AT last an American president has acknowledged a bitter truth: The US is not winning the Afghan war. In a two-hour meeting in the White House situation room on July 19, Donald Trump, according to NBC News, went one step further and said: "We are losing.”
Trump has always been inconsistent in his views on this war, America’s longest. Afghanistan hardly figured in his campaign speeches or statements except when he wanted to ridicule his predecessors for their military adventures. But immediately after assuming office, he cited Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear weapons as a justification for America’s continued presence in Afghanistan. Now he mentions Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth as a reason for American involvement in that country.
Trump may be inconsistent in his views on the war, but America’s main adversary, Taleban, are not. They know what they want and are determined to achieve it. An outright military victory against a superpower is impossible. So they go for the next best thing and make things as much difficult for the US as it is possible for them. This is why Afghanistan remains in utter turmoil though the US has fought there four times as long as the American combat participation in World War II.
An American-led coalition invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to topple the Taleban from power. The group was punished for supposedly harboring Al-Qaeda, held responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on America. Taleban lost power but none of Afghans’ capacity for fighting foreign invaders. With the result America has failed to bring peace or security to Afghanistan. That Taleban can stage attacks anywhere, any time became clear again last week.
On Thursday, a Taleban suicide bomber disguised as a woman rammed his motorcycle into an international convoy, killing a NATO soldier and two Afghan civilians in the north of the Afghan capital. It was the second deadly assault last week on a NATO convoy. On Wednesday, two US soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber who attacked a convoy of foreign forces in the southern province of Kandahar.
Dozens of people were killed in an attack at a packed mosque in the western province of Herat on Tuesday. At the end of July, a suicide car bomb killed at least 30 people as it struck a bus carrying government employees in a district of Kabul.
At least 26 Afghan soldiers were killed and 13 wounded in a Taleban attack on a military base in Kandahar province last month. April witnessed one of the deadliest-ever insurgent attacks on a military installation. The target was a base outside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and more than 140 soldiers were reportedly killed.
According to US watchdog SIGAR, casualties among Afghan security forces rose by 35 percent in 2016, with 6,800 soldiers and police killed. UN figures show that more than 1,600 civilians lost their lives in the first half of this year, a record high in the 16-year war.
This means that even if Trump sends more troops, it will only perpetuate a failed status quo.
At the height of the intervention, there were 140,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, about 100,000 of them American. How will an addition of some 5,000 troops reverse the sagging fortunes of the war?
The fact is none of the options available to Trump are appealing. Except talking to Taleban in hopes that it will lead to a political settlement without the superpower losing its face. There is a consensus among Iran, Russia, Pakistan as well as the Chinese in favor of a political settlement. Taleban too has expressed willingness to talk to the United States.
So Trump has to declare publicly his intent to make a peace deal, painful though it may be. What is needed is an imaginative diplomacy that will lead to a military withdrawal, though not all in one go, without jeopardizing Washington’s national security interests.
