Vietnamistan (reminder)

The president of the United States had planned to host the Taliban on U.S. soil, three days before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Can you even begin to imagine the reaction from the right if Barack Obama had made a similar announcement?

To be clear: Inviting the loathsome Taliban to Camp David, of all places, for a personal meeting with the U.S. president, not only in advance of any finalized peace agreement but also on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, was a dumb and offensive idea. However, engaging in negotiations with the Taliban to try and end the Afghan conflict — as the Trump administration has been doing for the past year in Qatar, including nine separate meetings led by the veteran U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad — is neither dumb nor offensive. It’s something that should have been attempted by the George W. Bush administration back in 2002 or 2003.

The war in Afghanistan, remember, has been an utter catastrophe. It may have dropped out of the headlines here in the United States, but it still holds the title for the longest-running conflict in American history. As the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow has pointed out, the Afghan war has lasted “longer than the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and Korean War combined.”

This forgotten conflict has cost the U.S. taxpayer almost $1 trillion and has resulted in the deaths of more than 2,400 U.S. military personnel — as well as tens of thousands of unnamed, innocent Afghan civilians. “We’re pretty close to the day when we will wake up to the news of a casualty in Afghanistan who was not born on 9/11,” Democrat Pete Buttigieg, who himself was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014, said at the CNN presidential debate in July.

So Trump, prior to becoming president, was right when he declared Afghanistan to be a “mess” and a “total disaster.”

And he was right, upon assuming office, to have authorized peace talks with the Taliban (despite harshly condemning Obama for trying to do the same in 2012). Liberals who piously condemn Trump for trying to do a deal with the Islamist insurgent group need to explain how they plan to end the fighting without trying to do the same. (“At some point,” tweeted political scientist Paul Musgrave on Sunday, “the US will have to reach a deal with the Taliban, accept defeat, go on an all-out rampage, or make it a literal forever war.”)

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As for the attempt to deny terrorists a safe haven, if 100,000 US troops couldn’t defeat the Taliban at the height of the Obama-ordered surge in 2011, why should we believe that the current deployment of 14,000 U.S. troops can achieve any kind of victory in 2019 or 2020?

Lest we forget, the Taliban right now controls “nearly half of Afghanistan.” There are at least 240 Al Qaeda fighters on the ground in Afghanistan, according to the U.N. Security Council. Meanwhile, Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman says an ascendant ISIS has invested “a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in Afghanistan,” while the Pentagon says the jihadi group poses a “substantial threat” to the country.

@ TI.