Trump Dumps Taliban Talks: Are U.S. Troops Forever Stuck in Afghanistan?

What he wants–and wanting to get out of war is a sane position–does not necessarily mean its the best thing to do. I think this issue has been the source of his conflicts with Mattis and Bolton. This has the danger of being Vietnam again in many ways. We don’t seem to have the guts or the objective of completely destroying the enemy, because we don’t have the ruthlessness to do what that would take: a massive destruction of Afghanistan and most of its people. Because of that, we can’t “win” in Afghanistan in the conventional sense. But we can’t just pull out either, for two good reasons. The first is that the Taliban will rally to attack us again somewhere. Its what they do. We went in there to get Bin Laden, and in that process we created the second reason: we made promises to the Pashtuns who supported us that we would have their backs and protect them from the Taliban if they helped us. Pulling out after promising our support only again shows third world nations that the word of the United States is worth nothing, absolutely nothing, where protecting them is concerned. No, we’ll try for a while, until it goes too long, gets to costly or causes too many casualties. Then like weaklings, we want to get out and leave the people we promised to protect hanging in the wind. So, we have to keep suppressing the Taliban and keeping our word to the loyal Pashtuns or we have no integrity. This is not like a pure business decision, which his what Trump does best. We aren’t mean enough to win there, and we don’t want to lose, plus we want to keep our promises. I don’t know that we have to keep doing it with ground troops in low-intensity conflict, however. We could remove many ground troops and hammer them with [precision airpower without warning. The CIA and other agents would still be in there for intel purposes, so they will remain. So in a sense, we will be there until we break our word and leave or we get ruthless enough to win. We don’t need to be in wars of attrition, we need either no war at all or declared wars with total victory as the objective. This is always the problem of us getting into “undeclared” wars. Either fight to win or don’t fight. You can’t have it both ways. And we need to keep our promises or no one will trust us in the future. Just ask the survivors of the Bay of Pigs, of South Vietnam, or the Iraqi Kurds. America is there for you until it gets tough for them or politically uncomfortable, then they’ll bail on you every time. But if we formally declare war, that is never the case. Then it’s win-lose. Then its conquest and the enemy brought to his knees begging for mercy. A policy like that would keeps us from getting into wars that we absolutely don’t have to win. I say no more undeclared wars. That doesn’t mean you can do limited strikes, but don’t call it a war. The only objective of war is total victory. Our problem is that the Taliban are not a nation. They’re a cult. It’s difficult under the current process to declare war against an ideology or a cult. It can be done, but it requires 100% commitment of all resources of the nation: restrictions on fuel, rationing of plastics, explosives, fuel, maybe even a draft. That’s war. But we can’t just go away in Afghanistan, either. We need friends in the region, friends on the ground, for intel if nothing else about what atrocities they are up to (and they are always up to some). Trump may desire to “get out” of Afghanistan but it is just not that simple and he knows it. You don’t always get what you want. Bill is absolutely right. We’ll be “mowing the grass” in Afghanistan for decades to come because radical Wahabi Islam and Pashtun tribal disputes will remain a problem there.