-Qaida, against provincial warlords, against drug kingpins, against common thugs, against Afghan culture and against history.” Trying to surge a relatively small number of troops to obtain the political outcome of turning Afghanistan into a stable democracy committed the U.S. to “a fight we can’t win.”
This piece was originally published in 19FortyFive on December 15, 2022. Read more HERE.