“More broadly, Pakistan’s use of extremist and terrorist proxies-including to threaten India-is a significant contributor to the global menace of Islamic extremism”, said Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a key role in shaping American policy towards Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq after 9/11.
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“Whereas previously he waited until a situation had developed in which Afghan forces really needed our enabling support, now he’s able to look ahead”, Carter said at a talk with American troops at the Bagram air base, flanked by Nicholson. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media. Nicholson said he reviews requests made through them personally before they are approved.
The group has met five times since January, in Kabul and Pakistan. They discussed a variety of issues, including how the new authorities can be used.
Instead of drawing down to 5,500 troops by the end of the year, 8,400 US troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of Obama’s presidency in January 2017.
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”.
Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has no plans to renew peace talks aimed at ending the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, according to a spokesman.
He said the hundreds of forces outside Afghanistan, in addition to the 8,400, will be “over the horizon”, but officials would not say where.
“It makes a lot more sense for our commanders working with their Afghan counterparts to look at the battlefield, look at what they know the enemy has planned and how the enemy is moving and to anticipate their movement”, Carter said. Earlier, the USA had planned to reduce the number of troops from 9,800 to 5,500 by the end of 2016, but a resurgent Taliban changed the White House’s thinking. Among them are 2,150 service members focused on a counterterrorism mission known as Freedom’s Sentinel.
Although the Taliban were pushed out of large stretches of southern and eastern Afghanistan during the surge, the insurgents quickly started trickling back and by 2015 – when coalition forces formally ended their ground combat mission – were again in control of large parts of the countryside.
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The worldwide leaders agreed to support war-torn Afghanistan with about 12,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops and funding pledge of United States dollars five billion a year for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces through 2020.
