The Taliban aren't going along with our plan to pressure them into talking:
The Afghan Taliban rejected reports in the Pakistani media that they were prepared to resume meetings with U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in Islamabad and repeated their refusal to deal directly with the Afghan government.
Trump simply added pressure to the Obama approach, really. And the Pakistan component of the "regional" approach just isn't working.
We could in theory break the Taliban without Pakistan's cooperation. We broke the Sunni Arab and pro-Iran Shia resistance in Iraq without dealing with the Syrian and Iranian sanctuaries, respectively.
But the situations are too different in practice. We don't have the troops in Afghanistan to win rapidly on the battlefield--and we shouldn't commit them to this landlocked theater in what is really a peripheral campaign in the war to help normal Moslems win the Islamic Civil War over who defines Islam--and the Taliban are a harder nut to crack for an awakening.
Our fight in Afghanistan is really about a narrower--but highly important--mission of preventing Afghanistan from serving as a sanctuary for terrorists who would strike America or the West as they did on September 11, 2001. We should not abandon that mission.
I was against the Obama surges because of the supply problem, in part. I didn't think that we could achieve lasting gains given that the Taliban problem really sits in Pakistan.
Mind you, our surge offensives--despite being truncated--did knock back the Taliban in the south and gave us time to build up Afghan forces to carry on the fight.
And the reality of the supply situation through Pakistan means that we can't really solve the "regional"--read that as primarily Pakistan (but toss in Russia and Iran who cause problems, too)--problem. If we had an alternative to Pakistan land lines of supply as we once had through Russia (before they got too Russian-like to trust) we could afford to be harsher with a jihadi-supporting Black Sheep ally Pakistan.
Maybe Iran should be the real "regional" focus for an Afghanistan strategy.
A harder policy toward Iran that reverses the Obama era Iran nuclear deal fantasy of making Iran a responsible regional power could actually open up supply lines to Afghanistan through a non-nutball Iran--which do exist--and allow us to seriously pressure Pakistan and reduce the "regional" problem in the east that sustains the Taliban and their drug gang allies.
We have a problem of extremely dedicated killers continuing to fight. Why is the answer to that problem a decision to come home and hope those dedicated killers will dedicate their lives to planting kale, or something?
Or do we simply want the false peace of retreat and hope future people will pay the higher price to stop the jihadis again?
UPDATE: Pakistan is unlikely to voluntarily be a regional help to resolve Afghanistan:
In Pakistan the military staged a silent coup since 2017 and took control of the top elected leaders, the mass media and highest courts. The Pakistani military plans to keep this power by doing what they have done for decades; create foreign threats where none exist and use that to justify the continued power, prosperity and immunity from prosecution of Pakistani military leaders. To make this work Pakistani generals have to ensure that several volatile situations do not blow up. One of the more obvious examples of this is Afghanistan, which the Pakistani military sees as a potential problem that is best handled by establishing a degree of Pakistani control over who does what in Afghanistan. Thus Pakistan created the Taliban in the early 1990s to end the civil war in Afghanistan and that had unfortunate side effects. For Pakistan, Afghanistan seems to be nothing but unfortunate side effects.
I keep hoping that Pakistan will come to its senses. They have not. Perhaps because my rational is not their rational.
If we had a supply line through a friendly Iran, we'd have options to combat Pakistan's sanctuary for Afghan Taliban and jihadis.
