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The situation is even starker in Afghanistan. Last month, a year after Mr. Trump grudgingly authorized the deployment of nearly 4,000 troops, bringing the total number there to 14,000, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., admitted that the Taliban “are not losing.”“If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to support the Afghans and put pressure on the terrorist groups in the region, I’m certainly open to dialogue on that,” General Dunford said at a panel sponsored by The Washington Post earlier this month.

“Despite holding most of eastern Syria for two years, including the oil-fields, the U.S. and its Syrian allies have extracted exactly zero political concessions from Assad,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Assad will wait us out.”

Announcing troop withdrawals will force the United States to rethink long-term military commitments that have little public support and are no longer effective. It could also force the Afghans and Syrians to confront their own deep-rooted problems, without the presence of foreign soldiers who often delay the day of reckoning.“I, for one, think the decision to withdraw is sound and wise,” said Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria

During a meeting in the Situation Room in July 2017, when Mr. Mattis and other advisers were pitching their plan to deploy more troops, an angry Mr. Trump lashed out. “We’re losing,” he declared, according to a person in the room.

Those frustrations are widely held by NATO allies who have been America’s partners in Afghanistan.“It’s been getting increasingly harder to explain to European publics why we need to stay there,” said Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador from Slovakia who is the director of Carnegie Europe. “Perhaps Trump’s tendency to disrupt things, including by withdrawing from Afghanistan, may not be such a bad idea after all.”

.Afghanistan’s leaders, mired in political infighting and corruption, need to see the partial pullout as a sign that they don’t have much time, he said.But that is not without risk, Mr. Mir warned, because if the Taliban returned, it would haunt the Americans “that they were defeated by a ragtag force after 17 years of fighting them.”However precipitously Mr. Trump acted, he was channeling the same reservations that Mr. Obama had. Both presidents questioned the open-ended nature of these campaigns, pressed their advisers to define success, and faced the problem of “mission creep.” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, recently vowed that the United States would not leave Syria as long as Iran, or its proxies, were active there.“Suggesting they stay until Iranian influence was gone was an unachievable goal and a recipe for potential escalation for a deployment that the Trump people have never been particularly transparent about,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama.Expanding the mission to resisting Iran, he pointed out, also “has no distinct congressional authorization.”

Mr. Rhodes said he supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria. But like many former officials, from Democratic and Republican administrations, he harshly criticized how Mr. Trump made the decision, without consulting allies or Congress, or even warning his generals

Even the president’s supporters did not defend him. James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation who worked on Mr. Trump’s transition, said he gave the president credit for not just accepting the status quo.But he added, “It’s not really clear what the plan is in Syria. It’s not clear how we protect our interests after we leave, and it’s not clear how it fits into our regional strategy.”

A Taliban spokesman claimed on social media that 53 soldiers had been killed or wounded in the militant group's attack.A recent BBC study found that the Taliban now control or threaten much more territory than when foreign combat troops left in 2014.Taliban fighters are openly active in 70% of Afghanistan

Former agency officials assert that the military, with its vast resources and manpower, is better suited to conducting large-scale counterinsurgencies.

The C.I.A.’s paramilitary division, which is taking on the assignment, numbers only in the hundreds and is deployed all over the world.

In Afghanistan, the fight against the Islamic State has also diverted C.I.A. assets.

The expansion reflects the C.I.A.’s assertive role under its new director, Mike Pompeo, to combat insurgents around the world.

The agency is already poised to broaden its program of covert drone strikes into Afghanistan; it had largely been centered on the tribal regions of Pakistan, with occasional strikes in Syria and Yemen.

For the president, it came down to a simple choice, according to officials with knowledge of the debate: Acknowledge that the Afghan government and its fragile security forces would need an American troop presence to prop them up indefinitely, or leave.

But Ms. Haines and the newly confirmed C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, were also clear that if Mr. Biden decided to pull out, there would be costs to intelligence collection. On Wednesday, presenting the government’s annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Burns said: “When the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish. That is simply a fact.”

Adm. Mike Mullen recalled a dinner he had with the Pakistani ambassador in 2007, one month before he was sworn in as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.As Admiral Mullen left the dinner, the ambassador, Mahmud Ali Durrani, handed him a gift. It was a long, thin, oddly shaped book, done by the British just after the epic partition that divided the region along religious lines, displaced 20 million people and led to an estimated two million deaths in sectarian violence.“You need to read this,” Mr. Durrani told Admiral Mullen.“Why?” the admiral asked.“Because nothing has changed,” Mr. Durrani replied.

The New York Times reports that for the week ending May 6, "at least 140 pro-government forces and 44 civilians were killed in Afghanistan ... the highest death toll in a single week since October."

Shah’s democratic experiment ended abruptly, but the policies of his cousin and the PDPA’s bloody coup ultimately destroyed it, and Afghanistan once again became a plaything for superpowers—in particular, the Soviet Union. In December 1979, the Red Army entered Afghanistan to end the PDPA’s internal disputes once and for all.

At the same time, the country’s leadership—in particular, the king himself—walked freely among his subjects, often alone and without a security detail—something unimaginable now when even minor dignitaries and their children can’t venture out without their pick-up convoys and Kalashnikovs.

He resolved through diplomatic means disputes over water rights with Iran, widened the scope of political participation with different members of society while also pushing forth an increasingly religious ethos in his government. It was during his time in office that the adhan, the Muslim call for prayer, usually blared out of the country’s thousands of mosques, was aired for the first time on the national radio.

The auditing agency, created by Congress in 2008, spent $11 million on a project called “Lessons Learned” that involved having staffers interview more than 600 people with firsthand knowledge of the war in an attempt to prevent the US from repeating the mistakes made in Afghanistan.

the Taliban promised al-Qaeda

a good deal of military action and training action with the Taliban

Al-Qaeda's strength and ability to strike the West has significantly diminished

its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is believed to still be based in Afghanistan along with a number of other senior figures in the group.

al-Qaeda remained "resilient" and "dangerous"

they aim only to implement an "Islamic government" within Afghanistan, and will not pose a threat to any other country.

US withdrawal plans were no longer "condition based" but "agenda based", suggesting President Trump's overriding priority is to end America's longest-ever war.

President Trump has made clear his desire to bring US troops home as soon as possible

Rahmatullah Andar, a former Taliban commander and now spokesman for the Afghan government's National Security Council, warned of the threat of a resurgence from al-Qaeda and other global militant groups.

Al-Qaeda members swear allegiance to the Emir, or leader, of the Taliban.

Taliban hardliners thought to oppose any measures cutting their links with al-Qaeda.

There are fears that if US troops are withdrawn next year, before an agreement has been reached, the violence could intensify and the Taliban push for a military victory.

Instead of building on this goodwill and solidarity, the US launched a War on Terror, the greatest strategic disaster in its history. Thus, the US squandered an historic opportunity to undo the harm of its Cold War policies, which had led to the emergence of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States – victor of the Cold War and last superpower standing – suddenly looked vulnerable and sympathetic. Outsiders felt pity but also a sly hope that, after decades of running the world clumsily at arm’s length, the Americans might recalibrate and become a humbler nation.

The War on Terror was a war of choice, not necessity. What if the US had used 9/11 as a catalyst to bring about transformative change in its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, rather than doubling down by invading Afghanistan and Iraq? It could have used its soft and hard power to help resolve regional conflicts and invest in human development, making the world safer and more prosperous. 

‘The world continues to get America wrong’ Tim Stanley, Historian, columnist and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph

The War on Terror was costly in blood and reputation. The so-called leader of the free world sanctioned torture and illegally invaded Iraq, destroying a state and creating a vacuum that allowed the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS. With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq looked like repeats of Vietnam: enrolment in US history courses in the UK took off as students, like me, wanted to understand why America kept making the same mistakes.

The opposite was perceived to happen: America became more like itself, proud, unilateral, dispensing vigilante justice with a cowboy president (‘some folks look at me and see a certain swagger’, joked George W. Bush, ‘which in Texas is called walking’).

‘That Southeast Asia became the “second front” in the War on Terror was a blunder based on bad intelligence’ Minh Bui Jones, Editor of Mekong Review

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I found myself in Washington DC talking to a well-known author on the legacy of the terrorist attacks. At one point he asked me about Islamic terrorism in Cambodia, where I was living at the time. The question startled me. In the seven years I lived there, I never thought of Islam and terrorism together.

That author’s question tells you one thing about 9/11 in relation to Southeast Asia. Mostly, it is paranoia wrapped in ignorance. There are about 300,000 Muslims living in Cambodia today, a little more than one per cent of the population.

That this region became the ‘second front’ in George W. Bush’s great ‘War on Terror’ – his administration sent 660 troops to the Philippines in January 2002, following the capture of al-Qaeda operatives in Singapore and Malaysia – was a strategic blunder based on bad intelligence. Of course, Cambodians and their Vietnamese neighbours know all too well where those sorts of mistakes can lead and they would have felt a sense of déjà vu as they watched US bombs raining on Afghanistan and Iraq

Growing up in Vietnam in the 1970s, I had an image of the US as impregnable and I wasn’t alone. After 9/11, it looked vulnerable; I’m sure I’m not alone here either.

‘As US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, history threatens to repeat itself’ Elisabeth Leake, Associate Professor of International History at the University of Leeds and author of Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2022)

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US led an ultimately failed invasion of Afghanistan that lacked a historical understanding of the state or its inhabitants. American policy planners and military officers seemed destined to repeat mistakes made by other foreign powers in the decades before them. This was not a case of the ‘graveyard of empires’ – itself an inappropriate moniker – striking again. Rather, it was a ready willingness to overlook Afghanistan’s complicated 20th-century history.

social scientists supported military personnel in comprehending supposedly incomprehensible Afghanistan. These policies fundamentally overlooked Afghanistan’s complex social and political relations and the dynamic ways Afghan elites and intellectuals had engaged with the international arena for decades. The US itself had fostered some of this modernisation in the era of Cold War competition, yet 21st-century narratives replaced a history of internationalism with a history of parochialism. 

Water pumps powered by cheap and highly efficient solar panels are able to drill deep down into rapidly dwindling desert aquifers. The solar panels have helped generate bumper opium harvests year after year since farmers in southern Afghanistan’s poppy-growing belt began installing them around 2014.

The opium trade earned about $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion last year, the United Nations has estimated. Opium sales have provided 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with 9 percent provided by legal exports of goods and services.

The solar arrays have been central to ensuring Afghanistan’s status as the global leader in opium.

The Taliban, for their part, have condemned opium as anti-Islamic, as Afghanistan’s poppy crop sustains addicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a huge number inside Afghanistan. But given their own deep ties to opium smuggling during the insurgency, Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between hypocrisy and holiness.

Now, solar power is a defining feature of southern Afghan life. Tiny solar panels power light bulbs in mud huts, and solar-driven pumps irrigate cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, as well as subsistence farmers’ vegetable plots.

The panels, which supplanted more expensive and less reliable diesel to run water pumps, have helped turn the desert green.

Opium farmers now rely on at least 67,000 solar-power-fed water reservoirs across Afghanistan’s desert southwest, according to a European Union-funded research project by David Mansfield, a consultant who has studied illicit economies and rural livelihoods in Afghanistan for two decades.

“For many opium farmers, abundant water is now a given,” he said. “No one perceives it to have a cost.”

“Do not destroy the fields, but make the fields dry out,” Gov. Maulave Talib Akhund said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to fulfilling the opium decree.”

The opium ban was met with a collective shrug this spring by southern farmers, many of whom were already harvesting their spring crops. Opium prices surged almost immediately, several farmers said, to roughly $180 per kilogram from $60 per kilogram.

But the Taliban have vowed to crack down on farmers who try to cultivate any new crops.

Dr. Mansfield said that determining how long the aquifers could continue to supply water was uncharted territory because no one had been able to conduct a rigorous scientific study of the desert groundwater.

“We have to continue to dig our wells deeper and deeper,” Mr. Armani said.

Even when prices are high, many poppy farmers say, they earn only about $2 a day for each family member. They are at the very bottom of a narcotic trafficking system in which profits increase exponentially from growers to middlemen to processing labs to major cross-border traffickers.

Farmers whose poppy fields were plowed under by the previous government could send their sons to paying jobs as soldiers or police officers — or to the constellation of unskilled jobs provided by the United States and NATO. But those options are gone, and unemployment has soared under the Taliban.

“Growing poppies is the only option to survive right now,” he said.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year, the TTP has stepped up its attacks in Pakistan, killing dozens of government soldiers in 2021.

The TTP was founded in 2007 in response to a Pakistani military operation clearing the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad where a radical preacher held sway. The group's founder, Baitullah Mehsud, was once considered close to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI.

One 12th-grade student in Kabul said the decision had stamped out her last bit of hope that she could achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer.

“Education was the only way to give us some hope in these times of despair, and it was the only right we hoped for, and it has been taken away,” the student, Zahra Rohani, 15, said.

On Monday, the Ministry of Education had announced that all schools, including girls’ high schools, would reopen on Wednesday at the start of the spring semester. The following day, a Ministry of Education spokesman released a video congratulating all students on the return to class.

Mehrin Ekhtiari, a 15-year-old student in 10th grade, said she and her classmates were shocked when a teacher announced the news to the classroom on Wednesday morning.

“My hope was revived after eight months of waiting,” she said, adding later that the announcement had “dashed all my dreams.”

In recent months, the Taliban had also come under mounting pressure to permit girls to attend high school from international donors, aid from which has helped keep Afghanistan from plunging further into a humanitarian catastrophe set off by the collapse of the former government and Western sanctions that crippled the country’s banking system.

. He attributed the decision to a lack of a religious uniform for girls and the lack of female teachers for girls, among other issues.

Many principals and teachers said they only received the new instructions from the ministry after students had already arrived for classes Wednesday.

The move came a little more than a week before a pledging conference where the United Nations had hoped donor countries would commit millions of dollars in badly needed aid, as Afghanistan grapples with an economic collapse that has left over half of the population without sufficient food to eat. It is unclear whether donors will be willing to contribute following the Taliban’s abrupt reversal on the key commitment of girl’s education.

The Taliban on Wednesday abruptly reversed their decision to allow girls’ high schools to reopen this week, saying that they would remain closed until officials draw up a plan for them to reopen in accordance with Islamic law.

When schools reopened in September for grades seven through 12, Taliban officials told only male students to report for their studies, saying that girls would be allowed to return after security improved and enough female teachers could be found to keep classes fully segregated by sex.

Later, Taliban officials insisted that Afghan girls and women would be able to go back to school in March, and many Western officials seized on that promise as a deadline that would have repercussions for the Taliban’s efforts to eventually secure international recognition and the lifting of at least some sanctions.

“I’m deeply troubled by multiple reports that the Taliban are not allowing girls above grade 6 to return to school,” tweeted Ian McCary, the chief of mission for U.S. Embassy Kabul, currently operating out of Doha, Qatar. “This is very disappointing & contradicts many Taliban assurances & statements.”

At one girls’ private high school in Kabul, more female students had arrived for classes Wednesday morning compared to previous years, the school’s principal said in an interview.

“They came to my office, crying,” said the principal,

The decision “doesn’t make sense at all, and it has no logic,” the principal added, noting that the new government has had over seven months to design a new uniform and address the teacher shortage.

Since seizing power, the Taliban have been reckoning with the need for consistent policies while struggling to tread a delicate line that satisfies their more moderate members, their hard-line base and the international community.

The sudden reversal on the girls’ secondary schools seemed to validate existing concerns among Western donors that, despite assurances, they are dealing with much the same Taliban as the 1990s.

“The Taliban have been solidifying their position and becoming hard-line on a lot of issues,” Mr. Bahiss said.

In recent months, the new government has issued restrictions on local media and cracked down on peaceful protests. Taliban officials have also issued new restrictions on women, including a ban on traveling farther than 45 miles in a taxi unless they are accompanied by a male chaperone.

“You can’t exercise your other rights if you can’t leave your house to attend your job or attend education classes,” Ms. Barr said. “It’s a really alarming sign of what may be to come, it’s likely to herald further crackdowns on women.”

In some precincts, Mr. Esposito noted, most enforcement activity, like ticket writing, occurred when officers were paid time-and-a-half overtime, instead of during their regular workweek. “It’s a question as to why they can see activity when they are being paid overtime as opposed to not being able to see activity when they are on straight time,” Mr. Esposito testified.

A 2010 state law forbids the department from retaliating against officers for not making a certain minimum number of street stops. But Mr. Beirne testified that performance goals did not violate that law. “My feeling was that the supervisors or the department could set performance goals for employees,” Mr. Beirne said. “Whether they be numerical or not was not an issue.”

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The current American force in Afghanistan of 9,800 troops will remain in place through most of 2016

The insurgents are now spread through more parts of the country than at any point since 2001

5,500 troops, along with contributions from NATO allies, which have yet to be agreed upon, would provide enough power to protect the force

Just because a consensus exists, though, doesn’t mean that the consensus is correct. Americans who watched Monday night’s showdown benefited from the relative honesty of the discussion. But they were deprived of a real critique of the incumbent’s record, and a real debate about what an alternative approach might look like.

Romney’s “me-too” approach on Monday night gave the impression that there should be nothing particularly controversial about, say, the dubiously constitutional way the president took us to war in Libya, or his march-up-the-hill-march-down-the-hill strategy in Afghanistan, or his willingness to claim and then use the power to execute an American citizen without trial.

More broadly, you would have no sense that there are any alternative grand strategies available to America beyond our current focus on terrorism and the greater Middle East – and, of course, the occasional detour into China-bashing.

On the evidence of the debate, the world beyond the borders of the United States starts in Mali and ends in Kandahar. Entire continents and major powers might as well not even exist.

the Bush-Obama consensus he embraced has already marginalized many other groups and ideas as well. Obama’s policy choices have co-opted or neutered the anti-war and civil libertarian left. Romney’s campaign rhetoric has marginalized realists and right-wing libertarians. The result is a landscape where huge swathes of public opinions and major schools of thought are represented only by fringe third party candidates

But a senior Taliban figure tells The Daily Beast that while Omar was in charge, Akhondzada did not have much seniority and was not on anyone’s list as a potential leader. His rise toward the top of the Taliban hierarchy only came after the announcement of Omar’s death and Mullah Mansour’s succession last year.

Within Taliban circles Mullah Haibatullah Akhondzada has the reputation of being very conservative, even by Taliban standards. Some claim he is sadistic with underlings and has little idea about or interest in politics as such

the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries — the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.

. In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.

It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a “Star Wars” storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.

Think for a moment about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.

Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first “Independence Day” movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life?

American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in “Star Wars.”

As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in The New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.

Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue?

Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The United States has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).

unlike the evil empire of “Star Wars” or the ruthless aliens of “Independence Day,” the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft and motherships with it.After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.

Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.