[In his speech Monday night, President Trump asserted that the United States would yet achieve peace through victory. Despite that assertion, and far more modest troop commitments this time, the hope of tiring the Taliban remains the mantra repeated by American diplomats and the generals whom the president has empowered to execute his policy.]
By Rod Nordland
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U.S. Army soldiers overseeing the training of Afghan National Army
soldiers in
Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2016. Credit Adam Ferguson
for The New York Times
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KABUL, Afghanistan —
Shortly after President Trump’s speech, a retired Afghan general recalled a
Taliban fighter who had taken up arms after six of his sons were killed, one by
one. The same AK-47 was handed down to each.
Then
the father was killed.
“You
don’t make peace with people like that,” said the retired general, Abdul Jabbar
Qahraman, a combat veteran and Parliament member who comes from Helmand
Province, the heart of the Taliban insurgency. “You also don’t win by killing
them, there are always more.”
After
nearly 16 years of war, America’s longest, the Taliban are not only far from
defeated, they are gaining ground. They also have evolved into a more tenacious
foe than the one routed in 2001, making a United States military triumph seem
more remote.
Ever
since 2008, when Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said “we can’t kill our way to victory,” the cornerstone of American
policy in Afghanistan has been not about obliterating the Taliban but pummeling
them toward peace talks. President Barack Obama’s Afghan surge of 100,000
American troops failed to do this.
In
his speech Monday night, President Trump asserted that the United States would
yet achieve peace through victory. Despite that assertion, and far more modest
troop commitments this time, the hope of tiring the Taliban remains the mantra
repeated by American diplomats and the generals whom the president has
empowered to execute his policy.
They
have quietly repeated that hope even in the absence of any visible peace
process since the latest serious effort at talks collapsed last year. Within hours
of President Trump’s speech, the American military commander in Kabul made that
clear.
“This
new strategy means the Taliban cannot win militarily,” said the commander, Gen.
John W. Nicholson. “Now is the time to renounce violence and reconcile. A peaceful,
stable Afghanistan is victory for the Afghan people and the goal of the
Coalition.”
As
might be expected, the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, scoffed at
President Trump’s speech as “nothing new.” But many Afghans on the government
side had a similar take.
“That’s
the same strategy going on the last two decades,” said Jamaluddin Badr, a
member of the Afghan High Peace Council. “He said we’re going to win, but he
didn’t make it clear how we’re going to win.”
It
remains unclear how many additional troops Mr. Trump will send, although
Pentagon officials have said as many as 3,900. Gen. Joseph Votel, the top
commander in the Middle East, told reporters traveling with him to Saudi Arabia
on Tuesday that they would start arriving in within “days or weeks.”
The
vision of victory laid out by American generals, then and now, has been to help
a friendly Afghan government hold Kabul and other crucial cities and convince
the Taliban that they cannot again rise to national power, as they did in the
’90s.
But
the ground has shifted. Even if the new American troop commitment limits the
Taliban to the territory they have seized in the past two years, the pressure
of that advance and old political rivalries have brought the Afghan government
to the brink of collapse.
Further,
the Taliban whom the Americans hope to bring to the table are not the same.
The
Taliban position against peace talks has rarely been more hard-line than now.
As the Taliban have regained territory, they have killed government soldiers and
policemen at the highest rate of the war. General Qahraman, who until last year
was the president’s military envoy to Helmand, said the insurgents control 60
percent of the country. Even the government’s own figures concede the Taliban
contest or control 35 percent, a substantial gain over last year.
What
once was a marginal, militant faction, the Haqqani Network, is now in the
Taliban’s top leadership, including the No. 2 figure, who is in charge of
military operations. The Haqqanis have been responsible for many of the
deadliest attacks on the capital, and are known for running a virtual factory
in Pakistan that has steadily supplied suicide bombers since 2005. The last
Taliban leader to espouse peace talks, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, was
killed in an American drone strike last year.
The
rise in Afghanistan of the Islamic State in Khorasan, an affiliate of the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, may be worrying Taliban leaders who see it as
a potential rival. But the more extreme violence and ideology promoted by the
Islamic State may also have forced the Taliban to adopt harsher methods
themselves and made participation in peace talks even more unlikely.
President
Trump mentioned “victory” four times and “defeat” of the enemy seven times in
his speech. But it remains unclear what victory would even look like.
His
speech hinted at one possible outcome: denying the insurgents safe havens in
Pakistan, possibly by severing that country’s billions in American military
aid.
American
policy makers have repeatedly considered and rejected that possibility before.
Pakistan has proved immune to sanctions, even severe ones when it was
developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan also has a powerful ally in China, which
is likely to step into any breach in American assistance. Alienating Pakistan
could make the situation in Afghanistan far worse.
More
likely, victory will resemble Afghanistan now: “a stalemate where the
equilibrium favors the government,” in General Nicholson’s words to Congress in
February.
That
assumes that the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani can survive, an
assumption sorely tested this year. Troubled with political divisions, and
sometimes deadly infighting among pro-government warlords, Mr. Ghani’s
government has faced debilitating street protests from citizens angry about
terrorist attacks and insecurity.
Long-delayed
parliamentary elections are scheduled for next year, but whether a credible
vote can be held remains unclear. The 2014 presidential election was a disputed
debacle of vote-stealing and other fraud.
President
Trump’s speech on Afghanistan was conspicuously devoid of details: no timetable
or numbers of new troops, though it is believed to be about 4,000. A timetable
has been long opposed by American generals and Afghan officials who see it as a
valuable piece of information for Taliban planners.
Franz-Michael
Mellbin, the European Union ambassador to Kabul, said Mr. Trump’s vagueness was
strategically shrewd. “It is an important signal to the Taliban that they can
no longer wait us out,” he said.
But
it also signaled that, 16 years on, many years of American entanglement may
remain.
Even
before the president’s speech, the American military and Afghan leaders were
laying long-term plans. President Ghani has a new four-year plan for the war,
extending through the 2020 fighting season, and includes doubling his army’s
special forces. The American military has a $6.5-billion plan to make the
Afghan air force self-sufficient and end its overreliance on American air power
by 2023.
The
Taliban have long-range plans, too. While their attempts to actually hold
seized provincial capitals have failed — often because of massive intervention
by American air power, aided by special operations troops — many provincial
centers remain little more than islands, surrounded by hostile countryside.
Taliban
fighters can create roadblocks and ambushes in almost any part of the country,
disrupting commerce and exacting an ever-growing human toll. Most of the 3,000
civilians killed annually are victims of the insurgents. And with Taliban
control of most of Helmand Province, where 80 percent of Afghanistan’s opium is
produced, Taliban coffers are full, both from taxing the drug and trafficking
in it.
The
insurgents, too, suffer high casualties; one senior American military official
put their losses at 10,000 a year. Only five years ago, American military
intelligence officials put the Taliban’s entire strength at 20,000 men, yet
they seem to have no trouble replenishing their numbers.
Ask
the Taliban about that, and they have a ready answer.
Hajji
Naqibullah, an insurgent commander from Sangin District, cited Hajji Amanullah,
who had 13 members of his family killed in battle, all replaced by his nephews.
And Mullah Abdul Salam had four sons killed but his fifth volunteered, and is
now a local commander.
Hajji
Naqibullah said three of his own cousins were killed during the fight in
Sangin, where more American and British soldiers died than anywhere else in
Afghanistan, and which fell to the insurgents in March after a yearlong
campaign. The three were brothers, and their widowed mother had one son left,
who joined after they died. “His mother is now living with widows and orphans,”
Hajji Naqibullah said.
Somewhere
in Kandahar Province Monday morning, the Taliban’s military commander for the
south, a member of the group’s ruling Quetta Shura, tuned in at 5:30 a.m. to
the BBC’s Pashto service to hear a translation of Mr. Trump’s speech. Like many
Taliban leaders, he said, he had hoped to hear Mr. Trump make good on early
vows to quit Afghanistan.
“This is not good for the people of
Afghanistan,” said the commander, who did not want his name or even precise
location identified for security reasons.
“He
should realize Afghanistan is not like it was during the Bush and Obama
administrations,” he said. “And we are not going to surrender, we are not going
to give up, we’ll fight this war for another 16 years.”
Reporting
was contributed by Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan, Fahim Abed and
Jawad Sukhanyar from Kabul, and Helene Cooper from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.