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The window during which President Donald Trump can extricate U.S. forces from the mess in Afghanistan and blame his predecessors for the calamity is rapidly closing. A few more weeks, another surge, and he will be the third president to be saddled with this war; it will become his. The move to allow the military to determine how many more troops to send to Afghanistan would have been a wise onelet the professionals make such tactical decisionsif it reflected the presidents decision to stay the course. Such a decision would follow a review of the war involving not just the Pentagon, but also the intelligence community, the State Department and the staff of the National Security Council, among others. However, that is not the way this president makes decisions. He just left it to the Pentagon to sort out.

The Pentagon has its own agenda. It does not want to admit to having lost another war. It cannot wash its hands of what is happening in Afghanistan and blame its predecessors the way Trump can. At the same time, the Pentagon knows damn well that even when there were twenty times as many troops in Afghanistan as there are now, we did not win the war. The Pentagon seems set on just limping along, which seems better than admitting defeat. No wonder none of the generals refers to winning the war in Afghanistan; they use phrases such as, creating stability (Gen. Allen) and a V-Day for the War in Afghanistan may never be marked on a calendar. Retired Gen. David Petraeus expects us to fight in Afghanistanfor generations, adding we have been in Korea for 65-plus years

Whatever drives the Pentagon to hold the course in Afghanistan, the reasons given for the surge do not pass the smile test. To argue that the Afghan forces need more training and advice after sixteen years raises the obvious question: why would one more year make a difference? Gen. Petraeus argues that the United States should continue its mission in Afghanistan to ensure that [it] is not once again a sanctuary for al-Qaida or other transnational extremists, the way it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned there. The argument that if we do not fight them there, we will have to fight them here is so threadbare it hardly conceals the hollowness of the argument.

First of all, the Taliban (which we organized and armed to fight the USSR) are not a transnational terrorist but a local insurgency. The terrorists who attacked the U.S. homeland in 2001 were not Taliban but Al Qaeda. True, the Taliban hosted them, but they were, for the most part, Saudis whom the Afghans considered foreigners. They did treat them as guests, in line with the very high value the Afghans put on hospitality. The Taliban paid a very heavy price for this mistake. There is no reason in the world to expect that they would seek to repeat it. They are fighting the United States because they want to run their country, not ours.

The notion that U.S. disengagement would turn Afghanistan back into a training base for terrorists also disregards the fact that most recent terrorist attacks in the West have been carried out by locals using makeshift weapons, like cars and knifes, trained (if at all) on the Internet. The suggested surge will do nothing to stop them. Also, now that ISIS has bases in at least half a dozen countries, if we are to deal with terrorists by occupying countries in which they may be trainedthe United States shall need to occupy and stay in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, parts of Nigeria and Mali, among other places. And the Talibans main training takes place in Pakistan, which we have not found a way to compel to help us stop the insurgency.

Last but not least, to repeat an often cited but still wise line, we need to be sure we do not create more terrorists than we kill. The civilian casualties that the war against terrorism causes is a major recruitment tool for those who seek to harm the United States.

In Afghanistan, we can safely let the Afghan people sort out their own fate. There and in other nations, the United States needs to work with moderate Muslims to counter the violent ones. Most of the job to protect us from terrorists will have to fall to the Department of Homeland Security, local police, vigilant citizens, and to mental health professionals and those who promote civility instead of hate. The Pentagon may find some consolation in the observation that the military is not losing the war in Afghanistanmerely the nation-building drive that followed a solid win in 2003 and the elimination of most Al Qaeda in the years that followed.

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor and Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. He is the author of Avoiding War with China, published by University of Virginia Press.

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Time to Say Goodbye to Afghanistan | The National Interest - The National Interest Online

Editors note: Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe as well as the Middle East. He was Chief of the counterterrorism staff and executive assistant to the CIAs deputy director.

Estimates coming out of the Pentagon indicate the likelihood of an additional commitment of several thousand troops to Afghanistan. Before we make any moves in Afghanistan, it is important to look critically at the past and at our motivation for what to do now and in the future.

We got to Afghanistan based on two realities. The immediate catalyst was 9/11. Second, we saw it as a key element in our oil interests in the region a way to get our foot in the door. The outgrowth of that was our fabricated rationale for the invasion of Iraq, which morphed into our current array of difficult dilemmas in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

In short, that momentous decision in 2001 launched us into a region which our government studiously never chose to understand, and which was so incredibly complicated that it flummoxed one U.S. administration after another.

So, what do we want or expect from our continued military involvement in Afghanistan and the Middle East? Apparently, we would like to see a stable region under democratic rule. We never hear U.S. officials talking about self-determination, only about regime change and democracy.

In fact, it makes no ultimate difference what the U.S. wants for Afghanistan and the Middle East. It only matters what they want for themselves, and as long as we are pushing values and ideas that are alien to them, we will never see the end of chaos.

Afghanistans geographic location has made it an important cog in the Middle East. It has been fought over and occupied for millennia by big powers seeking regional hegemony. That has relatively recently included England, Russia and the U.S., none of which has succeeded in changing the country or the minds of its peoples. Over many centuries, those and other struggles have caused hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths and significant resentment.

That momentous decision in 2001 launched us into a region which our government studiously never chose to understand.

Given recent developments in the world, oil no longer plays the role that it did 25 years ago. That alters one of our reasons for remaining militarily engagement in the region.

Terrorism is our other worry. We were hard hit on 9/11, but that sort of operation against us seems to be far better controlled now than it was in 2001. The fact is that the nature of terrorism has changed. It no longer requires hideaways in the mountains or deserts of the Middle East where terrorists can be given rigorous military training. Terrorism today involves self-motivated, highly-disaffected individuals who volunteer to ISIS or any other terrorist organization to carry out suicide attacks. They work with automatic weapons and murderous vehicles. Even bombs are within their reach, and recent operations have shown that those weapons can be developed undetected in apartments in major western cities.

Terrorists have no need for bases like those previously operated in the Middle East. All they need are volunteers and central direction and that can be found, as is now the case, in countries that are not in the reach of US troops assigned to Afghanistan or the Middle East, making them no longer critical to our counterterrorism needs.

What, therefore, could possibly motivate US policy makers to continue and even augment a decades-long war that is today virtually irrelevant to the realities and motivations that got us there in the first place? It would seem that the only rationale that stems logically from that is that we are interested in regime change and the subsequent maintenance of a democracy imposed on them by us. And yet, we know that doesnt work.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that Middle Eastern nations have values that differ from ours. In doing that, we would also have to acknowledge that there are major, conflicting differences between some of the states in that region and that to leave them to the resolution of their own conflicts would likely be a violent process.

Yet, the only real peace and stability that can ultimately exist in the region is that engineered by the people involved. Perhaps we should give them the opportunity to work that out in the absence of on-site U.S. military power while limiting ourselves to diplomatic, political and economic involvements.

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Haviland Smith: On sending additional troops to Afghanistan - vtdigger.org

Alberto Cairo (back row in brown sweater) poses with his staff and players at a basketball tournament in Kabul, Afghanistan. Olivier Moeckli/ICRC hide caption

Alberto Cairo (back row in brown sweater) poses with his staff and players at a basketball tournament in Kabul, Afghanistan.

When he was 10, a war injury put him in a wheelchair. His spine was permanently damaged. He was so depressed there were days he refused to get out of bed.

Now Mohammadullah Amiri can't wait to get up in the morning.

Mohammadullah Amiri, who was paralyzed when he was a child, has transformed his life since he started playing wheelchair basketball in Afghanistan. ICRC hide caption

Mohammadullah Amiri, who was paralyzed when he was a child, has transformed his life since he started playing wheelchair basketball in Afghanistan.

It's all because of wheelchair basketball. Since the 36-year-old from Afghanistan discovered it, he has become a changed man, says Jess Markt, his coach.

"He has this full life. All that has come since he played basketball," says Markt, an American who trains wheelchair basketball teams for the International Committee of the Red Cross in countries like Afghanistan, South Sudan and India. Like Amiri, he has paraplegia.

Since 2011, Markt has been working with Alberto Cairo, head of the Red Cross orthopedic program in Afghanistan, to get people who have been physically injured from war or illness to play sports. Cairo, a physical therapist from Italy, has helped over 100,000 people learn to use prosthetics or re-learn to use their limbs through physical therapy.

Wheelchair basketball has been a game changer for the patients, says Cairo, who has been living in Afghanistan for past 30 years. "Rehab is painful. Learning how to use artificial limbs is painful, too. For the first time with this sport, we were able to give only fun, only joy."

Today, there are 500 recreational players and a national men's and women's wheelchair basketball team across the seven Red Cross rehabilitation centers in Afghanistan. The national teams haven't won any international tournaments just yet, but Markt has his eye on the Paralympics.

Markt, 40, and Cairo, 60, visited NPR headquarters in May to talk about what they've learned from their Afghan patients, how people with disabilities are viewed in Afghanistan and the power of a high-five. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the idea for wheelchair sports come about?

Alberto Cairo: People asked me, "Can you do something for our leisure time?" I was a bit reluctant. In Afghanistan, there are so many things missing [like basic infrastructure]. To waste your time in leisure is something that should not be done. But that's a mistake. So we decided to start some sport activity.

Cairo, a physical therapist, says wheelchair basketball has been a game changer for his patients. "Rehab is painful. Learning how to use artificial limbs is painful, too. For the first time with this sport, we were able to give only fun, only joy." Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Cairo, a physical therapist, says wheelchair basketball has been a game changer for his patients. "Rehab is painful. Learning how to use artificial limbs is painful, too. For the first time with this sport, we were able to give only fun, only joy."

Seems like that turned out to be a good idea. What else have your patients taught you?

Cairo: In the beginning, the physical rehabilitation center was only for war victims. But I remembered, there was a lady. She kept coming, bringing her child with polio. He was not, strictly speaking, a war victim.

That's why you didn't want to treat him.

Cairo: If you are a child with polio, it's because you were not vaccinated. This lady kept coming. She told me: What is the difference between my son, who is paralyzed, and that man sitting over there who is paralyzed because of a land mine? Both of them cannot walk. Then I understood.

The Afghans opened my eyes. I learned to listen to them. Very often, they give me the right path.

Is there stigma around people with disabilities in Afghanistan?

Cairo: In Afghanistan, if you're disabled, you're not rejected from the family and the community. There is a kind of hyper-protection. The family says don't worry, I will take care of you. It's nice in a way, but it's disempowering. Patients should be given the chance to restart their lives.

What has been the impact of the wheelchair basketball program?

Jess Markt: We've seen the players, one by one, go through this transformation as they started to play sports. They no longer think of themselves as disabled people.

Now that they started playing basketball and [achieving] success, people come to watch them. The [audience is] amazed. The ones that are most successful get to play on the national teams, play internationally and have their national anthem played for them. They wear the flag of their country on their back, and people watch them on television.

Jess Markt has been working with Cairo and others to create sports programs for disabled people in war zones. He has his eye on the Paralympics for the Afghan national basketball teams. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Jess Markt has been working with Cairo and others to create sports programs for disabled people in war zones. He has his eye on the Paralympics for the Afghan national basketball teams.

Tell me more about Amiri.

Markt: He comes from a pretty conservative family. He's got a big long beard, a serious expression; he's quiet, a little stern. As I got to know him, I found out he was the sweetest person.

Amiri was injured during the war when he was a child. He was a patient of Alberto's. When he went home after his rehab, he went back to an environment where he wasn't expected to contribute to his family. He had no active life.

Then he started playing wheelchair basketball [at age 29] and very quickly, he went through this transformation. He said, how could he be sad? He always had basketball practice to look forward to.

He's more severely disabled than a lot of the players. But he worked very hard, and now he's a member of the men's national team. He's an extremely valuable player. He was one of the first to understand concepts like making your teammates better. Instead of always calling for the ball and wanting to score for himself, he found ways to make everyone else score.

He has also benefited from the Red Cross microfinance program, which makes small loans to patients.

Markt: Not only has he become a really great basketball player and coach, he used one of the microcredit loans to start his own automotive parts and repair business. He's the center of his community when he's at his shop.

Cairo: When he decided to get a microcredit loan, he gave back his relief card the card that all disabled people get that entitles them to receive every month some food. He said, "No, I don't need this anymore. That's charity. I have a job now."

Jess, you coach the women's wheelchair basketball team in Afghanistan, one of the hardest places in the world to be a woman. In a society where physical contact between men and women is limited, how did you teach them to shoot hoops?

Markt: I was very lucky in that whatever combination of being a foreigner, a teacher and in a wheelchair allowed me a pass that I could coach them. I had to be careful that I was doing everything within their cultural boundaries. I couldn't just grab a girl's hand and show her how to shoot the ball like I could with a male player or any other player here in the States. I had to describe how to do things but without physical contact. Which was fine, but challenging.

Eventually a few members of the women's national team gave you a high-five, after they saw other female players do it at an international wheelchair basketball training camp in Thailand in April. How did that happen?

Markt: They feel like now they're a part of the international community and can do the things that international players can do.

Were you worried that you might be putting the women in danger by high-fiving?

Markt: I wasn't too nervous. We were in a safe place, the gymnasium, and I definitely wasn't going to stifle their social breakthrough by ignoring the attempt. I didn't have a choice!

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Hoop Dreams: Wheelchair Basketball Is Changing Lives In Afghanistan - NPR

The photo taken on February 9, 2017 shows Afghan nationals waiting to cross the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan at the Torkham Border Post in Pakistan. (Photo by AFP)

Pakistans military has begun erecting fencing along the country's porous border with Afghanistan in order to stop cross-border infiltration and improve security in the region.

According to a high-ranking Pakistani security official, in the first phase, at least 43 border posts havebeen constructed in the northwestern tribal region alongtheborder. Sixty-three others are under construction in Dir Lower, Bajaur, Mohmand Agency, and Khyber Agency border areas.

The plan includes building 338 border posts and army forts along the border.

"There are several legal routes to cross into Afghanistan in Chitral, Dir, Bajaur, Mohmand Agency, Tor Kham Khyber Agency, Kurram Agency, North and South Waziristan, and the Chaman area of Baluchistan, but despite these legal routes, there are over 300 [illegal] crossing points, and terrorists always enter via those hard mountainous routes to carry out attacks in Pakistan and now the army will close them," media outlets quoted the official as saying.

Speaking to local TV media on Friday, Pakistani militaryspokesman, Major General Asif Ghafoor, said the move to fence the border was aimed at curtailing the movement of militants and stopping them from entering the country.

"The Daesh terrorist group has been gaining strength in Afghanistan along the Pakistan border, as we heard media reports that the group has also captured Afghanistans Tora Bora area. Pakistan will never tolerate any terrorist group setting foot on our soil and these are all efforts underway to eliminate terrorist groups," Ghafoor said.

Both countries have long pledged to improve security in the region and go after militant groups based in the rugged and mountainous border areas. But the exact location of the border has long been disputed by Kabul.

Last year, Pakistan started building a barrier at the main border crossing in the northwestern town of Torkham. The move irked the Afghan government.

The Pakistani military hasdismissed Afghanistan's criticism of the fencing plan, saying the activity is being performed well inside the Pakistani territory.

The two countries are in a dispute over the demarcation of the border, which is a key battleground in the fight against the Taliban and other militant groups.

Islamabad recognizes the Durand Line, the 1896 British-mandated border between the two neighbors, but Kabul says activity by either side along the line must be approved by both countries.

Successive governments in Afghanistan have never recognized the British-drawn colonial era border line.

Pakistan and Afghanistan regularly accuse each other of sheltering their enemy insurgents. Both sides, however, deny such an allegation.

Kabulblames elements inside the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence(ISI), for supporting the Taliban militants, while Islamabad blames the Afghan government for giving refuge to militants on its side of the border. The two sides also accuse each other of not doing enough to stop militants engaging in cross-border raids.

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Pakistani army starts fencing border with Afghanistan - Press TV

A rogue SAS unit killed unarmed Afghan civilians then covered up the details of the potential war crimes, it was claimed today.

The shocking allegations emerged in Operation Northmoor, a classified multimillion pound probe run by the Royal Military Police.

Senior defence sources have said that evidence gathered on the elite Who Dares Wins regiments alleged war crimes are credible, according to the Sunday Times .

A source close to Operation Northmoor, which is being run from a secure bunker at RAF St Mawgan near Newquay, Cornwall, said there was strong evidence unarmed Afghan civilians were murdered rather than captured during night raids on their homes.

In one allegation dating back six years, which is now being investigated, SAS commandos are accused of handcuffing and hooding some of the victims before later shooting them dead.

After the alleged murders, SAS mission reports are said to have been altered to make it look as if its Afghan special forces partners, rather than British soldiers, carried out the shootings.

That meant the killings were not investigated at the time.

But drone and other footage obtained by investigators, nicknamed kill TV, is said to show British troops opening fire on unarmed people.

An examination of bullets found in the victims bodies showed they were a type used by the SAS.

There were also claims SAS troopers planted Russian Makarov pistols on victims bodies and then took photos of the corpses to suggest the British special forces had killed armed Taliban insurgents in self defence.

Jeremy Corbyn branded the allegations extremely serious and called for them to be fully investigated.

The Labour leader added: Our Armed Forces have a reputation for decency and bravery.

If we do not act on such shocking allegations we risk undermining that reputation, our security at home and the safety of those serving in the armed forces abroad.

Our values and respect for the rule of law require full accountability.

We owe it to our Armed Forces and the victims and their families to ensure that a thorough investigation takes place.

There can be no question of a cover up. The Government must now establish an independent inquiry into what has taken place.

An MoD spokesman said: The Royal Military Police has found no evidence of criminal behaviour by the Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

They have discontinued over 90% of the 675 allegations made and less than 10 investigations remain.

Our military served with great courage and professionalism and we proudly hold them to the highest standards. Where allegations are raised it is right they are investigated.

Operation Northmoor was set up in 2014 and involves more than 100 Royal Military Police officers.

It has since been investigating dozens of alleged unlawful killings by SAS forces between 2010 and 2013.

Detectives had been looking into 52 alleged killings, but are now examining just one incident which involved four family members being shot dead during a night raid in Helmand province in 2011.

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Rogue SAS unit 'killed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan then covered it up' - Mirror.co.uk