U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter who paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday reassured Washington’s long-term support to the militancy-plagued country.
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“It obviously, to me, makes a lot more sense to be doing it the way we’re doing it now”, Carter said at a joint news conference with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in the capital Kabul.
Carter visited Afghanistan to meet with US commanders in the wake of a pledge by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies to keep troop levels stable as they battle a resilient Taliban.
Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in that strike, leaving Pakistan looking guilty of either incompetence or complicity, or turning a blind eye on the USA enemy.
Certainly, there are far fewer US troops in harm’s way than there were at the start of the Obama presidency, but to revisit his speeches over the years is to see his journey from hope to hard reality. There are presently about 9,800 USA troops deployed.
But “extreme poverty” often drives child labour in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world with rampant “landlessness, illiteracy, high unemployment rate (nearly 40 percent in 2016) and continuing armed conflict in much of the country”.
Almost 13,000 foreign forces are now stationed in Afghanistan for the NATO-led Resolute Support (RS) mission to help Afghan forces in the field of training, advising and backing Afghan troops in the war on insurgents.
Meanwhile, former top diplomats and think tanks said it is time that U.S. consider putting Pakistan on the list of state sponsor of terrorism. “We also need to suspend all military and non-education assistance”, he said in his testimony during the hearing titled ‘Pakistan: Friend or Foe in the Fight Against Terrorism?’. “I commend them for fighting courageously last year during a tough fighting season, and for their continued dedication in the face of formidable challenges this year”, he said.
The previous rules, which nominally marked the end of the Afghan War, restricted active United States operations in Afghanistan, but mounting losses to the Taliban has left the insurgency with more land than any time since the 2001 USA invasion, leading to the escalation.
Allies who have troops in the country, including Germany and Italy, and US military leaders had pressed the U.S.to continue to provide the security and logistics support they get now. The funding would maintain a total of 352,000 Afghan Army troops and police officers. While accusing Pakistan of making distinction between good and bad Taliban, would President Ghani explain why his Government and the occupation forces have not taken action against anti-Pakistan Taliban enjoying hospitality in different provinces of Afghanistan?
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A few months later, he triumphantly announced that the last troops would leave Iraq, and he was still ebullient in May 2012: “My fellow Americans, we’ve traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war”.
