Afghanistan
isn’t Vietnam. It isn’t even Iraq. George W. Bush did not lie America into this
war. He, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and their generals and diplomats didn’t
conceal the challenges and failures the US was facing. The “revelations” in The
Washington Post are only new to people who have forgotten front page news from
a few years ago. The documents The Post obtained just aren’t the Pentagon
Papers, however much some would like them to be.

The
US entered the war in Afghanistan following the most devastating terrorist
attack in history, prepared and launched from that country. Support was
overwhelmingly bipartisan; the AUMF passed the House in 2001 420–1. Public
support for the war in October 2001 was 88 percent.

None
of that support was based on a lie, questionable intelligence, or some modern
Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was based on video of the smoking ruins of the
World Trade Center and the knowledge, never questioned then or since, that al
Qaeda conducted the attack from a safe haven in Afghanistan.

Bush
did not rush to war. He issued an ultimatum to the Taliban, who had invited
Osama bin Laden to make his base in their territory in the 1990s and were
hosting him when he launched his attack: Hand bin Laden over to us or face war.
The Taliban refused, lining up with bin Laden even after the 9/11 attack and
making clear that they would continue to host and protect him as he prepared
other such attacks. Only then did Bush order the US military to work with local
Afghan partners to take down the Taliban regime and deprive al Qaeda of its
Afghan sanctuary.

The
initial military operations went relatively well, achieving their objectives by
early 2002: The Taliban government had collapsed, al Qaeda’s fighting forces
were destroyed or dispersed, and al Qaeda leadership fled to Pakistan.

The
US then faced a quandary: how to extricate itself from Afghanistan without
giving al Qaeda the opportunity to rebuild its sanctuary and resuming planning
and conducting attacks on the American homeland. Bush ran in 2000 on a platform
opposing nation-building and protracted wars (he was thinking of the Balkans)
and rushed to hand the Afghan problem over to the international community and
NATO. That was a mistake — but a mistake born of the desire to get out of
Afghanistan quickly, not to make it Nirvana in the Hindu Kush.

The
years that followed saw mistakes compounded. The Iraq War distracted attention
from Afghanistan, which the Bush administration allowed to drift. President
Obama, who had run on a platform of ending the Iraq War to refocus on
Afghanistan, ordered a surge of military forces to combat the rising Taliban
insurgency that was threatening to recreate space for al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
That surge was necessary and achieved important gains. He also ordered a
massive surge of reconstruction, spending dollars on the theory that building
Afghan governance and alleviating economic grievances was at least as important
as military operations to securing America’s gains and, once again, allowing
the US to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible — his constant aim.

The
surge of reconstruction spending and mistaken military contracting practices
supporting the surge of forces fueled the already massive corruption that was
actually doing more than anything else to drive the insurgency, however.

This
corruption and the problems it caused were no secret. Gen. Stan McChrystal, who
took command in Afghanistan in 2009, identified bad governance including
corruption as coequal with the Taliban as the principal threats to the success
of American operations in his report to President Obama. That report was
leaked, published, and widely discussed at the White House and in the media.
Gen. David Petraeus, his successor, established Task Force Shafafiyat under the
command of H. R. McMaster explicitly to combat corruption in the Afghan
government even as he intensified efforts begun by McChrystal to address bad
practices in military contracting. All these problems and efforts were publicly
announced and discussed.

Did
American civilian and military leaders attempt at times to portray overly
positive views of the situation in Afghanistan? Of course. The phenomenon of
spin is not new, nor is it confined to wars. It is a deplorable but inevitable
element of our social and political discourse about almost anything.

But
did American leaders systematically lie to the American people about the
situation in Afghanistan, conceal from them the problems we were facing there
and even the problems our mistakes were causing, or otherwise prevent them from
understanding what was really going on? Absolutely not.

The
best evidence for that is the steady erosion of public and congressional
support for a war begun with such widespread and bipartisan support. That
erosion resulted not just from war-weariness or innate skepticism, but rather
from the continuing stream of statements and reports by civilian and military
officials in Afghanistan and in Washington, and the honest reporting of
journalists who traveled freely to and often throughout Afghanistan, about the
mistakes being made and the challenges encountered. Americans knew about the
problems and mistakes as they occurred, even if we have now forgotten that we
did.

Afghanistan
today is hardly Vietnam in 1972. American military forces there are set to drop
below 10,000 — and that small number is engaged only in providing air,
intelligence, and other limited support to the several hundred thousand Afghans
fighting the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS, along with US Special Forces
continuing to fight terrorists.

The
hysteria now whipped up by The Post series is feeding the “end endless wars”
mantra of those who just want to pull even those limited forces out of
Afghanistan without giving any thought to the consequences (or denying that
there will be consequences).

There
would be a consequence, however: casting aside the critical gains we made in
2002 and have not yet lost in Afghanistan — the disruption and expulsion of the
group that attacked our homeland in 2001, the establishment of a base from
which to continue to target its leaders in Pakistan, and the denial of a
revived Afghan sanctuary to it and its ideological brethren.

That would be a terrible mistake — the greatest of all we have made in Afghanistan.

The post Afghanistan is not Vietnam appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.