The Trump administration will draw down U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 troops in each country before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller confirmed in a statement Tuesday, a move that will put the outgoing president at odds with Republicans in Congress and the incoming Biden team.
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A war begun to oust the Taliban is ending with a whimper almost two decades later, with those same Taliban poised for some sort of power-sharing agreement with Kabul. After decades of war and heartbreak and broken promises and shattered lives, so little seems to have changed in Afghanistan.
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For decades, Afghanistan’s untapped mineral wealth has been touted as the country’s trillion-dollar El Dorado. But while the Afghan government has never been able to monetise mountains of copper, iron ore, gold, and gemstones, the Taliban have—and are ramping up their mining operations as just-started peace talks aim to shape the future of a postwar Afghanistan.
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Iran’s view of the Taliban has largely been derivative of its analysis of the relationship of the Taliban to the top threat to the Iranian state, the United States. In this respect, Iranian policy toward the Taliban resembles U.S. Cold War policies that evaluated groups in other countries as a function of their relationship to the Soviet Union.
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The absence of a credible guarantor of peace in Afghanistan is a big problem for everyone involved. For its part, the West has long believed that Pakistan could play that role but is not quite fully exercising its power. In turn, the United States frequently tried to ramp up the pressure on its erstwhile partner.
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One of the most important lessons Russian policymakers have learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is to refrain from forging local allies in their own image and to instead seek to galvanise partners wherever mutual interests intersect. A case in point is the nexus with the Taliban.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah signed a power-sharing deal on Sunday, signalling the end of a months-long stalemate that plunged the country into a political crisis. The breakthrough, which sees Abdullah heading peace talks with the Taliban, comes as Afghanistan battles a rapid spread of the deadly coronavirus and surging violence that saw dozens killed in brutal attacks last week.
The reality is that Afghanistan is a landlocked country thousands of miles away from America and of marginal economic and strategic importance to it. Once the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban, it began to look at Afghan war through the rearview mirror. And with the monumental crisis created by the Coronavirus pandemic, the American foot will remain steady on the accelerator. The troops are coming home.
Read Here – The National Interest
It took the Trump administration 17 months to clinch a preliminary agreement with the Taliban – a first step toward ending more than 18 years of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. The deal is not so much a peace agreement as it is a way for Washington to manage conflict in the southwest Asian nation in the aftermath of the American withdrawal, which is supposed to be finalized by May 2020 (assuming the Taliban uphold their end of the bargain).
India must not commit the error of placing Indian troops on Afghan soil, says the diplomat who coordinated New Delhi’s secret military assistance to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military commander of the Northern Alliance, who fought the Taliban and U.S. forces till his assassination in 2001.
