America’s War in Afghanistan Is the Mother of All Sunk Costs
The blood and treasure already spent shouldn’t be used as a reason for staying the course.
A U.S. Marine along with an Afghan soldier after an IED exploded while under enemy fire in Mian Poshteh, Afghanistan.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan is an investment of kinds, albeit one of blood and treasure. To put things in financial terms, that investment is being written off—abandoned, essentially—with President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s terror attacks on the U.S. A war that was described as necessary is now said to be unnecessary. That’s bound to deepen the pain of families of fallen American and Afghan soldiers, who now have a new reason to ask whether their loved ones died in vain.
It’s tempting to say that the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan to protect its huge investment there. Some have argued precisely that. In an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2015 directed at President Barack Obama, retired General David Petraeus and Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon wrote, “The right approach is for Obama to protect our investment in Afghanistan and to hand off to his successor military forces and tools that will still be critically needed in 2017 and beyond.” They added that the cost of staying was small in comparison to “well over 2,000 American lives and nearly $1 trillion in expense” as well as the risk of future attacks on the U.S. emanating from Afghanistan.