Even in these divisive times, political leaders in Washington are beginning to converge on at least one issue: it’s time to end the longest war in American history and withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. President Trump said in the Oval Office last month that “it’s ridiculous” that we’re still there after almost two decades of stalemate and he reportedly wants to pull out by the 2020 election. His challengers on the Democratic side seem to agree.
Although in 2017 Trump authorized a small surge of troops and left the military strategy essentially unchanged, his special envoy for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, has made significant progress in direct negotiations with the Taliban. Daunting obstacles remain, but a political settlement that could include a U.S. withdrawal is at least within reach.
This has advocates of the “forever war” unsettled. Gen. David Petraeus, who once commanded forces in Afghanistan, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, with the Center for a New American Security’s Vance Serchuk, arguing that “under no circumstances should the Trump administration repeat the mistake its predecessor made in Iraq and agree to a total withdrawal of combat forces from Afghanistan.” Notwithstanding the Taliban’s stated promise not to host al Qaeda or other foreign terrorist groups, Petraeus and Serchuk insist that “common sense dictates the U.S. must retain its own means to pressure extremist networks plotting against the American homeland and U.S. allies.”
In making their case for indefinitely extending America’s 18-year quagmire in Afghanistan, they commit three analytical errors. The first is to fault Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq for the rise of ISIS. The second is to assume that a withdrawal from Afghanistan will, as in Iraq, result in the emergence of a rapacious terrorist army prone to spectacular atrocities and harboring vast territorial ambitions. Their third mistake is buying into the safe haven myth – that is, the claim that the presence of terrorists in Afghanistan represents a major security threat to the United States. In a new Cato Policy Analysis, my colleague John Mueller and I address all of these (and more).