With the closure of Bagram Air Force base, the U.S. departure from Afghanistan is picking up speed. My read had been that this is a top focus for the Biden administration, in particular driving the selection of Sec. Austin as someone that would get it done. Likewise I suspect it is largely taking precedence over attempts to use the FY22 defense budget proposal to shift policy and may have contributed to its lateness (along with the highly dysfunctional transition).
Even with that read,S I fell prey to status quo bias and so was surprised that Bagram air base has now been closed, as Dan Lamothe reports:
The transfer of Bagram air base to Afghan forces was completed with no ceremony or fanfare, a quiet end at a base that was for years the nerve center of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign across Afghanistan. U.S. Special Operations troops based there hunted al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Taliban and other militant groups in raids across Afghanistan’s rugged mountains to the east. Fighter jets, drones and cargo planes took off from Bagram’s twin runways day and night. Each of the previous three U.S. presidents visited the airfield during trips to meet the troops.
The base also was the site of detention facilities at which both U.S. troops and CIA interrogators tortured prisoners, according to U.S. government reports and investigations by human rights groups. The United States closed its detention center at Bagram in 2014, U.S. officials said.
Stripes also shared a quite surreal story about the Pokemon Go artifacts left behind as part of the closure.
I have been to Afghanistan once, and my part of the team went to not to Bagram but Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, which closed in May. It had already been shrinking a few year later, with the remarkable boardwalk already winding down by 2013. Home of a TGI Fridays, a floor hockey rink, and local goods shops, it was a a remarkably non-martial outpost but one of many places where memories of earlier stages of the war could lead one astray in thinking of the post-surge mission.
Predictions of coming disaster are often used to argue for indefinite interventions and I think the negative assessments have been more likely to be rebroadcast. Sadly, most of the reporting seems negative as well. Denial appears to have hampered any move to a more achievable strategy by the Afghan government. Similarly, militias taking up arms against the Taliban does reduce the risk of a takeover but could lead to a greater factionalism and ethnic conflict. President Biden is willing to offer sustained financial support, and some remote operational options, but for better or worse the core burden is Afghanistan’s to bear.
I had long hoped there may be some third way. To accept less ambitious goals, move away from the idea of a centralized presidential state in a highly divided country and even to consider autonomous regions in a Taliban peace deal. Charli Carpenter and David Cortright argued that U.N. Peacekeeping could be one such option, though I think peacekeepers from Muslim nations would be necessarily but far from sufficient to gain Taliban consent. I generally favor diplomatic and development surges but I do believe that for them to succeed the Afghan government will need to hold its own military. I think Michael Cohen goes to far in saying disaster for the Afghan people is inevitable and the U.S. will have little influence, but I think he is correct to say that we should not sugarcoat the downside risks for the Afghan people. For that reason, I am particularly grateful that both war supporters and opponents have come together to emphasize the criticality of visas for those Afghans that worked closely with the United States.
I strongly suspect that dating back to at least the Obama administration there has not been a deal on the table that would have been acceptable to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. I’ve long pondered Dominic Tierney’s book the Right Way to Lose a War. He proposes a “surge-talk-leave” that draws on a variety of past conflicts including the polarized war of 1812 and multiple examples where coalition disagreements complicated matters. However, even as he acknowledges coalition challenges, I think his and other approaches to Afghanistan often treat it as a two actor game and do not do enough to consider the agency of the national forces. So long as it had public support in Afghanistan, I would potentially be comfortable with keeping a residual force at the present cost of treasure and blood if it seemed to be bringing peace closer. However, my theory long was that a willingness to leave may be what it takes to have a chance of convincing the Afghan government to consider the range of options that may be necessary to achieve a political settlement, and at best that could only even be a chance. I think politics and negotiation would be critical and an ideally tailored institutional design from on high would not be sufficient, let alone seen as legitimate. However, the failure of an actually occurring withdrawal to shift dynamics makes me wonder if such hardball ever had a chance.
If you told me just over a decade ago, as I stared out at the hills of Kabul, that this is how U.S. presence ends I would have been saddened but not, I think, surprised. Even now I can easily imagine worse options. I remain skeptical of a prior Biden idea of somehow staying but narrowing even more to the counterterrorism mission, so perhaps this is for the best. My visit was a minor one, nothing compared to those who live their of course or those that served in defense or military capacities. Even so, I keep thinking back to the co-educational school we visited, funded by the profits of an Afghan contractor working for the U.S. government, and wondering where the students, their teacher, and the founder are today. This is an analytical error of sorts. The founder was charismatic and her extremely compelling story is missing the counterbalance of other missions at abroad and at home that lost out to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Similarly, there are the stories of the roughly 857 U.S. service members that have died in that decade, more from the coalition partners and far greater losses among Afghan troops and civilians and who surely had all manner of opinions on the war in life. For now, I can just give it some measure of my attention and strive to be clear eyed in observing what happens next and learning for the future.
[Update: Revised penultimate paragraph for clarity.]
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