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Here’s a point of view in favor of leaving Afghanistan that I haven’t yet encountered. But before presenting it let’s first ask why would we even consider leaving a country in which we have so much blood and treasure already invested? The short answer is that success there is highly unlikely, and things could very well get a lot worse in regard to the numbers of lost lives and lost treasure. The cost of staying and not leaving may be now too great.

The fact is, and this in spite of our clear military superiority, we are being defeated on the ground, as we were in Vietnam. We are not able even to protect our own soldiers, either from suicide bombers or from remote mountain ambushes (why are we even out there I asked myself as I read in today’s Times that 8 of our soldiers were killed in a firefight in the Nuristan province, a remote area on the border with Pakistan).

We just haven’t solved, nor are we even close to solving, the problem of an enemy who will willingly and joyfully give up his or her own life in a suicide attack on our forces. In addition, we are certainly not turning the population around in our favor.  Nor are we ridding the Afghan government of corruption. And we have no confidence that our efforts to create a strong and capable Afghan army and police force will succeed in any reasonable time frame.

With all these reasons for leaving why don’t we? Many have answered that question, rephrasing it as why we can’t leave. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke for many just the other day when he said that we could not leave because to do so would be “disastrous for the U.S.”

By disastrous he meant that the Taliban and al-Qaida extremist movements would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States, of even greater significance than the Soviet Union’s humiliating withdrawal in 1989 after a 10-year war.

And for the Taliban and al-Qaida to be seen on the world stage as having routed a second super power would have “catastrophic consequences” for the U.S. in that al-Qaida recruitment, operations, fundraising, and such would be energized as a result.

So the principal argument for staying is that things would be much worse if we left. (Wasn’t this the principal argument for staying in Vietnam?) I would respectfully disagree with Secretary Gates, with Condoleezza Rice, and even with David Brooks, with whom I usually agree, who writes that the country would again become a safe haven to terrorists, and worse seriously undermine the “stability” of Pakistan.

Pat Buchanan writes that it would be Saigon all over again. In the Atlantic D. B. Grady argues that we must have a stable Afghanistan, not the return of Taliban rule. And it goes on with all the others in favor of our staying. Oliver North in RealClear Politics says that the prospect of our withdrawal “has to make the Taliban leadership, hiding out in caves along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, feel all warm and fuzzy.”

The most convincing argument for staying that I’ve read, that mentioned by David Brooks, concerns what will be the effect of our leaving on Pakistan, already on the brink of becoming a failed state with weapons of mass destruction in its possession. I’ll reply indirectly to this in my argument that follows.

So what is my argument for our leaving, and for leaving right away? The real clashes that are taking place in the world today, I believe, are not between civilizations, not between Islam and the West, for example, but rather the clashes between extremists and moderates within nations and civilizations.

In the Muslim countries clashes between those who would join the open and developed world, with all its defects, in order to benefit from the higher living standard, and, yes, the freedom of thought and movement that the developed world affords its citizens, and those who want to return the country to an earlier closed, tribal, feudal way of life.

Muslims in the great majority want what the developed world has enjoyed for a long time. They do not want to live in an al-Qaida restored Caliphate. They don’t want to be once again part of an ancient tribal way of life, one for example in which a woman’s principal role is to do a men’s bidding. They want to be a part of the modern world, just as did Kemal Atatürk who nearly 100 years ago abolished the last Caliphate held at the time by Ottoman Turkish sultans.

Why haven’t the Muslims themselves, in their great majority, put down the extremists among them? Al-Qaida had never hid its deadly opposition to the autocratic Arab regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia among others. The answer is simple. Because it wasn’t yet their fight. We had made it our fight and they stayed on the sidelines. Who wouldn’t if given the choice.

They shouldn’t have the choice. They should have to fight. By our leaving Afghanistan we will be taking one giant step to making the fight their fight, the way it should be. Furthermore, they, much more than we, have the means, and when forced to do so will find the will to defeat the extremists.

Pakistan when its very survival is threatened by the Taliban will root out that movement from its NorthWest provinces and elsewhere. They will have no choice. For otherwise they would be a pariah in the modern world and suffer the terrible economic consequences stemming from their isolation from the Western world.

Upon our leaving even Afghanistan would probably step up to the plate and be transformed from within, perhaps even from within the Taliban leadership itself. For having the control of the country the Taliban, now outlaws and insurgents and recruiters of suicide bombers, will also have no choice and have to change their outlaw ways.

In short, our best chance to win the fight against the extremists is to get out of the way and allow those, with the most to lose and the most to gain to fight, in our stead. And it helps that they are much better equipped, it being their land and livelihood that is threatened, than we to wage that war.

This entry was posted on October 4, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.