[Hundreds of Afghan troops are being killed and wounded nearly every week — many in Taliban attacks on isolated checkpoints. Over the last year alone, the number of Afghan soldiers, police, pilots and other security forces dropped by about 5 percent, or 18,000 fewer people, according to the inspector general’s office.]
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and
Helene Cooper
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An American outpost in
the Afghanistan province of Nangarhar.
Credit Wakil
Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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WASHINGTON
— The Trump administration
is urging American-backed Afghan troops to retreat from sparsely populated
areas of the country, officials said, all but ensuring the Taliban will remain
in control of vast stretches of the country.
The approach is outlined in a previously
undisclosed part of the war strategy that President Trump announced last year,
according to three officials who described the documents to The New York Times
on the condition of anonymity. It is meant to protect military forces from
attacks at isolated and vulnerable outposts, and focuses on protecting cities
such as Kabul, the capital, and other population centers.
The withdrawal resembles strategies embraced
by both the Bush and Obama administrations that have started and stuttered over
the nearly 17-year war. It will effectively ensure that the Taliban and other
insurgent groups will hold on to territory that they have already seized,
leaving the government in Kabul to safeguard the capital and cities such as
Kandahar, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad.
The retreat to the cities is a searing
acknowledgment that the American-installed government in Afghanistan remains
unable to lead and protect the country’s sprawling rural population. Over the
years, as waves of American and NATO troops have come and left in repeated
cycles, the government has slowly retrenched and ceded chunks of territory to
the Taliban, cleaving Afghanistan into disparate parts and ensuring a conflict
with no end in sight.
When he announced his new war strategy last
year, Mr. Trump declared that Taliban and Islamic State insurgents in
Afghanistan “need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond
the reach of American might and American arms.”
After the declared end of combat operations
in 2014, most American troops withdrew to major population areas in the
country, leaving Afghan forces to defend remote outposts. Many of those bases
fell in the following months.
During a news conference last month in
Brussels, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of the American-led
coalition in Afghanistan, said remote outposts were being overrun by the
Taliban, which was seizing local forces’ vehicles and equipment.
“There is a tension there between what is the
best tactic militarily and what are the needs of the society,” General
Nicholson said.
The strategy depends on the Afghan
government’s willingness to pull back its own forces. A Defense Department
official said some Afghan commanders have resisted the American effort to do
so, fearing local populations would feel betrayed.
“Abandoning people into a situation where
there is no respect for them is a violation of human rights,” said Mohammad
Karim Attal, a member of the Helmand Provincial Council. “This might be the
weakest point of the government that does not provides security and access to
their people’s problems.”
Just over one-quarter of Afghanistan’s
population lives in urban areas, according to C.I.A. estimates; Kabul is the
largest city, with more than four million residents. Most Afghans live and farm
across vast rural hinterlands.
Of Afghanistan’s 407 districts, the
government either controls or heavily influences 229 to the Taliban’s 59. The
remaining 119 districts are considered contested, according to the Office of
the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan ambassador to the
United States, disputed that American and Afghan forces were leaving rural
areas and essentially surrendering them to the Taliban.
The intent was not to withdraw, Mr. Mohib
said in an email, but to first secure the urban areas to allow security forces
to later focus on rural areas.
Hundreds of Afghan troops are being killed
and wounded nearly every week — many in Taliban attacks on isolated
checkpoints. Over the last year alone, the number of Afghan soldiers, police,
pilots and other security forces dropped by about 5 percent, or 18,000 fewer
people, according to the inspector general’s office.
“This brings a very serious tension — when
you’ve had significant loss of life, and blood and treasure,” said Paul Eaton,
a retired two-star Army general who helped train Iraqi forces in the year after
the 2003 invasion of Baghdad. “But it is time to say that we need a political
outcome.”
Mr. Eaton said the plan to prod the Afghan
military to abandon the unpopulated areas and retrench to cities is “a rational
approach to secure the cities, and provide the Afghanistan government the
political opportunity to work with the Taliban.”
The strategy for retreat borrows heavily from
Mr. Obama’s military blueprint in Afghanistan after he began withdrawing troops
from front lines in 2014.
Under President George W. Bush, and during
Mr. Obama’s first term, the Pentagon established a constellation of outposts
across Afghanistan, affirming that the American-led military coalition would
fight the war in far-flung villages and farmlands.
In 2006, the United States Army set up a
string of small bases in the Korengal Valley — an effort that was planned in
part by General Nicholson, who was a colonel at the time.
But by 2009, an Army document outlined a
shift from “attacking the enemy in remote areas” to “protecting and developing
the major population centers” in eastern Afghanistan.
That approach began to take hold months
later, in 2010, when American forces withdrew from the Korengal Valley after
suffering bloody losses in isolated northeastern outposts. At the same time,
however, United States Marines were surging into the rural areas of Helmand
Province and the Army was pushing into the Taliban heartland in Kandahar.
In 2015, the Obama administration encouraged
Afghan commanders to give up defending some of the most remote checkpoints and
outposts that were seen as difficult to reclaim and hold. General Nicholson
supported the idea after he took command in 2016, the official said.
Should Afghan troops pull back now, defending
remote pockets of the country would mostly be left to the local police, which
are more poorly trained than the military and far more vulnerable to Taliban
violence. In some areas, police officers have cut deals with the Taliban to
protect themselves from attacks.
Ghulam Sarwar Haidari, the former deputy
police chief of northwestern Badghis Province, said his forces withdrew from
the small town of Dara-e-bom after the Afghan National Army abandoned their
outposts in past months. “We should lose 100 lives to retake that area,” he
said.
Not all of the roughly 14,000 United States
troops currently in Afghanistan have pulled back to cities. Some who are
training and advising Afghan troops as part of Mr. Trump’s war strategy are
stationed in bases in remote areas and smaller towns.
Mr. Trump has long called for ending the war
in Afghanistan and only reluctantly accepted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s
advice to send an additional 4,000 troops in an attempt to claim victory.
The Trump administration is also instructing
top American diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban to refuel
negotiations to end the war, and two senior Taliban officials said on Saturday
that such talks had been held in Qatar a week ago. If they happen, the
negotiations would be a major shift in American policy and would serve as a
bridge to an eventual withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan.
Evan McAllister, a former reconnaissance
Marine staff sergeant and sniper, fought in parts of Helmand Province in 2008
and 2011 — areas that are now almost entirely under Taliban control. He said
trying to maintain an Afghan government-friendly presence in rural areas was,
and still is, a “fool’s errand.”
“Attempting to control rural areas in
Afghanistan always eventually ends up boiling down to simple personal
survival,” Mr. McAllister said. “No strategic gains are accomplished, no
populace is influenced, but the death or dismemberment of American and Afghan
troops is permanent and guaranteed.”
