President Trump plans to pull about 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan early in 2020, officials in his administration reported in mid-December, a partial withdrawal that would put American force levels in our longest war exactly where they were when Trump entered office. Three years gone, thousands of American and Afghan lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with an apparently permanent entanglement in the longest war in U.S. history.
That futility and strategic failure has been a defining feature of the foreign policy of the 2010s. A decade ago, we were nine years into the War in Afghanistan and seven years on in Iraq. Both wars were increasingly unpopular: Public opinion had turned against the invasion of Iraq several years prior, and although support for the initial invasion of Afghanistan remained a little longer in the black, perspectives on the war in general were also pessimistic.
President Obama was just two years into his first term, following a campaign in which he’d promised to repudiate the foreign policy mistakes of his predecessor. Instead he built on them, and, after a similarly critical candidacy, President Trump has done the same. Both presidents insisted on their opposition to “endless wars,” but both escalated U.S. military intervention more often than they restrained it.
The war in Afghanistan, the rotting heart of U.S. foreign policy, is exemplary here, but not unique. The last decade saw Obama reject the small-footprint approach of the Bush administration in favor of a surge, deploying as many as 100,000 Americans at once in the first half of the decade. Although he announced an end to U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan at the close of 2014, it is impossible to say in retrospect that Obama ended this conflict in any ordinary sense of the word.
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