At the Pentagon they are fond of saying, “Hope is not a strategy.” But with little to show in the way of tangible battlefield results over the past 12 months, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan hinges on the fragile hope that a few ephemeral signs of peace may lead to an end to the nearly 17-year-old war.
When President Trump announced last August that he had agreed to dispatch more advisers, unleash more airpower, and commit to staying as long at it takes to help the beleaguered Afghan forces battle the Taliban, he admitted he was going against his gut.
“My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump said in his Aug. 21 address to the nation.
It took months over the summer of 2017, but Trump’s national security team ultimately convinced the reluctant president that a more muscular strategy could break the will of the Taliban and force a negotiated end to the fighting.
The main thing he needed to do, argued Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, was to correct what they considered to be President Barack Obama’s biggest blunder: announcing in 2009 that he was sending 30,000 reinforcements, but at the same time laying out a timetable for withdrawal.
“Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,” Trump said in announcing the new plan. “America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.”
One year later the traditional metrics for measuring success — the number of enemy attacks, the amount of territory controlled by each side, the number of civilians killed or wounded, and the performance of Afghan troops — all indicate that the conflict remains a stalemate, with neither side able to strike a decisive blow.
One key metric, the percentage of Afghanistan’s 407 districts under government control, has dropped from 66 percent in May of 2016 to 57 percent in August of 2017, and slipped to 56 percent in May of this year. Over the same two-year period, Taliban or insurgent control has risen from 9 percent in 2016 to almost 14 percent in 2018, while 30 percent of districts are now rated “contested” compared to only 25 percent two years ago, according to an audit by the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The U.S. military likes to point to the fact that while the Taliban have been able to carry out new offensives, they have been unable to hold on to any gains.
And U.S. officials are quick to tout the ability of the Afghan National Security Forces to maneuver forces more quickly, while employing their fledgling air force to provide their own support for troops on the ground as they beat back Taliban advances.
But in the assessment of Anthony Cordesman, an expert on military strategy at Center for Strategic and International Studies — improvements in the Afghan military not withstanding — America’s longest conflict has calcified into a textbook war of attrition.
“After 17 years of combat, no one at any level is claiming that enough military progress has been made in strengthening the ANSF enough for it to win,” Cordesman wrote in a CSIS assessment last month. “The most favorable claims seem to be that the ANSF are not losing, may someday become able to win with U.S. support.”
Unlike the campaign of annihilation aimed at capturing or killing every last member of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the battle against the Taliban is a test of wills, designed to convince the group it can’t win and its only logical choice is to negotiate.
In late February, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate political group and begin peace talks with no preconditions.
The Taliban didn’t jump at the offer, instead continuing for months to call for direct talks with the United States, something until last month the U.S. avoided, insisting any negotiations had be an “Afghan-led” process.
But late last month, a small number of U.S. diplomats, led by Alice Wells, the senior State Department point person on Afghanistan, met secretly with Taliban officials in Doha, Qatar, the first such meetings in seven years.
The thinking was that meeting with the Taliban could build on the prospect that a series of recent small developments might be a harbinger of a bigger movement toward reconciliation by the war-weary Afghan populace.
Among the promising signs: the rise of a peace movement with hundreds of marchers traversing the country and the issuance of a “fatwa” or decree calling for a cessation of hostilities by a gathering of prominent religious scholars, known as an “Ulema.”
But by far the highest hopes have been pinned on one potentially seminal event: a temporary three-day ceasefire around the Muslim religious holiday of Eid in June. Wells told Congress afterward that it provided “an exhilarating first taste of what peace might look like.”
“The national outpouring of relief and joy last weekend was unlike anything Afghanistan has seen,” Well testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Taliban fighters wandered the streets of the cities. They took selfies with Afghan soldiers. They sampled Eid treats with Afghan citizens. And they worshiped alongside those they had been exchanging fire with just a few days earlier.”
Of all the ways one could measure progress, U.S. commanders say that tiny glimmer of reconciliation could represent the most important change since the war began in October 2001.
“The ceasefire demonstrated the increased desire for peace, not only from the Afghan people, but from the belligerents of the conflict as well,” said Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, at a July 23 news conference in Kabul.
“This, I think, is the most significant thing that we’ve seen over the last year. And that to me is the game changer. That’s what is different this time compared to what we’ve seen in the past,” said Votel, who has overall responsibility for carrying out Trump’s strategy.
At last month’s NATO summit, two more countries joined the NATO-led Resolute Support mission — Qatar and the U.A.E. — and several allies pledged more troops to advise and assist the Afghan fighters, commitments Pentagon officials say show that other nations share a guarded optimism about prospects for eventual peace.
The next big milestone is the upcoming Afghan parliamentary elections, set for October, which will be a big test of whether the next government will be seen as legitimate by the Afghan people.
For now, the short-term military strategy is to maintain the pressure on the Taliban to provide “the time and space for diplomatic and social pressure to pursue this opportunity,” Votel said.
But the success will require playing the long game for at least a few more years, meaning America’s longest war will only become longer under Trump, who is now the biggest wild card.
Privately, Pentagon officials worry about another unscripted display of frustration, in which an impatient Trump suddenly blurts out his desire to bring U.S. troops home, as he did in April when he surprised the Pentagon by saying he wanted to get out of Syria.
An ill-timed statement or an ill-advised tweet, they worry, could be all it takes to derail the Afghan peace train and give the Taliban enough reason to dig in and try again to wait the U.S. out.
