The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Outlook for U.S victory in Afghanistan unclear
Trump’s plan, like Obama’s, is to get Taliban to talk.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN— The retired Afghan general is no friend of the Taliban: He is a parliament member, an adviser to the Afghan president and a combat veteran. But he is also from Helmand province, the heart of the Taliban insurgency, and knows people on the other side.
After President Donald Trump’s speech, the general recalled a Taliban fighter who had taken up arms after six of his sons were killed, one by one. The same AK-47 was handed downto each. Then the father was killed.
“You don’t make peace with people like that,” said the general, Abdul Jabbar Qahraman. “You also don’t win by killing them, there are always more.”
After nearly 16 years of war, America’s longest, the Taliban are not only far from defeated, they are gaining ground. They also have evolved into a more tenacious foe than the one routed in 2001, making a U.S. military triumph seem more remote.
Ever since 2008, when Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “we can’t kill our way to victory,” the cornerstone of U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been not about obliterating the Taliban but pummeling them toward peace talks. President Ba rack O ba ma’ s Afghan surge of 100,000 U.S. troops failed to do this.
Now, Trump has asserted that the United States would yet achieve peace through victory. Despite that assertion, and far more modest troop commitments this time, the hope of tiring the Taliban remains the mantra repeated by U.S. diplomats and the generals whom the president has empowered to execute his policy.
They have quietly repeated tha thope evenin the absence of any visible peace process since the latest serious effort at talks collapsed last year. Within hours of Trump’s speech, the U.S. military commander in Kabul made that clear.
“This new strategy means the Taliban can not win militarily ,” said the commander, Gen. John W. Nicholson. “Nowis the time to renounce violence and reconcile. A peaceful, stable Afghanistan is victory for the Afghan people and the goal of the Coalition.”
As might be expected, the Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, scoffed at Trump’s speech as “nothing new.” Butmany Afghans on the government side had a similar take.
“That’s the same strategy going on the last two decades,” said Jamaluddin Badr, a member of the Afghan High Peace Council. “He said we’re going towin, but he didn’t make it clear how we’re going to win.”
The vision of victory laid out by U.S. generals, then and now, has been to help a friendly Afghan government hold Kabul and other crucial cities and convince the Taliban that they cannot again rise to national power, as they did in the ‘90s.
But the ground has shifted. Even if the new U.S. troop commitment limits the Taliban to the territory they have seized in the past two years, the pressure of that advance and old political rivalries have brought the Afghan government to the brink of collapse.
Further, the Taliban whom the Americans hope to bring to the table are not the same.
The Taliban position against peace talks has rarely been more hard-line than now. As the Taliban have regained territory, they have killed government soldiers and policemen at the highest rate of the war. Qahraman, who until last year was the president’s military envoy to Helmand, said the insurgents control 60 percent of the country. Even the government’s own fifigures concede the Taliban contest or control 35 percent, a substantial gain over last year.
What once was amarginal, militant faction, the Haqqani network, is now in the Taliban’s top leadership, including the No. 2 fifigure, who is in charge of military operations. The Haqqanis have been responsible for many of the deadliest attacks on the capital, and are known for running a virtual factory in Pakistan that has steadily supplied suicide bombers since 2005. The last Taliban leader toe spouse peace talks, Mullah Akh tar Muhammad Mansour, wa skilled in an American dr one strike last year.
Trump mentioned “victory” four times and “defeat” of the enemy seven times in his speech. But it remains unclear what victory would even look like.
His speech hinted at one possible outcome: denying the insurgents safe havens in Pakistan, possibly by severing that country’s billions in U.S. military aid.
U.S. policymakers have repeatedly considered and rejected that possibility before. Pakistan has proved immune to sanctions, even severe ones when it was developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan also has a powerful ally in China, which is likely to step into any breach in U.S. assistance. Alienating Pakistan could make the situation in Afghanistan far worse.