That Afghanistan is in a period of transition is beyond doubt but just how fragile the new-found ‘stability’ in the country is has never been more obvious than during Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s current visit to Washington in which he brought to the fore some home truths. In a series of appearances, the Afghan president has thanked the US for keeping a troop presence in his country even though it is a diminished one. He has also gone a step further to state what may seem to many to be a contradictory and surprising stance: keeping a US troop presence in Afghanistan for much longer than the next few months or even years ahead. Currently, the US troop presence has been reduced to a taskforce of 10,000, which will be reduced by half in the months ahead with 2017 – the year Obama steps down as US president – promising to leave only 1,000 troops behind. Ashraf Ghani is expected to urge President Obama not to pull out the US military presence from the country anytime soon and there is very good reason for this. Afghanistan is not just war-ravaged, emerging slowly from the ruins of Taliban control and an intensive US invasion that has lasted for more than a decade; it could well become the battleground now for what may be a new war for militant expansion and control in the region. The new threat seems to come from the dreaded Islamic State (IS) organisation, which has taken control of large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria and now looks set to gain a foothold in the Af-Pak region. There have already been credible reports that IS has started establishing itself in Afghanistan and therein lies the crux: Ashraf Ghani – and we are sure a majority of Afghans – does not wish to see the added threat of an IS takeover in his country. It is not as though the Taliban threat is being pushed back, far from it; ever since the reduction of US troops, the Taliban have accelerated their attacks in the country, making President Ghani’s job very difficult indeed. The new Afghan president has been on a mission to encourage cooperation between Afghanistan and the US since his election, signing the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) that Hamid Karzai refused to do. With the US withdrawing completely it may also stop funding institutions in Afghanistan and, with an army that is paid its salaries intermittently at the best of times, Ghani knows that further reduction of aid will only weaken the country’s resolve against the Taliban and IS. There is too much at stake in the country and this visit by the Afghan president has underlined these hard realities. *