What does winning in Afghanistan mean?

General John Nicholson said that with the US pressure on Pakistan, he will win the war in Afghanistan. The new policy, he told Lara Logan on 60 Minutes, “can deliver a win.” General Nicholson didn’t mention a time frame for winning in Afghanistan. But what Logan didn’t ask or may be what her corporate media tsars didn’t allow her to ask, was a simple question: what does winning in Afghanistan mean?

Recently, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defence Secretary James Mattis both suggested that the path to peace in Afghanistan is for the Taliban to join the reconciliation process, join the government, and renounce violence. For once, both could have been mistaken for being spokesmen for Pakistan. The ‘stable genius’ wants to end the war. But he doesn’t know how.

There is one indication of what the ‘stable genius’ means by ending the war in Afghanistan or what he wanted it to mean during his election campaign. That he will bring home all the troops and leave Afghanistan. Well, that sounds great but how do you do that and what would that mean for the first or original war aim in Afghanistan, which used to be the removal of those groups in Afghanistan who were suspected of being involved in 9/11?

If the US leaves Afghanistan, the Afghan army wouldn’t be able to last more than six months. The president of Afghanistan said that. Logan had to ask again to confirm if he really said that. Ashraf Ghani said, “Yes. Because we don’t have the money.” And that exactly is the problem because the US is also realising that they don’t have the money. The ‘stable genius’ thinks his country is being ripped off by other nations.

So, the US withdrawal would not mean back to square one. It would rather mean arriving at a destination where things are far worse than how they were in 2001 before the US invasion of Afghanistan. It is like the upside down in Stranger Things, where the place becomes a grimmer and deadlier twin of the original. Quite a remarkable achievement after trillions spent, close to 2,400 US soldiers dead and countless deaths of Afghan civilians! With the US withdrawal, if by that General Nicholson means victory, Afghanistan would become sort of like the Silicon Valley of all major terrorist groups as well as providing enormous opportunities for startups, which are never in short supply. Such a Bitcoin-style shooting up of Afghanistan in terrorism industry would be an unmistakable latest addition in the terrorism promotion section of the West’s resume. Furthermore, Afghanistan has become so dependent on the American dollars that they cannot sustain their army, which really means the country’s security and Kabul’s grip on power for more than six months. That is commonly known as the reverse of nation-building. In other words, nation destruction. Hats off to Uncle Sam!

The other meaning of victory could be defeating the Taliban on the battlefield. At the height of US forces deployment during the Obama administration, the total number was 100,000 troops. That couldn’t help in achieving a battlefield victory. The current number of troops in Afghanistan is a small fraction of its former number. The absence of the meaning of the endgame in Afghanistan as well as the absence of what victory means at this stage of the war renders any strategy meaningless.

Trump has one strategy, which is unabated and unaltered by his mood swings. If left to his own grey cells, it seems like he is going to destroy Afghanistan and every other country in the world that he can tweet about but, well, America First.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2018.

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