JUSTIN KATZ
WASHINGTON: The day after the last US service members boarded aircraft leaving Kabul, a top House lawmaker responsible for crafting the annual defense policy bill said the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is not likely to trigger excessive aggression from Russia or China.
“I think anyone who thinks that their [Russia or China] calculation has significantly changed because we just pulled the last 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan — I really don’t see that,” the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, D-WA., said Tuesday. “There are a lot of other issues that go into whether or not Russia and China are going to feel like they have the ability to be aggressive in those parts of the world.
“The fact we’re no longer tied down in Afghanistan, I don’t really think is going to be one of them,” he added.
Smith’s comments came one day after the Pentagon announced the conclusion of a massive evacuation effort that has bookended the United States’ time in Afghanistan. That evacuation effort was marked by a deadly suicide bombing attack that killed 13 US troops and dozens of Afghans, as well as a bizarre, last-minute cooperative effort between the US and the Taliban, a group it has long sought to destroy.
After 20 years of fighting and thousands of service members killed, Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of US Central Command, told reporters on Monday that the final plane carrying the United States’ top military officer still in Kabul, his diplomatic counterpart from the State Department as well as all remaining US service members departed Hamid Karzai International Airport at 11:59 p.m. on Aug. 30 in Kabul – 3:29 p.m. eastern time on Aug. 30 in the United States.
While speaking at a virtual Brookings’ event, Smith was asked whether the withdrawal — or as the military prefers to call it, “retrograde” — would embolden China to attempt a takeover of Taiwan, or perhaps lead Russia to be more aggressive towards Ukraine or Estonia. Smith said he was unconvinced by those notions.
People are saying “weakness invites aggression. Well, why don’t we just bomb everybody all the time? Show them that we’re not weak,” Smith asked. “Let’s think our way through just the bumper sticker thought.”
While China may not make an immediate move towards annexing Taiwan, the current events have presented Beijing an irresistible messaging opportunity. “This has dealt a heavy blow to the credibility and reliability of the US,” the Global Times editorial page, a publication that is largely a mouthpiece for the Chinese government, wrote soon after the Taliban claimed Kabul.
“Beijing has just been handed an absolutely wonderful opportunity to basically say, ‘Yo, we thought the Americans were in decline, but everybody doubted us. They can’t even do a basic military operation against fairly backwards, less capable people like the Taliban,’” Dean Cheng, a top Chinese military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, recently told Breaking Defense. “And that’s part of the message that they are pounding away at toward Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and India.”
Smith also addressed a separate argument floating around that the United States’ withdrawal will mean the security environment is “September 10 all over again” — in other words, that Afghanistan will become a terrorist safe haven that will directly lead to new attacks on America.
The congressman disputed this notion, saying that the world — and even the Taliban — is very different compared to 20 years ago, and that he has had multiple conversations with Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the United States’ strategy for counter terrorism post-Afghanistan.
Smith’s comments also come a day before his committee is scheduled to mark up its final draft of the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. He said the committee had more than 700 amendments submitted for tomorrow’s marathon mark up. At least one amendment will come from Ranking Member Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) who plans to propose increasing the topline by $25 billion. Defense News first reported Rogers’ plans.
Smith did not directly address the purported amendment, but he did knock down arguments made by progressive Democrats who insist the country cannot afford to spend additional money on defense.
“I don’t support the argument that when you look at the defense budget, [it says] ‘oh my gosh, we can’t spend another $25 billion because we have all these other priorities.’ We’ve spent a lot of money on all those other priorities,” Smith said. The congressman cited the funding spent on coronavirus relief as an example.
The committee chairman wrapped up the event with a warning to his members about being too parochial during the mark up: “It is not your job to bring home every last dollar you can to your district,” Smith said.
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