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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-us-has-lost-the-afghanistan-war-dont-let-it-botch-the-retreat/ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-us-has-lost-the-afghanistan-war-dont-let-it-botch-the-retreat/> At some point in the next year, the White House will almost certainly complete the task it suspended last week, and negotiate a retreat from the largest military defeat it has experienced since Vietnam. The word defeat will not be uttered. Nor will retreat. Instead, “peace agreement” and “phased withdrawal” will be the preferred euphemisms, partly out of respect for the 3,459 soldiers, including 157 Canadians, who have given their lives in this 18-year war in Afghanistan, and partly out of a sense of political self-preservation. But there is no disguising the fact that it is an admission of defeat in an unaffordable and unsustainable conflict. The main challenge for the Trump administration will be to make it look like something more noble, by extracting some visible concessions in exchange for its retreat. The difficulty of accomplishing this in a non-humiliating way helps explain President Donald Trump’s bizarre shifts in behaviour last week, during which he was prepared to hold a rather distasteful-looking summit with Taliban leaders at Camp David three days before Sept. 11, and then cancelled the whole thing in alleged response to yet another bloody Taliban attack. The main challenge for the rest of the world will be to ensure that those concessions do not strictly serve narrow U.S. interests – that is, that they are not singularly focused on the chimeric threat of Afghan-based international terrorism – and that they include commitments that allow us to keep at least some of the promises we made to the Afghan people, giving them a sense that two decades of violence served some beneficial purpose. At best, those gains will be marginal. The United States is leaving not because the Afghan National Army is in a position to take control of a country it holds and is fully able to secure. Rather, the U.S. is leaving because it has proved to be impossible, at any price anyone wants to spend, to prevent the Taliban from controlling half that territory and from bringing horrifying violence to the rest. This is why the United States is negotiating only with the Taliban, and not with the elected Afghan government it installed. (In fact, the Trump administration this week angrily withdrew US$160-million in funding to the government, on the eve of elections). It is the Taliban that is fighting the United States and its allies. There has not been a surrender or ceasefire on either side – both are pursuing a fight and talk strategy. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted last week that they had killed “over 1,000 Taliban” in 10 days, and the Taliban has responded with horrific attacks, most recently a bombing on Thursday that destroyed a hospital and killed at least 20. At least 82 per cent of Afghans, according to polls, have “no sympathy” for the Taliban. The prospect of a return to the sort of Islamic-fundamentalist government they meted out in the late 1990s is abhorrent to the majority of the population. But the extraordinary level of violence – which has killed tens of thousands of Afghan civilians and maimed or impoverished far more – is also something Afghans desperately want to end. And that will only happen with a U.S. withdrawal. Big military surges under Barack Obama and Mr. Trump have only further inflamed the conflict and increased instability. Afghanistan is set to have a national election next weekend, and there are ominous signs that it will be blocked by awful acts of violence. Afghans’ biggest fear is not either of the combatants, but the war itself. The Taliban have shown that they are capable of ending the violence. When they called a three-day ceasefire on the eve of Eid last year, the country was startlingly peaceful for three days (and then for another 15 as the government extended its ceasefire). They have not, however, shown any trustworthy commitment to the minimum rights of women and girls, to the maintenance of democracy or to basic rule of law. Here is where the retreat negotiations, which have so far been kept secret, can have some sway. Sadly, the U.S., in their statements, have had an almost singular obsession with the possibility that the Taliban would once again allow al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base for attacks on the U.S. or its allies – the issue that formed the legal basis for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Few terrorism experts consider it a plausible threat today. Washington knows it will be back at the table with the Taliban. It is the duty of America’s allies to ensure that the result offers some hope, or at least prevents the very worst, for the people of Afghanistan. Doug Saunders, the Globe’s international-affairs columnist, is currently a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
