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U.S. Defense Secretary Defends Trump’s Strategy Toward Afghanistan
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has faced tough questions from the congressmen about why the United States is still at war in Afghanistan and why it should keep investing money and sending young troops into a war that appears increasingly unwinnable.
U.S. Lawmakers, skeptical about the prospects of victory, grilled the Trump administration on the direction of the nation’s longest-running war, now in its 17th year.
“After 16 years, thousands of lives, and probably a trillion dollars spent, the Afghans don’t seem to be ready to defend themselves,” said U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, a longtime critic of the war. “People say if we left the Taliban would take over tomorrow. When is enough, enough?”
“What is the end state that U.S. and NATO troops are fighting for?” asked U.S. Senator Ben Cardin, the committee’s ranking Democrat. “We’ve been there for 16 years. Should the American people simply accept that this is an endless war?”
“They’re gaining ground, they’re creating chaos, they’re getting through a perimeter and blowing up an international hotel,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., referring to the brutal January assault on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul that left 21 dead.
But, Mattis defended the U.S. strategy designed to break the will of the Taliban, under questioning U.S. lawmakers.
“If we were engaged in conquering Afghanistan,” Mattis replied, “I would agree 100 percent with what you just stated, if that was our sense of empire. In fact, what we are doing to earn the trust of the American people is to ensure another 9/11 hatched out of there does not happen under our watch.”
Mattis acknowledged that after 16 years, the war in Afghanistan has been dragging on without notable progress.
“It’s been a long, hard slog, and I recognize that,” he said, adding that among the skeptics he had to convince to try a much more robust support of the Afghans was the president himself, who was initially reluctant to sign off on the strategy.
“President Trump challenged every assumption. It took months to put it together to answer every question he had. And the gravity of protecting the American people caused him to change his mind,” Mattis said.
Mattis said the new strategy is a departure from all previous efforts because the Afghan forces are doing the fighting, and the U.S. is providing much more support in the form of airstrikes and fire support.
In August, when U.S President announced his new Afghanistan policy, he acknowledged that “my original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all my life, I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.”
Former president Hamid Karzai said in a meeting with Iran’s ambassador and special representative, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, that education of girls was a “vital issue” for Afghanistan.
Karzai said he appreciated Iran’s cooperation and its standing with the Afghan people, especially Iran’s contributions to education in Afghanistan.
During the meeting, Karzai said peace and stability in the region are in the interest of all regional countries.
A shipment of humanitarian aid from Uzbekistan was handed over on Thursday to the local officials of Balkh province in the trade port of Hairatan.
Local authorities said the aid, which includes flour, oil, wheat, sugar and meat, has been handed over by Uzbekistan’s Surkhandarya governor to the governor of Balkh.
The governor of Surkhandarya stated the purpose of sending this aid was to support the people of Afghanistan and stressed the need for the development of good relations between the two countries.
Islamabad’s special envoy for Afghanistan Asif Durrani said on Wednesday that Pakistan has suffered more due to Afghanistan’s internal situation than Pakistan has suffered in three wars with India in terms of blood spilt and finances drained.
Durrani said at a one-day International Conference titled “Pakistan in the Emerging Geopolitical Landscape”, which was organized by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) and the German Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), that over 80,000 Pakistanis died in the two decades of the War on Terror and that his country was still counting its dead and injured.
“After the withdrawal of NATO forces, it was hoped that peace in Afghanistan would bring peace to the region. However, such expectations were short-lived,” he said.
He also stated that attacks by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group on Pakistan’s border areas increased by 65 percent, while suicide attacks increased by 500 percent.
“The TTP’s enhanced attacks on Pakistan while using Afghan soil have been a serious concern for Pakistan. Another worrying aspect is the participation of Afghan nationals in these attacks,” he said.
Durrani also said Pakistan had suffered geopolitically since the Soviet Union invaded the neighboring country.
“The post-9/11 world order has negatively impacted Pakistan. Apart from losing 80,000 citizens’ lives, including 8,000 law enforcement agency personnel, the country’s economic opportunity cost is estimated at $150 billion,” Durrani said.
Talking about the future outlook for Pakistan in the regional context, Durrani said that while “our eastern neighbor is likely to continue with its anti-Pakistan pursuits, the western border poses an avoidable irritant in the short to medium term.”
However, he said Pakistan can overcome its difficulties with Afghanistan, including the TTP challenge.
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