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Trump outlines the foundation of a changed approach in Afghanistan


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AEI

Frederick W. Kagan

August 22, 2017

 

President Trump’s decision to recommit to Afghanistan was right and important. He explained the stakes of the fight accurately: to prevent al Qaeda and ISIS from regaining the base from which al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks and from which both would plan and conduct major attacks against the US and its allies in the future. He also described the minimum required outcome: an Afghan state able to secure its own territory with very limited support from the US and other partners. This outcome is essential to American security and it is achievable.

 

Recent commentary has cast doubt on the feasibility of any kind of success in Afghanistan. The doubts are understandable, but their framing is incorrect. Yes, America has had troops in Afghanistan for 16 years. But it is wrong to suggest the US has been pursuing a single policy or strategy in that time, and equally wrong to suggest that no progress has been made.

 

(Snip)

 

Afghanistan suffers from multiple challenges beyond ANSF capability as well, including a dysfunctional government (partially imposed upon it by the US after the contested elections of 2014); the fragmentation following the death of key leaders of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras that has been a key partner for the US since the 1980s; and the deterioration of security in the previously relatively peaceful north. There is still no agreed-upon political accommodation among the vast majority of Afghans who reject the Taliban, moreover — the people whom we most need to support. But there is no reason to despair of meeting these challenges. As General Petraeus said of Iraq, “hard is not hopeless.”

The policy President Trump just announced is yet another change in the kaleidoscopic strategy the US has pursued in Afghanistan since 9/11, but it is largely a positive one. It seeks to reverse the focus on withdrawal that characterized Obama’s approach after 2011, recognizes the importance of trying to win in Afghanistan, attempts to establish a reasonable definition of success, and begins to make available the resources necessary to achieve such a success.

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Draggingtree

If This is Strategy . . .

By Angelo Codevilla| August 23, 2017

Strategy is neither more nor less than a map for getting from here to there—a reasonable plan for using what you have to accomplish what you want. President Trump’s August 21 speech, touted as “a new strategy” for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is not a strategy, because it did not even try to show that what it proposes—in fact it proposed nothing concrete—should be expected to achieve anything at all.

The president made zero attempt to connect ends and means. Nor was anything new about his proposal, other than the application of new adjectives to what the U.S. government has been doing in Afghanistan and elsewhere for two generations. The one new element, announcing that henceforth the United States would take India’s side in its multifaceted, existential quarrel with Pakistan, is pregnant with far more trouble than today’s U.S. foreign policy establishment is capable of imagining. :snip: https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/23/if-this-is-strategy/

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