President Trump, don't withdraw from Afghanistan

President Trump is currently playing Hamlet over the fate of Afghanistan. He is divided between repeating the Obama mini-surge and cutting America's losses in the graveyard of empires.

But the consequences of unilateral withdrawal have not been considered. To borrow from one of Donald Rumsfeld's 2003 "snowflakes," will withdrawal help deter or dissuade "more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" Past experience suggests it is unlikely.

Proponents of withdrawal operate under four incorrect assumptions. The first is that occupations, not ideology, drive terrorism. End the occupation, the theory goes, and you drain the swamp of support for terrorists. The second is that we can cut a deal with the Taliban to prevent them from harboring a new generation of terrorists because it will be in their best interest. The third is that even if more terrorists emerge, they can easily be deterred. And the fourth is that we have nothing to fear but threat inflation itself. (John Mueller, for example, purports to demonstrate that the threat of terrorism has been exaggerated.)

As attractive as these contrarian ideas might seem, sometimes conventional wisdom is conventional precisely because it is wise. In the real world, a multitude of factors account for terrorism, from anger over occupations to disenchantment among lonely, educated, middle-class young men. The removal of just one will not fix anything. There's no guarantee that it will be in the Taliban's interest to keep any commitment to the West. There are no good answers as to how to deter terrorists by denial or punishment. And terrorism is just as terrifying as it seems.

Unilateral withdrawals have an abysmal record of unrequited failure. Rather than draining the swamp of support for terrorists, unilateral withdrawals produce a new species of mosquito or strain of malaria. Call it the "March of Dimes" model.
by is licensed under