Obama formula is not the solution to Afghan crisis

President Donald Trump has never held back when slamming Barack Obama on mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, as the White House prepares to announce a US deal with the Taliban, Trump seems poised to mimic his predecessor. He is eager to pull the remaining 14,000 US troops out of Afghanistan by November 2020 to please his base before US elections.

This means US forces will be gone before we know whether the Taliban will keep its pledge to negotiate an intra-Afghan peace with elected Afghan officials — or push to re-establish an Islamic Emirate (and end rights for women). The latter course will produce a renewed civil war and an opening for Daesh 2.0 amidst the chaos.

Shades of Obama, who pulled all remaining troops out of Iraq in 2011, providing pre-conditions for the Daesh invasion of northern Iraq in 2015. “We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq,” Trump insisted in a speech in August 2017.

So why would he do that now? The superficial answer is obvious. The president is frustrated that we aren’t winning.

“We’ve been there for 19 years. It’s ridiculous. We are not fighting to win,” he complained in July, suggesting he could have won in a week, but would have had to “kill 10 million people.” Presumably by bombing the country back to the stone age.

To be fair, most Americans are also frustrated at “forever wars” with no victory or obvious conclusion. Yet the time has come for Americans to reconsider whether it is smarter and cheaper to keep a small residual force in Afghanistan to prevent losing.

“If the Taliban know there’s a timeline by the end of 2020, which isn’t conditional on an agreement first being reached and implemented, it will never take place,” says James Dobbins, a US diplomat who served as US Special Representative to Afghanistan in 2013-2014.

In other words, despite the length of US involvement, it is worth maintaining a longer presence as leverage to test whether the Taliban are serious. Or to prevent a Taliban takeover of Kabul in case negotiations fail.

After all, it would be far more costly to return to Afghanistan after a likely Daesh rebirth. To understand how costly, it’s useful to return to what happened in Iraq in 2011, the example Trump cited in 2017. In 2011, the Obama administration sought to retain a minimal presence in Iraq, after drawing down most US troops – the residual number varied from around 10,000 to as low as 3,500.

According to then-Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, in his memoir, “Worthy Fights,” “It was clear to me – and many others that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability then barely holding Iraq together.”

After the last US troops left, US attention and intelligence waned when it came to Iraq. The Baghdad government politicized the Iraqi army command; Iraqi forces in Mosul collapsed when Daesh invaded in 2015. Eventually, Washington had to send 6,000 US troops back to Iraq to spearhead the brutal campaign to wipe out Daesh.

Yet, as I was told (off the record) by senior Iraqi officials then serving, there was another route by which the Obama team could have secured Iraqi approval, and probably prevented the Daesh resurgence. That approval could have been obtained under terms of a strategic framework accord negotiated by the George W. Bush administration.

That is the very basis under which around 5,000 US troops remain in Iraq now, advising and training Iraqi forces. The lesson of this sad Iraq misadventure is that it’s better to invest in not losing than to stage a premature retreat.

The current Taliban leadership pledges not to permit any future Al Qaeda presence. But once US troops leave, how can they be trusted? Hardline Taliban who prefer to keep on fighting are likely to join the local variant of Daesh or new jihadi groups.

Any intra-Afghan accord is unlikely to be negotiated by the end of 2020. So that leaves Trump with a choice. He can rush to failure, or he can try some strategic long-term thinking. Unfortunately, his 2017 speech was written when James Mattis was Defense Secretary and H.R. McMaster his National Security advisor.

These days he appears to make such crucial decisions all alone.