Trump to deploy more troops in Afghanistan

Taliban warns Afghanistan will become a ‘graveyard’ for the US

Washington, Aug. 22: President Donald Trump cleared the way for the deployment of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan on Tuesday, backtracking from his promise to rapidly end America’s longest war, while pillorying ally Pakistan for offering safe haven to “agents of chaos.”

In his first formal address to the nation as commanderin-chief, Mr Trump discarded his previous criticism of the 16-year-old war as a waste of time and money, admitting things looked different from “behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

“My instinct was to pull out,” Mr Trump said as he spoke of his frustration with a war that has killed thousands of US troops and cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars. But following months of deliberation, Mr Trump said he had concluded “the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable” leaving a “vacuum” that terrorists “would instantly fill.”

He said in 2011, the US hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq. “As a result, our hard-won gains slipped back into the hands of terrorist enemies...the vacuum we created by leaving too soon gave safe haven for ISIS to spread, to grow, recruit, and launch attacks. We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq,” said Mr Trump.

While he refused to offer detailed troop numbers, senior White House officials said he had already authorised his defense secretary to deploy up to 3,900 more troops to Afghanistan.

He warned that the approach would now be more pragmatic than idealistic. Security assistance to Afghanistan was “not a blank check” he said, warning he would not send the military to “construct democracies in faraway lands or create democracies in our own image.” “We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists.”

The US has grown increasingly weary of the conflict that began in October 2001 as a hunt for the 9/11 attackers has turned into a vexed effort to keep Afghanistan’s divided and corruption-hindered democracy alive amid a brutal Taliban insurgency.

The Islamist group later vowed it would make the country “a graveyard” for the US and would continue its “jihad” as long as American troops remained in the country. “If America doesn’t withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, soon Afghanistan will become another graveyard for this superpower in the 21st century,” Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan welcomed Mr Trump’s move. President Ashraf Ghani, speaking to troops in southern Kandahar, said Mr Trump’s first formal address showed that America was “with us, without any time limit”. “You cannot win this war,” Mr Ghani told the Taliban, calling on them to join talks and saying Kabul wants peace with neighbouring Pakistan. — AFP