Pakistan Predicts Failure of Trump’s Strategy in Afghanistan

To achieve his planned reversal of fortunes in the war, Trump will be deploying an additional 4,000 troops to boost the 8,400 USA soldiers already based in Afghanistan. Nowhere in the speech did he say we will fight and defeat the ideology of Islamism, which is the principal propellant of all the terrorist networks.

Most pointedly, the president said we were stopping the practice of nation-building but rather we were in the business of killing terrorists. “Pakistan has also sheltered the same organizations that try every single day to kill our people”. Now, as president, he’s doing the complete opposite by sending more troops there.

Successive US administrations have criticised Pakistan for maintaining links with the Taliban and harbouring leading jihadists – like Osama bin Laden.

“At the request of the government of Pakistan, the visit of the U.S. delegation has been postponed until a mutually convenient time”, the Pakistan foreign office statement said. He is expected to visit China, Russia and Turkey next week in the first phase of the country’s regional diplomatic outreach.

“If they have control over so much land and resources in Afghanistan, it means they have hideouts there, not in Pakistan”, The Dawn quoted Iqbal, as saying.

Afghanistan’s government is slowly losing its grip with the Taliban now controlling about 40 percent of the country, which USA officials say couldn’t be possible without help from Pakistan’s military.

“But, (India’s role is) not focusing on security issues”.

Furthermore, given the president’s pronounced aversion to admitting error, his embrace of the Afghanistan conflict is nearly certainly irreversible. He is substantive and he makes sense, as in resurrecting an exit strategy from war that had all but been forgotten.

“We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society”, Trump said.

No “blank check” for USA presence in Afghanistan.

All walks of life in Pakistan, including political and military leadership, civil society, analysts and public gave a strong response to the U.S. President Donald Trump’s new policy about South Asia and Afghanistan, in which he blamed Pakistan for harboring terrorist groups.

Jihad as foreign policy was indeed encouraged by the United States in the 1980s and blessed by many leading Islamic countries, Western Europe and China as part of the global effort against the Soviet army’s occupation of Afghanistan.

Many in the United States argue it is not only futile but also risky to even try and change Pakistan’s behaviour, either at home or in the region.

The marked shift in Beijing foreign policy is due to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which Chinese officials have described as the flagship for President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative. I take serious note of it because Trump seems to have approached Afghanistan the same way I would have approached Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

China’s spending in Pakistan has helped to revive the country’s sputtering economy. As Michael Yon and others who have lived in the combat zones for years write, there are so many sub-nationalities, tribes, languages and cultures within Afghanistan that there is no nation to call by that name. Added to this are vast deposits of gold, iron, copper and cobalt. Afghanistan borders Pakistan on the north and India is to Pakistan’s south. Referring to reports that Afghanistan is endowed with almost $1 trillion in mineral resources, he wryly observed, “I’m sure the moon has even more mineral wealth, but you need a way to get it out to markets”.

Similar protests were also reported in the southwestern province of Balochistan. I digress, but here is Rex Tillerson: “The U.S. alone is not going to change this dynamic with Pakistan”. Within months he presented, with great fanfare, a continuation of the same. In terms of interventionist politics and foreign policy; support for the ramifications of globalisation, some of which are the corporatisation of agriculture and structural adjustment programmes in the developing world; and being harbingers of peace through preemptive strikes, the two have much in common.

The two also discussed regional and worldwide efforts for lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan.

The meeting took place on the sidelines of the Quadrilateral Counter Terrorism Coordination Mechanism (QCCM) meeting. Australia has been better than most, at least in Afghanistan, and we have made sizable funding donations.

“It’s the most economically stable that it’s been in a decade, thanks in part to massive Chinese investment, and it has managed to secure much of its border regions despite the withdrawal of most USA combat forces”. Second, now China has strategic partnership with almost all the neighbors of Afghanistan that means China is not alone in dealing with the regional security issue.