[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 64 (Wednesday, April 14, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1914-S1915]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Afghanistan

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President and my colleagues, there is a saying about 
Afghanistan: that we have turned the corner toward victory so many 
times that we are spinning in circles.
  During the beginning of my time in Congress, I went to Afghanistan to 
visit our troops and military leadership about every 2 years. Each time 
I went, I was met by a new, capable, impressive general who had just 
started his yearlong tour, who told me that the last general did it 
wrong and that, this time, everything was going to be different. I 
remember coming back from my third trip to Afghanistan--I think it was 
in 2011--convinced that it was time to leave. The primary mission had 
been accomplished. Within a few years of our invasion, al-Qaida in 
Afghanistan had been reduced to a shell of its former self, and we had 
really shifted to a new mission: nation-building. At the outset, there 
was reason for us to stay and engage in that mission and to work with 
the new Afghan Government to help get it on its own feet, but, by 2011, 
that mission had, for all intents and purposes, become a permanent one.
  Now, after 20 years of war and handwringing about when the right time 
is to leave, we have to acknowledge some basic truths: Our military 
presence in Afghanistan is not creating the conditions necessary to 
eradicate the Taliban or the conditions necessary to create a fully 
functional Afghan military or government.
  In fact, the facts on the ground would tell you the opposite is true: 
The longer we stay, the more powerful the Taliban becomes and the less 
willing the Afghan Government appears to be to make the hard choices to 
stand on its own.
  We can pretend that another year is going to change this, but it 
won't. ``Just a little bit more time'' has become the rinse-and-repeat 
phrase of the Afghanistan hawks, but to stay any longer is really--
let's be honest--a decision to stay forever, and that is something the 
American people do not support.
  I want to tell you one story from my trip to Afghanistan in 2011 that 
helped to confirm my belief that something was very wrong about our 
policy there. I went with a bipartisan delegation. I was in the House 
at the time. We visited a far-off Province in western Afghanistan--a 
small town called Parmakan--and we were there to visit a group of Army 
commandos who toured us around this village. They were protecting the 
farmers in this village from Taliban attack. They attested to us that 
the attacks had largely stopped, and in the place of those attacks had 
matured a commerce between the Taliban forces that surrounded the 
village and the farmers of the village. As we walked around this 
village, we made our way through fields of these beautiful, beautiful, 
colorful flowers.
  I turned to my colleague next to me, and I asked him if he had a 
sense as to what this crop was.
  He said: I think I do, but let's confirm.
  So we asked one of the village elders what they were harvesting in 
these fields.
  Poppy, he told us.
  Our U.S. military forces were protecting the poppy trade in this 
western Province of Afghanistan--in fact, protecting the ability of the 
Taliban to come in and purchase that poppy in order to fuel the 
insurgency that we were fighting. Our troops were literally being 
utilized to protect the revenue source of our enemy. And so no wonder 
our policy in Afghanistan appears circular. In many ways, it is and it 
has been for a very long time.

  But even for those who disagree with me and contest that our presence 
there has actually helped facilitate the survival of the Taliban, what 
evidence is there that staying for another few years is going to make 
the key difference?
  The American war in Afghanistan is nearly 20 years old. It is the 
longest war in U.S. history, outlasting the Civil War, the Spanish-
American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean war combined.
  The United States and other international donors have invested an 
extraordinary amount of money and effort and blood to help stand up a 
functioning Afghan Government and civil society. And yet that 
government has

[[Page S1915]]

failed to get widespread support from the Afghan people. There are many 
reasons for this, but there is one big one: corruption. And the 
billions upon billions of dollars that are pumped into the Afghan 
economy by U.S. taxpayers often never find their way to actually 
helping the people of that country. Too much of our aid has been 
syphoned off by local leaders and unintentionally we have helped 
establish a system of corruption that has become so pervasive and so 
predatory that people have, frankly, become less resistant to Taliban 
inroads.
  Without a functioning police force, local Governors establish their 
own militias, and the mafia-style system that has developed has led to 
this vast drug trafficking network, fueled by corruption and that poppy 
production I talked about.
  This has distorted Afghanistan's economy, and it has, frankly, 
neutralized a lot of our economic aid. And yet the United States often, 
over the course of the last 20 years, has tolerated these warlords, 
these drug traffickers, and these corrupt defense contractors inside 
Afghanistan because we consider the enemy of our enemy to be our 
friend. Our entire mission there has often been built on a self-
defeating strategy.
  In fact, what began as a vital mission to eliminate the threat of 
those who attacked us on September 11 has now, in some ways, become a 
symbol of nearly everything that is wrong with American foreign policy. 
Our armed presence in Afghanistan epitomizes this hubristic myth around 
the power of U.S. troops abroad; that they can completely dismantle 
terrorist networks by force, install and cultivate a stable democratic 
government, and eliminate rampant corruption and illegal drug 
cultivation.
  Two decades and nearly $2 trillion dollars of spending later, we have 
seen the limitations of those fantastical assumptions. Our generals 
have offered PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation on 
how this time it is going to be different, but it never is because the 
failure really isn't in the execution. The failure has been in the 
design.
  A few thousand troops--and that is what we have there today--cannot 
deliver security and political stability to a complex, multicultural, 
multilingual nation, long resistant to centralized rule, on the other 
side of the world.
  We were right to pursue the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked us on 
September 11, but that mission is completed, and it is time to face 
facts about the limitations of American military power in Afghanistan 
and bring our troops home.
  Now, let's be clear, al-Qaida still wants to harm the United States, 
but the threat that they pose today is nowhere near what it was 20 
years ago when they attacked our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 
bombed the USS Cole, and killed thousands of Americans on September 11.
  Intelligence estimates tell us that in Afghanistan, there may be only 
200, 300, maybe 400 al-Qaida members total. The organization is no 
longer capable of planning large-scale attacks against the United 
States. That is what our intelligence estimates tell us. And, frankly, 
there are far more al-Qaida members today in other countries, like 
Yemen, for instance. Does that mean that we should also plant huge 
numbers of U.S. troops in every place where there are security vacuums 
to eliminate the terrorist threat from those countries? Of course not.
  After two decades of the War on Terror, we have made a ton of 
mistakes, but we have also gotten a lot better in terms of our 
intelligence capabilities and our ability to strike against a terrorist 
threat absent a huge in-country presence. Why not apply that lesson 
learned to Afghanistan?
  To their credit, the Trump administration was right to finally call 
it like it is and state that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan couldn't 
and shouldn't continue forever.
  But as usual, the Trump team didn't put in the work to ensure that we 
could do this responsibly by their deadline of May 1. So a 4-month 
extension, announced by President Biden, will give us the space needed, 
not to magically accomplish what we haven't been able to do in 20 years 
but to realistically chart out the operational plans for pulling out 
the 2,500 troops whom we still have there.
  Now, finally, I want to be honest. When we withdraw, there is a real 
possibility the situation in Afghanistan is going to get worse. It is 
likely that fighting between the Afghan Government and the Taliban 
escalates. At that point, either the Afghan Government will have to 
lead the fight without the crutch of American support or the government 
could collapse.
  But this is the key point: That has been the dynamic for the last 15 
years, and it is going to continue to be the dynamic for the next 15 
years. It wouldn't be any different if we had stayed for another 5 
years, another 20 years, or another year. There is simply no evidence 
to suggest that things are going to change. After 20 years and billions 
of dollars of investment in the Afghan Government, the onus has to be 
on them to get their act together and to earn the support of the 
people.
  And one last point, being in Afghanistan is a choice, a choice to not 
focus on other theaters that present more serious threats to 
international norms, global stability, and American security. It bogs 
America down having 2,500 troops there and thousands more contractors 
and billions of dollars. It bogs us down in a theater that, frankly, 
just matters less to us today than it did years ago.
  Just within the last few days, China has leveled new threats to the 
territorial integrity of its neighbors; Russia is amassing thousands of 
troops on the border of Ukraine; and there are new worries about a 
potential attack on NATO member states.
  And remember, counterterrorism officials and our daily newsfeed 
remind us that the most serious threat to America today is actually not 
from foreign terrorist organizations but from domestic groups.
  We spend more money than any other nation in the world on security, 
but even given the gargantuan size of our global military footprint, we 
cannot and should not be everywhere. We need to make choices every now 
and again, and right now it is fantasy, not reality, that undergirds an 
argument to stay in Afghanistan for another 10 years or 5 years or even 
another year.
  A big part of being President is making tough choices, and today 
President Biden has made the right one to end this war
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.