At War with Pakistan

In office Trump reversed course from the campaign trail and proclaimed a renewed U.S. commitment to the war in Afghanistan. At the beginning of the month, Trump tweeted his disdain for Pakistan's role in that war, and his administration suspended aid to its ally. The response -- crippling Taliban and Islamic State attacks on Kabul -- was predictable.

What's interesting about recent coverage in "the newspaper of record," a sampling of which you will find below, is how explicitly this increase in attacks is connected to Pakistan. The U.S. is at war with our NATO ally Turkey, and it has been at war with Pakistan for quite some time, 17-plus years.

From "As Afghan Attacks Intensify, So Does Anger at Country’s Leaders" by Mujib Mashal and Fahim Abed:

Afghan officials said they had expected the urban attacks to escalate after President Trump this month ratcheted up pressure on Pakistan, long seen as supporting Taliban insurgents as proxies in Afghanistan, and intensified the air campaign against the Taliban in the countryside.

But critics say the political disarray in Kabul has exacerbated the security situation. The government is facing a growing and vocal opposition and has long been strained by a constitutional crisis. Mr. Ghani has struggled to manage, picking what critics call untimely political battles. His recent firing of a powerful provincial governor, who is refusing to leave a post he has held for 13 years, has led to a protracted showdown that is consuming the government’s energy.

In the latest wave of violence, Taliban militants laid siege to a hilltop hotel, fighting for 15 hours and killing at least 22. Then, on Saturday, the Taliban drove an ambulance packed with explosives into the heart of the city, within a earshot of the country’s intelligence agency and other government offices, and slaughtered more than 100 people.

Although the Monday attack at the military university was claimed by the Islamic State, Afghan officials saw it as connected to the Taliban violence. Afghan and Western officials have long spoken of an overlap between the networks that carry out urban attacks for the Taliban and the Islamic State.

The Trump administration announced last month that it would suspend security aid to Pakistan for harboring such terrorist groups. Mr. Ghani, his aides say, has repeatedly warned that Pakistan would push the Taliban to intensify its violence in order to weaken the government here before American pressure could change Pakistan’s long-held calculations.

The war will not end, said Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the Afghan intelligence chief, who is facing calls to resign, “without Pakistan stopping the support for terrorists.”

“The mentality there that ‘fighting in Afghanistan is a holy war’ should be eliminated,” he added. “Without that, it is not possible to end the war here.”

Mr. Stanekzai said the international pressure on Pakistan had “translated into revenge on the Afghan people.”

Taliban commanders say they are intensifying the urban attacks as a retaliation for increased airstrikes on their areas. The United States military alone dropped more than 4,000 bombs across Afghanistan in 2017, and the Afghan air force, as it expands with aircraft provided by the United States, increasingly carries out regular bombings. New American military units are expected to arrive, adding to the approximately 14,000 troops already here, to advise and assist the Afghans.

Much of the blame for the security lapse has focused on the leadership of Mr. Ghani, whose voice has been lacking from the public conversation in the face of the bloodletting. He rarely speaks to local news media, and critics accuse him of not understanding the gravity of the situation as he remains mired in trying to fix a broken bureaucracy.

On Monday, Mr. Ghani appeared at a brief news conference along with the visiting president of Indonesia. The day had been declared a national holiday “to free resources” for victims of the earlier attacks, though many suggested that the main motive was to shut down the city for security reasons to make the Indonesian’s visit possible.

Mr. Ghani said the Taliban, who in the past had hesitated to claim responsibility for attacks with high civilian casualties, were now happy to do so because “their masters” — a reference to Pakistan — had been cornered by international pressure. “They did it at the behest of their masters, so their masters can get out of political isolation,” Mr. Ghani said.

He added: “Our blood will not go unanswered.”

From "Attacks Reveal What U.S. Won’t: Victory Remains Elusive in Afghanistan" by Helene Cooper:

In coming months, the total number of American troops in Afghanistan will grow to an estimated 15,000. Nearly a third of them — 4,000 — will have been sent under President Trump’s new war strategy, which he is expected to promote during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

“We’re going to finish what we have to finish,” Mr. Trump told reporters Monday at the start of a lunch at the White House with United Nations ambassadors on the Security Council. “What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it.”

But in a war that began with airstrikes and a few hundred Special Operations forces in 2001, and which later saw as many as 100,000 troops deployed, such promises have been heard before.

[snip] 

On May 27, 2014, Mr. Obama announced that the bulk of American forces would head home. An estimated 100,000 United States troops were in Afghanistan at the peak of war operations; that number would dwindle to 10,000 under Mr. Obama’s strategy.

“It’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

That was before the Islamic State arrived on the scene. In 2015, the extremist group rooted in Iraq and Syria marked its arrival in Afghanistan with a suicide bomb attack in Jalalabad, killing more than 30 people and injuring more than 100.

Not to be outdone, the Taliban soon after overran Kunduz — the first time the group had managed to take over a major city since 2001. Afghan government troops, backed by the United States, eventually wrested back control.

By the end of 2016, General Nicholson, the current war commander, said the United States’ support “sends a clear message to the enemies of peace and stability in Afghanistan, and the world, frankly, that they will not win.” Four months later, he ordered the dropping of the “mother of all bombs” — the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal — on an Islamic State cave complex in the Achin district of eastern Afghanistan.

In November, General Nicholson delivered another bright update from Kabul. “The Taliban cannot win in the face of the pressures that I outlined,” he said on Nov. 28. “Again, their choices are to reconcile, live in irrelevance or die.”

From Max Fisher's "Why Attack Afghan Civilians? Creating Chaos Rewards Taliban":

As American-led forces have escalated in response to Taliban gains, they have unintentionally pushed the Taliban toward grislier violence. Airstrikes have forced the Taliban to lie low in rural areas, where they prefer to operate, seizing territory and extorting from locals.

Instead, they have shifted toward terrifying if brief guerrilla-style attacks in Kabul and other urban districts, where American air power is of little use. Though this gains them no territory, it allows them to humiliate the government where it is most visible.

“The city is infiltrated, the city is contaminated,” said Amrullah Saleh, a former intelligence chief.

The government, Mr. Saleh said, often cannot even know whether a suicide bomber entered from outside the city “or whether he is brainwashed here; whether they build the vests here or whether they import.”

The group’s internal dynamics have aligned with its shifting incentives, elevating officers who favor large-scale attacks on civilians.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, who leads the once-semi-autonomous Haqqani Network, a terrorist group closely associated with Al Qaeda, now serves at the Taliban’s No. 2 leader and de facto military planner.

“The Taliban and the Haqqani are the same,” said Sayed Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander. “Only the government is differentiating between them.”

[snip]

For as long as Afghanistan’s war has raged, Pakistan, which plays a double-game with the Taliban, has been at the center of its seeming intractability.

President Trump, following two presidents who tried and failed to rein in Pakistan’s meddling, publicly chastised Pakistani leaders this month, freezing security aid to Pakistan.

But Ms. Brown said that the United States seemed unready for the all-but-inevitable response to its confrontation with Pakistan. “If you start on the path of escalating pressure, you have to be ready for the other side to escalate,” she said.