News Journal:Good men are dying in our unwinnable war in Afghanistan

Two weeks ago, Sergeant Major Timothy A. Bolyard was killed in Afghanistan. Awarded the Bronze Star on six different occasions, he was on his 13th foreign deployment.
He was the 154th member of the American-led coalition to be killed by what is known as an “insider attack” by one of the Afghans he was helping to train.
I didn’t know Tim Bolyard, but I met hundreds of dedicated soldiers like him on my trips to Afghanistan when I was a United States senator. I read about his death with sadness and a deep sense of anger.
Nothing has changed since my last trip in March and April of 2010. I knew then we were wasting the lives of good men and women in a war that had been and always will be unwinnable.
As a member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, I had access to just about any information or anyone in the world who could help me decide what we should be doing in Afghanistan.
I took three trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. I met with special forces on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border training the Pakistan Frontier Corps to go after the Taliban, then and now using Pakistan as a safe harbor from our troops in Afghanistan.
I met half a dozen times, in Kabul and Washington, with then-President Hamid Karzai to complain about the rampant corruption of his government officials.
I traveled by helicopter to all parts of Afghanistan, meeting with our troops and the troops of our NATO allies. And I took part in numerous briefings and hearings in Washington.
I can’t tell you how reluctantly I finally decided that, even though we had in place perhaps the best fighting force in history, the United States would never win a war in Afghanistan.
Had the battle been a simple one between our troops and the Taliban, I believe we could have won fairly easily. But that is not the war being fought. The war is between the Taliban and the corrupt Afghan government in Kabul that our troops have no choice but to support and defend.
Just as in Vietnam, a corrupt central government has made victory impossible. Every knowledgeable American I spoke to felt the people hated the Kabul government every bit as much as they despised the Taliban.
What’s more, the Pakistani military, especially its intelligence service, believed it was in Pakistan’s interest to have the Taliban win in Afghanistan. They provided aid and comfort to the Taliban, and supported the Haqqani Network, located in Pakistan.

The Haqqani Network had been the go-to organization for the CIA in the 1980 efforts against the Russian troops in Afghanistan. Since then, it has sided with the Taliban and is opposed to all “western” influence in the region.
Operating from safe havens in Pakistan, organizations like the Haqqani Network make it incredibly difficult for our troops and Afghan security forces.
Finally, the people of Afghanistan know we are eventually going to leave, and anyone who had helped us would be at the mercy of the Taliban. During one of my trips, I traveled to the Maiwand District in Kandahar Province and attended a community shura in a small town. It consisted of about 75 men who were in the leadership in the town and the surrounding area.
They were polite, but were clearly leery of being too friendly. I could sense their unease.
I was reminded of that meeting when I watched War Machine, a recent movie starring Brad Pitt. Pitt plays the latest in a parade of American generals who come to Afghanistan to finally get it right. He meets with a shura, very much like mine, and tells its members about his great new ideas that will definitely defeat the Taliban.
When he asks for questions, there is no response. Finally one man says, very quietly, “The longer you stay, the worse it will be when you leave.”
Pitt tries to reason with him, but the only response he gets is “Please leave now.”
The people of Afghanistan have been saying that to us for eighteen years. They said the same thing to the Russians in the 1980s, and the British twice in the nineteenth century.
The Russians and the British finally listened. When will we?