Washington Wednesday - What’s next for Afghanistan?

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 21st of April, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Megan Basham.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: leaving Afghanistan.

Nearly 20 years ago, roughly a month after the Sept. 11th attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the White house.

BUSH: On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

That was the opening salvo in Afghanistan of what would become America’s longest war.

In 2011, roughly 100,000 U.S. servicemen and women were stationed there. That number is down to about 2,500.

REICHARD: There’s not much on which President Biden and former President Trump agree, but on this they are of the same mind:

Both believe it’s time for American troops to get out of Afghanistan.

BASHAM: President Trump had planned to bring all of them home by May 1st under a deal brokered with the Taliban.

President Biden is pushing that deadline back by several months. But he insists he is committed to bringing every troop home before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

But plenty of lawmakers on Capitol Hill and some top military commanders have disagreed with both presidents on the troop pullout.

REICHARD: Here to explain what the withdrawal might mean both in the short and long term is Clifford May. He is president and founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

May spoke to World's Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON: Clifford, thanks for joining us, and let’s just start by setting the scene in Afghanistan. Obviously, there’s an ongoing power struggle between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Is civil war the right term to describe the situation or is that too strong?

CLIFFORD MAY, GUEST: No, there's no question. There's a civil war. It's a low intensity conflict, although Afghan forces are and have been taking casualties at a steady rate. Americans have not been. We haven't had an American casualty in over a year, doesn't mean we couldn't have at another time. But again, the American mission—at one point, there were well over 100,000 foreign troops, American and NATO, in Afghanistan. But that stopped about 2014. Since then it's been an advise, train, and assist mission. That's what's going on now. So there is a civil war there. We are supporting the Afghan government side against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in that.

President Biden has announced that he wants that to end on September 11. On that date, I think we can rest assured that the Taliban and Al Qaeda will have two causes for celebration. One cause will be they will remember what al Qaeda did to us on 9/11 ‘01. They'll celebrate that. But they'll also celebrate that over 20 years of fighting, they have forced us to retreat to withdraw to accept defeat in Afghanistan, so they can go on and do what they would like to do. This will be very important—this will send a very important message to Islamic jihadists around the world. Not least to the jihadists, and that's how they think of themselves, in Iran, who now will know they have nothing to fear from President Biden, and that they can get the deal they want to get.

I think what we know from this is that our enemies around the world will take this to heart, will understand what this means in terms of U.S. resolve. And our friends will also understand what this means and try to think about who they need to cut deals with and how they may have to hedge their bets over the years to come.

COVINGTON: After all these years in Afghanistan, why have we not been able to help usher in a stable Afghan government?

MAY: Look, it's not an easy thing to do. We don't know a lot about how to do nation building. That’s not the hardest question. The harder question is, why were we not able to defeat the ragtag band of Taliban? Couple of reasons I would say for that. General H.R. McMaster, national security adviser, as you know, to President Trump would say that we haven't had a coherent military strategy. Instead of fighting a 20-year war, we fought a one-year war 20 times.

President Bush, I don't think wrongly, decided the Taliban needed to be toppled after he had hosted and assisted al Qaeda. But then his attention was elsewhere, mostly in Iraq. President Obama said this was a just war and an important war. But then he did strange things like—he said, well, I'm gonna have a surge, but that surge will end no matter what the conditions are in so many months. So the Taliban can know, okay, well, we just need to hunker down for a while these guys are coming in and then they're going. It's not really a problem for us.

President Trump kind of held fast but then he tried to develop a peace process with the Taliban, negotiating with the Taliban. I don't think that worked out very well either. But you know, we need post action reviews to learn from our mistakes. I think we can have a decent, reasonably decent government in Kabul, but it's not going to be Switzerland or even, you know, Costa Rica.

COVINGTON: Secretary of State Tony Blinken was interviewed Sunday on ABC’s This Week, and he said, “If the Taliban has any expectation of getting any international acceptance, of not being treated as a pariah, it's going to have to respect the rights of women and girls.” What do you make of that statement? Does that statement suggest that he believes the Taliban will become the dominant power there when the US military leaves?

MAY: That statement strikes me as mind boggling and delusional. If you understand who the Taliban are, if you understand what they believe and what they represent, the notion that they care about international approval; I mean, I want you to try to imagine the senior management meeting of the Taliban where they say, "Guys, we got to talk about this because, you know, if we keep throwing acid in the faces of little girls going to school, if we make women put them in full veils, I think there's going to be a lot of, you know, infidels, crusaders, Zionist heretics, and apostates who disapprove of us. And gosh, I'd feel awful about that, wouldn't you?" I mean, that's not gonna happen. How at this point can we not understand who these people are and the ideology, that theology to which they subscribe? I was so disappointed to see the Secretary of State say that. It is just sophomorically naive.

COVINGTON: Clifford, how much is known about the pushback both Presidents Trump and Biden got from the Pentagon about pulling out this year? And why?

MAY: I think what most of the security cabinet in certain Pentagon has said is we shouldn't leave Afghanistan completely. We should have a residual force there. If we don't, the jihadists will arise and resurrect again. And we should have learned a lesson from 2011 when President Obama ignored the advice of his national security cabinet and withdrew every troop we had in Iraq. He was warned that if he did that, the jihadists would regroup into a new force. That happened worse than anyone expected. What we got was what's called the Islamic State.

One of the reasons that President Biden was advised to keep a residual force in Afghanistan is to have a platform there. For the Indo-Pacific region where there are more than 20 US designated terrorist groups. If you're not there, it's very hard to maintain surveillance to have intelligence on them. And to hit them when necessary. Our intelligence assets need the protection of the military. So those two things go hand in hand. There is a reason why we have to, even today, we have troops in Germany. We have troops in Qatar and Kuwait, in Bahrain, Japan. We have troops in South Korea. They are there because being forward deployed, they can gather intelligence. They can hit her enemies when necessary. They can deter enemies to the extent possible. Bring them all back to Kansas and Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, and you really can't do any of that effectively.

COVINGTON: There are obviously plenty of people in Washington, and perhaps even at the Pentagon, who do agree with President Biden’s decision to pull out. And say sure, there are good reasons to keep troops there. But we can’t stay in Afghanistan forever, and the commander in chief has a great responsibility to the troops to end this at some point and bring them home and out of harm’s way. What do you say to that?

MAY: Don't forget what happened in Iraq. President Obama had to send troops back in. We had to go back in because the Islamic State was resurrected. We took more casualties, rather than fewer. We would have had fewer casualties had we left the residual force of elite troops in there as a stabilizing force. So for that reason alone, the protection of American troops, that's why we have our military planners saying it's best if we stay there. Again, not in huge numbers. But this is what our elite troops are trained to do.

We need the intelligence. We need to be able to hit our enemies when they're planning. If we find out before our intelligence that they're planning, say another 911 attack of some kind, let's get them there rather than hope that the FBI finds out about it when they're in the US and gets to arrest them and send them to Guantanamo and put them on trial another 10 or 15 or 20 years.

The war in Afghanistan will not end because we leave it. But our enemies will advance if we leave this front and leave the Afghan forces to fight this without our assistance, training, and advice. And part of what bothers me is if we just bug out, all the troops, all the soldiers who have sacrificed for that theater, they will have done it for nothing, no purpose. If we stay there, and maintain and proceed over time, then the sacrifices will be worth a lot more.

COVINGTON: Clifford May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Clifford, thanks so much!

MAY: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.