Eight years ago Wednesday, U.S. Special Forces dropped into a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader whose team of mostly Saudi hijackers had killed some 3,000 people in a terrorist assault in New York City and Washington, D.C., nearly a decade before. That would have been the perfect time to bring all the U.S. and other NATO troops home from Afghanistan.
At the time there were about 100,000 U.S. troops there, triple the number when President Barack Obama took the oath of office in 2009. Obama soon ordered a phased withdrawal after bin Laden was killed, and in 2014, he commanded the Pentagon to come up with a plan for a complete withdrawal by the time he left office at the end of his second term. But in 2015, military leaders changed his mind because of what was called a “fragile” situation. He chose to leave 8,400 troops in Afghanistan for the next president to figure out what to do with.
Before being elected, Donald Trump had talked about withdrawing all the troops immediately. But he ultimately boosted those numbers to about 14,000, and it wasn’t until late last year that he again spoke of pulling most U.S. troops out immediately. He was talked out of that, and said half should be withdrawn quickly, with the rest to come home at some later time. But far fewer than 7,000 troops are likely to be withdrawn anytime soon because, say military authorities, a more rapid drawdown would make it easy for the Taliban to finish the job of retaking control over the nation they ruled until they were toppled by the U.S. invasion after the 9/11 attacks.
Sound familiiar?
In fact, even as peace talks grind along in Doha, Qatar, the Taliban now controls more of the country than it has at any time since that invasion 17 years ago. After nearly more than a decade of NATO training the Afghan National Army and police forces, U.S. analysts say the Afghanistan government is still not ready to take over total control of national security. Many observers have said over the years that it never will be.
Now, NATO’s Resolute Support operation, which has been producing publicly available quarterly reports assessing how things are going in Afghanistan will no longer do so or will stamp “classified” on all such information. Trump gave the order to do this at a cabinet meeting in January, stating that the Taliban studies these reports. Keeping the information secret from the American public on the grounds that the Taliban can use the information is a joke given that they know the situation firsthand.
Phillip Walter Wellman at Stars and Stripes reports:
For about three years, NATO’s Resolute Support mission had produced quarterly district-level stability assessments that counted the districts, total estimated population and total estimated land area that Kabul controlled or influenced, as well as those under the sway of insurgents and those contested by both sides.
Officials have stopped the assessments because they were “of limited decision-making value” to Army Gen. Scott Miller, commander of the Resolute Support mission, the coalition told the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, according to a quarterly report published late Tuesday.
This change in policy was passed along Tuesday to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. The U.S. general in charge of Resolute Support said the quarterly assessments aren’t reliable.
That may be so. Or maybe the reason is because of the situation detailed in the last quarterly assessment, which was released in October. What it concluded was that Kabul’s control or influence in the country’s 407 districts was lower and the Taliban’s influence stronger than at anytime since 2015. The coalition’s goal of gaining control over areas where 80% of the Afghan population lives had fallen far short, with government in control of areas with less than 65% of the population.
Enemy-initiated attacks were up 19% from November through January, security force casualties were 31% higher for December 2018 through February 2019, and security-related incidents up 39% during the same three-month period, according to information from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. Among the casualties, eight Americans have been killed in combat since the beginning of this year. That compares with one each for the same period of the past four years. The death toll for Afghan military and civilians is, of course, far higher.
In a statement about the quarterly assessments, the Pentagon said, It’s “more important to instead focus on the principal goal of the strategy of concluding the war in Afghanistan on terms favorable to Afghanistan and the United States.”
The talks with the Taliban in Doha have been … problematic. With the Taliban gaining more extensive control of Afghanistan and launching its usual spring offensive, getting terms favorable to all parties is highly unlikely in the short run. One of the key sticking points is the timeline for withdrawal of U.S. and other coalition troops. The U.S. has agreed to a phased pull out over five years, while the Taliban wants it to happen over 18 months. What that probably means is that the U.S.-Afghan war will not be ended until the fourth president to preside over it is in office. For now, there is no end in sight to the expenditure of money and lives—American, Afghan, and other.