The longest 'war on terror' launched by the United States in Afghanistan seems to have been forgotten amidst the exploding nature of crisis in Syria. Both the wars were initiated by Washington - sixteen years ago in Afghanistan and six years ago in Syria. The Trump administration since coming to power in January this year has hardly mentioned about Afghanistan.
However, Pentagon chief Jim Mattis exploded a bombshell in mid-June in Washington when he told the US lawmakers that America is not winning the Afghan war and that American military commanders are asking for more troops to try and help stabilise the country's mounting security crisis. Both Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and President Donald Trump's Security Adviser H. R. McMaster recently returned after a sort of fact-finding tour of Afghanistan.
For the first time anyone holding such a high government position is known to have made such an honest confession before Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about the Pentagon's budget. He told the Senate Committee: "Taliban had (a) good year last year (2016), they are trying to have a good one this year (too). …. Right now, I believe, the enemy is surging."
A few commentators have called the Afghan war a 'failed intervention' and the situation there now, to put it bluntly, is out of control. The unity government in Kabul formed in 2014, led by President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, after a contested presidential poll is not really functioning and security situation - as evident from the frequent media reports - is deteriorating fast.
THE WAR IS COSTING IN BODY BAGS & ENORMOUS FORTUNE: The Afghan war has been exacting enormous costs in man and materials. An Afghan specialist and author Graciana del Castillo, in a recent article has claimed that so far, casualties roughly include about 3,500 coalition soldiers (70 per cent American) almost same numbers of "contractors" and over 100,000 Afghans (which include security forces, opposition fighters and civilians). However, other sources talk about much larger civilian casualties who had to be sacrificed as the so-called "collateral damage" - a cliché now frequently used by the US - of the war.
A widely quoted report says, since 2002, the US government has spent over $780 billion on the Afghan war alone. For comparison, this is equivalent to entire US foreign affairs budget for over two decades. But there are also additional non-budget expenditures that include disability payments and compensation to the families of fallen soldiers which will add additional hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of the war.
Any war is an expensive game and such expenses go haywire if the conflict appears to be an unending one. And one has to be reminded that this cost of Afghan war is borne by the US alone. These costs, however, do not include what the coalition partners and NATO countries have spent on this Afghan war so far.
A French news agency report from Washington says military commanders, who were part of the 'fragile security games' in the Obama-era, have lately been pushing for new strategy in which additional soldiers could be deployed to "help train and advise the beleaguered Afghan partners."
UN SAYS THERE'S NO MILITARY SOLUTION IN AFGHANISTAN: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced in Brussels on June 29 that NATO will increase troops. He said: "I can confirm we will increase our presence in Afghanistan."
It should be mentioned that the NATO alliance had ended its 'longest-ever military operation' in Afghanistan in 2014 and handed over frontline duties to the Afghan military and took on an advice and training mission. The diplomatic sources are now speculating about NATO fielding additional troops of about 3,000, though the secretary-general did not specifically mentioned the figure.
Earlier in February this year, NATO commander in Afghanistan General John Nicholson bluntly announced that he needed "a few thousand" more troops to reverse what he called a stalemate. Since then the deployment of additional soldiers in Afghanistan gained currency. He said 15 countries had already pledged more contribution and he hoped for more. He, however, explained that "this is about training assistance and advice… It is not about combat operations but to help the Afghans to fight."
Meanwhile, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres was in Kabul earlier on June 12 and said that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan which is forcing a record number of people out of their homes. At least 126,000 Afghans have been forced to flee their homes, according to UN statistics.
The UN secretary general had previously served as UN High Commissioner for Refugees and knows by experience about the horrible impact that an endless war and horror that the resultant refugee problem can create for the world. So he declared: "Peace is the solution for the problem." This would largely depend on how the pattern of thinking and political ambitions of the world leaders would be synthesised into a coherent strategy on geopolitics to achieve such a peace.
HOW MANY FOREIGN TROOPS ARE IN AFGHANISTAN: How many US-led alliance troops, including American soldiers, are there in Afghanistan now? There is a bit of confusion. NATO says there are about 13,500 alliance soldiers of which half of them are American. On the other hand, the US sources claim there are 8,400 American soldiers in Afghanistan on advisory and training duty. So, the current figure should be anything between 13,500 and over 15,000. Likewise, the additional troop deployment being talked about by the US and NATO should number between six and eight thousand and it should be added to the total number.
Reports quoting White House officials say that the White House has done the same thing as it did in Iraq and Syria - "granted defence secretary the authority to set troop levels." In the midst of claims and counter-claims about troop deployment in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump authorised the Pentagon to do 'whatever is needed' to be done there.
Those who have been watching the Middle East imbroglios since the early 1990s sparked by Iraqi President Saddam Hossain's ill-fated Kuwait invasion (reportedly with tacit US understanding) know well that this kind of autonomy granted to the military commanders in the field has not worked to contain the situation. Rather, it escalated beyond repair. So, what is needed to contain the situation is 'out of box' thinking which most of the military commanders by nature are not capable of doing.
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