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In the 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama declared that the war in Afghanistan is finally coming to an end. That was a quixotic proclamation. It was even bad strategy, just as the US was preparing to withdraw its combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of that year, to tell the American public and world and that an end to the conflict was near, when it was not.

The powerful May 31 truck bomb attack in the highly secure diplomatic area of Kabul, one of the deadliest in the Afghan capital that left nearly 100 people dead, is yet another painful remainder of that the war is nowhere near its end.

(Image: AFP)

Obamas successor, the self-styled deal-maker, has not even said anything about Afghanistan since he became President Trump. He spoke precious little about it on the campaign trail. As President, he apparently thinks that occasional bravados like inflicting a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) device, dubbed mother of all bombs, is the silver bullet to an out of sight and out of mind war. Such actions impress no one, not least the Taliban and their Pakistani backers.

Each ferocious and brutal Taliban attack, such as the biggest attack ever on Afghan security forces in Mazar-i-Sharif on April 22 that occurred just a week after the MOAB show targeting Islamic State-Khorasan in Nangarhar, underlines an unpalatable truth for the Americans: nearly 16 years, $1 trillion and 2,400 casualties later, it is still an awful, costly stalemate. Each Taliban offensive not just erodes the stability of the fragile unity government in Kabul led by President Ashraf Ghani and debilitates the national military, both of which the US struggles valiantly to prop up, it also serves as a grim reminder that the longest war in American history is flailing.

That is the stark assessment the US military itself seems to have made after 16 years of military engagement. During a Congressional testimony in February this year, the supreme commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen John Nicholson, was asked whether the US would be vulnerable to an attack planned and directed from Afghanistan if the US withdrew its troops. His reply: Yes, definitely. About the worsening security situation about Afghanistan, he said: I believe were in a stalemate.

Gen Nicholson called for expanding the USs military presence, saying that they have a shortfall of a few thousand. The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) are trying to take the fight to the Taliban, Gen Nicholson said, but they are doing more losing than winning. To turn the tide, Afghan security forces need more training, according to the general.

The word stalemate resonates eerily. It was the word successive US administrations and their war generals used in the 1960s and early 1970s to escalate American troop levels to half a million in Vietnam in their futile attempt to permanently divide the nation and install a client state in Saigon.

Stalemate, in reality, was a steady loss of territory by the US-backed weakly regime whose corrupt, demoralised and desertion-prone military forces were getting outflanked by insurgent forces. In Afghanistan, every offensive is either part of the Talibans drive to increase its share of territory in outlying parts of the country or to completely demoralise the ANSF. In this, they are winning. A report released early this year by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction made clear that, despite the Pentagon pouring some $70 billion into arming and training the ANSF, the force is steadily losing ground to insurgent groups, while suffering record casualties. The report cited wholesale corruption as a major reason for this. It estimated that more than 40 per cent of the Afghan population lives under areas of either total or partial Taliban control.

After the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), under Natos umbrella, ended its combat mission in December 2014, it launched a new non-combat Resolute Support Mission (RSM) to train, advise and assist Afghan national security forces. The RSM currently has about 13,000 troops, of which about 8,400 are American soldiers. The US soldiers are deployed in as trainers and advisers of ANSF units involved in search and destroy missions.

Currently, the Trump administration is reportedly weighing whether to send up to 5,000 additional American troops, including hundreds of Special Operations forces, to be sent to Afghanistan in a mini-surge. In the Nato summit held in Brussels last week, the US was pushing its allies hard to commit more troops to the country.

However, adding a few thousand troops appears a quick fix than a strategy. The US cant disengage from Afghanistan, which is clear. Nor can it passively cede the momentum to the Taliban. The first big question to ask then is, whether the US still can live with a stalemate while spending several billions dollars in a year supporting the Afghan government and its security forces? If the US could not win the war or force the Taliban to a political settlement when the ISAF had 130,000 troops at its height, how can it do so with a few thousand? If it could not prevent the Pakistani establishment from double-dealing and supporting the Talibans Haqqani network in 16 years, which, along with narcotics trade, kept the insurgency going, how can the US do so now? How can it bring the Taliban around to a negotiated end to the conflict, a dim prospect at any point in the war? What constitutes a victory, after all? None of these fundamental questions has a satisfactory answer.

The war has not ended for the US in 2014; rather, it is caught in a quagmire in Afghanistan, with no good way to get out of it.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Original post:
The truth about 'stalemate' in Afghanistan - Economic Times (blog)