Trump’s New Strategy on Afghanistan

Donald Trump has probably never heard of the Grand Old Duke of York and his 10,000 men. But in spelling out his new Afghan strategy, the US president gave a good impersonation of that symbol of military muddle-headedness, incompetence and futility immortalised in the English nursery rhyme.

By marching US troops back up the Afghan hill, having previously solemnly vowed to march them down and out of the country, Trump risks the worst of both worlds: leaving the US and its allies neither up nor down, without a clearly defined mission, and stuck in the middle of a worsening conflict.

His speech on Afghanistan was long delayed, and it is easy to see why. White House advisers had been arguing for months over what to do about the 16-year-old war, America’s longest. When the speech came, there were no new ideas or initiatives. Instead Trump retained the main planks of Barack Obama’s policy and tried to dress it up as something fresh.

Two things have changed. One, Trump has agreed with his generals that troop levels must be increased, reversing the drawdown proposed during the Obama years. There are nearly 10,000 US military personnel in Afghanistan, mostly Special Forces, advisers and trainers. That figure looks likely to rise by about 4,000.

The other change is more dangerous. After the searing US experience in Iraq, policymakers broadly agreed that future overseas missions should have attainable objectives, a fixed duration, and a clear exit strategy. Not setting such parameters in advance was George W Bush’s big mistake in Iraq. Obama was careful not to repeat it.

Trump has ignored that hard-won knowledge. He has committed the US to waging an open-ended conflict with no limit on its scope or duration, and with no agreed measure of what constitutes victory. Now Britain and other Nato allies will be under pressure to perform a similar volte-face, and increase their combined troop deployments above the current level of roughly 6,500.

Trump’s repeated assertion that the US would “fight to win” is misleading at best and reckless at worst. Obama almost trebled US combat troop levels to around 100,000 after taking office in 2009, in an all-out attempt to finish the war. It did not work, although Obama claimed it did, and he slashed troop levels accordingly. The history of warfare in Afghanistan suggests nobody ever “wins”.

The US has hardly any combat regulars in theatre now, and Trump’s proposed reinforcement of about 4,000 is a drop in the ocean. The security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply. The Afghan government faces a resurgent Taliban, a continued al-Qaida menace and a rising Islamic State presence. Kabul, once relatively safe, has been targeted by repeated suicide bombings.

According to US estimates, government forces control less than 60% of Afghanistan, with the remainder of the country either contested or controlled by insurgents.

In an indication of how increasing troop numbers can make matters worse, the annual total number of civilian deaths and injuries has broken previous records each year since Obama’s “surge” in 2009. According to the UN’s mid-year report for 2017, there were 1,662 civilian deaths and 3,581 casualties. Armed conflict has claimed the lives of 26,512 civilians and injured 48,931 since 2009.

The US strategy of training and equipping the Afghan army and police to bear the brunt of the fighting, which Trump indicated will continue, has also been costly. US officials say an average of 20 Afghan national army soldiers are dying each month. The Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs says 1,302 police officers were killed between March and August, about nine a day.

Despite Trump’s bald threat to cut financial support for Pakistan, which is accused by Washington of failing to suppress Taliban bases in the north-west of the country, he offered no reason as to why his warnings would be heeded when those of Obama and Bush were ignored. His tough words are likely to be seen in Islamabad as typical Trump bluster.

A parallel statement by Rex Tillerson, the US Secretary of State, that Washington is ready to conduct unconditional peace talks with the Taliban, also offered nothing new.

The Taliban dismissed the President’s speech as vague and unhelpful, and have threatened to cause more American pain if the war is intensified.

Trump’s political U-turn in recommitting to a war he has previously dismissed as a waste of time and resources marks a victory for the “realists” in the White House, notably HR McMaster, his national security adviser, and James Mattis, his Defense Secretary, both of whom are former generals.

They were opposed by Steve Bannon and other champions of Trump’s nationalist, “America first” platform, which pledged to end foreign entanglements. Bannon was dismissed from his post as chief strategist.

Despite his efforts to justify his about-turn in his prime time TV speech, Trump will find it difficult to convince his domestic supporters, and his foreign allies, that he has a workable policy. And his bad relations with Nato mean he may struggle to get the European troops he wants as the US once again marches up the Afghan hill.

New Policy: more of the same?

Candidate Donald Trump once called US military involvement in Afghanistan a “total disaster.” Now president, Trump has told the nation that, after studying the issue, he had reconsidered his original instinct to pull US forces out of that country.

Administration officials say he has approved a plan to send thousands more American trainers, advisors and specialists to Afghanistan to deal with a resurgent Taliban and other violent groups, including Islamic State.

The president’s second thoughts may be warranted, but we understand why it took him so long to accede to his advisors’ recommendation. US involvement in Afghanistan has dragged on for far too long, and the government it helped erect now controls little more than half of the nation’s districts.

In a nationally televised speech, Trump said that US strategy under his leadership will change dramatically. Yet despite the new packaging and more muscular rhetoric, much of the policy he outlined seems like more of the same: using US forces to prevent the Taliban and other insurgent groups from toppling the US-supported government, but with no guarantee of either a decisive victory or military gains significant enough to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.

Depressingly, even after 16 years of US intervention, the Taliban in Afghanistan are not only alive, but ascendant.

This doesn’t mean Trump is making the wrong decision or that he should revert to the glib advice he offered as a private citizen in a 2013 tweet: “We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!”

Much as the US may wish that the Afghan military and police were able to neutralize the Taliban without foreign assistance, a hasty withdrawal would, as Trump said, create a security crisis for the Afghan government – and increase the possibility that the country again would become a haven for terrorists who would export violence to the US. That’s the very problem which drew the US-led coalition into war in Afghanistan in the first place.

Trump has decisively rejected a total withdrawal. He also has properly rebuffed hare-brained suggestions — advanced by former strategist Steve Bannon — that he entrust much of the US military mission in Afghanistan to private contractors. Instead, the US will use American troops – to be increased from 8,400 to approximately 12,000 – to train and assist Afghan forces while pressing Pakistan to deny shelter to fighters from the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

In its broad outlines, the policy announced by Trump is not very different from that pursued by President Obama at the end of his administration. Obama originally had hoped to reduce the number of US. troops to about a thousand, stationed at the US. embassy in Kabul. But on the recommendation of his military advisors, he twice modified planned troop reductions to leave more Americans in deployment.

One arguably new element was Trump’s suggestion that he would put pressure on Pakistan to stop providing a safe haven for the Taliban and associated groups. Noting that the US. has been paying Pakistan billions of dollars, he said that country had much to lose if it continued to harbour terrorists. He also suggested that, unlike the Obama administration, his goal in Afghanistan was to kill terrorists, not engage in nation-building. (That is actually less of a distinction between the two administration’s policies than Trump suggests.)

Finally, Trump suggested that the US was open to the idea of peace negotiations in the future with elements of the Taliban. But in the meantime, Trump has concluded, as President Obama did before him, that the US must continue to be engaged militarily in Afghanistan. Even if that is the least bad decision, it’s depressing that 16 years after the US intervened in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks – at an eventual cost of 2,400 American lives – the Taliban is not only still alive but ascendant, corruption remains rife and political consensus seems elusive.

Given the alternative, Trump is right to try to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan. But it’s hard to be optimistic about where that will lead.