President Trump is withdrawing a significant number of troops from Afghanistan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is livid. According to AP, McConnell “warned against a potentially ‘humiliating’ pullout from Afghanistan that he said would be worse than President Barack Obama’s 2011 withdrawal from Iraq and reminiscent of the U.S. departure from Saigon in 1975.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Michael McCaul, Republican leader on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, insisted: “We need to ensure a residual force is maintained for the foreseeable future to protect U.S. national and homeland security interests and to help secure peace for Afghanistan.” But McConnell and McCaul are advocating for a failed policy. It is long past time to leave Afghanistan.

In his State of the Union address on February 5, 2019, President Trump stated: “As a candidate for President, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.” Epitomizing the need to do this was what happened when Trump first moved to end America’s longest endless war, the war in Afghanistan, with a treaty with the group that the U.S. entered Afghanistan in order to topple, the Taliban, in February 2020. The ink was still fresh on the signed document when the Taliban launched a new attack against Afghan government forces, killing twenty Afghan soldiers and police officers.

The attack was a fitting symbol of the fruitlessness of these endless wars and the bankruptcy of the assumptions and policies that had led to their being waged.

After all these years, we have little to show for all our efforts in the nation that has been ominously dubbed the “graveyard of empires.” The U.S. has sacrificed the lives of numerous heroic service members and squandered trillions for nearly two decades in the fond hope that it could remake Afghanistan into a stable, Western-style republic that would respect the human rights of all its citizens. That’s still the plan, as far as the architects of our intervention are concerned: One foreign policy establishment wonk counseled patience, saying that Afghanistan “is not going to become Switzerland overnight,” a fact that is as obvious as Joe Biden’s dementia.

Great. So we know now after almost twenty years that it isn’t going to happen overnight, but how long exactly is it going to take? To that question the advocates of endless intervention have no definite answer. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in late 2019: “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”

All right, but what’s it going to take? Do Rumsfeld, McConnell, and McCaul really think that after nearly twenty years, one more year, or five more years, or ten more years, will do the job?

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