President Donald Trump is recommitting the US to its battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which at 16 years’ duration is now the longest war the Americans have ever fought.
Trump has given few details about his planned increase in troop deployments but said that he was not prepared to write a blank check. At the same time, he said that he was determined to defeat the Taliban. Pessimists will see yet another US foreign policy disaster in the making. Optimists, however, are choosing to believe that Trump is going to head a very different Afghan policy than his vacillating predecessor Barack Obama.
There is a dynamic to terrorist insurgencies. They generally begin with terrorizing local populations by murdering officials and anyone who supports the government. Then they fight back against the security forces sent to suppress them. That is generally the start of a war of attrition. In Afghanistan with its wild and wonderful geography, it is easy for the government to control the major towns and cities but there are mountainous fastnesses where insurgents can hold out, impervious even to this April’s dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Bomb (MOAB), the biggest non-nuclear explosive in the American arsenal.
It seems clear that but for the intervention of the US-led foreign contingent of NATO troops, the government in Kabul would by now have been overrun and the Talibs returned to power. By training the Afghan police and army and riding airborne shotgun over these local security forces, the Americans have stayed the advance of the insurgents.
However, Obama made a massive mistake, which Trump must not repeat. After he first came to the Oval Office, Obama deliberated for months over what to do about NATO’s lackluster performance in Afghanistan. He finally decided that rather than pull out, as he had promised voters he would do, he was going to order a “surge”, akin to that in Iraq which did for a time bring the violence there to lower levels. But his terrible error was that he gave a date for when the surge would end and the majority of US military personnel would be pulled out of the country. It is hard to believe the depth of stupidity in this announcement. The Taliban knew that all they had to do was endure whatever new assaults were thrown at them, certain in the knowledge that once the storm had passed, they could emerge from their hiding places and effectively claim they had driven the foreigners from their land.
In the event, Obama did not pull out all US forces and the insurgency has not triumphed. But some American generals still fume at Obama’s crassness in announcing an end to an operation before it had even begun.
When Trump ordered the dropping of the MOAB earlier this year, he probably imagined he could inspire shock and awe in the Taliban. He needs to read his briefing notes again. Ever since the 1979 Soviet invasion, Afghan rebels of all colors have been exposed to some of the world’s most destructive and sophisticated weaponry. A country that has been at war with itself for approaching 40 years needs no lessons in shock and awe. What it does need are lessons in peace and reconciliation. There will be many who wonder if the blustering, no-nonsense Trump is the man to teach that class.
