A True Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Is Trump's Only Hope - John A. Nagl

We cannot afford to quit. In the best two lines of his speech, President Trump laid out U.S. interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as is possible: “We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America. And we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us or anywhere in the world.”

Leaving Afghanistan would quickly result in the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, and the resumption of a safe haven for terror in Afghanistan, which cost us dearly on September 11, 2001. The United States cannot follow the Roman method of making a desert and calling it peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And so Trump, like Bush and Obama before him, chose a counterinsurgency strategy, not as his first choice, but as the least bad option available.

In a counterinsurgency campaign, one goal is to kill or capture terrorists, as the president proclaimed. But the primary objective is to build a local government that earns the support of its people by meeting their needs. The first purpose of a government is to take care of its people, so earning the support of the locals demands an Afghan army and police forces that can protect the Afghan people against the Taliban. The most visible sign of President Trump’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan will be the several thousand combat advisers that Secretary of Defense James Mattis will commit there over the next several months.

This strategy has been tried before, and it will work given enough strategic patience and sufficient resources. America’s exceptionally talented and committed all-volunteer force makes possible an open-ended commitment to this strategy, and President Trump avoided repeating President Obama’s mistake of telegraphing a time-limited American commitment to counterinsurgency. The sixteen-year war in Afghanistan, America’s longest, may only be half over—if we’re lucky. These wars take decades to win.

Finally, President Trump claims that he “studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.” This is, of course, untrue; one of the easily conceivable angles from which he could have studied Afghanistan is from the ground, in Kabul and on the country’s mountainous border with Pakistan. I urge him to go to Afghanistan immediately—this week—to meet with his commanders and diplomats in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He will find brave Americans committed to his strategy, and determined to keep Americans safe, by conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan under the third president to order them to do so. - Read More

A True Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Is Trump's Only Hope

The National Interest

Afghanistan: Trump Is Playing the Bush-Obama Game