Afghan strategy...

Trump's new Afghan strategy rings all too familiar in longest war

'To prosecute this war, we will learn from history,' the president said in an address to the nation.

By WESLEY MORGAN and BRYAN BENDER

President Donald Trump says he is pursuing a "dramatically" different strategy in Afghanistan that will bear better results — but some of the Pentagon's own experts expect to see few dramatic changes despite the president’s soaring promises about America's longest-ever war.

"To prosecute this war, we will learn from history," Trump said in an address to the nation Monday night, saying that America will not telegraph, as it has in past, when it will pull back from the fight. "A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions."

"In the end," he added, "we will win."

Yet sending thousands of additional U.S. troops to train and fight alongside Afghan security forces and forcing allies like Pakistan to do more is unlikely by itself to turn around all the gains the Taliban have made in recent years, military strategists said.

Seth Jones, director of the international Security and Defense Policy Center at the government-funded RAND Corporation who advises the Pentagon, described the new approach as "some slight changes around the edges."

"But it is hard to see how these changes are going to significantly change the outcome of the campaign," he added.

Indeed, the approach mostly represents a reinforcement of the existing one, making it the latest in a series of strategies over the past 16 years that critics assert have failed to bring stability, at a cost of more than 2,400 dead U.S. soldiers and untold billions in taxpayer dollars.

“What those extra U.S. forces mean is that we’ll have guys with slightly more forward Afghan units and we’ll be able to deliver air and intel support to those units. Don’t underestimate that,” said Jason Dempsey, a former officer who served as a combat adviser in Afghanistan. “But let’s not believe for a second that they’ll be with those units long enough or with enough consistency to make a significant difference in how those units fight on their own or change the underlying dysfunction of the Afghan military."

“The advisory effort has been under-resourced since 2014 and needs to be shored up,” added Christopher Kolenda, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served four tours in Afghanistan and is now a researcher at the Center for a New American Security.

Reinforcing that mission, he explained, “will help reduce the high-water mark the Taliban is able to reach but it’s not going to force the Taliban to sue for peace, and it’s not going to compel the Pakistanis to turn against the Taliban.”

The elusive nature of stabilizing Afghanistan through military force was underscored by scholars at the Army War College this summer who wrote that America’s recent conflicts have suffered from a "strategy deficit."

Their study cited as primary drivers the military's "weakness in the understanding of local politics and culture ... too alien for it to be able to convert its tactical prowess into meaningful strategic gain for political purpose."

And extra troops alone won’t likely eat into that deficit, in the view of many steeped in Afghanistan tribal politics and strife.

"How many guys are we sending who speak Pashto or Dari?," asked Dempsey, referring to two of the country's primary languages.

Strategists who support Trump's decision to boost U.S. forces there by 3,500 or more — up from an official baseline of 8,400, plus an undisclosed number of additional troops on short-term duty that is thought to be in the low thousands — call it a welcome change from years of talk about drawing down the American commitment.

Trump has signed off on the deployment of at least 3,500 fresh advisers, trainers and other support troops that the U.S. commander in Kabul, Army Gen. John Nicholson, requested months ago. As with the prior U.S. strategy, those extra forces will pair a counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda and the Afghan branch of ISIS with a bigger advise-and-assist mission aimed at helping the battered Afghan security forces fend off and reverse the Taliban-led insurgency’s growing gains.

Nicholson plans to use some of the extra troops to advise more regular Afghan army brigades around the country and provide more direct support to them in combat.

That means the advisers themselves — mostly mid-level combat officers, experienced non-commissioned officers and special operations forces — will provide howitzer cannons, long-range rocket-launchers, attack and medical evacuation helicopters, and surveillance and command-and-control planes to protect and “enable” the teams when they are in the field.

But while they will go into the field, they will not establish new bases, said one officer in Kabul, noting that existing U.S. forces have already reoccupied several bases they had previously left in the south and southeast of the country. This makes this different from the larger surge of forces that then-President Barack Obama approved in 2009, when U.S. reinforcements focused on specific areas in southern Afghanistan and spread out into hundreds of new outposts to plan their own operations.

That probably means the fundamental shape of the fight will not change: Afghan troops will spend much of their time, energy and manpower reacting to one crisis after the next, retaking rural districts when the Taliban captures them and defending cities when the Taliban threatens them.

French and American special operations forces will help expand the Afghan army’s commando units, which U.S. Army Green Berets have spent more than a decade training and advising. The commandos’ presence is a virtual necessity for any offensive operations against the Taliban, and the U.S.-led coalition hopes to double the number of them over the next several years.

Some U.S. troops will also be involved in training programs that convert regular Afghan units into commando units, a step that is seen as necessary to preserve the commandos in the long term but could dilute their quality and effectiveness in the short term.

Meanwhile, the U.S. forces in the country will continue to spearhead the separate mission of going after terrorist groups.

Run out of Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, that mission relies heavily on drone strikes, along with occasional raids by U.S. Army Rangers and the elite Afghan unit that works alongside them. It is focused primarily in the northeastern part of the country, where Al Qaeda and ISIS personnel are holed up in rugged terrain that the Afghan government is unlikely to retake anytime soon.

Supporters of the strategy believe it can work if given the chance — and they say it differs from the approaches that Obama and George W. Bush took.

"We haven't been at this for 16 years. We haven't been doing anything consistently in Afghanistan," said Fred Kagan, a military specialist at the American Enterprise Institute who has advised U.S. military leaders in both Afghanistan and Iraq. "We have only been at this a few years a time."

He contends that the U.S. military effort there has been a series of fits and starts, culminating with Obama's decision in 2014 to reduce the number of U.S. forces in the hopes of fully withdrawing them. "We didn't complete the military operation," Kagan said.

Others agreed that the United States has pursued a series of strategies — from full-blown counterinsurgency to counterterrorism, advise-and-assist, or a combination thereof — since U.S. forces toppled the Taliban from power in late 2001 after the militant group refused to turn over the Al Qaeda terrorists who had planned the 9/11 attacks.

But all those strategies have suffered from lack of follow-through, in the view of many with direct experience.

"We keep committing and not committing," said Suzanne Levi-Sanchez, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College who studied the local population from 2009 to 2015. "Then we lose focus. And then we had a surge and then we said we are going to withdraw. It is like an infection that keeps coming back stronger.

"If they are increasing advisers to help Afghan special forces and intelligence units in hot-spot provinces and coordinating with those local teams, I think that could be quite effective," she added. "I think the most effective forces in Afghanistan at the moment are the Afghan commandos. But they are completely outmanned by the insurgents, and like before if we prop them up for a while, but we leave, they will crumble."