Departing commander in Afghanistan sees fruits of U.S. strategy shift

President Trump’s highly touted re-set of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan a year ago is beginning to bear fruit as the Taliban inch closer toward Kabul and Washington on a peace plan to end the 17-year conflict, the top U.S. commander in the country said Wednesday.

Gen. John Nicholson, set to step down as head of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan in the next few weeks, told a Pentagon briefing that the Trump administration’s decision to reject timelines initiated by the Obama administration on the U.S. deployment has bolstered the government of President Ashraf Ghani and forced the radical Islamic movement to re-think its attitude toward peace talks.

“In the time that I joined this mission as the last commander appointed by President Obama, we were on a glide path to reduce our forces and eventually to close down the mission,” Gen. Nicholson said during a teleconference from coalition headquarters in Kabul.

“At that time, the enemy had no incentive to negotiate because we were leaving. In war, which is a contest of wills, the enemy believed that we had lost our will to win and that all they needed to do was wait us out.”

That changed as Mr. Trump’s new approach began to be felt. Mr. Ghani’s unprecedented call for no preconditions on future peace talks with the Taliban and the group’s open letter to the U.S. expressing its desire for a political solution all took place six months after the strategy was released, Gen. Nicholson said.

“Then within 10 months, we had the first cease-fire,” he added.

A recent spate of high-profile Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, capped by the group’s brief takeover of the provincial capital of Ghazni, has analysts and regional observers questioning the success of the new U.S. approach. Most recently, Taliban insurgents launched a coordinated rocket attack against the highly-fortified diplomatic zone in Kabul Tuesday, as President Ghani was marking the beginning of the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha.

The ground war in Afghanistan appears to have ground to a stalemate, with the central government in Kabul holding sway over roughly 56 percent of the country’s 407 districts, according to figures compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in May. Those figures mirror those reported by the government watchdog agency in previous months.

Gen. Nicholson on Wednesday acknowledged that military and political control of the country, split between the central government and the Taliban, remained static even with the new U.S. strategy.

“Despite that, we have seen other forms of pressure emerge … that are advancing the peace process,” he added, referring to the groundswell of support by religious and other social groups inside Afghanistan for peace.

Separately, the Trump administration revealed it has rejected an invitation to join Russia-led talks on Afghanistan because they are unlikely to help bring peace, a State Department spokesman told the Associated Press Wednesday.

Russian officials revealed Tuesday that the Taliban will be joining the Sept. 4 talks in Moscow, along with representatives of several neighboring countries. It will be one of the insurgent group’s biggest diplomatic forays since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The State Department official said that as a matter of principle, the U.S. supports Afghan-led efforts to advance a peace settlement. And, based on previous Russia-led meetings on Afghanistan, the Moscow talks are “unlikely to yield any progress toward that end.”