Wars are not Won by Evacuations
September 9, 2021 | Mark Kelton
Mark Kelton, Former Deputy Director, CIA’s Counterintelligence, National Clandestine Service
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Winston Churchill’s 04 June 1940 speech in which he vowed that he and his countrymen would “fight on the beaches “and would “never surrender” in the face of a seemingly inevitable Nazi invasion is rightly renowned as perhaps history’s most famous address by a wartime leader. Less well known, however, is the cautionary tone the new Prime Minister struck in that same appearance before the House of Commons, as he sought to temper the joy and relief engendered by the seemingly miraculous extraction of the British army from the beaches of Dunkirk. “We must,” Churchill warned, “be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.” “Wars” he admonished, “are not won by evacuations.”
Shortly before the 2011 Abbottabad operation that killed Osama bin Laden, I was asked by my HQ, my views on mounting an assault on the target we knew as Abbottabad Compound 1, (AC1) given that we were not sure it sheltered the terrorist leader. After expressing my 95% confidence that the Al Qaeda (AQ) leader was in fact, there, I allegorically added that we must strike as ‘you cannot leave Hitler in his bunker and end the war’. I was fortuitously, right in my assessment that the murderer of so many innocents was present within AC1. Sadly, however, his death did not bring our war with radical Islamic terrorism to a conclusion. As was the case after Dunkirk, our enemy was unwilling to quit the field or to limit his unbounded war aims.
Likewise, we should have no expectation that the withdrawal of our forces from the Afghan theater of combat signals an end to the conflict with terrorists who started that war by attacking us on September 11, 2001. We cannot unilaterally declare an end to the War on Terror by leaving Afghanistan – however much we might wish to do so – for the very simple reason that our enemies do not share that desire. As former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta put it, “I understand that we’re trying to get our troops out of there, but the bottom line is, we can leave a battlefield, but we can’t leave the war on terrorism, which still is a threat to our security.”
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/afghanistan/wars-are-not-won-by-evacuations
