Taliban Gaining Territory in Afghanaistan, 2017

2-2-17

"The U.S. government's main watchdog organization in Afghanistan released its quarterly report to Congress this week, and it contained a shocking statistic: The government of Afghanistan has uncontested control over only 57 percent of its territory as of last November. That is down from 72 percent a year earlier.The war in Afghanistan has proved to be the United States' lengthiest and costliest to date. Barack Obama campaigned for president on wrapping it up, but the emergence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, as well as the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, have prolonged the U.S. troop presence. There are about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more than in any other war zone in the world."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ory-says-u-s-watchdog/?utm_term=.b9a088300aa3


"Fifteen years after suffering defeat at the hands of the United States, the Taliban are retaking territory in Afghanistan at an alarming pace.
Wide swaths of the country are now under their control. But the prize for the armed group is the city of Lashkar Gah, seen as the gateway to the rest of the country. Standing in their way, is a ragtag group of Afghan soldiers and police, ill-trained, and ill-equipped."


Afghanistan: Taliban At The Gates | | Al Jazeera




Taliban 'special forces' lead Helmand assault: Afghan officials | Reuters





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"U.S. President Donald Trump and his Afghan counterpart discussed security in a phone call on Thursday, officials said, hours after the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said thousands more troops were needed to break a stalemate with the Taliban.

Trump and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani also spoke about opportunities to strengthen ties, counterterrorism cooperation and economic development, the White House said in a statement.

It said Trump also emphasized the continuing importance of the U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership and his support for Ghani's government, which is faced with an emboldened Taliban-led insurgency that is still gaining ground after more than 15 years of war."


Trump speaks with Afghan leader, U.S. commander calls for more troops | Reuters


"In a stark admission, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan told Capitol Hill lawmakers Thursday that after 15 years of war, the conflict remains a “stalemate” – and said thousands more troops are needed to train Afghan forces.

Army Gen. John W. Nicholson, Jr. offered lawmakers a grim assessment about the prospects for truly ending a war that so far has cost more than 2,000 American lives -- and billions of dollars -- since 2001. The challenge, he testified, is made even tougher by Russia and Iran’s aid to the Taliban, amid signs the militant group is making territorial gains."

Top US general says Afghanistan war at 'stalemate,' more troops needed | Fox News








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Gladiator said:

2-2-17

"The U.S. government's main watchdog organization in Afghanistan released its quarterly report to Congress this week, and it contained a shocking statistic: The government of Afghanistan has uncontested control over only 57 percent of its territory as of last November. That is down from 72 percent a year earlier.The war in Afghanistan has proved to be the United States' lengthiest and costliest to date. Barack Obama campaigned for president on wrapping it up, but the emergence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, as well as the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, have prolonged the U.S. troop presence. There are about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more than in any other war zone in the world."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ory-says-u-s-watchdog/?utm_term=.b9a088300aa3


"Fifteen years after suffering defeat at the hands of the United States, the Taliban are retaking territory in Afghanistan at an alarming pace.
Wide swaths of the country are now under their control. But the prize for the armed group is the city of Lashkar Gah, seen as the gateway to the rest of the country. Standing in their way, is a ragtag group of Afghan soldiers and police, ill-trained, and ill-equipped."


Afghanistan: Taliban At The Gates | | Al Jazeera




Taliban 'special forces' lead Helmand assault: Afghan officials | Reuters





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It should be turned over to the UN to keep the peace. It's not the business of the US to protect every population around. We should help. Not more.

If after 15 years of training, the Afghan military still isn't ready, it never will be. Time to leave.

Iran Revolutionary Guard has been providing funding, arms and recruitment as well as direct IRGC members dying in battles.




How Iran aides the Afghan Taliban under America's nose | TheHill

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Gladiator said:

2-2-17

"The U.S. government's main watchdog organization in Afghanistan released its quarterly report to Congress this week, and it contained a shocking statistic: The government of Afghanistan has uncontested control over only 57 percent of its territory as of last November. That is down from 72 percent a year earlier.The war in Afghanistan has proved to be the United States' lengthiest and costliest to date. Barack Obama campaigned for president on wrapping it up, but the emergence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, as well as the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, have prolonged the U.S. troop presence. There are about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more than in any other war zone in the world."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ory-says-u-s-watchdog/?utm_term=.b9a088300aa3


"Fifteen years after suffering defeat at the hands of the United States, the Taliban are retaking territory in Afghanistan at an alarming pace.
Wide swaths of the country are now under their control. But the prize for the armed group is the city of Lashkar Gah, seen as the gateway to the rest of the country. Standing in their way, is a ragtag group of Afghan soldiers and police, ill-trained, and ill-equipped."


Afghanistan: Taliban At The Gates | | Al Jazeera




Taliban 'special forces' lead Helmand assault: Afghan officials | Reuters





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Thank goodness they're just JV.

MaggieD said:

Thank goodness they're just JV.

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Since Obama made that statement deriding the Taliban, Iran has stepped in.


"Afghanistan security forces have formally complained of Iran logistically and militarily supporting the extremist activities of the Afghan Taliban group.

An Afghan official told Kabul Television that Iran supports the extremist group by hosting training exercises inside the country.

A former foreign ministry official told German media outlet Deutsche Welle: “This is the first time that Iran has confessed to supporting the Taliban. In the past, they always blamed Pakistan for this.”

Late in October, Al Arabiya English reported on how one Afghan Taliban leader revealed details of his group’s relations with Iran.

“The movement is trying to benefit from all legitimate means to reach a regional agreement as part of the war against the American invasion; therefore, the Imara holds ongoing networks with a large number of regional and neighboring states."


http://english.alarabiya.net/en/New...ly-accuses-Iran-of-aiding-Afghan-Taliban.html



The Afghanistan Army has held up for two weeks, after Obama left office. Afghanistan is ready to fall, so Trump better be quick on the uptake.




"Trump administration blacklists more than two dozen firms and individuals, prompting Iranian threat of reciprocal measures.

"The Trump administration sanctioned dozens of Iranian-linked entities in a move that senior U.S. officials said marked the beginning of an escalating campaign to confront Tehran in the Middle East and restrain its military capabilities."


https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-sanctions-25-iranian-entities-1486135896


Trump is talking sanctions and Iran is governing Afghanistan.


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This Nov, 2015 article describes the conflicts in Taliban areas, with Isil tribal leaders, and Pakistan. Now there is also the influence of the Iran Republican Guard,



"Afghan and foreign media reports claim that ISIL is making steady military gains capturing territory, recruiting Taliban fighters to their cause, spending large amounts of cash while carrying out horrendous punishments for those opposing them.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has frequently warned his Western backers that ISIL poses the next major threat to Afghanistan.

Complicated and bloody

The reality is that the Afghan battlefield has become much more complicated and bloody since the disclosure in July that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had died two years ago and the leadership was being manipulated by his deputy Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansoor."

"ISIL's largest gains have been only in one province - Nangarhar, which borders Pakistan. Here, there is an active civil war ongoing between the Taliban and former Taliban, who have switched sides to join ISIL.

This fighting has less to do with ideological reasons than it has to do with control of the lucrative trade and smuggling of goods, money laundering, and most significantly, heroin that passes through the provincial capital Jalalabad to Peshawar and onwards to Western Europe. Jalalabad became a drugs transit centre in the early 1990s, even before the Taliban emerged."



The Afghan battlefield has become more complicated - Al Jazeera English


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joG said:

It should be turned over to the UN to keep the peace. It's not the business of the US to protect every population around. We should help. Not more.

Click to expand...

That is a very odd position to take, considering the US and coalition forces brought the country to its knees. There is a responsibility that comes with that. Fact.

gunner said:

That is a very odd position to take, considering the US and coalition forces brought the country to its knees. There is a responsibility that comes with that. Fact.

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It was run by thugs that had allowed attacks against us to be planned, organized and carried out from their territory and that were less than helpful in pursuing the perpetrators. That only meant the US was required to remove the criminals. It was in no way obliged to build a new society or enforce laws.

joG said:

It was run by thugs that had allowed attacks against us to be planned, organized and carried out from their territory and that were less than helpful in pursuing the perpetrators. That only meant the US was required to remove the criminals. It was in no way obliged to build a new society or enforce laws.

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It was/is a Tribal country with 10s of dialect. The region is a hotbed of sympathy, for the Taliban what we see unfold is to be expected once the US scaled back the commitment. The US invasion was predicated on a philosophy of good vs evil etc. a no win situation. That said, once you invade you are incumbent to manage the aftermath.

gunner said:

It was/is a Tribal country with 10s of dialect. The region is a hotbed of sympathy, for the Taliban what we see unfold is to be expected once the US scaled back the commitment. The US invasion was predicated on a philosophy of good vs evil etc. a no win situation. That said, once you invade you are incumbent to manage the aftermath.

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And so the UN should secure the country for the population. It will take a major effort and cost 40 years. But hey! That's what we learned in Europe and Asia after WWII. It is faster to let a new local thug, but that would make the same people rant that do, if don't or at least try not to.

joG said:

And so the UN should secure the country for the population. It will take a major effort and cost 40 years. But hey! That's what we learned in Europe and Asia after WWII. It is faster to let a new local thug, but that would make the same people rant that do, if don't or at least try not to.

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I don't really know what you're trying to say here. Europe needed the UN to stop local thugs from gaining a foothold?

gunner said:

I don't really know what you're trying to say here. Europe needed the UN to stop local thugs from gaining a foothold?

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Not at all. We did not learn that from UN behavior. We learned that there were no more wars between the European powers after a large external military was stationed and was responsible for external security. The question is now, whether the long stationing was responsible for the unusually long peace or as with Bismarck's German solution it was the internalization of defense at a supranational level.

joG said:

It was run by thugs that had allowed attacks against us to be planned, organized and carried out from their territory and that were less than helpful in pursuing the perpetrators. That only meant the US was required to remove the criminals. It was in no way obliged to build a new society or enforce laws.

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"After 15 years of war in Afghanistan, the government there and its allies from the US and elsewhere have had little success staunching the flow of opium and heroin out of the South Asian country.

According to recent data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose 10% in 2016, reaching an estimated 201,000 hectares, or about 496,000 acres"


Opium poppy production increasing in Afghanistan during war - Business Insider



"Officially, it’s believed that the Taliban has a yearly budget of around 500 million dollars. In private, however, Western and Afghani intelligence agencies admit that the real Taliban budget is closer to between one billion and two billion dollars, with most opting for the higher number. Intelligence sources at the former International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), since replaced by the Resolute Support Mission (RSM), place the number even higher—at more than two billion. Moreover, it is widely believed that the Taliban has stockpiled cash amounting to several billion additional dollars in preparation of a major campaign to seize control of Afghanistan at some point in the future.


Where exactly does the Taliban get all this cash? The sources are many and varied. Narcotics are one of the principal sources of the Taliban’s financing. Over the last two decades, Afghanistan has emerged as the principal source of the world’s heroin, producing somewhere between 70% and 90% of the world’s supply. Afghanistan sits at the heart of a region called the “Golden Crescent,” a rugged mountainous region incorporating northeastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan, which is the center of the world’s heroin production. Afghanistan is a “vertically integrated” heroin producer in that the entire process, from the cultivation of the opium poppy to the production of morphine and its subsequent conversion into heroin, all takes place within the country."


How the Taliban Gets Its Cash | The Huffington Post




Poppy Production: The Taliban?s Cash Cow | The Diplomat

http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/taliban_opium_1.pdf

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In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. might have left behind a smaller version of the force it left in South Korea after 1953. That would only have worked, though, if a reasonably stable central government had first been established. It has become clear these people are too backward for that. We may have to accept that some nations are nations in name only, where most people feel little or no national allegiance and large parts of the territory are not under any real government. In those places, we can expect jihadists to create save havens where they can train and plot to kill us and other Westerners, just as they have done in the, largely ungoverned areas that forms the western frontier of Pakistan.

We can never tolerate that, even if it means a determined, persistent campaign using very heavy weapons such as bombers to kill these fanatic enemies en masse, and even in that in turn means the incidental killing of many innocent civilians. That, unfortunately, is the price of allowing depraved murderers to live in your midst--and in many cases, abetting them. If conditions became miserable enough, I think many people in these chaotic Muslim countries would begin to turn on the jihadists who had brought all that suffering down on their heads. And that result would be good for the U.S. If, on the other hand, they decided to take the side of the jihadists, as many of them seem inclined to do, they would become targets also.

Our main concern should be defending Americans from depraved, fanatic murderers, by attacking them hammer and tongs, without letup, wherever we may find them. We should stop worrying about what these people may try to do to us if we go after them all out, and concentrate instead on making them worry about what we certainly will do to them if we finally resolve to get serious. Of course the U.S. should never intentionally target innocent civilians, but at the same time, just as Americans realized in World War Two, we cannot let the fact that many civilians will inevitably be killed in rooting out fanatic enemies of this country keep us from doing just that.

I can say that I was against the Afghanistan war from the beginning. But Bush at least had a reasonable plan of using special forces and Afghanis themselves to do the heavy lifting. For some unknown reason, many in the US (and, apparently, NATO as they approved) liked the war. Obama escalated greatly, using conventional forces, which simply made more targets. And the forces mainly bunkered down in security zone, with minimal mixing with the people. 1,700 US troops died on Obama's watch with nothing to show for it.

And bin Laden was in Pakistan the whole time.

It is an uncontrollable area but when you break it you have an obligation to fix it. And NATO is involved and responsible. Not the US's problem alone.

Those people have been hiding beside a road waiting for an enemy to come along for umpteen generations. Any western country that wants to rule, or even just pacify them better be prepared to kill them all.

Gladiator said:

"After 15 years of war in Afghanistan, the government there and its allies from the US and elsewhere have had little success staunching the flow of opium and heroin out of the South Asian country.

According to recent data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose 10% in 2016, reaching an estimated 201,000 hectares, or about 496,000 acres"


Opium poppy production increasing in Afghanistan during war - Business Insider



"Officially, it’s believed that the Taliban has a yearly budget of around 500 million dollars. In private, however, Western and Afghani intelligence agencies admit that the real Taliban budget is closer to between one billion and two billion dollars, with most opting for the higher number. Intelligence sources at the former International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), since replaced by the Resolute Support Mission (RSM), place the number even higher—at more than two billion. Moreover, it is widely believed that the Taliban has stockpiled cash amounting to several billion additional dollars in preparation of a major campaign to seize control of Afghanistan at some point in the future.


Where exactly does the Taliban get all this cash? The sources are many and varied. Narcotics are one of the principal sources of the Taliban’s financing. Over the last two decades, Afghanistan has emerged as the principal source of the world’s heroin, producing somewhere between 70% and 90% of the world’s supply. Afghanistan sits at the heart of a region called the “Golden Crescent,” a rugged mountainous region incorporating northeastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan, which is the center of the world’s heroin production. Afghanistan is a “vertically integrated” heroin producer in that the entire process, from the cultivation of the opium poppy to the production of morphine and its subsequent conversion into heroin, all takes place within the country."


How the Taliban Gets Its Cash | The Huffington Post




Poppy Production: The Taliban?s Cash Cow | The Diplomat

http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/taliban_opium_1.pdf

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Yes. I know that. What exactly do you want to say?

Russia got it's ass kicked during the height of it's military power in Afghanistan.

America never learned from this.

RetiredUSN said:

Russia got it's ass kicked during the height of it's military power in Afghanistan.

America never learned from this.

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It is a pity Afghanistan was not turned over to the UN after removing the warlords protecting bin Laden

joG said:

Yes. I know that. What exactly do you want to say?

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One question is whether putting more US/NATO troops on the ground, in advisory roles, would yield less conflict?

Another question is what are the goals of Iran? What solution does Iran desire as an outcome?

What is the value of the Central Afghan government? Can it sustain with a 40% territory control?


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Gladiator said:

One question is whether putting more US/NATO troops on the ground, in advisory roles, would yield less conflict?

Another question is what are the goals of Iran? What solution does Iran desire as an outcome?

What is the value of the Central Afghan government? Can it sustain with a 40% territory control?


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Iran wants to be the regional hegemon and spread its client base militarily and with the Koran.
A couple of military advisors probably won't do the trick. You either do these things right or they Vietnam you.
So, we should not be there anymore. It should be the global community in there. We should only be in a supporting role.

gunner said:

It was/is a Tribal country with 10s of dialect. The region is a hotbed of sympathy, for the Taliban what we see unfold is to be expected once the US scaled back the commitment. The US invasion was predicated on a philosophy of good vs evil etc. a no win situation. That said, once you invade you are incumbent to manage the aftermath.

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The aftermath should be simple. Extermination of the Taliban.

PirateMk1 said:

The aftermath should be simple. Extermination of the Taliban.

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Easier said than done. As Iraq showed the US are more than capable of winning the fire fight, but less able at controlling the aftermath.