US Afghan intervention is a failure of concept, not execution

It is nearly 18 years since the United States invaded Afghanistan, and neither the United States nor Afghanistan is better for it.

The U.S. has lost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, and all sense of prudence and purpose in our Middle Eastern foreign policy. We are stuck, as military historian Andrew Bacevich put it, in a grueling “pattern of promiscuous intervention” in which new military commitments are accrued more by automation than strategy, “oblivious to the possibility that in some parts of the world, U.S. forces may no longer be needed, whereas in others, their presence may be detrimental.”

Afghanistan remains mired in chaos, poverty, and terror. By 2014, our government had spent more money, adjusted for inflation, on Afghan reconstruction than it spent on the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II. Still, Afghanistan ranks at or near the bottom of every measure of human development: Security is low; economic vulnerability is high; life expectancy is just 60 years. The refugee crisisrages on. More than 100,000 Afghans are estimated to have died in this 18-year fight, and after all that bloodshed the Taliban is once again on the rise. By mid-2016, the terrorist group’s territory was at its highest since 2001. Taliban fighters took control of 15 percent of the country in a single year.

It is this morass into which the Trump administration is expected to send another 1,000 U.S. troops by spring, bringing the total U.S. military presence there to somewhere around 16,000, excluding about 28,000 American contractors also on the scene. But Defense Secretary James Mattis has yet to sign off on that plan. And he should not do so.

Another 1,000 U.S. troops will not “fix” Afghanistan. Neither will another 5,000, or another 10,000 or 20,000. In 2010 and 2011, at the peak of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, there were about 140,000 outside forces in the country, 100,000 of them American, plus 112,000 U.S. contractors. What will 1,000 soldiers do now that hundreds of thousands failed to do then? Why will this time be different?