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No, the War in Afghanistan Did Not End

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Yesterday afternoon, an AP article proudly announced to us that the war in Afghanistan has ended:
AP hed

Unfortunately, the AP headline is total bullshit. There was indeed a ceremony in Kabul yesterday. And yes, it did mark (for the second time), the end of the international force called ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) assembled under NATO as the lead in the war in Afghanistan. The new NATO mission, dubbed Operation Resolute Support, also under NATO leadership, is proclaimed most often to consist only of training and support to Afghan forces who will do all the fighting.

The problem with that description is that it is a lie. Just over a month ago, Barack Obama “secretly” expanded the role of US troops remaining in Afghanistan:

President Obama decided in recent weeks to authorize a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned, a move that ensures American troops will have a direct role in fighting in the war-ravaged country for at least another year.

Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described to the public earlier this year, according to several administration, military and congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The new authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support Afghan troops on combat missions.

In an announcement in the White House Rose Garden in May, Mr. Obama said that the American military would have no combat role in Afghanistan next year, and that the missions for the 9,800 troops remaining in the country would be limited to training Afghan forces and to hunting the “remnants of Al Qaeda.”

The decision to change that mission was the result of a lengthy and heated debate that laid bare the tension inside the Obama administration between two often-competing imperatives: the promise Mr. Obama made to end the war in Afghanistan, versus the demands of the Pentagon that American troops be able to successfully fulfill their remaining missions in the country.

But to AP, the only message worthy of being in their headline and lede paragraph is that the war has ended:

The war in Afghanistan, fought for 13 bloody years and still raging, came to a formal end Sunday with a quiet flag-lowering ceremony in Kabul that marked the transition of the fighting from U.S.-led combat troops to the country’s own security forces.

The reader has to hang in there for another dozen paragraphs or so before reaching the admission of the expanded role of US troops and the reason for that expansion:

Obama recently expanded the role of U.S. forces remaining in the country, allowing them to extend their counter-terrorism operations to the Taliban, as well as al-Qaida, and to provide ground and air support for Afghan forces when necessary for at least the next two years.

In a tacit recognition that international military support is still essential for Afghan forces, national security adviser Mohammad Hanif Atmar told the gathered ISAF leaders: “We need your help to build the systems necessary to ensure the long-term sustainability of the critical capabilities of our forces.”

More than ten years after starting our “training” mission, Afghan troops remain unable to defend the country on their own and must rely on US troops.

Of course, the military knows that they have this expanded role. Here is the video the military provided on the transition ceremony:

Note that at around 38 seconds, the narrator says “combat by American forces on counterterrorism operations will continue”. You can bet they will.

Oh, and for a righteous rant on this whole charade, scroll back to yesterday on James Risen’s Twitter feed.

Post-2014 NATO Mission in Afghanistan Has a Name, But No Enabling Agreement

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[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlwYESlvqs’]

 

In a complete repeat of the process the Obama administration used to get NATO to be the entity to propose extending the mythical 352,000 Afghan National Security Force size through 2018 instead of letting it drop by a third in 2015, yesterday saw NATO “announcing” that the training of ANSF would extend post-2014 and that Germany and Italy would participate in this training. This mission is clearly guaranteed to succeed because it has the nifty new name of “Resolute Support” and is even the subject of the slick video above that NATO released for the roll-out of the surrounding propaganda campaign:

The United States has agreed to lead a training mission in Afghanistan after 2014 that will include troops from Germany and Italy and will operate under a new NATO mandate, officials announced Wednesday.

U.S. troops would be based in hubs in the east and south, Taliban strongholds where the Afghan army is likely to face a deadly insurgency for years to come. Germany has pledged to keep troops in the north and Italy in the west, an arrangement that would mark a continuation of the current force structure, albeit with far fewer troops.

However, there still is no underlying agreement that will authorize US trainers to be in Afghanistan after 2014 with full criminal immunity:

Officials did not specify how many troops the mission, called Resolute Support, would include. They declined to say whether it would include a counterterrorism mission, one of the capabilities that the Obama administration has expressed interest in keeping after the mandate of NATO’s current troop contingent, the International Security Assistance Force, expires.

“The new mission will not be ISAF by another name,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “It will be significantly smaller.”

/snip/

The White House has been reluctant to specify how many troops it would be willing to keep in the country because it has yet to sign a security cooperation agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. That has made U.S. allies reluctant to make their own commitments to continue pouring money and troops into a deeply unpopular conflict.

It’s nice to know that we have the toughest detail of naming the mission out the way so that we can now get down to the minor details of criminal immunity, force size and full combat activity for US troops under the rubric of “counterterrorism”. What could possibly go wrong with this terrific new effort?

It might also be noted in parting that Rasmussen claimed Afghan Special Forces as the “bedrock” of the post-2014 effort. From what I have been able to find, those “special forces” have a whopping twelve weeks of extra training, compared to 14-18 months of extra training for US Special Forces.