CD (Portland) — In order to achieve a lasting peace in Afghanistan, the United States needs to keep waging its longest-ever war there. That’s the conclusion of a report published Wednesday by the Afghanistan Study Group, a congressionally-mandated task force that is recommending the Biden administration keep US troops in the war-torn nation beyond the May 1 deadline set under former President Donald Trump.

According to the study group—a fifteen-member bipartisan panel led by former Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire), former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford, and former United States Institute for Peace CEO Nancy Lindborg—the Taliban has not met the prerequisite conditions for the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 US troops in the country.

“The study group… believes that it will be very difficult, and perhaps impossible, for those conditions to be achieved by May 2021,” the report states. “Achieving the overall objective of a negotiated stable peace that meets US interests would need to begin with securing an extension of the May deadline.”

The conditions, established during the talks that led to the February 2020 agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban, include reducing violence, severing ties with al-Qaida militants, and engaging in intra-Afghan talks. Under the agreement, the United States committed to reducing the number of forces in Afghanistan from 13,000 to 8,600 within 135 days, with a complete withdrawal within fourteen months.

However, “complete withdrawal” is a misnomer, says Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington DC-based think tank. “No one is talking about withdrawing the US bombers and drones that are responsible for so much civilian suffering,” she says. “By calling them ‘counter-terrorism operations,’ it seems those airstrikes and drone attacks are completely off the withdrawal agenda.”

The 2,500 US troops Trump left in Afghanistan just before President Joe Biden took office were the fewest that have been there since the United States invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the then-ruling Taliban’s harboring of Usama bin Ladin and the al-Qaida militants who attacked on September 11, 2001. At the peak of former President Barack Obama’s “Afghan surge” in 2011, there were over 100,000 US troops in the country.

The war, currently in its 20th year, is now a multi-generational conflict for both the Afghan civilians who endure its terrors and those who inflict them. That includes Afghan government forces, Taliban, and other militants, as well as US and allied troops—some of whose parents also fought there.

The cost in blood and treasure has been tremendous. More than 100,000 Afghans civilians were killed by all sides in the years 2010-2020 alone, according to the United Nations. Taliban militants have killed the most noncombatants, but thousands of men, women, and children have also been killed by US, coalition, and Afghan government bombs and bullets. The Trump administration’s 2017 decision to loosen military rules of engagement meant to protect noncombatants was followed by a 330% surge in civilian deaths since the end of the Obama administration, according to the Brown University Watson Institute’s Costs of War Project.

Millions of Afghans have also been displaced by the decades of fighting.

The total US price tag for the war is estimated at over US$1.5 trillion, with hundreds of billions of dollars more spent on reconstruction, economic development, training and equipping Afghan security forces, and counternarcotics operations.

However, critics say that after all that war, the United States cannot buy peace in Afghanistan. That, says peace activist Kathy Kelly, “will require finding jobs and incomes for desperate people, [and] also require finding ways to greatly reduce the power of various warlords who have profited through prolonged warfare.”

“It’s important to reckon with the reality that billions were spent to prolong the war, enabling vast profits for military contractors, various warlords, and mafiosa-style groups that often gained control over foreign funds,” Kelly states. “Equivalent sums should be directed toward reparations that would enable Afghanistan to rehabilitate its agricultural infrastructure and provide work and income for people.”

“Young Afghan friends regularly tell me that they can’t find work unless they are willing to work for a military group,” Kelly added.

While progress has been made in Afghan civil society and other areas, the Afghan government remains one of the world’s most corrupt, and Afghan military and police forces are plagued by human rights violations, while remaining incapable of defeating the Taliban and other insurgents.

In recent days and weeks, reports of widespread torture in Afghan prisons and of US-backed military death squads underscore the yawning chasm between the US government’s vision for Afghanistan and the stark reality there.

“US troops weren’t able to protect Afghans or prevent Taliban attacks when they were deployed in the tens of thousands—they just caused more casualties with their own actions,” says Bennis. “Military officials agree there is no military solution, so keeping a few thousand US troops in the country… makes no sense strategically.”

Michael Galant, senior communications associate at the peace advocacy group Win Without War, agrees. “The word for spending another minute trying to ‘win’ on the battlefield after the last two decades isn’t ‘logic,’ it’s absurdity,” he declares. “In a situation where everyone agrees that the challenges we face do not have military solutions, only in Washington can the solution be to keep using the US military.”

“The future of Afghanistan must be up to Afghans,” added Galant, “and while the United States has a moral obligation to help rebuild what we’ve spent decades breaking, the Biden administration should also listen to the US public that has been crystal clear that they want the United States’ longest war to finally and fully end.”

Originally published at Common Dreams. Republished by cc by-sa 3.0. Minor edits for style and content.

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