Over the weekend, the Taliban in Afghanistan declared a three-day ceasefire. The cession of hostilities was announced to coincide with the islamic festival of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. In response, the government in Kabul released a number of Taliban prisoners. This was only the second ceasefire in Afghanistan since the Americans arrived there in 2001. It also offered a brief period of stability in what has been a very rocky and fragile peace process. From The New York Times:

In February, the insurgents and the United States signed an initial peace deal that lays out a phased withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. It also describes the next steps of a process to end the war in a political settlement — including an exchange of up to 6,000 prisoners that would pave the way for direct negotiations between the Afghan sides. All of those steps have since hit obstacles, and the Taliban over the past couple months have intensified their attacks on Afghan forces even as they have left United States troops alone.

Meanwhile, the President* of the United States, who does not have even brief periods of stability, would like to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan in time for his campaign to make commercials about it this fall. Again, from the Times:

The proposal for a complete withdrawal by November reflects an understanding among military commanders that such a timeline may be Trump’s preferred option because it may help bolster his campaign. But they plan to propose, and to advocate, a slower withdrawal schedule, officials said.
The move is part of the Pentagon’s attempt to avoid another situation like the one in December 2018 and again in October 2019, when Trump surprised military officials by ordering the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. Diplomatic chaos and violence followed, and the president subsequently modified each announcement. American troops remain in Syria, although in smaller numbers.
Senior military officials believe a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan would effectively doom the peace deal reached this year with the Taliban.

The American combat presence in Afghanistan hasn’t made a lot of sense for quite some time now. Like the Russians, British, Romans, and Macedonians before us, we learned that nobody really wants Afghanistan except the people who live there. Once al Qaeda’s headquarters was cleaned out and/or moved to Pakistan, the mission dissolved into a muddle. Were we establishing a peaceful democracy there? A great number of the people there seemed unimpressed. Now, with the end of American involvement looming, the Taliban has reorganized itself in preparation for what comes next.

They have never explicitly renounced their past of harboring international terrorists, nor the oppressive practices toward women and minorities that defined their term in power in the 1990s. And the insurgents remain deeply opposed to the vast majority of the Western-supported changes in the country over the past two decades.
enter caption here on july 10, 2009 in kandahar, afghanistan
Joe Raedle//Getty Images
The American combat presence in Afghanistan hasn’t made a lot of sense for quite some time now.
“We prefer the agreement to be fully implemented so we can have an all-encompassing peace,” Amir Khan Mutaqi, the chief of staff to the Taliban’s supreme leader, said in a rare interview in Doha, Qatar’s capital, with The New York Times. “But we also can’t just sit here when the prisons are filled with our people, when the system of government is the same Western system, and the Taliban should just go sit at home. “No logic accepts that — that everything stays the same after all this sacrifice,” he said, adding, “The current government stands on foreign money, foreign weapons, on foreign funding.”

As this exemplary piece in the Times shows, there are now at least two generations of Taliban who have fought against Americans and against the central government that they see as a Western corruption of their religious fanaticism.

“Our fight started before America — against corruption. The corrupt begged America to come because they couldn’t fight,” a young commander of the Taliban elite “Red Unit” in Alingar said. He was a toddler when the United States invasion began, and met up with a Times reporting team in the area where government control gives way to the Taliban. “Until an Islamic system is established,” said the commander, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “our jihad will continue until doomsday.”

There is nothing left for the United States to do in Afghanistan except leave it. The odds are that the consequences will be violent and unpleasant. Domestic repercussions, heavily draped in self-righteousness, will be deafening. The eventual historical accounting will be severe. A purpose for nearly 20 years of war will be as elusive as ever. Wars don’t end cleanly anymore.

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Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.