The Obama administration is nearing a decision to keep more troops in Afghanistan next year than it had intended, effectively upending its drawdown plans in response to roiling violence in the country and another false start in the effort to open peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
As recently as last month, American officials had hoped that a renewed push to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table would yield the beginnings of a peace process and allow the United States to stick with its plan to drop the number of troops in Afghanistan from just under 10,000 to about 5,600 by the end of the year.
But those hopes have been dashed by signs that the Taliban remain deeply divided over whether to engage in talks, as they have been for years, and that the remaining Qaeda presence in the region is proving more resilient than officials had anticipated.
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Keeping the number of troops closer to 10,000 would also allow the American-led coalition to maintain two large bases in Kandahar, the main city in southern Afghanistan, and in Jalalabad, the biggest city in the country’s east. The base in Jalalabad is a hub for the collection of intelligence on Qaeda operations; it was, for instance, the base from which American forces launched the raid in 2011 that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Despite the formal end of the American-led combat mission in Afghanistan, coalition forces are still regularly launching airstrikes to support Afghan soldiers and police, and American Special Operations troops are still raiding remote villages and mountainside redoubts that shelter both Taliban fighters and operatives from Al Qaeda and other foreign extremist groups.
The continuity between the Bush and the Obama administration has become more and more striking over the years.
Same as it ever was!It’s one thing to listen to your generals, who come from a culture that thinks that the problem with the whole Vietnam war wasn’t the 58,000 American dead, or the 1½-3½ million Vietnamese, but instead was that we lacked sufficient will to win, and it’s another to swallow this perverted world view as gospel.
The Pentagon in general, and the uniformed military in particular, is structured with the singular goal of prosecuting a war. They spectacularly ill-equipped to determine whether and when we should go to war, and only misery and defeat can come from letting them take this roll.
It’s one of the reasons that civilian control of the military is enshrined in the constitution.