In a secret NATO report recently leaked to the British media, Taliban insurgents told their interrogators that they are increasingly confident that the Taliban will retake power once NATO forces depart Afghanistan, and that Pakistan is positioning itself for such an outcome. NATO officials have sought to downplay the report’s contents, emphasizing that it represents uncorroborated pieces of information, not an overall analysis of the military situation. Still, the contents of the report should give pause to those who are pushing for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. There are …
During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Obama largely glossed over the ongoing war in Afghanistan, where nearly 100,000 American soldiers are fighting to prevent the reemergence of a terrorist safe haven in the region. He did, however, deliver a misleading statement on the subject in declaring that “the Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.” The President’s inaccurate statement was duly noted by the Associated Press’s SOTU fact check, which highlighted findings of the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) …
The relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was one of the hot topics of Monday night’s presidential debate. Candidate Ron Paul downplayed the dangers of the Taliban, declaring the “Taliban used to be our allies when we were fighting the Russians… The al-Qaeda wants to come here to kill us. The Taliban just says we don’t want foreigners.” The Taliban came on the scene in Afghanistan in 1994, several years after the Soviets departed. Taliban (which translates to “students”) were made up mainly of Afghan refugees who had grown up …
The British newspaper The Guardian has reported that the U.S. has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantanamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office in Qatar. If true, this would demonstrate that the Obama Administration is dangerously naïve about the reality of the threat the Taliban continues to pose in the region. It also could reveal that the Administration has no real strategy for achieving U.S. counterterrorism objectives in the region and is desperate to strike a deal with the …
On a Saturday in late October in Kabul, Afghanistan, a car carrying explosives rammed into an armored U.S. military bus, killing 13 Americans, including five soldiers and eight civilian staff. In August, a Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans. Who was responsible? The Taliban. And who now says the Taliban is not America’s enemy? Vice President Joseph Biden. In an interview with Newsweek, Biden laid out his — and the Administration’s view — of the Taliban: Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s …
Vague platitudes, rather than meaningful solutions, dominated last week’s international conference on Afghanistan held in Turkey’s capital, Istanbul. Conference participants, including Pakistan, Iran, India, China, and Russia, broadly affirmed their support for the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Afghanistan. But for countries like Pakistan that continue to support Afghan insurgents at the expense of stability in the country, the declarations seem empty. And in Iran’s case, the real objective is to minimize Western involvement for the advancement of its own regional agenda. Despite the 2014 deadline for U.S. and …
The recently released Century Foundation International Task Force report on Afghanistan titled “Afghanistan: Negotiating Peace” usefully sketches out the myriad issues surrounding the challenges of seeking an Afghan peace settlement involving the Taliban. However, the report’s call for a “neutral international facilitator” harkens back to the 1990s, when the United Nations (unsuccessfully) sought to stitch together an Afghan peace agreement between the warring mujahideen factions. The U.N. proved no match for the well-armed and Pakistani-supported Taliban, who successfully captured Kabul in 1996 and ruled Afghanistan until the U.S.-led invasion in …
In the past week, military excursions into the tribal regions of Pakistan targeted Islamist militants believed to have connections to a number of plots designed to strike at the European mainland. As more evidence comes to light, it becomes clearer that Islamist militants have been preparing to hit “soft” targets in and around Europe, in a manner and fashion similar to the coordinated attacks in Mumbai in 2008. While the United States appears to have avoided the target lists associated with this latest round of threats, it would be foolish …
Before concluding that today’s New York Times article on Taliban outreach to Karzai means that an Afghan settlement is on the horizon, consider today’s other news from Afghanistan, which includes a suicide attack that killed the Deputy Governor of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. The point is the Taliban may be reaching out to the Karzai government less to negotiate a compromise and more toward establishing a perception of their inevitable return to power in the country. A recent Wall Street Journal article reports that key leaders of Afghanistan’s ethnic minority communities …
General Petraeus laid out clear-cut benchmarks that would indicate signs of progress with the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan in the lead up to the December review at an inter-agency meeting at the White House on Monday, according to today’s New York Times. In addition to the number of Afghan forces trained and military operations against key Taliban strongholds, he pointed to local security initiatives run by the Afghan police, the pace of reintegration of former members of the Taliban, and success of attacks carried out by U.S. Special Operations Forces …
