Excerpts:
Sending more troops to Afghanistan is a good start
By Thomas Joscelyn & Bill Roggio | August 21, 2017 | billroggio@gmail.com |
Editors’ note: A version of this article was first published at The Weekly Standard
...
The premature withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 paved the way for the rise of the Islamic State, which evolved into an international menace after overrunning much of Iraq and Syria. A similar scenario could have unfolded in Central and South Asia. The Taliban-led insurgency currently contests or controls more territory today than in years. And a withdrawal would have cleared the jihadists’ path to take even more ground, possibly leading to dire ramifications throughout the region.
...
But if America is really going to put the Afghan government on the path to victory, then the Trump administration will have to learn from the mistakes of its predecessors. In particular, the US government needs to drastically reassess America’s jihadist enemies and avoid the policy pitfalls of the past.
With that in mind, the Trump administration has the opportunity to make the following course corrections.
Stop underestimating al Qaeda
President Trump can explain to the American people that al Qaeda is still a significant problem in South Asia—a potentially big one. President Barack Obama frequently claimed that al Qaeda was “decimated” and a “shadow of its former self” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That wasn’t true. The Obama administration’s counterterrorism campaign dealt significant blows to al Qaeda’s leadership, disrupting the organization’s chain-of-command and interrupting its communications. But al Qaeda took measures to outlast America’s drones and other tactics. The group survived the death of Osama bin Laden and, in many ways, grew.
Consider that from June 2010 until 2016—that is, most of the Obama administration—the US government repeatedly insisted that there were just 50 to 100 al Qaeda operatives in all of Afghanistan. This was clearly false at the time, and US officials were eventually forced to admit that this figure was far off.
From October 2015 until the first week of December 2016, the US and its allies killed or captured 400 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan— ....
Continued: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2017/08/sending-more-troops-to-afghanistan-is-a-good-start.php
This sounds real Neo-Conish (published originally in the Weekly Standard) while Breitbart lambasts the administration for doing this. Of course, that's not to say continuing involvement is a bad decision.
Co-Author Roggio appears on newsmax regularly as a guest.
