Washington has descended into a familiar battle: the blame game. The issue is Iraq and a major territory grab by the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), but that is unfortunately secondary to the brawl itself. Many Republicans, foremost among them Sen. John McCain, lambast President Barack Obama for failing to keep American troops in Iraq beyond the end of 2011. The president’s defenders counter that America was treaty bound to withdraw its troops by December 2011, and efforts to negotiate a new arrangement foundered on the realities of Iraq’s internal politics.
Whether or not an American military contingent could have been left behind, there are people on both sides of this debate who look at Iraq today and agree that the situation might be better if there were some American troops in country who had been tasked with counter-terrorism, security force assistance, and coordinating continued air support to the Iraqi Security Forces.
In a few years, whoever occupies the White House might wish he or she still had the same in Afghanistan. However, under Present Obama’s recently announced plan, American military forces will be completely withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, leaving behind only a miniscule presence at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
This isn’t the first time that President Obama announced a premature, non-conditions based withdrawal deadline from Afghanistan. Unfortunately, he hasn’t learned from past experience. In his December 2009 speech at West Point, Obama not only announced the Afghan surge of 30,000 American troops, but also signaled when it would end: beginning July 2011 security responsibility would be transitioned to the Afghans. That may have been a sensible goal, but announcing it to the world—and thereby signaling an unconditional withdrawal at a specific date—was foolish.
As it turned out, I was working for the Department of Defense in Afghanistan in 2011. My job was, in essence, to talk to Afghans from all walks of life in the southern province of Helmand—from farmers to shopkeepers to soldiers. In every conversation about the course of the conflict, Afghans dreaded the drawdown of Western troops that would follow the end of the surge. Even Afghans who were otherwise very critical of ISAF operations expressed that sentiment. Why? Many of them remembered the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal that saw their country descend into civil war. While they certainly had grievances against Western troops, very few Afghans I spoke with wanted those troops to quit the country entirely.
Obama may not have anticipated the impact of his words, but he certainly was briefed on their pernicious effect. And yet, here we are again, with a new deadline set.
The effect of this new announcement is far more deleterious than its 2009 predecessor. This is, first and foremost, due to the simple fact that the U.S. presence will, by the end of 2016, be effectively zero rather than the tens of thousands that remained in the summer and fall of 2011 after the transition as underway. The Taliban now know they can wait things out. There is no need for them to reach a political agreement with the Americans. Factions in the Afghan government and security forces now understand even more than before that they better hedge their bets and explore deals with the other side. This realization was undoubtedly behind many of the “green-on-blue” attacks that saw Afghan soldiers and police killing NATO soldiers. And, more significantly, it has driven a more consequential rise in “green-on-green” attacks in which Afghan soldiers and police kill their comrades, usually right before defecting.
As Obama and his national security team watch Iraq crumble, they would do well to reconsider their unconditional 2016 deadline. It would not be unreasonable for the United States to leave behind a small footprint of less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future to focus on counter-terrorism, security force assistance, and the continued provision of air support to the Afghan National Security Forces. Even after 2016, Washington needs to ensure that the Taliban does not give shelter and aid to terrorists with transnational ambitions. Indeed, this gets more urgent by the day as the group reclaims parts of Afghanistan’s rural south and east. For a number of reasons, a small but capable troop presence is the best means of doing this. It provides political leverage, deterrence, and a hammer. And as my friend Tom Lynch explains, there might be other benefits to having troops in the region.
Without troops left behind, America’s next president, whoever she or he may be, might confront an ISIS-style bind in the Hindu Kush.
Ryan Evans is the founder and editor-in-chief of War on the Rocks and the assistant director of the Center for the National Interest.
Photo credit: The U.S. Army
mwill 
YouGuysAreNUTS 
Ian 
Some Jerk 
Ryan Evans 
Claude Schmid 
Rick 
Cam Jennings 
Dutch Powell 
I gather from the last para that the US national interest in all this is to avoid an “an ISIS-style bind in the Hindu Kush”…? Might there be better ways to do so than leaving behind a significant force in AF? I don’t think you make your case.
Dear America,
You went into a war you should never have gone into, and you made the place worse than it was for you before. The rest of the sane western world can see this.
Get well soon
Love, Everywhere else
Refresh my memory. How was Afghanistan better under the Taliban than it is now? Was it the public beheadings, the ban on educating girls and women, the short life expectancy, abject poverty, violent religious and political oppression? Maybe it was the ban on kite flying.
While your point might be valid about Iraq, it is not valid about Afghanistan.
Thanks for your comment and thanks for reading. I hope you’re right!
Mr. Evans, as usual, you provided a solid and balanced commentary. @mwill — you ask, if there might be a better way to avoid an “ISIS-style bind.” What is it? Other suggested solutions — empowering Pakistan, negotiated settlement with the Taliban, etc — seem fanciful, at best. Power often requires making choices between less than perfect options. We can be sure that the collapse of the Iraqi Army stung the Obama Administration. Everyone in Washington is asking: How did that happen? Can it happen in Afghanistan? It is always interesting to speculate about what might have been. Policymakers and commentators are all asking the same question: had the USA left forces in Iraq, could the ISIS success have been prevented? We cannot be sure. It depends on many factors. Probably we would have had better warning and more intelligence. Possibly we could have put more spine into the Iraqi Army, while at the same time pressing moderate policies on the government. It is certainly reasonable to suggest that extending the presence of US forces in Afghanistan would reduce the likelihood of a Taliban resurgence. Good leadership mandates careful risk assessment. Let us hope they decide correctly.
Thanks Claude for your thoughtful comment and for reading WOTR!
Hi Ryan, I too was in Afghanistan in 2010-2011, and had many similar conversations: don’t leave, we’re not ready yet, etc etc. People always seem skeptical when I explain this — too much assuming that Americans are terrible and make everything worse, I guess. I’m glad to see someone else had the same experience.
My worry is that the Pakistani Taliban, in the absence of NATO, will very easily sweep into Afghanistan.
Thanks Rick. I share the same concerns. Unfortunately the depiction of Afghanistan in the popular media is far different from its ground reality, as you know.
It strikes me as rather ludicrous that the human species is not capable of learning from trial by error and surely the rat in a maze outperform us in real terms…real terms whatever one wants to argue is the basic learning process of being able to disseminate information and act upon that information and or the collected data and to move forward and progress towards a better state of being, usually in an attempt to survive, in the case of a maze scenario.
Why is it then the we in the West allow one nation, one sovereign state that goes by the name of a united collective, to dominate and to dictate the terms and conditions for the rest of the other 192 states. it is the 21st Century and whilst our trajectory was set into place in the latter half of the last century, is it not time that our governments took responsibility for making global decisions, and preventing further messy, unnecessary conflict and killing.
The blame game will be part of our argument as we allow these self professed leaders within government to continue to play Pan and to set a course for us lemmings that will eventually have us walk off the edge of the cliff. Surely, there are scholars, academics and captains of industry who can stop the train and prevent the inevitable disastrous future that is so obviously just around the corner.
The polarised ineffectual government, that is now too large and complex to manage the affairs domestic, is going to lead us through these turbulent troubled waters ahead between now and 2025 and towards a better tomorrow ? If there was a choice between the two golden utopian states, it sadly would be the writers choice to select, unquestionably the past and not the future, if history is what is the primary metric for performance.
The Marshall Plan was set up by the old guard and now we see a different set of wet behind the ears kids, who have lust and greed that twinkle in the corner of their eyes, holding office, employing spin doctors to weave a false and untrue tale of a new horizon that is at best circumspect, when in reality it is merely leading our 7.3 billion global citizens towards a dark foreboding future of global mistrust and geopolitical tension on more than one front.
Where be our true leaders and where be our dreams of a better world ?
We could stay 100 years and when we left they would go right back to fighting a tribal warfare geme…We were no mor successful then the British, Russians and way back to Alexander the Great.
To misuse an old quote: “all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to abandon the notion of evil”. I intend here the evil intentions of men and women (historically men but we are progressing towards an egalitarian state) who want what is not their’s; who resent those who have it; and also the somewhat ambiguous intentions of the “fact finders” (code for the media) who seem unable to even address the evil intentions that exist throughout our world. I give you Sudan.