THIS was James Mattis’ first visit to Afghanistan as US secretary of defense. He went there unannounced as American officials usually do when they visit countries they have liberated. Even President Barack Obama who was against the Iraq war used to shroud his visit to that country in mystery.

We don’t know whether Taleban have a better intelligence system than Americans and knew of the high-profile visit. Or it was just a coincidence. In any case, what greeted the American official at Kabul’s airport on Wednesday was a barrage of rockets. Fortunately, the attack occurred after he had left the airport.

But this attack and the US air raid launched in support of Afghan security forces who confronted the attackers as well as the Taleban assault on government and police headquarters in Maroof district the same day provided an extremely somber background to the talks between Mattis and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

This was the first visit to Afghanistan by a high American official after President Donald Trump announced a new Afghan strategy last month. Trump is the seventh president since the end of World War II who inherited, on taking office, his predecessor’s war. During the campaign, he used to ridicule the futility of US troops remaining in Afghanistan without having anything to show after spending so much of blood and treasure for 15 years. Now that he is president, he does not want to publicly lose the war on his watch. Hence the new strategy and his muscular talk of victory, a word he used four times in his speech. How he is going to win the war? Simply by killing terrorists of all hue — Taleban, Al-Qaeda, Daesh (the so-called Islamic State).

In all essentials the new strategy is the old one except in three respects. One, Trump declared that he was saying goodbye to nation-building. Second, he was blunt in his criticism of what his predecessors also felt was insufficient commitment on the part of Pakistan to America’s war against Taleban. Third, it envisions India playing a bigger role in helping bring stability and prosperity to Afghanistan. If Pakistan is not fully cooperating with the US in Afghanistan, Trump is probably making true cooperation from Islamabad even more elusive by involving India in the search for peace. Both countries have diametrically opposite objectives in that country.

Trump may be reluctant to embrace Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan which he openly and repeatedly criticized. But Obama too, like George W. Bush, treated the Afghan exercise as part of a broader war on terrorism. At the height of the war in 2011, there were more than 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Trump is inheriting the war only because they could not crush the terrorists and dismantle their safe havens and sanctuaries. Now the question is how some 19,000 troops (including those of NATO allies and those Trump has promised) could accomplish these objectives. Gen. John Nicholson, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, may say the fact that Americans are not leaving “has put them (insurgents) in disarray.”

But the developments on Wednesday and Friday (when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a mosque in Kabul, killing five people and wounding 33 others) show that Taleban remain undaunted. Despite the bombasts from White House, the Afghan conflict still remains within the bounds of a stalemate, with neither side in a position to achieve a decisive victory.

But in the immediate future, there is a real danger. After his “fire and fury” threats against North Korea, Trump is under pressure to show some resolve and once again he may choose Afghanistan as he did in April when the US dropped a 11-ton bomb in eastern Afghanistan killing more than 90 supposed militants. This possibility can’t be ruled out when we remember that US dropped more bombs (503) on Afghanistan last month than any single month since 2012.