Rarely in U.S. history has the endof a war been marked with less fanfare than the withdrawal ofthe last troops from Iraq in time for Christmas. Indeed, youcould almost be forgiven for failing to notice it at all, soarbitrary does the timing seem.
U.S. interests in Iraq will be no different in the firstweek of 2012 than they are now. Iraq��s government remains shaky,and the dangers of instability and civil war remain. About16,000 Americans are still there, too, including an unspecifiednumber of military contractors who bear arms.
What happened? How, exactly, does an eight-and-a-half-yearwar end with no one noticing?
The immediate answer is a failure to communicate. Theagreement between the Iraqi and U.S. governments about troopnumbers was scheduled to expire at the end of the year, and anew one was needed. The U.S. demanded that any new status offorces agreement give its troops immunity from prosecution underIraqi law.
Based on several prior rounds of negotiations, the Iraqisthought they knew the script. The U.S. would compromise,accepting de facto immunity without firm legal guarantees. Thatwould allow troops to remain and also let the Iraqi governmenttell its voters that the country had refused immunity to theperpetrators of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses.
When the U.S. threatened to pull its troops, as it had inthe past, the Iraqis didn��t believe it. But this time, theBarack Obama administration was very happy to allow the Iraqisto demand withdrawal. This absolved the White House of thecharge that it had abandoned Iraq before it was ready for trueself-determination.
A Convenient Withdrawal
From the standpoint of principle, the Obama administrationcan��t be faulted. Whatever we owe Iraq after invasion,occupation and botched nation-building, surely we must leavewhen its elected government tells us to get out.
The withdrawal was also good politics. The ��home forChristmas�� line will be forgotten after the new year. But thebottom line is that no ! one on t he political spectrum cancriticize the withdrawal.
Republicans would like to focus the public��s attention onthe struggling economy. The last thing they want is to remindvoters that their party initiated the war of choice that helpedspend us into the poorhouse. Nor would they like to seePresident George W. Bush��s unfortunate ��Mission Accomplished��episode freshly remembered.
Democrats, for their part, think they need to keep quietabout Iraq for a different reason: anticipatory worry aboutAfghanistan.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is still a couple of yearsaway. But it��s likely consequences are much more troubling thanthose we can expect in the near future in Iraq.
All the Iraqis need to do for Obama is to avoid a full-oncivil war before the presidential election in November. TheAfghans actually need to create a stable, functioning governmentthat will not fall to the Taliban. If they don��t, a second Obamaadministration, if there is one, is going to be plagued bydisaster that will make the fall of Saigon look modest bycomparison. The Democratic Party will almost surely pay a price.
Even the Iraqis won��t have an easy time of it. Exactly oneday after the Americans left, the Shiite-led administration ofPrime Minister Nouri Kamil al-Maliki turned on its Sunnipartners in what was supposedly a government of national unity.It issued an arrest warrant for a vice president and demanded ano-confidence vote in Parliament for a deputy prime minister,the two highest ranking Sunnis in the country.
These decisions, and their timing, can only be read as aSicilian message to the Sunni minority: Your leadership sleepswith the fishes.
Power-Sharing Ruse
Maliki is gambling that the Sunnis are too weak to restartthe insurgency and too wary of al-Qaeda infiltration to rely onthose bloodthirsty allies again, as they did in the years ofcivil strife before the U.S. military surge. The high stakesgamble tells the world that coexistence was a front to pleasethe America! ns. The Sunnis who bought into power-sharing weresuckers -- and now they are no longer needed.
Even if no one in the U.S. seems to be watching, one can beconfident that the Taliban are. The so-called reconciliationprocess in Afghanistan is supposed to persuade the Taliban tojoin some sort of national unity government and renounce theiral-Qaeda connections. If they go along, the U.S. could withdrawwithout appearing to leave the Afghans to their fate at thehands of resurgent Taliban.
The question for the Taliban has always been whether theprocess offers them any advantages compared with waiting out theU.S. and trying to take out the government of President Hamid Karzai. The situation of the Sunnis in Iraq shows thedisadvantages of cooperation clearly enough: Give up your arms,and you are vulnerable to being suppressed. The U.S. might bewilling to make friends with you, but its main objective is toprovide cover for its withdrawal. Erstwhile enemies will not beso forgiving -- especially if they believe their survivaldepends on getting rid of you.
Add to this that the Taliban probably believe they caneventually defeat the Afghan army, and you can see how dim theprospects for national reconciliation really are.
The Taliban aren��t delusional. Who really believes thatKarzai on his own -- even with another hundred thousand lightlytrained Afghan troops -- could win a war that the U.S. militaryhasn��t?
Barring some huge change in circumstances, the U.S.withdrawal from Afghanistan will be followed by intensified war.U.S. air support can delay the inevitable, but it cannot defeatthe Taliban. They will continue their strategy of guerilla warfought on their own terms. And their Pakistani supply lines willflow more freely than ever.
If and when the Taliban win, things will get very ugly veryfast. Afghans who allied themselves with the U.S. will beexecuted. Girls will be banned from school, and worse. TheTaliban have no doubt learned a thing or two in their decade ofwar against the worl! d��s sup erpower, but tolerance is unlikely tobe high on the list. The next U.S. withdrawal won��t escapepublic notice.
(Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University andthe author of ��Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR��sGreat Supreme Court Justices,�� is a Bloomberg View columnist.The opinions expressed are his own.)
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