The New U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Brings Along the Same Stale Ideas by Sophia Larson and Jerrod A. Laber - The National Interest
As the anniversary of the September 11 attacks draws near, the Afghanistan War—the nearly seventeen-year-old conflict those terrible events spawned—is seeing a change in leadership. Army Lt. Gen. Austin Scott Miller, America’s ninth commander, is preparing to take charge of the effort but has already admitted to his lack of innovative thinking. At his confirmation hearing in June, he told the Senate that he couldn’t guarantee a timeline for bringing U.S. troops home. This is unfortunate—and expected. Despite the change of command, Miller represents the same stale thinking that has permeated U.S. foreign policy for the last two decades.
Last Wednesday, outgoing Afghanistan commander Gen. John Nicholson, held his final press conference , where he repeated the same talking points on making progress with nothing to show for it. This comes on the heels of a very violent past few weeks in Afghanistan featuring multiple suicide bomb attacks that killed dozens. If there were true progress, America would be creating an exit plan instead of supporting indefinite sustained commitment.
But the Pentagon continues to argue that the Afghanistan mission is about protecting the homeland, asserting that Al Qaeda’s unmolested presence there in the 1990s allowed them to carry out the attacks on 9/11. In reality, those terrible attacks were coordinated from multiple points across the globe—including inside the United States. Moreover, the intelligence community missed almost two dozen opportunities to stop them. Additionally, there are now multiple Al Qaeda-inspired groups across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia…