U.S. Army and Afghan commando forces at a checkpoint in the eastern province of Nangarhar, Afghanistan, on July 7, 2018. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump Ready to Keep Promise to Get Out of Afghanistan
Commentary
The impending wind-down of the Afghanistan War is an unheralded success of the Trump administration.
There will not be much objection to the arrangement, as everyone in both parties wants to have as little as possible to do with Afghanistan. Everyone acknowledges that the chief interlocutor, the Taliban, are barbarous, treacherous, and objectively despicable.
But after more than a trillion dollars, over 23,000 American casualties including 2,440 dead, prolonged international effort, and an inability to pacify the country completely other than by the retention of unsustainably large occupation forces for no evident strategic purpose, it is time to continue de-escalation.
There have been under-recognized successes; while the Taliban are formidable, they don’t control any of the 34 regional capitals and are largely confined to under-populated areas. Afghanistan’s GDP has increased ten-fold in twenty years, and literacy rates have risen spectacularly.
It is not the same Afghanistan that has been too sluggishly primitive to progress at all in the past. The development of the country in the 19 years of the Western military involvement has made it much more difficult for the Taliban to prevail, and as their only argument is the foreign presence, the proposed arrangement is to some extent a self-correcting problem.
No Strategic Value
The well-known truth about Afghanistan is that it is a poor and land-locked country with no resources except opium and no strategic value, whose mountainous terrain is populated by fierce, primitive, and xenophobic tribesmen. It would require an occupation force of probably at least 300,000 heavily armed and well-coordinated soldiers to enforce a regime in Afghanistan, and there is nothing there to justify such a deployment.
This was the conclusion reached by the British during the numerous Anglo-Afghan Wars between 1838 and 1919, when they considered extending their vast British Indian Empire, (today India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan), to Afghanistan. They never had more than 100,000 British in that empire, and were deterred from stranding large forces in unremitting Afghanistan. (It was one of the political miracles of all history that the British managed to maintain their position in the Indian subcontinent with such small forces for over two hundred years.)
The Soviet Union famously invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and remained for a decade, with about 150,000 men in the occupying force, but never pacified the country outside the main cities and were constantly taking casualties from guerrillas well-supplied by the United States. They abandoned the whole project and departed in 1989, undefeated, but hardly victorious either, and after six million Afghans were displaced in the conflict and approximately one million killed. (The current population is about 35 million.) The American-led expedition has been an astonishing comparative success by any measurement.
The United States involvement began a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, when it came to light that the Al Quaeda terrorists were trained in camps in remote Afghan areas, with the toleration of the Talibani government that was engaged in an interminable civil war with tribal, regional, and sectarian opposition groups.
The insertion of small numbers of special forces was sufficient to send the Talibani packing, and the Allied force, authorized by both the United Nations and NATO, set out to modernize and politically cleanse the population.
The American draw-down (from 13,000 to 8,600 military personnel) and the agreement with the Taliban to reduce violence, coming after somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Afghans are reckoned to have died, somewhat disguises the fact that the Allies have succeeded in their principal goal of chasing Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and overthrowing the government that welcomed and enabled it.
Most members of Al Qaeda have been killed and its terrorist network has been largely destroyed. While the Taliban have been ineradicable, the central government is not the paper tiger of earlier times, and the remaining American contingent will assist it in non-ground combat roles. The Americans have made their point about not tolerating terrorist provocations. The Taliban are not suicide forces.
US Interests
The United States has no interest who governs Afghanistan (or any other country), as long as they do not threaten the United States and refrain from immense humanitarian outrages. Since the end of the Cold War, when the United States had a direct rival and did not want Soviet influence subsuming and redirecting the national policy of even relatively small and feeble countries like Nicaragua and Albania, the United States has no interest and claims no right of involvement in the internal affairs of other countries, apart from the George W. Bush unsuccessful attempt to plant democracy in infertile ground.
Antagonistic leftist regimes in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Uruguay attracted little American notice; Venezuela is only an irritant because of closer commercial connections and the extreme odium of the Chavez-Maduro despotism. Even Cuba, though Trump has reversed the concessions made by Obama, is not a matter of real concern or even interest.
No one not steeped in confidential world-wide counter-terrorism intelligence has any idea of how much terrorist activity has been avoided and of the extent to which the potential for terrorist activity has been eliminated. But everyone of an age to be aware twenty years ago remembers the widespread fear of a pandemic of terrorist outrages conducted by the apparently unlimited numbers of people who were happy to die in the massacre of others.
The late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon adopted the technique of killing the Hamas leadership whenever Hamas conducted a suicide bombing in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, and this soon shut down the suicide attacks. The rooting out and execution of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (2019), hiding like moles, illustrated how tenacious they were of their own lives, in contrast to their breezy disregard for the lives of their own followers and the innocent masses of their victims.
The only peace that can work in Afghanistan will be one agreed by the sponsors of the different factions, particularly Pakistan as the chief source of support for the Haqqani Taliban, but also including India, Iran, and Uzbekistan, who have patronized rival factions in Afghanistan.
The United States will retain sufficient strength to protect its embassy and continue training operations, and has sufficient familiarity with the country to identify the culprits in any serious future provocations. There is an almost unanimous consensus in U.S. public and political opinion that terrorist enemies have to be treated with the utmost severity. No Afghan factions will have any interest in provoking the West, since retribution can be visited at unlimited length and with minimal or no American and allied casualties by the use of drones and conventional air strikes.
There will be no return to the Clinton administration policy of inadequate reprisals for the Khobar Towers Barracks (1996), and USS Cole, and Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy attacks (1998), that killed a total of 49 Americans and hundreds of others, and injured about 4,500, mainly local, people; the U.S. responses were so limited they constituted a virtual incitement for the stupefying atrocity at the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
It is frequently lost sight of that the United States has never had a foreign policy goal that went very far beyond the requirement that it not be threatened. Once it populated its own half-continent, it had no desire to colonize, and released the colonies it seized from others, Cuba and the Philippines, and has only retained Puerto Rico and Hawaii at the request of the local populations.
In these circumstances, it can ensure that it is in the interests of no country, nor any force harbored and nurtured by any country, to attack Americans. The abrupt killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani last month illustrated this and the tame Iranian response demonstrates that the message has been received.
The United States and its allies could probably have done better and could probably have left Afghanistan just as well years ago, but they have succeeded in their primary goal of punishing and discouraging terrorism. They can now scale back the conflict with honor intact, another Trump promise kept.
Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
SEN.
DIANNE FEINSTEIN RANKS AS ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT AND SELF-SERVING POLITICIANS
IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
SHE
HAS AMASSE A STAGGERING FORTUNE AS SHE STALKED THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING
OUT DEALS THAT SHE AND BARBARA “BRIBES” BOXER VOTED ON THAT DROPPED HUNDREDS OF
MILLIONS INTO THE POCKETS OF FEINSTEIN’S PIMP-HUSBAND RICHARD BLUM
BLUM
HAS HANDED OUT CAMPAIGN “CONTRIBUTIONS” BRIBES TO VIRTUALLY ALL MAJOR DEM POLS
SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTHS CLOSED ABOUT FEINSTEIN’S STAGGERING CORRUPTION.
FEINSTEIN
HAS VOTED AGAINST ALL SENATE ATTEMPTS TO CURB SIPHONING OFF BRIBES TO FAMILY
MEMBERS IN THE FORM OF “CONSULTANT” FEES.
BARBARA
“BRIBES” BOXER MADE A VAST FORTUNE SHE SIPHONED OVER TO HER SON, OAKLAN LAWYER
DOUG BOXER.
PELOSI
HAS SIPHONED OFF BRIBES TO HER HUSBAND. AND THEN THERE ARE THE BACK ROOM DEALS
BLUM MADE TO PROFIT ON FEINSTEIN’S RED CHINA CONNECTIONS.
JUST
FOLLOW THE MONEY AS THESE TRAITORS DESTROY OUR COUNTRY AND FILL THEIR POCKETS
DOING IT!
*
IN THE November 2006
election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly
appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.,
is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But
for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of
interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an incredible victory
for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other
any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire
crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
A SEARCH FOR FEINSTEIN AND WAR PROFITEER
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Dianne
Feinstein: War profiteer and war criminal | Freepress.org
Jul 5, 2013 - Dianne Feinstein: War profiteer and war criminal ... Senator Feinstein has been quick to be at the forefront of defending these
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Feinstein's War Profiteering - Antiwar.com Original
Feb 28, 2006 - If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings,
a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush
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(DV) Frank:
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Senator Feinstein's War
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Sep 25, 2015 - ... about Israel that Dianne Feinstein and her war-profiteering husband ... Illinois Democratic Senator Dick
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Sen. Dianne
Feinstein's Husband, Richard Blum, Grows Fortune
Jul 16, 2015 - Richard Blum, husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, has ... has a $50,000–$100,000 investment in Colony American
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War Profiteering
– Underground Network
War profiteers are people, corporations, or any actors that profit from
war. ... US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution, and her ...
Sen Dianne
Feinstein's Husband Top Iraq War Profiteer - Democratic ...
Jul 24, 2008 -
32 posts - 28 authors
That's because Blum's wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein, appears to have used her seat on the Military Construction Appropriations
subcommittee ...
Dianne Feinstein - Wikipedia
Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein is
an American politician serving as the senior United ... At the age of 86, Feinstein is
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Dianne Feinstein is the current senior senator in
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Censored 2009:
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Peter Phillips,
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And in December 2007, Judicial Watch ranked Senator Feinstein as one of ... Sources “The Diane Feinstein War Profiteering Scandal,” Rush Limbaugh, ...
The Economics of
War: Profiteering, Militarism and Imperialism
Imad A. Moosa - 2019 -
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Combating War
Profiteering: Are We Doing Enough to ...
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary - 2007 - Contracting out
Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United
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of Senator Feinstein - Indybay
PDF
Dec 10, 2015 - Sen. Dianne
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wins CA rail contract . ... The Feinsstein Family held war profiteering contracts in Afghanistan, Bolivia and ...
The Dianne
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Mar 29, 2007 - The Dianne Feinstein
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Mar 29 ... 'Sen. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations ...
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Feinstein's Conflict of Interest in Iraq | Town Square ...
Feb 24, 2008 - Shortly before my expose of Senator Dianne Feinstein's conflict of interest was published in January ... Blum
& Feinstein - Corrupt War
Profiteer
Feinstein quits
committee under war-profiteer cloud - WND
Mar 28, 2007 - Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has abruptly walked away from her responsibilities
with the Senate Military Construction Appropriations ...
Dianne
Feinstein: War Profiteer | Dyncorp Sucks
Oct 12, 2009 - A particularly brazen example of the latter is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and formerly the mayor of what is
generally ...
Lev Parnas on
Maddow: Trump Knew 'Exactly What Was ...
2 days ago - “It was never about corruption,” Parnas said, referring to the
unreliable Trump-team claim that the administration wanted to go after profiteering ...
How to Profit Off War: Iraq,
Afghanistan and Big-Money ...
Jan 18, 2015 - A war profiteer is any person or organization that profits from warfare or
by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term has ...
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