This comes shortly after another leak, when Afghan media revealed a U.S.-authored plan to “accelerate peace talks” to end the war in Afghanistan. What both of these revelations expose is that Washington still has not come to grips with the stone-cold fact that our Afghan war is unwinnable—and it remains unwilling to do what is necessary: end the war and bring the troops home by May 1, as agreed to in the February 2020 agreement the U.S. signed.
Last week, President Joe Biden all but signaled that the United States would not meet the withdrawal timeline by saying that while it “could happen,” getting out by May 1 would be “tough.”
Though the president scorned the deal brokered by the Trump administration in February 2020, the deal nevertheless established, for the first time, a conclusive end to our futile war. Tying our withdrawal to the necessity of both sides reaching a mutually satisfactory settlement, however, would be moving the goal posts of the 2020 agreement—and setting up conditions for the war to continue.
After seven months of painful, incremental progress, the two sides finally agreed on exchanging proposed agendas for the talks last December. To date, the parties have yet to reach agreement on even what categories of items they are going to negotiate, much less on the substance. This painfully slow progress is nothing new.
The United States and the Afghan government have been conducting on-and-off negotiations to end the war for over a decade. A New York Times headline in March 2009 stated, “As U.S. Weighs Taliban Negotiations, Afghans Are Already Talking.” In December 2011, Reuters reported that after 10 months of “secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture.” The Washington Post said in 2013, “U.S. to launch peace talks with Taliban.” In 2019, Al Jazeera went so far as to claim, “Peace Deal is Near.”
Now the Biden administration wants to effectively write off the past two years of negotiations and start with new talks from scratch, in Turkey, with the hope of quickly reaching a negotiated settlement. Just as a never-ending string of military commanders were unwilling to acknowledge the obvious reality that the war could never be won, Biden is now the fourth consecutive president to be unwilling to acknowledge the utter futility of trying to end the war with a negotiated settlement to our liking and benefit.
So long as Afghanistan’s government knows it has the perpetual support of the U.S. military to ensure the Taliban never captures Kabul, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani is not going to make any hard compromise necessary to end the war. From his perspective, it makes sense: Why agree to a less-than-optimal outcome when he can hold out and continue enjoying, free of charge, the use of the world’s premier Armed Forces to keep his government secure?
The Taliban expanded in number from approximately 25,000 during the height of former President Barack Obama’s surge in 2011 to as many as 85,000 today. They own or contest more territory today than at any time since the U.S. invasion.
I served in two combat rotations to Afghanistan, and no one finds those facts more unpalatable than I. But they are objective reality. The Taliban is in the superior negotiating position and we ignore it to our harm.
In 1986, after trying one last time to militarily defeat the radical Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the war could never be won and made the decision to end the war on terms favorable to Moscow. Many in Russia feared that leaving Afghanistan with the enemy still viable would cause even more attacks against their homeland. The fears proved unfounded. Instead, the USSR ended the “bleeding wound” of Afghanistan and they kept their country safe.
The same is true for the United States.
We should have ended the war well over a decade ago, but we can’t change the past. Biden should accede to the painful reality that the war can never be won at an acceptable cost and a negotiated settlement that we like is not a realistic possibility. He should therefore withdraw our troops, on schedule, by May 1.
Daniel L. Davis is a senior fellow for Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America. Follow him @DanielLDavis1.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
