As we watch the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, let us first dispense with the fantasy that the United States was maintaining the peace there with just a few thousand troops and that this situation could have been managed with this small commitment. For the past couple of years, it looked that way to Americans because Washington had made a deal with the Taliban and, as a result, the Taliban was deliberately not attacking U.S. and coalition forces.
For the Afghans themselves, the war was intensifying. In the summer of 2019, the Afghan Army and police force suffered their worst casualties in the two decades of fighting. It was also the worst period for Afghan civilian casualties in a decade. In 2018, when the United States had four times as many troops as this year, the fighting was so brutal that 282,000 Afghan civilians were displaced from their homes in the countryside. … …
You have heard people suggest that the withdrawal should have been a year or two later. Consider this news report in the Guardian in 2016: “Afghan Forces Lose Ground to Taliban Despite Delayed U.S. Troop Withdrawal.” The story pointed out that the U.S. military had persuaded Barack Obama to delay the troop withdrawals he had already delayed a year earlier, but despite having robust U.S. forces and significant air power, the central government’s control dropped to only about 65% of the country’s districts.
Some of the data I have cited comes from a powerful new book, “The American War in Afghanistan,” by Carter Malkasian, who served as a civilian officer in Helmand province and rose to become senior advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Drawing his conclusions from the book in a Politico essay, he begins by noting, “there can be little doubt that we lost the war.” The United States spent 20 years, $2 trillion, commanded at their peak 130,000 coalition troops, built up an Afghan security force of 300,000 (at least on paper), and used the world’s most sophisticated and lethal air power. Still, it was unable to defeat an ill-equipped Taliban force of perhaps 75,000. Why?
