Afghanistan: Amid Taliban’s resurgence, America despairs for an exit strategy

Afghanistan: Amid Taliban’s resurgence, America despairs for an exit strategy

Eight years ago, shortly before the U.S launched a major offensive to defeat the Taliban, I was in Afghanistan embedded with the US marines and Afghan army. In one part of the country, the NATO and Afghan troops were fighting to secure the strategically important Kapisa province, some 50 kilometres away from Kabul city. The larger military plan was to defeat insurgents and to start reduction of foreign troops by July 2011 and by 2014 handover the complete security to the Afghan army. But things never worked that way in Afghanistan.

Today the US and Afghan military is still fighting Taliban in Kapisa and elsewhere in Afghanistan. The Taliban runs parallel administrations in many provinces and is more popular despite being brutal. At the heart of the Taliban’s growing strength is the support from the Pasthuns, a dominant ethnic group, peeved over the US support to their worst enemies—Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. Sixteen years after the coalition forces went in to capture Osama bin Laden and quash the Taliban, the Afghan situation has worsened. The deadly raid by Taliban on Friday on a northern army base that killed more than 140 Afghan soldiers was a haunting reminder of how bad the situation has become.

The Afghan Army is still unable to explain how Taliban gained entry into the military base at Mazar-e-Sharif, which is home to the Afghan National Army's 209th Corps. For long, Mazar-E-Sharif was peaceful area. Not anymore. The situation in the Southern part is so bad that the Afghan military is reluctant to patrol the Sangisar province, the town where the reclusive one-eyed chief of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, used to live and where he took oath with a few dozen men that started the Taliban movement in 1994.

To many Afghan watchers, America was never clear what it wanted in Afghanistan. It started the war to capture Osama Bin Laden then went to destroy Taliban and then to Taliban supporters across the border in Pakistan. As the war escalated, with huge human toll, the US tried almost every strategy raging from special ground operations to massive bombing to targeted drone attacks to secret negotiations with Taliban in Pakistan and Doha.

Today, the Afghan war poses new challenges to the U.S. administration. After more than sixteen years of war, 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. The war in Afghanistan is now President Donald Trump’s war. Since assuming office he has barely mentioned Afghanistan. His silence on Afghanistan was finally broken on the evening of April 13—when the US dropped the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb in Nangarhar province, reportedly killing 95 Daesh recruits. It was a clear indication how worse the situation has turned in Afghanistan that the Daesh recruits have found safe havens. The Daesh is the new worrying development in Afghanistan.

The Daesh recruits have been pummelled by US airstrikes and receive little local support, but today they maintain a small – but resilient – stronghold in eastern Afghanistan. They may not be an existential threat to the Afghan state but they are gaining ground. The bomb was meant to destroy their hideout and to scare them. But it has given local populations a new reason to hate the United States. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, once a close ally of the U.S., went on to say that the U.S. is using Afghanistan as a weapons testing ground, calling the recent use of the largest-ever non-nuclear bomb "an immense atrocity against the Afghan people."

The bomb, as many Afghan watchers note, did nothing to address the country’s primary security problem, which is not ISIS but the ever-strengthening Taliban which have adopted the tactics of anti-Soviet Jihad. During the fight against Russia, the Afghan Mujahideen would work in the field during day and in night they would dig out their weapons and carry attacks on Russian troops. The Taliban has been using the same tactics against the foreign troops.

There are only 8,500 American and 6,000 NATO soldiers left in the country. At one time there were more than 1.2 lakh foreign troops stationed in Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom, the name for the war in Afghanistan, officially ended in December 2016. In the absence of international troops, the Taliban have punctured the legitimacy of government forces. The US knows that it has lost the war. It is now looking for an honourable exit and some sort of calm in Afghanistan. Perhaps, the US may continue its random air attacks and a small military presence in Afghanistan permanently. Just as it has a permanent presence in South Korea, Japan, Germany and other places. But without enough troops on the ground the war will never be won.

In the long run, the situation is getting more complicated with the Taliban still receiving clandestine support from Pakistan and more worryingly from Iran and possibly Russia, according to US officials. From Delhi’s perspective, America’s artificial deadlines and exit strategy is flawed and will only increase the US’ dependence on the Pakistani military, something Delhi sees as an inherently wrong-headed policy.

Syed Nazakat is a Delhi-based senior journalist.

Source http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-afghanistan-amid-taliban-s-resurgence-america-despairs-for-an-exit-strategy-2417597