Daily Times

United States president latest strategy in Afghanistan is to urge U.S. backed troops to move to more heavily populated areas of the country in a bid to avoid attacks in isolated regions, The New York Times has reported.

Quoting three anonymous U.S. officials familiar with Trump’s Afghan war strategy, the report states that the new strategy will pave the way for concentration of military resources on Kabul as well as other cities,

The strategy is outlined in a previously undisclosed section of the Afghanistan strategy, announced by Trump in 2017; aimed at protecting cities like Kabul, including other populated cities and to protect vulnerable military forces in isolated outposts.

Trump’s strategy resembles that used by former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush and is likely to lead to uncertainty about the future U.S. involvement in the 17-year-long war. The strategy ensures that the Taliban and other insurgent groups retain the territory already seized in sparsely populated hinterlands, leaving the Afghanistan government to safeguard cities that include Kandahar, Kunduz and Jalalabad.

The pushback to the cities will be viewed as an acknowledgment that the Afghanistan government is unable to lead and protect the country’s rural civilians.

However, the report quotes Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan ambassador to the United States, as rejecting claims that Afghan and American security forces are leaving rural areas. He says that the intention is to first secure urban areas to allow security forces to later focus on rural areas.

In a surprise visit to Afghanistan earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the U.S. may be willing to engage in peace talks between the Taliban and Afghanistan; stressing that discussions must be Afghan-led, with the U.S. only having a supporting role in the negotiations.

However, last week, U.S. diplomats were in Qatar for direct talks with the Taliban, to restart the peace negotiations and end the war. If the talks prove to be a success, it will indicate a major shift in U.S. policy and support the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

Last summer, Trump had announced a new Afghan strategy, that included increasing the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to around 14,000; he also removed a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal, saying withdrawal would be based on the conditions on the ground.

Published in Daily Times, July 31^st 2018.