Why We Will Never Leave Afghanistan

Bagram Air Base in north-central Afghanistan. Note Kandahar, home of Kandahar Air Field, much further south.

by Thomas Neuburger

The U.S. will never leave Afghanistan. Our military is too strong to be driven out by the Taliban, just as U.S. military control is too weak to "pacify" (fully conquer) the country.

Fortunately for the U.S., its goal is not to pacify the nation. The U.S. goal is much more narrow, and in geostrategic terms much more significant. It's to keep control of Bagram Air Base. So long as the U.S. controls Bagram and has a semi-successful client state installed in Kabul as a way of keeping the insurgency at arm's length, it has everything it needs to accomplish what it wants to accomplish in the region.

Holding Bagram Air Base does two things for U.S. military planners:

• The Bagram base in particular and the U.S. occupation in general put a U.S. military presence on the borders of five important Central Asian nations — Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. From there the U.S. can project power in every direction that matters, east, north and west.
   
• The base at Bagram represents a permanent and constant threat specifically to Iran, our designated primary enemy in the region. We are sitting on their border in the same way a Russian air base in Cuba would be sitting on ours — constantly a threat, constantly a reminder of the presence of a hostile foreign power.

The Bagram base has one added feature: Until 2014 it was home to one of the CIA's primary black torture sites, and perhaps it still is, unless you trust the CIA not to lie.

Until the U.S. makes peace with Iran — something I don't see happening under any presidency but Bernie Sanders', if at all — we will maintain our military presence there until we are forced by force to abandon it. Given the current state of our war against the Taliban and theirs against us — a kind of rolling, shooting stalemate — that base and that presence is as permanent as we want it to be.

For more, I refer you to this excellent short article by Ronald Enzweiler, a man who has lived and worked in the Middle East since the 1970s, including for seven years as a civilian adviser during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

After a discussion of who the Taliban are and why they will neither stop fighting nor ever lose popular support, Enzweiler writes this about why the U.S. will also never stop fighting (emphasis added):

The real reason for the pushback by the Washington national security establishment against getting all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan is the guiding maxim of our post-World War II “War State” (the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned about) that has grown into a $1-trillion/year enterprise with a worldwide empire of over 800 foreign military installations: never give up a military base in a strategic location. The U.S. military eventually will be pushed out of Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan (it’s also a civilian airport near a large restive city in Taliban territory). But Bagram Airfield (a prior Soviet base north of Kabul) is a military-only installation in an easily defended remote area. Bagram is the missing piece in our War State’s chessboard of worldwide bases. Retaining it will enable our military to “project power” throughout Central Asia. It’s a steal at $30 to $40 billion/year (assuming troops levels and graft payments are drawn down at some point) for our overfunded War State. Representative Max Thornberry, then chairman and now ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, visited Bagram in October 2018. He publicly acknowledged afterwards that the U.S. seeks “a sustainable presence” in Afghanistan. (The U.S. military’s new high-tech F-35 fighters — a $1.5 trillion program — are manufactured at a Lockheed plant near Rep. Thornberry’s district in north Texas.)

To repeat — The guiding maxim of our post-World War II state is, never give up a military base in a strategic location. Look again at the map at the top. When will the Pentagon agree to surrender that base? Answer: Never.

Enzweiler is more certain that the U.S will eventually be pushed out of Afghanistan than I am, perhaps with good reason. He thinks, for example, that the U.S. will eventually lose Kandahar in the south, and of that I'm sure he's right. It's true that the Taliban will never stop fighting us, just as the Vietnamese never stopped.

But the U.S. doesn't need to hold Kandahar to hold Kabul. Note the location of Bagram on the map. So long as the U.S. holds that region and can maintains a compliant puppet "government" there with a reasonably sized "pacified" (or bribed) quiet zone around it — and so long as the current geopolitical forces of the world are not radically restructured by the coming and massive scramble that climate chaos will bring — our military will flex every muscle to maintain its position there. It doesn't have to control the country to control that region.

Will the U.S. military flex every muscle to keep the base at Bagram even if an elected president decides on a full withdrawal? I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one. To start, we'd need to elect a president who wants what voters want, an end to the war in Afghanistan.