Endless Regional Chaos: American Presence In Afghanistan Explained

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The geographic location of Afghanistan has always occupied a central role in many geopolitical studies. Donald Trump’s reasons for reinforcing US troops in the region are driven by the continuing US need to prevent a complete Eurasian integration among regional powers.

The April peace talks between Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Russia and China seemed to have put an end to the persistent and dominant American presence in the country. In Washington, following fifteen years of war and a series of failures, many had come to the conclusion that the time had come for the United States to return home.

Trump had throughout his electoral campaign criticized the foreign policy of his predecessors, giving the indication that he would be looking to leave Afghanistan once he assumed the presidency.

The road plan for Afghanistan laid out by the April peace talks seemed to offer the prospect of national reconciliation between the Taliban and the central authority in Kabul, assisted by parties with great interest in the country like India and Pakistan, given their geographic proximity, as well as Russia, China and Turkey.

The first talks in April 2017 capitalized on America"s absence at the conference as well as on the will of the protagonists to reach an agreement after fifteen years of war and terror. Afghanistan is a key crossroad in the eastward expansion strategy that illustrates the special partnership between Russia and China, as seen with the steady progress of the Silk Road 2.0 initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union. Given Afghanistan’s geographic position, sharing boundaries with Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, it is useful to emphasize the role the country could play as a commercial and energy hub in the not too distant future.

Due to incompetence or perhaps due to facing insurmountable pressures, Donald Trump is undergoing a gradual and inexorable diminution with the elimination of all the most representative members of his administration. At the same time, the appointment of military personnel to civilian roles has pushed the administration into unexplored directions not foreshadowed in the electoral campaign. Trump spoke of less US military presence in the internal affairs of other nations. But as we shall see, nothing could be further from the truth.

The appointment of Generals McMaster, Kelly and Mattis (Mattis perhaps being the most powerful US defense secretary since the end of World War II) is Trump"s attempt to withstand and bargain with the most significant elements of America’s deep state. A strong military component in the White House helps ensure continuity in US foreign policy. Contrary to what was professed during the elections, Donald Trump immediately traded American foreign policy in exchange for explicit GOP backing for key legislation that will help secure a 2020 re-election. Without bills on health, tax and immigration reform being passed, there will be no arguments in favor of the GOP and Trump during the midterm and presidential elections in 2018 and 2020 respectively.

The deep state in Washington has slowly but inexorably taken over Trump"s presidency, a task made all the simpler by Trump’s character, which dismisses his lack of experience with an overweening self-confidence. The military component of the deep state, in concert with GOP leaders, took less than six months to quash Trump"s electoral promises and turn the president’s foreign policy into a dangerous reprise of the Obama and Bush years.

More and more frequently, American intervention in foreign lands lead to situations of uncontrollable chaos, with no real central authority able to govern and obey Washington’s orders. The current state of the Middle East is reflective of this. In Afghanistan, Washington, especially Mattis, is cognizant of the country"s rebirth under Sino-Russian leadership after fifteen years of America’s presence. This is a scenario that the US deep state is not willing to tolerate.

Leaving aside Afghanistan’s huge amounts of natural resources (about one trillion in precious metals), as well as its strategic location linking east and west, a peaceful Afghanistan led by a single central authority would hardly cohere with US objectives in the country. The US loves to consider itself the indispensable nation for peace in Afghanistan, when actually it is the main obstacle to peace.

For American foreign policy continuity, Afghanistan needs to remain in a chaotic situation. Above all, the US military industrial complex is not willing to surrender its political and military power in the country, only to be substituted by Moscow or Beijing. With these unofficial motives, General Mattis announced a surge of several thousand American troops to the country. It is immediately clear that numerically and tactically, four or five thousand soldiers will make no difference. The intent is purely demonstrative, as seen in Syria with a few missiles lobbed at an empty airbase. The purpose is to send a clear and unambiguous message to Russia, China, Pakistan and even India, to the effect that without American consensus, no strategic reorganization is permissible in Afghanistan.

General Mattis and all those who for decades have been constantly thinking of MacKinder"s geopolitical theory (Heartland Theory) are aware of the strategic importance of keeping Afghanistan hostile towards regional powers like China and Russia. The USSR"s war in defense of the country, and the socialist superpower’s subsequent collapse, offers a historical warning.

In April, Moscow and Beijing, with the tacit approval of New Delhi and Islamabad, launched a peace process in Kabul that should have facilitated talks between the central authority and the Taliban to bring about a truce that would bring to an end the violence and destruction that had over fifteen years left the country bleeding in endless poverty and suffering.

The American surge will not advance American interests in the country. It will not change the delicate balance negotiated between the parties back in April. It will not affect the efforts of Moscow and Beijing to stabilize the country. It will only buy Washington more time by bombing and killing civilians, always viewed by American generals as an acceptable and privileged option available to them.

Like in other parts of the world, the presence of American troops does not fully explain the long-term goals of military planners. Afghanistan in some respects resembles a similar situation to Southeast Asia. In South Korea, the American presence has persisted since 1950, and with it the destabilization of the Korean peninsula. As in Asia, the central purpose of the American presence in Afghanistan is to occupy geo-strategic zones in order to prevent Eurasian integration between powers like India, China and Russia. Secondly, it is the constant presence of troops and military bases in locations close to or around the two major powers of China and Russia that aims to overburden and thereby diminish the defensive capabilities of these two strategic threats. In 1962, when the USSR did something similar in response to the US deployment of patriot missiles in Turkey, it started building up its offensive capability in the Western Hemisphere using Cuba as a military base. The US was willing to go to war to halt this domestic threat and for weeks the world was on the verge of a nuclear conflict. Only dialogue between American and Soviet leaders averted this threat to human existence.

Conclusions

Washington cares for nothing other than its own interests. But twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the world is changing, and more and more fruitful efforts to replace the chaos wrought by US policies can be seen with peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation increasingly being the order of the day. The road to economic prosperity and a re-established unity among the Afghan people is still a work in progress, but once the country manages to establish its independence, Washington will have a hard time dictating conditions. Countries like Russia, China and India have every intention of using diplomacy and peacekeeping to prevent a dangerous escalation in Afghanistan.

India and China have some divergence over the future of the region, but by the start of the 2017 BRICS conference, they had already resolved a border dispute that lasted over two months. The ability to create diverse organizations like BRICS, AIIB and SCO provides the opportunity to begin any kind of negotiation with a legal and economic foundation. This represents a commendable example of overcoming differences through diplomacy and economic benefits.

While the United States exhales the last breaths as a declining global power, no longer able to impose its will, it lashes out in pointless acts like lobbing 60 cruise missiles at Syria or sending 4000 troops to Afghanistan. Such acts do not change anything on the ground or modify the balance of forces in Washington’s favor. They do, however, have a strong impact on further reducing whatever confidence remains in the US, closing the door to opportunities for dialogue and cooperation that may otherwise have offered themselves.

Trump promised isolationism. His generals, behind the scenes, have managed to make this electoral promise come true, leaving Washington alone in the international arena in the near term.

Domestic Politics Is Dictating Our Foreign Policy

There is a common naïve view among many conservatives — and other supporters of a bloated military establishment — that foreign policy is made as part of a rational process in which foreign threats are assessed, and then requests are made to Congress to fund projects that "keep America safe." 

This credulous approach to foreign policy — expressed by many millions of "red-blooded" Americans who fancy themselves as the hard-nosed, realist "adults in the room" — ignores the immense amount of domestic political power wielded by the military and its allies in the private sector. The advocates of this view instead defer to the belief that the military"s current drive for ever-more spending and military build-up in Afghanistan is based on revelations about the "real threat" in Afghanistan, and that the military is driven only by a selfless desire to "kill terrorists."

Meanwhile, American policy aimed toward perpetual occupation of Afghanistan has little to do with actual defense of the North American mainland, and much more to do with domestic politics. 

Daniel McAdams recently examined the bizarre American preference for occupying Afghanistan while considering Saudi Arabia to be a great "ally":

A gang of radical Saudis attacked the US on 9/11. Their leader, Osama bin Laden, was a CIA favorite when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. ... Osama"s radicals roamed from country to country until they were able to briefly settle in chaotic late 1990s Afghanistan for a time. They plotted the attack on the US from Florida, Germany, and elsewhere. They allegedly had a training camp in Afghanistan. We know from the once-secret 28 pages of the Congressional Intelligence Committee report on 9/11 that they had Saudi state sponsorship.

...Bin Laden"s group of Saudis attacked the US on 9/11. Washington"s neocons attacked Afghanistan and then Iraq in retaliation, neither of which had much to do with bin Laden or 9/11. Certainly not when compared to the complicity of the Saudi government at the highest levels.

...Sixteen years — and trillions of dollars and thousands of US military lives — later no one knows what the goals are in Afghanistan. Not even Trump, which is why he said tonight that he would no longer discuss our objectives in Afghanistan but instead would just concentrate on "killing terrorists."

This is what American policy amounts to in Afghanistan. No clear objective has ever been stated for the occupation there, while one of the world"s biggest sponsors of Islamic terrorism — Saudi Arabia — remains on the Best Friends list. 

A More Sober, Realist View

Nevertheless, conservatives and other interventionists stick dogmatically to the claim that more intervention is always better. When specifically confronted with dissenting views from libertarians such as Ron Paul, interventionists invent a caricature of their critics and claim that anyone who disagrees with them is a pie-in-the-sky anarchist utopian who thinks there are no "bad guys" in the world. 

In reality, these endless occupations are frequently opposed by foreign policy realists such as Andrew Bacevich and John Mearshimer to name only two. The realists, of course, set their foreign policy in accordance with increasing actual military defensive capability. Realists are anything but believers in the boundless good will of human beings — and they"re certainly not Rothbardians — but they also understand, as Mearshimer put it, the "basic realist view" is "these interventions [i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan] have not been good for the United States."

Other realists have also recognized the absurdity of comparing the current terrorist threat to past conflicts such as the Cold War. In 2007, Harvey Sapolsky, et al — none of them Rothbardians, to say the least — wrote at World Affairs: 

No nation or ideology now menaces American security in the same ways or to the same degree that the Soviet Union and Communism did during the Cold War. Instead, a variety of ethnic, religious, and nationalistic conflicts oceans away from us now obsess our policymakers, even though those conflicts have little to no prospect of spreading our way. To be sure, radical Islamists have attacked Americans at home and abroad, and while these attackers should be hunted down, they do not pose an existential threat, only a difficult and distracting one. Killing or capturing the criminals who attack Americans makes sense; trying to fix the failed states they call home is hopeless and unnecessary. The United States is safer than ever. 

This, of course, is not what we hear from the military itself, or from the Republican party. In that case, we hear nearly an endless litany about how the military is near "collapse" and how it has been "gutted" and how, thanks to Obama, the military is now on a shoestring budget. In truth, the military is still funded at Reagan-era Cold War levels. 

In the jejune minds of much of the American public, though, it"s never a possibility that the military acts in its own financial self interest. If the military says it needs more taxpayer money, then, well, they must be given what they want. Why, a military officer would never lie or bend the truth! 

The Role of Domestic Policy 

So if the US current spate of military interventions are both damaging and unnecessary, why do these military operations continue unabated? 

Part of it, as we"ve noted, is due to the public"s tendency to always defer to the pro-military position. Frankly, the American public"s ideological views tend toward indifference toward foreign policy, or outright militarism. There is a reason that no major candidate running for president in 2016 advocated for any significant cut in military spending. Even Donald Trump, who — at the time — claimed to oppose the ongoing occupations, advocated for massive increases in military spending. 

With the public reliably on the military"s side, the debate then boils down to how much of the budget the military industry can wrest from other special interests. 

Again, on the side of the military establishment is the large swath of the American population that benefits financially from taxpayer funds being funneled to military spending schemes. These have many economic benefits for certain groups. 

It has long been true, for instance, that the US military is a jobs program. As we"ve noted here are mises.org, military personnel tend to make more money than their peers of similar education levels working the private sector. 

But the beneficiaries of an expansive military establishment extend far beyond the people who can be defined as active military personnel.

Sapolsky has noted that, in spite of frequent claims that military personnel make up only one percent of the population, the real number of people whose paychecks rely on military spending is actually much larger: 

In fact, more than 1% of Americans are involved in America’s defense. In addition to the two plus million service personnel—the 1.4 million active duty and 800,000 plus in the reserve components—there are 800,000 plus civil service employees of the Department of Defense—people who work in military depots, defense laboratories, shipyards, and contract management offices—and five to six million (the exact number is not known) contract employees—people who build weapon systems, provide support services, and conduct defense related research.

This totals to 3-4% of the adult population. Add spouses and other family members, and you can see that not an insignificant portion of the American population is involved in defense. 

In other words, we"re looking at more than 12 million Americans who rely on military spending. For comparison"s sake, we can note that the the total number of people in the US working in agriculture totals less than 3 million people. 

Nor should those 12 million Americans worry that they"re not being looked after on Capitol Hill. According to Open Secrets, in 2016 there were more than 752 defense-sector lobbyists working in DC, representing 223 clients. 

It"s unlikely this total includes state-level politicians who engage in informal lobbying in favor of more military spending in their districts and states. In some states, such as Virginia and Hawaii, military spending is equal in size to more than 12 percent of the state"s total GDP. Needless to say, mayors and governors in these areas won"t exactly be complaining if the President announced yet another military occupation. Each additional ratcheting up in military action means more training exercises, more weapons testing, more spending by soldiers in the local economy. 

Thus, when we hear that a variety of policymakers are united in their call for more military spending, there is no reason at all to assume this is due to some important change in the international environment. It"s far more likely that domestic political conditions have changed in such a way that the Pentagon realizes the political situation has swung in its favor. 

Certainly, this has been the case with the arrival of the Trump administration. Republicans have long received more funding from defense lobbyists than Democrats, and even before Trump was sworn in, it was assumed that a military spending binge was on the way. 

And, in spite of claims that the Trump administration is merely the continuation of the Obama adminsitration"s foreign policy, there is good reason to believe that the Trump administration is actually a departure from the Obama years — in a more militaristic direction. While military spending did not actually suffer to any meaningful extent under Obama, some observers believe there was nevertheless an antagonism between the Obama White House and the Pentagon. As Mearshimer claims here, had the Deep State been less powerful, Obama may have actually been successful in withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. As it was, Obama settled for a rapproachment with Cuba and Iran — two moves that infuriated foreign interventionists. 

Are There Any Real Limits on Military Spending? 

Mearshimer is speculating here, but even if he"s right about what Obama would have preferred to do, how would a drawdown of troops benefit Obama politically? 

As a politician, there"s actually very little to be gained from military withdrawal. As we"ve already noted, the political and economic rewards of expanding military spending and operations can be substantial. This is especially true in the modern world when the political downside of military operations is very small. 

Historically, the downside of starting a war or sending troops to foreign soil was twofold: 

1. It was expensive.


2. Dead and wounded soldiers were politically damaging. 

Nowadays, the first problem can be solved with deficit spending, and by inflating the money supply. The financial costs of war are palmed off on future generations who have no say in the current policy debate. 

The second issue is now mostly solved as well. While, as McAdams points out, more than 2,000 American lives have been lost in the Afghanistan occupation, that"s a total that accumulated over more than a decade. Compared to large military operations of the past, these are very small numbers. Military spending nowadays focuses on producing weapons and material that can be used while minimizing the danger to the American soldiers themselves. The drone program — in which American soldiers drop bombs on children from the safety of a warehouse in North America — is a perfect example of this. 

Moreover, when casualties do occur, they are inflicted on volunteers. Nor do these deaths disproportionately fall on poor or minority soldiers. As analyses have shown, poor and minority soldiers tend to volunteer for work in medical and logistical fields. The front-line combat positions tend to go to educated white people. 

So, there"s no especially damaging political cost to sending more troops to central Asia to conduct yet another occupation. Yes, there will be some deaths, but calculating politicians know that casualties are unlikely to occur in such numbers as to cancel out the political benefits of starting a nice new war. 

The Afghanistan Escalation

Thus, how can anyone be truly surprised that Donald Trump — who once fiercely mocked supporters of the Afghanistan occupation — has now changed his mind. Trump, of course, is a man who apparently is swayed by photographs of mini-skirts rather than by anything resembling serious historical analysis.

As he has become increasingly isolated politically, he has seen an opportunity to shore up his political base with yet another military expansion - one that"s likely to come with a lot more spending. Even worse, Trump may become even more bellicose the less popular he becomes. Domestic concerns won"t be mentioned in the dominant narrative however. The administration and the Pentagon will invent a justification for why a new war is necessary, and the media, of course, will happily play along. 

Watch Live: President Trump Unveils "New Path Forward" For Afghanistan

As we detailed last night, President Trump will unveil his long-awaited new strategy for Afghanistan tonight. Will he, as Ron Paul suggests, do the sensible thing and end the failed longest war in history? Or will he continue doing the same thing and expect that somehow he will "win" the war? Does America even know what "winning" looks like in Afghanistan?

Here"s Ron Paul"s preview (which may be a post-mortem)...

With the anti-neocon Steve Bannon out, and nobody left in Trump"s inner circle to halt the simmering push for war, we suspect we know the answer, and as The Hill details, here"s what to look for in his speech...

How many more troops?

The United States has about 8,400 troops in Afghanistan on a dual mission of training, advising and assisting Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban and conducting counterterrorism missions against groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Trump gave Mattis the authority in June to send more troops there, but Mattis has held off deploying any more until Trump finalized a strategy. “I was not willing to make significant troop lifts until we made certain we knew what was the strategy, what was the commitment going in,” Mattis told reporters traveling with him on Sunday. Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has said he needs a “few thousand” more troops to break the stalemate against the Taliban. That few thousand is said to equal about 4,000 U.S. troops. Those troops would be used to embed with conventional Afghan forces closer to combat — at the battalion level — and improve the capabilities of the Afghan air force and special operations forces. Nicholson assured the Afghans on Sunday that the U.S. commitment to the country will continue. “I assure you we are with you in this fight. We are with you, and we will stay with you,” Nicholson said during a ceremony at Camp Morehead, a training base for Afghan commandos southeast of Kabul.

What’s the end game?

Trump himself has questioned why America is still in Afghanistan after more than a decade of war. He’ll need to explain to the American people what victory would look like in Afghanistan and how a few thousand additional troops can achieve it when 100,000 before could not. “We’ve been there for now close to 17 years, and I want to find out why we’ve been there for 17 years, how it’s going and what we should do in terms of additional ideas,” Trump said in July. Military officials have described victory as getting the country secure enough to prevent another 9/11-style attack on the United States. To do that, they say, the United States needs to have an open-ended presence to train Afghan forces to be able to fight insurgents and terrorists themselves, as well as to stabilize the Afghan government with anti-corruption and other reform efforts. Officials have also said a negotiated political settlement with the Taliban is the only way to end the conflict, which they say U.S. forces can help with by reversing Taliban battlefield gains and forcing them to the negotiating table.

Will Trump incorporate unconventional ideas?

Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater, has been privately and publicly shopping a plan to replace most U.S. troops with contractors. Prince’s plan would include sending 5,500 private military contractors to embed with Afghan forces at the battalion level. They would be supported by a 90-plane private air force. The plan was championed by Bannon, but opposed by Mattis, McMaster, key leaders in Congress and Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. With Bannon gone, the proposal appears dead. Still, Trump is said to have been deeply skeptical of the options the military presented to him. That skepticism could translate into using elements of Prince’s plan. Trump has also expressed interest in mining Afghan’s vast mineral resources, estimated to be worth up to $3 trillion. Ghani reportedly pitched Trump in May on the potential to mine as a way to keep him interested in the country. Trump has stressed a desire for the United States to be paid back for its military support before, such as with NATO. In that vein, he could emphasize the monetary benefits of continued involvement in Afghanistan during his address.

Will Trump mention Nicholson?

Trump reportedly got so fed up with the state of the war and the options being presented to him that he suggested firing Nicholson. “We aren"t winning," Trump reportedly said during a July Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan. "We are losing." Nicholson has been the top U.S. general in Afghanistan since March 2016 and has won accolades on Capitol Hill for his candor about the state of the war, which he first described as a stalemate in February. Last week, Mattis defended Nicholson, but would not say whether the president has confidence in the general. “Ask the president,” Mattis said. “I will tell you right now, he is our commander in the field, he has the confidence of NATO, he has the confidence of Afghanistan, he has the confidence of the United States,” Mattis said.

What about Pakistan?

The administration has stressed that its strategy will take a regional approach, including pressuring Pakistan to more aggressively combat terrorist safe havens within its borders. To do that, the administration could reduce aid or make it contingent on Pakistan’s efforts against terrorists. Mattis has already withheld $50 million in aid from Pakistan over what the Pentagon described as its insufficient actions against the Haqqani Network. Still, the Pentagon said that decision was unrelated to the overall strategy review for Afghanistan that was then ongoing. Other options to pressure Pakistan include taking away its status as a non-NATO ally and naming the country as a state sponsor of terrorism. Mattis on Sunday said Trump’s strategy would address Pakistan, but would not get into more details ahead of the president’s address. “It is a South Asia strategy,” Mattis said. “It is not just an Afghanistan strategy. So if you look at the region, it"s a South Asia strategy, and we"ll be addressing those issues in it.”

As we noted briefly earlier, the key highlights of the upcoming speech were leaked online courtesy of Fox News" Jennifer Griffin, and are as follows:

• The president has signed off on 4,000 more US troops to Afghanistan; not clear he will talk numbers tonight. No talk of withdrawal.


• In speech tonight Pres Trump will ask "region to do more,"  will ask "India and Pakistan to do more to bring Taliban to negotiating table.


• Trump strategy to include negotiating w/ Taliban. In past Qatar negotiations failed because Pres Obama announced troop withdrawals: US official

Of the items above, the aditional 4,000 troops are the most notable and confirm Ron Paul"s guess above - continue doing the same thing and expect that somehow he will "win" the war!

President Trump is due to speak at 9pmET from Fort Meyer, Va....

The Latest Attempt To Win The Afghan War: Replace The Soldiers With Mercenaries

Authored by Daniel Lang via SHTFplan.com,

One of the most controversial aspects of the Iraq war was the heavy use of defense contractors, who were in many cases paid vast sums of money to do jobs that you’d think an ordinary soldier could do. When it was all said and done, defense contractors had reaped $138 billion dollars by providing security, logistics, and construction services. Among the most notorious of these contractors was Blackwater, whose employees gained a reputation for reckless behavior that caused many unnecessary deaths.

Fast forward to today, and now Blackwater’s founder, former Navy Seal Erik Prince, is pushing for a plan to win the war in Afghanistan by replacing the soldiers with defense contractors. Prince first suggested the plan last May in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he described this idea in colonial terms. The private military units would be based on units that were deployed by the British East India Company, and would be lead by a single person who he referred to as an “American Viceroy,” that would report directly to the president.

As strange as it may sound, Trump appears to be taking the idea seriously. It’s hard to blame him. Afghanistan is now America’s longest running war, and no matter how many soldiers, generals, aid, or money we throw at the country, nothing seems to bring stability. 

Which is why this radical new plan probably looks very enticing to Trump right now.

Under his proposal, private advisers would work directly with Afghanistan combat battalions throughout the country, and the air force would be used for medical evacuation, fire support and ferrying troops.

 

Prince said the contractors would be “adjuncts” of the Afghan military and would wear that nation’s military uniforms. Pilots would only drop ordnance with Afghan government approval, he said.

 

Currently, troops from a U.S.-led coalition are stationed primarily at top level headquarters and are not embedded with conventional combat units in the field. Under the plan the contractors would be embedded with Afghanistan’s more than 90 combat battalions throughout the country.

In addition the plan will supposedly cost $10 billion per year, which is a far cry from the $40 billion that is currently being spent. It would involve replacing much of the 8,400 troops who are currently stationed in Afghanistan with 5,500 contractors, and provide a privately owned air force of 90 planes that wouldn’t give fire support without the permission of the Afghan government.

However, there is one problem with this plan. There’s probably a good reason why our soldiers aren’t embedded with the Afghan army in such a decentralized fashion. It probably has to do with the fact that our soldiers are routinely killed by Taliban sympathizers masquerading as Afghan soldiers (many of whom are severely demoralized, poorly paid and equipped, and lead by corrupt officers). Without separating the contractors into heavily fortified compounds (as our military does right now), and by spreading them thin across a vast and desolate country, these contractors would be extremely vulnerable.

It’s certainly a unique plan that is at least different from what our military has been doing in Afghanistan since 2001, which has been more of the same, year after year. But it’s also fraught with danger and the potential for disaster. This is Afghanistan we’re talking about. When it comes to military operations led by advanced nations, disaster is always the safest bet. After all, they don’t call Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” for nothing.

Perhaps instead of asking how we could win the war in Afghanistan, we should be asking ourselves how we can get out as fast as possible and cut our losses.

It’s been 16 years, and there’s no sign that the people in that country have any interest in becoming the kind of liberal democracy that we want them to be. And without that support, there is no military plan in the world that will ever give us a satisfying victory in Afghanistan.

Pentagon To Send 4,000 Troops To Afghanistan In Trump's Largest Deployment Yet

Two days after Trump ceded unilateral authority on Afghan troop deployments to the Department of Defense, the Pentagon wasted on time and according to AP, the Pentagon will send 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan to support existing forces and in hopes of breaking a stalemate in a war that has now been passed on to a third U.S. President. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump’s young presidency.

According to AP, the decision by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis could be announced as early as next week, and was prompted by "the rising threat posed by Islamic State extremists, evidenced in a rash of deadly attacks in the capital city of Kabul, has only fueled calls for a stronger U.S. presence, as have several recent American combat deaths." Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said, “No decisions have been made.”

Trump’s decision Tuesday to give Mattis authority to set force levels in Afghanistan mirrored similar powers he handed over earlier this year for U.S. fights in Iraq and Syria. The change was made public hours after Sen. John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Republican chairman, blasted Mattis for the administration’s failure to present an overarching strategy for Afghanistan. McCain said the U.S. is “not winning” in Afghanistan, and Mattis agreed.

The finality of the decision isn’t entirely clear. While Trump has handed over the troop level decision-making, there is nothing preventing him from taking it back.

Mattis has repeatedly stressed that increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan would take place within a broader, long-term strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan. In congressional testimony this week, he said the strategy will take into account regional influences, such as Pakistan’s role as a Taliban sanctuary. Regional powers Iran, India and China, which all have political stakes in the fate of Afghanistan, also must be considered.

The bulk of the additional troops will train and advise Afghan forces, according to the administration official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss details of the decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. A smaller number would be assigned to counterterror operations against the Taliban and IS, the official said.

From the Afghan side, reactions were split: Daulat Waziri, spokesman for Afghanistan’s defense ministry was reluctant to comment on specifics Friday but said the Afghan government supports the U.S. decision to send more troops. “The United States knows we are in the fight against terrorism, ” he said. “We want to finish this war in Afghanistan with the help of the NATO alliance.”

However, another Afghan lawmaker, Nasrullah Sadeqizada, however, was skeptical about additional troops and cautioned that the troop surge should be coordinated with the Afghan government and should not be done unilaterally by the United States. “The security situation continues to deteriorate in Afghanistan and the foreign troops who are here are not making it better,” he said.

The gamble to send even more troops in Afghanistan is a big one for the president who inherited America’s longest conflict with no clear endpoint or a defined strategy for American success, though U.S. troop levels are far lower than they were under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. In 2009, Obama authorized a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, bringing the total there to more than 100,000, before drawing down over the rest of his presidency.

Trump, who barely spoke about Afghanistan as a candidate or president, concentrating instead on crushing the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, may be underestimating the potential risk he faces by sending more troops in harms way. His predecessors both had hoped to win the war. Bush scored a quick success, helping allied militant groups oust the Taliban shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, before seeing the gains slip away as America’s focus shifted to the Iraq war. In refocusing attention on Afghanistan, Obama eliminated much of the country’s al-Qaida network and authorized the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, but failed to snuff out the Taliban’s rebellion.

Obama set a cap a year ago of 8,400 troops in Afghanistan after slowing the pace of what he hoped would be a U.S. withdrawal. Nevertheless, there are at least another 2,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan not included in the official count. These include forces that are technically considered temporary even if they’ve been in the war zone for months.

That said, Mattis’ deployment of more troops will be far smaller than Obama’s.  While the new troops could raise fears of mission creep, Mattis told lawmakers this week he didn’t envision returning to the force levels of 2010-11, when Obama thought he could pressure the Taliban into peace talks. Despite heavy losses, the Taliban fought on and in recent months appear to be gaining traction.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of news that awaits Trump: there have been almost 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan since 2001. Three U.S. soldiers were killed and another was wounded in eastern Afghanistan this weekend in an attack claimed by the Taliban.

U.S. Special Forces Deployed To 70% Of The World In 2016

U.S. Special Operations Command launched a raid in Yemen’s Baida Province on Jan 29, targeting Qassim al-Rimi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The first high-profile special forces operation of Trump’s presidency, the raid resulted in the deaths of at least 14 Al Qaeda fighters, 20 civilians and Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens. Three other Americans were reportedly wounded and an Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft was destroyed by U.S. forces after it was heavily damaged in a forced landing. Over the past few days, it has emerged that al-Rimi survived the raid and he has subsequently released an audio message taunting President Trump.

As The Burning Platform"s Jim Quinn notes, special forces operations like the one in Yemen are nothing new. America’s elite troops have found themselves on the frontlines constantly since 9/11, conducting operations everywhere from the dusty back alleys of North Africa to the snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan. Even though they have made headlines for high-profile operations like the prison break near Hawija in Iraq or the raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in Afghanistan, the vast majority of special forces missions across the world involve training friendly soldiers to fight, mainly so Americans don’t have to.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Although US elite troops typically only appear in the media when an event of particular relevance (such as the capture and murder of Osama bin Laden in 2011), this does not mean that they are not active. As this infographic above shows, elaborated by Statista, these forces were present in 138 States last year or 70% of the world’s countries according to official Special Operations Command data published by TomDispatch. 55.29% of deployments were in the Middle East, a 35% decease since 2006. In Africa, deployments of elite U.S. forces skyrocketed 1,600 percent during the same timeframe.

Top US Commander In Afghanistan: "I Am Short A Few Thousand Troops"

The next "surge" is imminent.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army General John Nicholson, said on Thursday he is short "several thousand" troops in order to break a stalemate in a war with Taliban insurgents, signaling the matter may soon be put before President Donald Trump.

"I have adequate resourcing in my counterterrorism mission. In my train, advise and assist mission, however, we have a shortfall of a few thousand," Nicholson, who leads U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Nicholson’s testimony before the committee is the first since President Trump’s inauguration, providing much needed color into how the new commander in chief might handle a war that received little attention on the campaign trail. At this moment there are about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan tasked with training, advising and assisting Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban and conducting counterterrorism missions against groups such as al Qaeda. About 7,000 are dedicated to the NATO mission. In addition to the U.S. troops, there are about 6,400 NATO troops in the country.

The number of U.S. troops is down from 9,800 last year. As The Hill writes, former President Obama had initially planned to draw down that number to 5,500, but decided instead to set the troop numbers at 8,400.

So why the need for more troops? Nicholson described the situation in Afghanistan as a “stalemate," adding that the only the way to break the stalemate is to increase the offensive capability of the Afghan forces. As a result, Nicholson asked Congress to invest more in the Afghan air force, though he didn"t offer a dollar figure on how that investment should cost.

“This investment which we are requesting the Afghan air force will help them, as you mentioned, to take over responsibility for their own close air support,” he said. “And even more importantly, this then will to an offensive capability that allows them to overmatch the Taliban or any other group on the battlefield anywhere around the country.”

This was music to the ears of perpetual warhawk John McCain, the chairman of the committee and a critic of the Obama administration"s troops levels, who said he hopes the new administration take the “opportunity” to increase the troop commitment and give commanders more flexibility. 

“This new administration has the opportunity to turn the page," he said, and finally give our commanders the resources and authorities they need to seize the initiative and force the enemy to react, instead of the other way around.”

McCain"s endorsement of Nicholson"s request may be a problem: on Thursday morning Trump revived his feud with McCain, tweeting that the Arizona senator “doesn"t know how to win anymore” and shouldn’t have called a U.S. raid in Yemen a failure.

“Sen. McCain should not be talking about the success or failure of a mission to the media. Only emboldens the enemy! He"s been losing so long he doesn"t know how to win anymore,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets Thursday morning. “Just look at the mess our country is in - bogged down in conflict all over the place. Our hero Ryan died on a winning mission ( according to General Mattis), not a "failure." Time for the U.S. to get smart and start winning again!”