It has been almost two decades since the United States helped kick the Russians out of Afghanistan….
With them gone?
American and it’s Allies has spend Billions in money and thousands in lives to try and democratize the country and keep the Taliban with its strict Muslin rule from taking hold…
It appears that President Donald Trump will probably be the one to ‘lose’ Afghanistan to the Taliban…
While the just announced peace treaty will have phases of American and Allied troop withdrawals?
There is NOT real thought that the Taliban won’t claim the country for their own in the future…
Without outside military, economic and political assistance ?
The people running the country will be hard up to survive…
(The present Afghan government was NOT a major party in cutting this deal, which most ‘experts’ think will fail…)
But?
Donald Trump WILL make sure he broadcast to American’s that HE brought the troops home….
(Afghanistan has resisted outsiders ALL thru it’s history)
That will be another action of a President that does NOT see America involved much beyond it’s borders unless a country is able to pay America ‘protection’ money…
Some of us (Democrats AND Republicans) do NOT think America withdrawing from the world is such good or smart idea….
Donald Trump’;s batting average in foreign affairs isn’t too good…
It could come back to haunt us in very harsh ways…
President Trump has left no doubt that his first priority in Afghanistan is a peace treaty that would enable him to claim that he is fulfilling his vow to withdraw American troops.
But a parade of his former national security aides say he is far less interested in an actual Afghan peace.
And that creates an enormous risk for Mr. Trump and for Afghanistan: that, like President Richard M. Nixon’s peace deal with North Vietnam in January 1973, the accord signed Saturdaywill speed an American exit and do little to stabilize a democratically-elected government. In the case of Vietnam, it took two years for the “decent interval,” in Henry A. Kissinger’s famous phrase, to expire and for the South Vietnamese government to be overrun.
“Trump would not be the first president to exaggerate the meaning of a truce in an election year,” said Joseph Nye, an emeritus professor at Harvard whose newest book, “Do Morals Matter? President and Foreign Policy From F.D.R. to Trump,” examines the Vietnam precedent.
In the heat of the 1972 election, Mr. Nye notes, “Nixon made great claims about an imminent peace in Vietnam,” and it was only after his re-election — and his resignation — that the image of a frantic helicopter evacuation from Saigon came to mark the failure of a long, costly American experiment.
Afghanistan in 2020, of course, is driven by a different dynamic than Vietnam a half-century ago. But there are haunting echoes.
Three successive American presidents have promised victory in Afghanistan, even if they each defined it differently. Each experienced failures of political will, and on the battlefield.
President George W. Bush began the Afghan war to hunt down Osama Bin Laden in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Yet he soon turned his attention to Iraq and, despite denials by the White House at the time, bled resources from the Afghan effort to fuel his next war.
President Barack Obama called Iraq a strategic mistake, but pledged that America would not lose the “good war” in Afghanistan. Yet his brief “surge” failed to strike a decisive blow. Strategy was soon turned over to a small group inside his White House that was aptly nicknamed the “Afghan Good Enough” committee.
Mr. Trump has long lamented the cost of “endless wars,” and by the time he took up direct negotiations with the Taliban, he knew American voters were interested mostly in one thing: ending participation in a war that has now dragged on for more than 18 years, its objectives always shifting.
When historians look back at the moment, they may well conclude that Washington ended up much like other great powers that entered Afghanistan’s rugged mountains and punishing deserts: frustrated, immobilized, no longer willing to bear the huge costs….
…
The accord signed on Saturday — with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo overseeing the moment but not actually signing it himself — will initially bring down American troop levels to about 8,600 from about 12,000 now. That is almost exactly where they were three years ago, at the end of Mr. Obama’s term. That is the minimum number of Special Operations forces, intelligence officers and support and security personnel that the Pentagon and C.I.A. believe are necessary to hold the capital, Kabul, battle militants of the Islamic State and advise an Afghan military that remains, at best, a fractured, inconsistent fighting force after close to two decades of training and billions of dollars in American and NATO investment…
…
Douglas E. Lute, a former Army general who served first as Mr. Bush’s coordinator on Afghanistan for the National Security Council and then stayed on for several years in a similar role for Mr. Obama before becoming American ambassador to NATO.
“The odds of this breaking down, or coming to gridlock, are significant,” Mr. Lute said in an interview. “And if the Americans truly left, there’s reason to be concerned” that the Taliban could ultimately take Kabul, just as the North Vietnamese took Saigon.
It is exactly that concern that led more than 20 Republicans and Democrats to send a letter this week to Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Esper warning that “the Taliban is not a de facto counterterrorism partner, and pretending that they are ignores their longtime jihadist mission and actions.” It added, “They have never publicly renounced Al Qaeda or turned over Al Qaeda leaders living in their safe havens,” or “apologized for harboring the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks.”…
Note…
The deal STILL leaves American and NATO troops IN Afghanistan for a while…
The Pentagon leaders HAVE to NOT be to happy with this ….
top image…Tyler Hicks/NY Times
middle image…Damon Winter/NY Times
bottom image…James Hill/ NY Times
I REALLY do NOT think this ‘deal’ is gonna work in the end….
Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani said on Sunday that he will not release 5,000 Taliban prisoners ahead of peace talks next week, as laid out in a peace agreement that the U.S. signed with the Taliban on Saturday, according to AP.
Why it matters: Ghani’s public disagreement with the contents of the agreement presents the first major hurdle in its implementation, which is crucial to ending America’s longest war.
What they’re saying: Ghani said in a news conference that the U.S. could not promise a prisoner swap because it is his government’s sovereign right to release and accept prisoners. He said he is not ready to release prisoners before negotiations begin.
“The request has been made by the United States for the release of prisoners and it can be part of the negotiations but it cannot be a precondition,” Ghani said…..
More….