Twenty-seven U.S. senators, including Colorado’s Michael Bennet, have written a letter to President Obama that is one of most forceful arguments for “a sizable and sustained reduction of U.S. forces in Afghanistan” that we’ve seen.
It is also one of the most persuasive arguments, and we hope the president follows the advice.
In a few months, the U.S. will reach the 10th anniversary of its invasion of Afghanistan — a righteous move prompted by the fact that the Taliban government harbored and supported al-Qaeda, including the arch-terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden.
As the senators point out, “combating al-Qaeda has always been the rationale for our military presence in Afghanistan.” And yet, they go on to emphasize, “al-Qaeda no longer has a large presence in Afghanistan, and, as the strike against bin Laden demonstrated, we have the capacity to confront our terrorist enemies with a dramatically smaller footprint.”
President Obama has promised for many months that a troop reduction would begin in July, but he hasn’t been clear about its magnitude. The letter’s writers hope to nudge him into making significant withdrawals from the current force of 100,000, although the letter doesn’t specify how many. Our hope would be tens of thousands of troops.
And as the senators rightly suggest, if the reduction isn’t also “sustained,” we could end up marking the 15th and 20th anniversaries of this nation’s intervention, too.
“There are those who argue that rather than reduce our forces, we should maintain a significant number of troops in order to support a lengthy counter-insurgency and nation building effort,” the senators write. “This is misguided. We will never be able to secure and police every town and village in Afghanistan. Nor will we be able to build Afghanistan from the ground up into a Western-style democracy . . . . While it is a laudable objective to attempt to build new civic institutions in Afghanistan, this goal does not justify the loss of American lives or the investment of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.”
Actually, most proponents of a continued large-scale presence in Afghanistan no longer believe we can build a “a Western-style democracy.” But that’s part of the problem: The fallback goal of a competent central government whose rule is respected throughout the land and that protects the fundamental rights of its citizens appears equally elusive.
As useful as the letter may be, we’re disappointed that only 27 senators signed on and that they were so heavily weighted toward Democrats. Just two Republicans — Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee and Kentucky’s Rand Paul — were among the signatories.
The U.S. didn’t invade Afghanistan to build a modern nation. It invaded to overthrow the Taliban and kill al-Qaeda terrorists. As the letter to Obama says, it’s time “to confront our terrorist enemies with a dramatically smaller footprint.”
