The seemingly endless Afghanistan conflict
If war is too important to be left to the generals, Trump hasn’t received the memo
On Aug. 21 U.S. President Donald Trump put forward a plan for resolving the nearly 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan, but he declined to specify the conditions by which he would judge the success of their mission there.
Trump declared that a rapid exit from the war-torn nation would leave a major power vacuum that would create a new safe haven for terrorists.
He is expected to send roughly 4,000 additional U.S. troops to the country, a recommendation made by the Pentagon. The decision will add billions of dollars a year to the already-towering war costs, which have topped $1 trillion in Afghanistan alone over the past 16 years.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has also spent tens of billions of dollars on projects in Afghanistan, many of which have failed.
With this announcement, Trump deepened American involvement in a military mission that has confounded his predecessors and that he once called futile. Remember, Trump campaigned for the presidency promising to extricate the United States from foreign conflicts.
An estimated 8,400 American troops remain stationed in Afghanistan, most assigned to an approximately 13,000-strong international force that is training and advising the Afghan military.
About 2,000 American troops are carrying out counterterrorism missions along with Afghan forces against groups like the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, the Islamic State in Khorasan.
But the regular Afghan police and army have been disappointing. The police are corrupt and ineffective, while the army is intent on staying in fixed positions rather than taking the fight to the Taliban. Trying to make soldiers out of Afghan recruits hasn’t worked.
The Bush administration claimed to have defeated the Taliban seven times from 2002 through 2005. So much for that! The country’s combination of state collapse, civil conflict, and ethnic disintegration has created a situation that may be beyond outside resolution.
Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity, though once stable, has provided another set of fault lines along which the country has atomized. Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Baloch, and Hazara are among the 14 groups listed in the country’s constitution.
Amid collapse, communities have coalesced around local ethnic groups. As they fight for control, their divisions harden. This has deepened violence and created barriers to peace.
The U.S. has tried everything since 2001. Nation-building, large scale operations, troop surges, diplomacy, requests for help from neighbouring Pakistan — you name it. Yet the Taliban is stronger than ever, and Trump won’t change that.
The new approach appears to be a victory for Defence Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who urged Trump to take a more aggressive effort to fight terrorist groups in Afghanistan. Both are military men.
If war is too important to be left to the generals, as the saying goes, obviously Trump hasn’t received the memo. In fact, the military seems to be taking an independent stance these days.
The top officers of the Navy, the Marines, the Army, the Air Force, and the National Guard came out after the violence in Charlottesville last month to say that racism, hatred and extremism had no place in the military, and ran counter to its most important values.
Though they did not refer specifically to Trump, the sharp contrast with some of the president’s comments was unusual.
They were reinforced by General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said it had been crucial that they speak out.
“They were speaking directly to the force and to the American people,” he said, “to remind them of the values for which we stand in the U.S. military.”
Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who was a national security official in the George W. Bush White House, said Trump was wise to take the hint, especially as he made a difficult case for increased involvement in Afghanistan.