US President Donald Trump has unveiled his plan for peace in Afghanistan. There will be more US boots on the ground, more authority to US advisers and increase in air strikes on armed anti-government targets.
President Ashraf Ghani will ensure the success of the “war for peace” strategy by fighting to clean the system of corruption and removing ineffective commanders in the security forces.
The new strategy removes all the curbs that Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama put on US forces in the battlefield.
Abdul Ahmad Joya, a security issues expert, believes the new strategy would increase both US casualties in the war, and the money spent on keeping the war going. “The new strategy is to change all policies of Obama,” he says.
Trump has told his advisers to finalise the plan before May 25 when NATO leaders are to meet in Brussels, which will be his first as president of the US.
Atiqullah, another defence expert, thinks the US president has shown “seriousness to tackle terrorism”.
But the plan has critics with the Trump administration in Washington. It has been dubbed the “War of McMaster” after National Security Advisor HR McMaster. CNN has also reported that Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon is one of the opponents of the new strategy, and would do his best to torpedo the plan.
Can a new military strategy break the present stalemate on the peace process in Afghanistan?
Political analyst Naweed Elham is sceptical since everything that was tried by the previous US president “remained fruitless’”. “There has been no movement on the peace talks since the death of Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, the leader of Taleban, in a US airstrike in 2016,” says Elham. It is unlikely that the new strategy will have a serious effect on the peace process, he adds.
In 2014, as the US pull out of troops kept to the deadline, Obama said his country was no longer at war with the Taleban. But that hardly stopped the Taleban who went on to capture a few villages, forcing Obama to change his plan to leave US forces in Afghanistan as non-combatants to assisting Afghan forces wherever they were under siege or in danger.
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