The Never-Ending War in Kabul: Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, May 31, 2017 — A suicide bomber detonated a vehicle packed with explosives near the German Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, at 8:22 local time this morning.
What Does America Consider Success in Afghanistan?: Luke Coffey, National Interest, June 1, 2017— Wednesday’s terror attack in Kabul is a stark reminder of how brutal the war in Afghanistan still is.
Trump and the Foreign-Policy Establishment: Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, May 16, 2017 — Speaking to a number of governors in February, Donald Trump unburdened himself, “We have to win. We have to start winning wars again. . . . We never win and we don’t fight to win. We’ve either got to win or don’t fight it at all.”
Iran, Fighting to the Last Afghan: Michael Rubin, Commentary, Apr. 3, 2017— During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and Cuba regularly used foreign proxies to fight their battles.
Deadly Kabul Bombing the Latest in a Raging Afghanistan War: Mark MacKinnon, Globe and Mail, May 31, 2017
Afghanistan Blames Pakistan for Planning Deadly Kabul Attack: Ruchi Kumar, Foreign Policy, June 1, 2017
It’s Time to Give Up On Saving Afghanistan: Ralph Peters, New York Post, June 5, 2017
Afghanistan, the Sequel. Why Would Canada Return to a War it Would Rather Forget?: Andrew Potter, National Post, May 19, 2017
Thomas Joscelyn
Weekly Standard, May 31, 2017
A suicide bomber detonated a vehicle packed with explosives near the German Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, at 8:22 local time (May 31). The death toll has steadily risen in the hours since. The Afghan government says that at least 90 people were killed and 400 more wounded, according to the Associated Press. That makes the attack one of the deadliest in the history of the Afghan War–if not the deadliest. And it underscores the severity of the threat to the Afghan capital at a time when the Trump administration is debating what policy course to pursue next.
The Taliban was quick to deny any involvement. Afghan officials are blaming the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, which is part of the Taliban's coalition, anyway. And the group is certainly capable of executing such an attack. However, even though the group has been responsible for many civilian casualties, it is sensitive to the charge that jihadists indiscriminately kill men, women, and children. Taliban leaders, like their comrades in al Qaeda, have concluded that such operations limit their ability to appeal to a broader swath of the population.
The Islamic State, on the other hand, doesn't hesitate to kill anyone it deems to be an apostate or infidel. The difference is best illustrated in how the two rivals, who frequently fight one another, treat Shiites. In years past, the Taliban committed war crimes against Afghanistan's Hazaras, who are predominately Shiite. Two of the "Taliban Five" commanders held at Guantanamo until May 2014, when they were exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, were suspected of murdering "thousands of Shiites." Yet, the Taliban has been more restrained when it comes to anti-Shiite violence in recent years. This created a market opportunity within the jihadist community for the Islamic State, which has a fetish for Shiite blood. Since some Sunnis accuse Shiites of adhering to a deviant version of Islam, they see no need for restraint. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's Sunni loyalists cater to this fetish in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. It is a blood sport for them. And this has helped drive up the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
In fact, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the "single deadliest conflict-related incident for civilians" in Afghanistan since 2001 came on July 23, 2016, when two ISIS suicide bombers struck a what the U.N. described as a peaceful demonstration in Kabul's Deh Mazang Square. The terrorists in Deh Mazang deliberately targeted members of Afghanistan's Hazara minority. The so-called caliphate claimed the massacre was retaliation for Afghan Shiites participating in the Syrian war on the side of Bashar al-Assad's regime and Iran. UNAMA "documented 85 civilian deaths and the injury of 413 others" from the heinous assault. Incredibly, this is less than the casualty figures currently being reported out of Afghanistan after Wednesday's's bombing.
UNAMA has been recording civilian casualties, including both deaths and injuries, since 2009. According to its annual report, 2016 was worse than any of the preceding seven years, in no small part due to the surge of violence in Kabul. 11,418 people were killed or wounded in 2016 across Afghanistan. (By comparison, 5,969 civilian casualties were recorded in 2009.) Afghanistan's south was still the most dangerous area, but the country's "central region," which includes Kabul, was not far behind. UNAMA found a 34 percent increase in civilian casualties in the central region in 2016, as compared to 2015, "due to suicide and complex attacks in Kabul city."
ISIS's Afghan arm, known as Wilayah Khorasan (or the Khorasan "province," also known as ISIS-K), slaughtered Shiites in Kabul in the months after the assault on Deh Mazang Square. The group claimed responsibility for two additional suicide attacks at Shiite mosques in October and November 2016, killing at least 59 people and injuring 134 others. Wilayah Khorasan claimed that the victims deserved to die because they were "polytheists." ISIS continued to launch high-profile operations in Kabul during the first five months of 2017. And their operations haven't solely targeted Shiites.
In February, the group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing outside of Afghanistan's supreme court, killing at least 20 people. In March, a suicide assault team raided the Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan Hospital in Kabul. The hospital is Afghanistan's largest for military personnel and their families. The jihadists dressed like medical staff in order to confuse their victims. Dozens more were killed or wounded. Then, in May, another ISIS suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy near the U.S. Embassy, killing at least eight civilians in the process.
The U.S. has been leading a counterterrorism campaign against the Islamic State's Wilayah Khorasan in eastern Afghanistan since early last year. The territory controlled by Baghdadi's goons in Nangarhar province has dwindled. But the fighting has been intense; three American servicemembers were killed in April. And even as the U.S. and its Afghan allies have whittled away at the jihadists' turf, they have retained the ability to launch mass casualty attacks in Kabul and elsewhere. The suicide bomber responsible for this morning's atrocity made it to the border of Kabul's highly-secure "Green Zone," which is supposed to be safe for foreign diplomats and media personnel. Afghan security forces prevented him from entering, but that provides little comfort to the victims and their families.
While Wilayah Khorasan remains a potent threat, we should not forget that the Taliban-al Qaeda axis is a far bigger danger to Afghanistan's long-term security. The Taliban-led insurgency contests, controls or influences more than 160 of Afghanistan's districts, according to data compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR), which reports to Congress. Wilayah Khorasan currently controls only a handful of districts, at most. And a return to Taliban rule would surely usher in new barbarities, despite the organization's current, tactical restraint in conducting operations. The Trump administration has yet to decide on a strategy for the Afghan war. Today's bombing in Kabul is a reminder that one is sorely needed–quickly.
WHAT DOES AMERICA CONSIDER SUCCESS IN AFGHANISTAN?
Luke Coffey
National Interest, June 1, 2017
Wednesday’s terror attack in Kabul is a stark reminder of how brutal the war in Afghanistan still is. A suicide truck bomber drove near the German Embassy in Wazir Akbar Khan, the diplomatic heart of Kabul, and then detonated his bomb amid the morning rush-hour traffic. The blast killed at least ninety civilians and wounded another four hundred. This wasn’t the first such attack in Afghanistan, and it won’t be the last. After almost sixteen years of war in Afghanistan, it is only natural to wonder: how do we know if we are winning?
Winston Churchill, while serving as a young officer fighting the Pashtuns in the 19th century, explained the difficulty of winning the type of war he faced then and that the United States faces now in Afghanistan: “There are no general actions on a great scale, no brilliant successes, no important surrenders, no chance for a coup de theatre. It is just a rough hard job, which must be carried through. The war is one of small incidents. The victory must be looked for in the results.”
Some things never change. What was true in 1897 is as true in 2017. When NATO ended its combat operations in Afghanistan and transitioned into a train, advise and assist role in 2015, the usual fanfare associated with victory in war was notably absent. There were no triumphal parades, no formal surrender ceremony, and no heroic march into an enemy’s capital. This is not the Afghan way of war.
In late 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks, there were two main goals in Afghanistan. First, to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven from which to plan, train and launch terrorist attacks on a global scale. Secondly, to remove the Taliban regime from power as punishment for not cooperating with the international community and for harboring terrorism—a sort of twenty-first century version of a nineteenth-century punitive raid on the frontier. Both were accomplished with relative speed— it can even be argued that this was achieved by the summer of 2002.
As the years went by, the explanation for what U.S. forces were doing in Afghanistan shifted from America’s raw national-security needs to vague notions of nation building and “bringing democracy.” Consequently, the inability to produce what public opinion considers tangible and achievable results sixteen years on has disappointed many. Since our military intervention in 2001, we have focused on the quixotic goals of creating “a strong central government” and a “pluralistic society” in Afghanistan. We have tried accomplishing these goals by “holding free and fair” elections, “tackling corruption,” and building the “institutions of democracy.” If we fail to achieve these goals, we are presented with doomsday scenarios of “ungoverned spaces,” the Taliban “back in power,” and the establishment of new terrorists “safe havens.”
But this black-and-white view of the situation doesn’t work in a place like Afghanistan. It is a place with many shades of gray. There is a complex middle ground in Afghanistan, and this is where we are today—and where we will likely be for the foreseeable future. Few in the United States believe that we have been defeated in Afghanistan. They just think we haven’t met the objectives they expected to be achieved—and that what we have achieved has taken too long and cost too much. This is not an unreasonable view. We have been fighting in Afghanistan for almost sixteen years and will likely have some form of military involvement there for at least sixteen more. An eighteen-year-old soldier serving in Afghanistan today was only two years old at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Thousands of U.S. troops have been killed and wounded and just shy of $1 trillion has been spent.
For years, especially in the earlier days of the war, successive U.S. commanders thought that if one more road could be paved, one more school built, or one more hospital constructed, America could leave Afghanistan just that much better. Over the years, this focus on nation-building—however well intended it might have been—resulted in expectations set so high in Afghanistan that even obvious successes on the security front were not considered good enough. This created an impossible situation for the U.S. military. With the lofty goals of nation building defining our success in the early days, the only thing most people see today in Afghanistan is failure.
However, a closer look at the situation shows that much has actually been achieved. After the successful targeting of Taliban leaders, combined with a robust counterinsurgency campaign over the years, the group as a national movement has degenerated into several smaller, weaker and localized insurgencies—each with a different set of grievances and goals. Even with today’s horrific attack in Kabul, the level of violence in Afghanistan is nowhere close to its peak in 2011–12. Al Qaeda, which once used Afghan territory with impunity, no longer enjoys a safe haven in Afghanistan from which to plan and launch terror attacks on a global scale. The threat posed to Afghanistan by the Islamic State isn’t even close to being in the same league as the Taliban, and pales in comparison to the terror group’s other affiliates in Syria, Libya and Yemen. No major terrorist attack originating from Afghanistan has been successful in the United States since 2001.
The Taliban that rolled into Kandahar in 1994 with tanks and planes is a shadow of its former self today. In 2001, outside of a small rump of territory run by the Northern Alliance in northeast Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled the entire country. Today, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s most recent quarterly report to Congress, the Taliban has “control or influence” in only eleven out of 407 districts across Afghanistan, equaling only 9 percent of the country’s population. By contrast, 66 percent of Afghanistan’s population live under the “control or influence” of the Afghan government. The remaining 25 percent of the population lives in “contested” areas. After sixteen years of warfare, maybe we should come to terms with the fact that until there is a genuine political settlement between all warring parties and Pakistan stops providing succor to the Taliban, this might be as good as it’s going to get.
So what does success look like in Afghanistan? Success in Afghanistan is not when 100 percent of its districts are under the complete control of the Afghan government or when there are no more suicide bombings. Nor is success in Afghanistan achieved when every road is paved, every girl goes to school, or everyone gets the right to vote. These things are very important in themselves, and we should aspire to them, but they are neither the reasons why we went to Afghanistan nor the reasons why we should remain there. Success is achieved when there is a stable enough Afghanistan—when it is able to manage its own internal and external security to a degree that stops interference from outside powers, allowing the country to resist the establishment of terror bases that were there before. Nothing more and nothing less…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
TRUMP AND THE FOREIGN-POLICY ESTABLISHMENT
Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review, May 16, 2017
Speaking to a number of governors in February, Donald Trump unburdened himself, “We have to win. We have to start winning wars again. . . . We never win and we don’t fight to win. We’ve either got to win or don’t fight it at all.” So far, so familiar. But in Afghanistan it seems Trump is considering a different option — to muddle through, indefinitely. America’s longest war will just go on, and American blood, treasure, and honor will be spent in perpetuity supporting a government it knows to be corrupt, in a society that every empire in history has given up on reforming.
Trump would be the third president to settle for less in Afghanistan. President Obama promised to finish the job that Bush didn’t finish because of the “distraction” of the Iraq War. Obama fulfilled his campaign promise of doing more in Afghanistan. His dramatic surge of troops resulted in real gains for the U.S. But he never instituted a full counterinsurgency strategy, and dared not risk a more comprehensive strategy of going after the Taliban’s redoubts in Pakistan. As U.S. troops withdrew according to a predetermined schedule, the Taliban took back more and more territory. By the end of his presidency, Obama was left just slowing down the pace of withdrawal in order to avoid the humiliation of Kabul’s fall before his exit.
As the Taliban regained territory, hundreds of thousands of Afghans were displaced from their homes. Opium production boomed. And corruption in the allied government in Kabul increased. A January report from the inspector general for Afghanistan stated that just over half of the country’s administrative districts were under the control of the U.S.-backed government. Military experts issued memos explaining that even putting 100,000 ground troops in Afghanistan might not achieve “the appearance of victory.” You’d think that Trump, facing such long odds, would cut America’s losses. Not so. “The interventionists prevailed” in an internal White House debate, reports Bloomberg’s Eli Lake. Obama’s strategy of using scheduled time limits may have controlled the domestic political cost of continuing the war, but it certainly failed as a strategy for encouraging the Afghan government to grow up and reform itself. And that strategy will be abandoned under Trump.
Instead of scheduled withdrawal dates, the U.S. will manage the percentages, increasing troop levels in order to keep the Taliban pinned down in eastern Afghanistan, winning back a larger portion (but not all) of the country’s administrative districts, and generally keeping the Taliban and other Islamists locked down in a resource-poor part of the country that can be harassed by planes and drones. Doing this manages the risk on both ends. It reduces the risk of Afghanistan’s returning to its pre-9/11 state as a safe haven for terrorists, but it also reduces the risk that America will tire of the costs of the mission and that Congress will cut the purse strings. Trump was on to something, however, when he pined for the simpler measures of victory over the current model of threat management — which is deeply unsatisfying, and a long fall from the belief of General Tommy Franks, expressed on December 22, 2001, that the United States had “liberated twenty-five million people and unified the country.”
After World War II and the Korean War, the United States maintained a large presence of troops in Germany and East Asia in order to keep the peace and deter potential enemies. But this is something different. Now we are maintaining troops in order to make sure the enemy is fighting us over there, so that every spring and summer see another round of skirmishes. Afghanistan is now a strange test for the United States: How long can a democratic people support a limited war that everyone acknowledges will not end in victory? Or at least, not in a victory as we’ve known it before?
If Trump embarks on National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster’s plan for Afghanistan, it will show that on certain questions the foreign-policy establishment is successfully pushing Trump to accept their premises and their conclusions. Maybe you find it reassuring. But there are a half-dozen conflicts in which the U.S. is a player, and in which there are few prospects of leaving behind a success story like Germany or South Korea. In Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, the United States has all but admitted it cannot leave behind a functional, self-sustaining ally and member of good standing in the international order. Will Trump hand all of them on to his successors in more or less the same condition as they are now? We got into these conflicts with much heady talk about a democratic domino theory, or even an end to evil. We comforted ourselves that an Arab Spring would lead to peace and accountable government, and quickly reaped the whirlwind. If this is what the next American century looks like, it will be a depressing slog.
IRAN, FIGHTING TO THE LAST AFGHAN
Michael Rubin
Commentary, Apr. 3, 2017
During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and Cuba regularly used foreign proxies to fight their battles. When Radek Sikorski became Poland’s Defense Minister in 2005, he exposed how the Soviet Union’s classified war plans against NATO included using nuclear weapons against West Germany and then sending Polish soldiers to march across the radioactive battlefields. Cuban soldiers meanwhile became proxies for Cold War struggles in Angola and across Latin America. During the Cold War, the Algeria-based Polisario Front forcibly separated Sahwari children from their parents for re-education in Cuba and eventual deployment in service of various liberation movements. Such exploitation of whole countries as mercenary forces was a disgusting practice. It was one that should have ended with the fall of the Cold War.
Increasingly, however, the Islamic Republic of Iran is replicating the former Soviet and Cuban strategies in Syria, where its intervention to support Bashar al-Assad has cost the Islamic Republic several thousand Iranian soldiers and cadets. The Iranian use of Hezbollah in Lebanon should have put permanently to rest any notion that Hezbollah has evolved into a Lebanese national organization. Rather, it remains what it always has been: A proxy for the Islamic Republic of Iran. But Hezbollah is not alone. A couple of years ago, I noted the increasing number of funerals of foreign nationals—especially Afghans—occurring in Iran whom Iranian news sources said had died fighting in Syria.
In recent weeks, however, mention of the Afghans has increased. On March 2, for example, Esmail Ghani, the deputy commander of the Qods Force, praised the entirely Afghan Shi’ite Fatimiyoun Brigade for its sacrifices in both Iraq and Syria. When the Fatimiyoun [Brigade] set foot in Syria, its streets were in America’s hands. Today… [the Fatimiyoun] have slapped America on the mouth. [America] would never have come to the negotiations if it weren’t for [the Fatimiyoun’s] strength on the field,” Ghani said, according to a translation from the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran team. Subsequently, the Fatimiyoun Brigade announced that it had created a dedicated mosque in Mashhad–Iran’s second-largest city–so that it could form its own Basij unit.
The Basij, of course, are a paramilitary and cultural organization which, on the one hand, keeps order in times of crisis but, on the other, recruits and indoctrinates. They fall under the wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iranian leaders have previously said they want to create a 100 million-strong Basij organization spanning national borders and nationalities. It seems this was not mere rhetoric but rather a roadmap to Iran’s future plans. Throughout its existence, Hezbollah has been a force for instability. As first the Obama administration and now seemingly the Trump administration acquiesce to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remaining in power and the Iranian influence that follows him, it is time to recognize that such ‘stability’ comes at a price which makes the world decidedly less stable. While the Obama team, at least, whitewashed Iran’s poor behavior, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have put in place a strategy to radicalize not only Afghans but to use Shi’ite mercenaries from Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere to take ‘export of revolution’ potentially ever farther afield.
Deadly Kabul Bombing the Latest in a Raging Afghanistan War: Mark MacKinnon, Globe and Mail, May 31, 2017— The sewage tanker that exploded in the centre of Kabul on Wednesday – leaving at least 80 people dead and damaging several foreign embassies, including Canada’s – was a bloody reminder that the long war for Afghanistan is far from over.
Afghanistan Blames Pakistan for Planning Deadly Kabul Attack: Ruchi Kumar, Foreign Policy, June 1, 2017
It’s Time to Give Up On Saving Afghanistan: Ralph Peters, New York Post, June 5, 2017— In Afghanistan, we’re the Redcoats. And for a substantial portion of the country’s ethnic-Pashtun majority, the Taliban, however cruel and odious we find them, are the Minutemen.
Afghanistan, the Sequel. Why Would Canada Return to a War it Would Rather Forget?: Andrew Potter, National Post, May 19, 2017— The last time Canadians paid any serious attention to Afghanistan was just over three years ago. It was March 2014 when we ended our training mission in Kabul with a quiet flag-lowering ceremony in Kabul.
