World War Trump by Hall Gardner

Author:Hall Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633883963
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2018-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

FACTORS LEADING TO POTENTIAL CONFLICT

The situation in Central and Southwest Asia, in Afghanistan and Kashmir, has accordingly begun to heat up again due to a number of factors. First, Obama promised that the United States and NATO would to leave Afghanistan during his administration. Yet Trump has been considering a significant increase in NATO and US troops in the country. The main purpose of a renewed surge would be to shore up Afghan troop morale—but it would also provide the Afghan government with greater firepower. Trump would, in the process, put an end to Obama's restrictions that had limited the ability of the US military to act on the battlefield. And he would give the Pentagon greater authority to use air strikes, such as the April 2017 MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or Mother of All Bombs) attack against an IS tunnel complex. Trump would purportedly authorize the Pentagon, not the White House, to set troop numbers in Afghanistan.

Trump's National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster, who had led anticorruption efforts in Afghanistan, is said to be one of the main backers of the new Afghan strategy. McMaster was also one of the architects of President George W. Bush's generally failed troop surge in Iraq.65 Donald Trump had initially claimed that he opposed—and would continue to oppose—unnecessary, if not disastrous, US military interventions, such as those in Iraq and Libya, but these initial assertions appear completely false. And it was only after the fact, that Trump argued that the George W. Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq may have been the worst foreign-policy decision in US history.66 Trump has also stated that he would attempt to limit the exposure of US servicemen and servicewomen to combat situations, but will he?

Despite his campaign statements, Trump appears to be engaging in yet another futile military intervention after the Bush administration had severely maltreated American service members during the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Ironically, in 2013 Trump had tweeted that the United States should leave Afghanistan immediately, or, “if we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick.”67 But it does not look like the United States will be going in hard and quick. And, at the same time, by unleashing the Pentagon rather than pressing for renewed diplomacy, Trump may actually end up extending this seemingly endless war.

Trump's call to deploy more US and NATO forces (as many as five thousand above the already eight thousand present) is a due to the fact that the Taliban appear to be making advances concurrent with the arrival of the Islamic State in the region. In effect, this will complicate US calculations as it attempts to fight both movements, which in turn will fight each other—unless they join forces. (It is possible that the new IS groups could be disgruntled Taliban elements who have formed their own groups and have declared themselves to be IS.68)

Moreover, Moscow appears to be seeking a rapprochement with the Taliban—given the Obama administration's promises to withdraw from Afghanistan, which Moscow believes might then lead to a Taliban takeover.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.