The Kandahar Massacre: What Is America Still Doing in Afghanistan?

Should the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan? This subject is back under debate in both the United States and the rest of the world, especially in the countries involved in the so-called war against terrorism. The massacre in Kandahar, where an American soldier killed 16 civilians, including nine children, created horror around the world and made everyone ask the same question all over again: What are the Americans still doing in this war, 10 months after Osama bin Laden, the most iconic figure of terrorism, was killed?

A week ago, when six English soldiers were killed by a bomb planted by the Taliban, the public opinion in Great Britain demanded early withdrawal from this front. The story repeated itself when those civilians were murdered by a 38-year-old soldier, who was on his first mission in Afghanistan after three previous missions in Iraq. Moreover, this massacre follows a series of errors that the American forces have made — soldiers urinating on Taliban bodies or the burning of several copies of the Quran — all of which were publicized worldwide and were used by the insurgents as proof of the mentally-ill American savages, as they were described by the Taliban.

However, the discussion concerning a potential early withdrawal of the Americans from Afghanistan will be nothing more than a discussion, since it is impossible for this to happen before 2014 for numerous reasons. Let us go through some numbers:

– Among the Americans, the rate of disapproval against this war has reached 60 percent

– The annual cost of keeping one American soldier fighting in Afghanistan is more than $1 million. There are 90,000 soldiers out there.

– Logistically speaking, it will be at least a year until the Americans take apart their infrastructure and send it back from Afghanistan

– The issue of early withdrawal is strongly influenced by the presidential elections.

According to a survey carried out at the request of the Washington Post/ABC News on the eve of the armed attack, 60 percent of Americans said that this war should not go on.

There is no doubt that the war in Afghanistan is too long and too expensive. The United States, which is leading NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan, should have withdrawn from this war zone a long time ago. And judging by the American citizens’ opinion, this is what they should do now. More than that, considering that it costs $1 million each year to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan, when each taxpayer multiplies this cost by the 90,000 soldiers who are stationed there, they will realize that the cost of keeping this war during times of crisis is enormous.

The main countries who are taking part in the war are the United States, Great Britain and Germany, and the current agenda provides that the troops withdraw and that power is transferred back to Afghan officials by the end of 2014. German chancellor Angela Merkel stated that this is not possible, due to the insufficient progress made in the last period. As for the two other allied countries, their leaders are currently discussing, and they might even come up with a new deadline for the power transfer sometime in the middle of next year. However, in the context of Obama’s disastrous popularity rates in relation to the upcoming presidential elections, any change of plans will mean huge strategic leverage for the Taliban and will create the impression of a chaotic withdrawal, which would discredit NATO itself. This is the main reason why an early withdrawal is impossible.

For the moment, Obama is hesitating to promote a change of plans. During an interview for KDKA, he again stated that the U.S. does not want a precipitated withdrawal from the front. “It’s important for us to make sure that we get out in a responsible way so that we don’t end up having to go back in,” Obama said to KDKA.

At the same time, the U.S., having 90,000 soldiers out of the total 130,000 present in Afghanistan, cannot leave this war on its own. They run this war, and any change of schedule would be subject to consultation with the other states who are involved in this conflict. Or even simpler, even if most countries are preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, it is the U.S. that needs to stay behind and turn off the lights of this war, since it began with an attack over American soil.

Furthermore, the anti-American feelings that continue to grow in Afghanistan and the low rates of approval from civilians concerning the NATO mission are not reasons to rush the withdrawal. On the contrary, these issues complicate the withdrawal and make it even harder to attain. This is something that even Angela Merkel admitted to being aware of, but at the same time, it is something which the promoters of the end of Enduring Freedom, including Republican presidential candidates, are ignoring.

The early withdrawal was a vivid subject even after May 2011, when Osama bin Laden could no longer be used as the war’s main target. At the time, there was a great amount of pressure exercised by India, which is the main sponsor of the war in Afghanistan with development projects worth over $1.19 billion and which offered much needed support for the United States in the last years. Therefore, India will surely not agree to an even earlier withdrawal.

There is also the Hamid Karzai problem. The relationship between the Afghan president and the U.S. or the Obama administration was never cordial. In his book called “Obama Wars,” American journalist Bob Woodward, well-known for his role in uncovering the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, tells the story of how the U.S. Secret Service all agreed that Karzai was becoming paranoid. One of the most recurrent sentences about Karzai told by the Secret Service and the Obama administration was that he had stopped taking his medication. Obama asked Karzai to gather himself on more than one occasion, says Woodward.* On the other hand, Karzai would be dead without ISAF, and there is no replacement for him right now. Karzai’s second presidential mandate should expire exactly in 2014, when NATO is scheduled to withdraw its troops. Should ISAF end the war sooner, Afghanistan will be under Karzai’s control and stands no chance against the Taliban.

One of the most frequent mistakes that are made regarding the military operation in Afghanistan and that American officials refuse to correct is that, according to the current calendar, all soldiers will step back in 2014. In fact, the withdrawal scheduled before 2014 refers to the military offense, in the sense that the actual attacks stop and the U.S. moves to offering assistance to troops and Afghan authorities by that time — the difference between combat and support. This last phase of the war will also take time. In the case of Iraq, for example, it prolonged the military presence by a year and a half. So, in order to withdraw earlier, the U.S. should urgently pass to the assistance phase.

In this context, the U.S. and its allies cannot hope to end either the offense or assistance. But even now, reality shatters the hopes of an early withdrawal. Even if the reconciliation process with the Taliban has a happy ending, it would still take at least a year to effectively withdraw the troops. The reason for that is simple — ISAF benefits from a huge military infrastructure in Afghanistan, which Barack Obama also mentioned in his interview for KDKA. In the 11 years of war, the allied forces created a nucleus state within a state and simply shipping it back will prove to be an incredibly laborious process. Again, Iraq is proof of that, since it turned out to be the most difficult withdrawal in world history, logistically speaking. There were millions of things, from tanks to coffee filters, that needed to be taken apart and out of Afghanistan. The shipping alone took one year, and it became so expensive that it was decided to leave more than four million objects in Iraq behind, worth $390 million, because the calculations indicated that this would save $685 million per shipment. Even so, the war in Afghanistan is already two years longer than the one in Iraq, and the physical problems behind the withdrawal will be even bigger.

In conclusion, there are a number of reasons why the U.S. should have ended the operation in Afghanistan. Perhaps there are as many reasons not to have begun this operation in the first place. Still, the reality is that under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that the current schedule of actions is feasible and that a withdrawal, in any sense of the word, could be more than just an electoral promise.

*Editor’s Note: This is not a direct quote in the original article. However, the source was still verified.