America’s military merry-go-round continues. Questions still abound about the role our servicemen and women should play in the 21st century. This was brought again into focus when President Trump announced last month that he would pull out 7,000 troops from Afghanistan and the remaining 2200 from Syria in the near future.
Results of this policy move were predictable. Republican hawks were aghast at this precipitous action, taken without proper consultation with Congress or military brass. Since anything the President does is met with opposition from the Democrats, we listened to those who had praised former President Obama’s pullout from Iraq now accusing Trump of betraying our allies and not living up to our commitments.
Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned in protest over the announcement, hinting strongly that he disagreed with the removal of troops from anywhere in the world.
True to his libertarian roots, Rand Paul, the Republican Senator from Kentucky, praised the change in policy, putting him at odds with most of his Senate colleagues.
About 15 months ago, I blogged about the situation, and my position has not changed in the interim. In fact, my opinion has hardened with respect to our military commitments around the world. Here are, again, some of the facts as to the extended involvement of our armed services around the globe.
More than 150 nations have American personnel stationed in them. Included are the little heard of African countries of Djibouti, where the U. S. has an important base located. Niger has about 800 troops from America, and four of these were killed in October of 2017. How many citizens of this country can even find these nations on a map, much less care about the situations there?
Of more interest are the thousands stationed overseas in major countries. More than 65 years after a truce was signed in the Korean Conflict, about 24,000 American soldiers are still there. Dwarfing that, around 40,000 reside in Japan, even though it has been 73 years since we defeated that nation in WW2, and 67 years since a peace treaty handed over control to the Japanese. On the other side of the world, 24,000 or so still patrol in Germany, again with the same timeline as Japan since ending hostilities in that country.
Nation after nation hosts American troops, with reasons for such deployments varied and sundry. According to the Department of Defense, more than 300,000 troops are overseas in the above mentioned 150 countries. Even high ranking members of Congress (Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican) did not know we had soldiers in Niger when the four servicemen were killed.
But back to Afghanistan and our involvement there. Our reasons for sending troops to that fourth world nation stemmed from its involvement in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That’s right — seventeen years, and counting, our soldiers have been in that battle-scarred land. And since I last wrote about our involvement, more of our sons and daughters have died in the fighting.
About 14,000 military personnel are in the Afghan nation, which means that Trump wants our presence there cut in half. Indications are he wants to pull more out in the near future. This begs the question — what can we accomplish in the months and years to come we have not accomplished in the past 17 and a half years? Seven years of former President George W. Bush leading our military, eight years of former President Barack Obama at the top and now two years of Donald Trump — when does it end?
Those who oppose the moves to return our troops to our own soil MUST be able to justify the expense of money and blood expended to keep them in Afghanistan. If they cannot, or if those naysayers cannot give a good example of what the end game should look like, they must give the pullout a chance to succeed.
And what of the removal of our soldiers from Syria? Since 2011, that country has seen a brutal civil war which has taken hundreds of thousands of Syrian lives, spawned the growth of ISIS and has seen conflict spill over into bordering nations. What “skin” do we have in the game? ISIS is now only a pale shadow of its former self and Bashar Assad has not been toppled, enabled to stay in power by the support of Russia and the inept red-line drawing of our former administration. What can we change by keeping such a small support contingent within the Syrian borders? President Trump has wisely attached a condition to the withdrawal, the protection of our Kurdish allies, but seems intent on carrying through with ending our involvement with the internal struggles of the Syrians.
Iraq? Don’t get me started on that conflict. When that began, my statement was simply that it was “the wrong war and the wrong time against the wrong enemy and for the wrong reasons”, and the thousands who died there may well have “died in vain” as Lincoln said of the Civil War carnage.
But for those who oppose the policy change on Afghanistan and Syria, a couple of questions still need to be answered. One — what can be done with continuing the policies of the past years that have not already been done? Two — what will winning the wars look like? Give us, the American people, those answers and maybe we will be able to fund the efforts with blood and treasure knowing it might, just might, be worth it.