By Frank Sobchak
In recent weeks there have been a number of articles written prognosticating that America’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan spells wholesale doom for U.S. and Israeli counterterrorism efforts, and the broader security and wellbeing of both states. While we are right to worry over the coming humanitarian disaster, anxiety over the security impact of the withdrawal is grossly misplaced. Instead, both nations should be thankful that the long drain on resources is finally coming to an end, and that their leaders will be able to refocus their grand strategies in areas that matter, rather than waste valuable resources in areas of strategic distraction.
There is an old adage that if you try to defend everything, you defend nothing. Proper grand strategy, something neither state has been effective at imagining and then implementing recently, requires carefully balancing risks, costs, and benefits. It requires thinking clearly and rationally rather than acting with emotion – — as hard as that may be. It also demands recognizing that no state has unlimited resources. To determine how to allocate those scarce resources, states should meticulously assess what are their most vital interests and then commit resources towards protecting those interests. Difficult decisions will have to be made, often with the best choice being the least bad of a series of unsavory options.
Pretending that Afghanistan qualifies as a vital interest for the U.S. or Israel is simply ludicrous. The Afghan war started with little thought of costs, consequences, or second or third order effects. As a result, the strategy (using that term loosely) of the U.S. and its allies has drifted for many years, with national leaders more afraid of domestic political costs than reassessing the core assumptions of the conflict or evaluating our chances of success or goals.
This has caused a monumental expenditure of our limited resources. Many estimates put the U.S. cost of the Afghan war in the range of $1 trillion. When all expenditures are totaled, it will almost certainly cost trillions more due to the long-term impact of veterans’ care as well as the interest on loans taken out to finance the war. There is considerable evidence that Al Qaida’s strategy was to draw the U.S. into Afghanistan and keep us there until bankruptcy. This was no farcical fantasy: Afghanistan economically bled dry the empires of Alexander the Great, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The conflict in Afghanistan was such a gross waste of resources that it would probably have been more useful if the U.S. had set the trillions of dollars spent on the war on fire and used it for heat.
In addition to its financial cost, the war also spent the nation’s reserves of public willingness to face its enemies. War weariness is at an all-time high, and if we had continued to stay and fight in Afghanistan, it would have further degraded America’s willingness to confront our true enemies and the world’s real dangers.
When thinking of our vital interests, the U.S. should focus on areas that matter to us strategically and the enemies that can threaten those interests. While we squandered our finances in Afghanistan, the forces of authoritarianism have been on the march. Russia and China present complicated global threats to the existing liberal order that the U.S spent decades building. Iran, a nation that has pledged the destruction of both Israel and the United States, presents a regional threat to that order and is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power – a grave danger that could ignite an arms race that would further destabilize a crucial region. Afghanistan is a distraction from those threats.
Even if a vestige of the terrorist threat rises again in Afghanistan, it is unlikely to be significant enough to require another large-scale intervention as no American administration of either party would blithely sit by while such a threat re-established itself there. The vast majority of the current fighters are domestic combatants engaged in the struggle for Afghanistan’s future. While there are some Al Qaida and Islamic State militants in Afghanistan, long ago those organizations spread across the world to survive. The global jihadist movement metastasized and learned. It would require a willful suspension of reality to pretend the senior leaders of those organizations would return to set up terrorist training camps or operate overtly in Afghanistan as this would put them in the crosshairs of American and coalition aircraft. If anything, the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan provides fodder for recruitment of the global jihadist network. Ending our involvement in the conflict will hurt their recruitment efforts – a positive consequence for both the U.S. and Israel.
As John Quincy Adams noted, we should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The world is full of monsters who wish us ill. If we continuously go hunting for them, as we have for the last two decades, we will find ourselves insolvent, exhausted, and our skills dulled. It is time for us to rest and prepare so that when they do come for us, we will be ready.
Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.