President Trump’s pick to lead his new surge strategy in Afghanistan is likely to be pressed this week on whether the plan is finally turning the tide there, and whether building up Afghan security forces is having an effect on rising levels of violence there.
The Senate Armed Services Committee will meet Tuesday to hear from the nominee, Lt. Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller.
Miller now heads U.S. Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., and is poised to take the reins from current Afghanistan commander Gen. John Nicholson.
The change of leadership comes as Trump and the Pentagon have sent thousands more troops to the country in an effort to gain momentum toward ending the 17-year-old war and force the Taliban into peace negotiations.
Miller commands U.S. special operators who run clandestine missions against terrorists and other threats around the world. As a young infantry officer, he led elite Army Delta Force soldiers during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia when a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter was shot down with a rocket propelled grenade, standing troops in hostile territory.
Now, the general could become the ninth Afghanistan commander since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, and be tasked with overseeing the new Afghanistan strategy announced by Trump in August, which will cost about $45 billion this year. The strategy included sending about 4,000 more U.S. troops to train and assist Afghan forces as part of the NATO Resolute Support mission.
The Taliban tentatively agreed to a three-day ceasefire this week as the U.S.-aligned government in Kabul offered peace talks. But the group has committed a string of deadly bombings, assaulted provincial centers, and maintained control of vast portions of Afghanistan since the new strategy was declared.
“This is a group that knows they cannot win at the ballot box, so they go to bombs. They can’t take on the Afghan army anymore, and so they kill innocent people,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters last week.
The Army officer in charge of the Security Forces Assistance Brigade deployed under the president’s new strategy to assist and train Afghan forces cited “great progress” during a briefing to reporters this week.
“And I’ll tell you in the less than a hundred days we’ve been here, across our SFAB formation, across the country, we see the examples where the Afghans are taking the fight to the enemy,” said Army Col. Scott Jackson, the brigade commander. “They’re using their own organic resources to fight against the enemy, their own attack aviation, their own air force, their own artillery and utilizing their own ground maneuver to put the enemy in a bad spot.”
