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Mohammad Ismail/Reuters Smoke from a battle between Taliban and Afghan forces, Kabul, Afghanistan, March 1, 2017

Since assuming office President Donald Trump has barely mentioned Afghanistan, a countrywhere US forces have been engaged in the longest war in American history. Perhaps this is because, after more than fifteen years and $700 billion, the US has little to show for it other than an incredibly weak and corrupt civilian government in Kabul and a never-ending Taliban insurgency. Now Afghanistan faces a new horroras a testing ground for what can only be called a US weapon of mass destruction.

Trumps silence on Afghanistan was finally broken on the evening of April 13not with the announcement of a new political strategy but with the dropping of a monster bomb, the GBU-43, nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs, on an ISIS base in a rural area of the country near the Pakistan border. Worse, while causing untold damage and giving local populations new reason to hate the United States, the bomb did nothing to address the countrys primary security problem, which is not ISIS but the ever-strengthening Taliban.

The target of the 21,600-pound bomb was a network of caves and tunnels in a twenty-five-mile-long valley in the Achin district of Nangarhar province. For the past two years the area has been the main base for ISIS in Afghanistan. On April 8, an American Special Forces soldier, Staff Sergeant Mark R. De Alencar, thirty-seven, was killed near there.

Local officials told Afghan journalists that ISIS was retreating intothe caves and tunnels when under fire. Frustrated Afghan officers then requested air support from the US, and on Thursday the US dropped the GBU-43, whichcarries 11,000 pounds of high explosives and is the most powerful non-nuclear device ever used. Its blast radius stretches for more than a mile, and the blast waves knocked people to the ground and punctured ear drums five miles away, according to Afghan journalists. General Dawlat Waziri, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, said on the day after the strike that initial information indicated that thirty-six militants had been killed and three large caves destroyed.That seems a low figure, given the fire power used. Later, Afghan officials said that ninety-one militants were killed. Neither figure is verifiable.

Although ISIS poses a global danger, it has not been a major threat to the Afghan government. Afghan and US officials place the number of ISIS fighters in the country at around seven hundred, compared to three thousand last year; attacks by the Taliban and by US forces have reduced their strength. By contrast, there are an estimated 40,000 Taliban fighters who now control one third of the country and last year attempted to capture major cities and topple the regime.

Whereas ISIS fighters in the region are isolated, the Taliban now receive clandestine support from Pakistan, Iran, and possibly Russia, according to US officials. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has long demanded that the US focus on stopping this assistance of the Taliban by neighboring countries. Ghani has also been insisting that the US help him put pressure on Pakistan to force the Taliban to enter into talks with the Kabul government. The bombing has only strengthened the Taliban conviction that US forces must leave Afghanistan before any cease-fire can take place, and they are likely to increase their military activity in the coming weeks.

Ghani faces multiple crises: a collapsing economy, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the country, and tens of thousands more refugees being forced back into Afghanistan by Iran and Pakistan, and European countries thatdeport illegal Afghan migrants. Meanwhile, in Kabul, Ghani is facing dwindling popularity, the loss of support from his ruling partner and chief executiveAbdullah Abdullah, a power struggle between various warlords, and challenges from former President Hamid Karzai and his supporters.

The bombing will worsen this situation; already several leading politicians, including Karzai, have condemned Ghani for allowing such a bomb to be used. Afghans know about bombardment. The Soviets destroyed much of the country in their brutal conquest in the 1980s, the civil war in the 1990s turned much of Kabul into a cemetery, and the endless war with the Taliban has destroyed even more lives and property. This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing group for new and dangerous weapons, Karzai wrote on Twitter on April 13. Even the Taliban condemned the bombing.

Much of the $10 billion a year in foreign aid that is needed to run the Afghan government and fund the armycomes from the US, and Afghan leadersare deeply apprehensive that the Trump administration will not provide its share. So far the only promise being made by Washington is to send more troops, though the 8,500 American and 5,000 NATO soldierscurrently deployed have accomplished little.

General John Nicholson, head of US-NATO forces in the country, told reporters in Kabul that the bomb was the right weapon for the right target. The US military has not yet released a formalestimate, but US officials insisted that most civilians had already fled the area to escape ISIS. However, it is difficult to imagine there were zero civilian deaths, as the region is a fertile agricultural zone.

With no apparent strategy behind it, the bombing appears merely to intensify the dramatic militarization of US foreign policy we have already seen in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. Trump has now clearly expressed his preference for force(as I discussedlast month). We have the greatest military in the world, Trump said after the bombing. We have given them total authorization and thats what theyre doing, and frankly, thats why they have been so successful recently.

The effects are clear in Yemen and Somalia, where the US military now has free-fire zones in which it canattack any target even at the cost of civilian casualties. The increase in US bombing in Iraq and Syria has resulted in many morecivilian casualties in both countries. Airwars, a group that tracks bombings, says that civilian casualties have doubled from February to March. Such an open-ended bombing campaign has killed and wounded not just civilians but also friendly forces. In mid-April, a US drone strike in northern Syria killed eighteen members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a rebel group allied with the West.

In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces have had limited success in training and supportinga demoralized Afghan army, which will face new Taliban offensives. Although there are 170,000 regular Afghan soldiers, 70 percent of the armys offensive operations have been undertaken by a much smaller contingent of 17,000 US-trained elite forces, because the rest are not considered competent enough; nevertheless the non-elite forces have sufferedvery high casualties. The current debate in Washington about sending troopshow many, what kind, with what mandateis over exactly the same issues that preoccupied the last years of the Obama administration.

Afghanistan desperately needs an overarching political strategy, which should include dialogue and diplomacy to deal with the problems that Ghani faces, as well as a regional strategy to counter external support for the Taliban. So far Trumps teameven though it includes several former Afghan hands, such as the highly respected National Security Adviser Lt. General H.R. McMasterhas only come up with excessive use of force. The capacity of the military to create lasting change remains limited. How many more lives will have to be lost before the Trump team figures that out?

Read more from the original source:
Afghanistan: Making It Worse - The New York Review of Books

Roughly 300 Marines are en route to Afghanistan to help Afghan troops stop the Taliban from swallowing more of the hard-fought territory for which so many Marines have bled and died, Marine Corps Times has learned. The deployment of Marines from the II Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be the largest Marine deployment to Afghanistan since 2014, when the U.S. military's combat mission known as Operation Enduring Freedom officially ended.

By the end of April, the Marines will be in Helmand province as Task Force Southwest, replacing the Armys Task Force Forge. During their nine months in Helmand, the Marines will train the Afghan National Armys 215th Corps and the 505th Zone National Police in marksmanship, indirect fire and small-unit tactics and other skills, Marine Corps officials said.

The advise-and-assist mission can give Afghan troops and police the support they need to reverse the momentum of the Taliban in that important province that sits astride the critical Ring Road that connects the southern and western parts of the country to Kabul, Petraeus said.

I think that was one of the problems the Obama administration had: Announcing withdrawals that came and went and really made no sense from any kind of point of view, Bergen said. They tended to undercut the government. They also, obviously, were really helpful to the morale of the Taliban.

Theyre winning the war, Forrest said. Theyre winning actual terrain and population control. They have no incentive to actually go to the table, especially as they are getting additional support from other malign regional actors, such as Russia and Iran.

See the article here:
Marines headed to southern Afghanistan, where Taliban are ... - Marine Corps Times

On April 13, the United States dropped its biggest non-nuclear bomb in eastern Afghanistan on an "Islamic State" (IS) target. The so-called '"mother of all bombs" (MOAB) killed at least 96 IS fighters, according to Afghan officials. Surprisingly, 13 of them were from India.

IS in Afghanistan is known to have recruited hundreds of local fighters as well as militants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Central and Southeast Asia, but an active involvement of Indian jihadists in IS' Afghanistan operations is not well documented.

In an interview with DW, Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, saysthere's good reason to believe there could be Indian extremists in Afghanistan.

DW: Not much is known about the activities of Indian militants in Afghanistan. What can you tell us about it?

Michael Kugelman: I think the broader question is why Afghanistan is becoming so attractive to extremists on the whole. Over the last few years there has been an influx of extremists from around the broader region - the militant network in Afghanistan is much more diverse and international than merely the Taliban and al Qaeda. Clearly what appeals to extremists about Afghanistan is its growing swath of lawless and hard-to-navigate territory, which provides ideal conditions for sanctuaries. These are conditions that appeal to extremists of all types, whether we're talking about Indian militants, jihadists from Central Asia, or Arab fighters from the Middle East.

This is one of the few cases, if not the first, in which Indian extremists have been killed in Afghanistan. Are Indian militants active across Afghanistan?

There's reason to believe that al Qaeda, and particularly AQIS - al Qaeda's South Asian regional affiliate - could feature some Indian nationals. Let's not forget that the supreme leader of AQIS is widely believed to be an Indian. Al Qaeda, despite claims to the contrary, remains a serious threat in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.

Also, based on recent history, there's good reason to believe there could be Indian extremists in Afghanistan. Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT) has had a presence in Afghanistan, and for quite some time LeT partnered closely with Indian Mujahideen, an al Qaeda-aligned Indian terror group, which has since been decimated.

Kugelman: 'There's good reason to believe there could be Indian extremists in Afghanistan'

The bottom line is that given the types of terror groups that have operated in Afghanistan, both past and present, there's reason to believe that there could be some Indians among them.

Are Indian PM Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalistic policies pushing some Indian Muslims towardextremist groups in Afghanistan?

It's true that Indian Muslims have faced new and growing challenges of discrimination and marginalization in India, though it's doubtful this has had a radicalizing effect and led some to join IS. I think it's highly unlikely that radicalized young Indian Muslims are gravitating to IS en masse, though one can't discount the possibility that if current conditions remain in place, you may eventually have this dynamic play out, albeit on a modest scale. For all the challenges and problems they face, Indian Muslims, on the whole, are treated better than religious minorities are in many other countries.

The Afghan Ministry of Defense also confirmed that Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Philippine nationals were among those killed in the MOAB attack. Is Afghanistan becoming a favorite destination for jihadists willing to join IS ranks?

For quite some time in previous years, when we thought of top destinations for global terrorists, Pakistan was at the top of the list. But aggressive counterterrorism operations by the Pakistani army in the tribal areas - long South Asia's ground zero for militant safe havens - have shifted the calculus. First, counterterrorism operations have pushed many Pakistan-based terrorists across the border into Afghanistan. Second, these operations have prompted other terrorists from the region and beyond to view Afghanistan as a more attractive destination because the law and order situation is so much worse there.

In effect, Islamist extremists far and wide are starting to see Afghanistan as a more coveted address than Pakistan because the real estate is simply more attractive and safe havens are so much easier to establish.

How do you analyze the future of IS in Afghanistan?

I think that IS'star is falling in Afghanistan. Several years ago it was developing a strong profile, at a time when IS was going on the offensive around the world by staging attacks in so many places and enjoying a strong grip on its Middle East-based "caliphate." But over the last year, as IS has lost much of its territory in the Middle East, the US has worked closely with Afghanistan to degrade the organization's infrastructure and capacities in Afghanistan, mainly through airstrikes. Also, IS has not endeared itself to anyone with its particularly brutal tactics in eastern Afghanistan, making the Taliban look like a modest force in the eyes of local communities.

I am not saying IS is on life support in Afghanistan, but it's certainly struggling in a big way. The Taliban have always been the top militant threat in Afghanistan, and as IS continues to get beaten down there, the strength of the Taliban will be amplified even more.

Michael Kugelman is a senior associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

The interview was conducted by Masood Saifullah.

Read more:
How active are Indian jihadists in Afghanistan? | Asia | DW.COM ... - Deutsche Welle

Afghanistans President Ashraf Ghani really doesnt want to talk about torture. He made that clear this month when, in a scene that could have been scripted for U.S. President Donald Trump, he tried to shut down veteran Tolo news reporter Sharif Amiry for daring to ask what the Afghan government was doing about allegations that first Vice President Dostum had abducted, tortured and sexually assaulted a rival. But Ghanis refusal to answer wont make those concerns go away. And it begs an even more awkward question: Is his administration really incapable of enforcing the rule of law in even such a blatant case of alleged torture by one of its own top officials?

It has been four months since politician Ahmad Ishchi accused Dostum of abducting him and imprisoning him in Dostums stronghold in Shiberghan, where guards allegedly beat him and raped him with a rifle barrel.

At the time, Ghani assured Western diplomats that he would see justice done. In January, the attorney general ordered the arrest of nine of Dostums guards, but when Dostum refused to hand them over, the attorney general settled for interviewing seven of them in Dostums compound in Kabul. Today, the case remains stalled, with both Dostum and his bodyguards waiting out political negotiations over what has become not only a test case for Ghanis ability to ensure justice, but a clear example of the power strongmen wield over Afghanistans future.

Dostum, however, is only part of the sordid picture of impunity for torture in Afghanistan.

In January 2015, President Ghani wrote to Human Rights Watch in response to our report on widespread impunity for Afghan security force officials responsible for torture, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances. In Ghanis words, the Afghan government would not tolerate torture, and he was committed to addressing allegations of torture. Further evidence of Ghanis personal abhorrence for torture emerged when he read the US Senate torture report. Ghani reportedly demanded details on the number of Afghans tortured at US black sites, and condemned the methods used as shocking and inhumane. When the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) released its February 2015 report showing that one-third of Afghan detainees had been tortured, Ghani announced a national action plan aimed at ending torture.

That was two years ago. Fast forward to now.

Draft legislation on torture is finally emerging after years of political and bureaucratic battles, but torture is on the rise. While in a few cases police have been dismissed or relocated following investigations, in places were torture is used systematically, the Afghan government has done nothing to hold the most egregious offenders accountable. Afghanistans strongmen, and the forces loyal to them, remain above the law. These include not only Dostum, but also Police Chief Raziq of Kandahar, among others. Human Rights Watch has documented cases of torture by other prominent political figures, including Asadullah Khalid, former head of the National Directorate of Security.

When I was in Kabul two weeks ago, a senior administration official tried to explain away the governments failure to show any genuine improvements in combatting torture. He instead fell back on excuses for inaction, such as that the victims lie, the research methodology used to document torture is flawed, the Taliban fabricate stories of torture by government forces. But in truth, the Ghani administration has failed to curb torture because those implicated in such crimes wield sufficient power to ensure they are never prosecuted and are free to continue to commit such abuses without any fear of accountability.

Afghanistan faces its first review in 20 years under the UN Convention Against Torture at a session in Geneva next week. The Afghan government delegation is expected to dispute evidence that UNAMA and human rights organizations, including the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, have provided. But the fact remains that those who torture get away with it. When he read the US Senate torture report, President Ghani rightly observed that: When a person is tortured in an inhumane way, the reaction will be inhumane. There can be no justification for these kinds of actions and inhumane torture in todays world. He called it a vicious cycleprophetic words, perhaps, but a cycle he can break only by acknowledging what human rights investigators have said: Torture continues because theres no real deterrent. Impunity for the use of torture means that torture will continue.

See original here:
Afghanistan's Entrenched Systemic Torture - Huffington Post

Abby Huntsman traveled to Washington for an up-close look at a day in the life of Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), who continues to serve after losing both of his legs in Afghanistan.

Mast, who was elected to the House of Representatives last November, served as a U.S. Army bomb technician and was severely injured in an IED explosion in Sept. 2010.

The 36-year-old veteran sat down with Huntsman and to discuss the attack and why he decided to continue his service by running for Congress.

Mast was on a team clearing explosive devices for Army Rangers in southern Afghanistan when they came to a river that he suspected was mined by the enemy.

The team stopped, but one soldier fell in the waterway. He moved to help pull the soldier out, but stepped on an explosive device.

He said he remembers being thrown five to 10 feet away in a cloud of dust and hearing urgent messages on the radio as his fellow soldiers called for medical help.

Mast told Huntsman that he woke up at a hospital in Washington, D.C. to see that he had lost his legs.

Luckily, a friend had tracked him down, contacted his wife, gotten a family photograph and taped it to Mast's hospital gurney.

"He did it so that the first thing I would ever see would be my wife and my son looking back at me," Mast said.

Mast said that he also received support and inspiration from his father.

"He said, 'Brian, you can't let this keep you down. You've got to find a way to pull yourself up, get out there and get back to work,'" Mast said.

He revealed that helped him realize that he still had a purpose in life and he could still contribute on a different battlefield: Congress.

He told Huntsman that the job can be difficult and arduous, but it's all worth it to continue serving the American people.

"When you accomplish something great, when you go out there and do something great for the people back home, for the country, for freedom, for standing up for the Constitution, for fiscal responsibility, you've accomplished something good," Mast said. "And it makes every sacrifice worth it."

Watch the full inspiring story above and don't miss Abby on Saturday and Sunday mornings on "Fox & Friends Weekend."

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See more here:
The Story of How a Double Amputee Veteran Went From Afghanistan to Congress - Fox News Insider