Latest in Afghanistan/Pakistan
In my previous essay, I laid out arguments for continued involvement in Afghanistan. In this essay, I present the opposing view.
The Case Against Involvement
The case for involvement prioritizes future risk; the case against involvement focuses on the considerable cost of past U.S. efforts and the seeming futility of attempts to improve the situation.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan, which enters its 16th year as the longest war in American history, has no end in sight, and Americans increasingly question its value. As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump questioned the continued U.S.
There has been no shortage of editorial commentary on the potential impact of having military officers occupy so many senior positions in the Trump Administration. Whether the development is good or bad, they have certainly influenced the re-crafted policy in Afghanistan set forth in President Trump’s speech on Monday.
After much soul-searching, President Donald Trump intends to order the deployment of more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Although he avoided giving a specific number of troops in his speech to the nation Monday night, the president laid out the case for renewing the U.S. involvement in that country, citing the legacy of 9/11, the dangers of premature withdrawal and the range of security threats in the region.
At first glance, the Afghan state seems to be badly flailing, if not outright failing. Kabul’s politics are as divisive and paralyzed as at any time since 2001, while the Taliban presence is growing in the countryside. But beneath the turbulent surface, a widespread and abiding commitment to the survival of the Afghan state has emerged that merits recognition and support.
In mid-November, International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that her office would make a decision “in the very near future” on whether to launch a full investigation in Afghanistan. That statement meshed with my own reporting that prosecutor’s office had finally chosen to move ahead.
Editor’s Note: Radical Islam is not a monolith. The Lebanese Hizballah fights the Islamic State in Syria, Hamas has crushed al-Qaeda sympathizers in Gaza, and—most importantly from a U.S. perspective—al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are bitter rivals. This tension shows up in Afghanistan, one of the most important U.S. theaters of war. Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation details how a surprising source contains the Islamic State there—the Taliban.
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Earlier this week, a suicide bomber outside a crowded hospital in Quetta, Pakistan killed at least 74 people, most of them judges or lawyers, and wounded dozens more. Yesterday, another blast in Quetta wounded an additional 13 people. The provincial interior minister told Reuters that the bombing targeted police escorting a judge, who was not killed in the attack.
This morning, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) released its formal report of investigation into the airstrike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) trauma center in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Of note in the report is a finding that the “aircrew’s failure to exercise judgement . . .
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence yesterday released a second set of documents recovered during the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The trance includes 113 newly declassified documents, adding to the government's publicly accessible "Bin Laden Bookshelf."