Source: Spiegel.de

The United States is drawing down its forces in Afghanistan.  Some military personnel will remain for untold years to come, but the vast majority of troops will be gone in 2014.  Many Americans favor getting out of Afghanistan, and the country’s fiscal troubles make leaving all the more appealing. More broadly, the sense that things are not going particularly well (nor particularly badly) has sapped the desire to stick around. Dexter Filkins writes,

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the NATO presence in Afghanistan, is at risk. By the end of 2014, when the last Americans are due to stop fighting, the Taliban will not be defeated. A Western-style democracy will not be in place. The economy will not be self-sustaining. No senior Afghan official will likely be imprisoned for any crime, no matter how egregious. And it’s a good bet that, in some remote mountain valley, even Al Qaeda, which brought the United States to Afghanistan in the first place, will be carrying on.

Filkins’ lengthy article carries an unsettling subtitle—“Will civil war hit Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves?” The answer appears to be—quite possibly.  Various factions within the country are armed, and the Afghan government remains weak.  And this possibility makes one wonder, “Should the U.S. reconsider its pullout? Is the cost of the collapse of Afghanistan higher than the cost of a continued U.S. presence?”

Filkins’ full article can be read for free at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/09/120709fa_fact_filkins.