(The Wire) New Delhi: Even as there is quiet elation in the Indian and Afghan establishments over US President Donald Trump’s speech on South Asia in which he lambasted Pakistan for providing a “safe haven” for “agents of chaos”, there are continuing questions over what his vague articulations will entail on the ground.
Over seven years after Barack Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 additional US troops in Afghanistan, Trump has not just adopted US’s longest war as his own but also committed to an indefinite US presence in the embattled nation. This is a big turn-around for a president whose campaign speeches made little or no reference to Afghanistan and whose instinct had been to immediately remove US soldiers from a war which he considered un-winnable. […]
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“It needlessly antagonises India at a time when it can play only a modest role in Afghanistan. Asking it to assume a greater financial burden may not be realistic, at least in the short term, and it will certainly antagonise Pakistan, creating incentives to double-down on its support of the Taliban,” said Jason Lyall, associate professor and director of the university’s Political vVolence FieldLab. […]
Lyall felt that the lack of specifics in the policy speech raises several questions. “Does this mean that the US will no longer pursue economic reconstruction in Afghanistan? What of USAID projects? Does training and equipping the Afghan army not count as ‘nation building’?” he asked. […]
The counter-terrorist approch is “seductive” as it projects a decrease in financial aid to Afghanistan, which Lyall said, “plays well with his domestic audience”. “But it isn’t clear that a sole focus on killing insurgents wins these types of wars,” he added. […]
“There’s not even a US ambassador in Afghanistan, for example. It’s not clear how many of these initiatives – getting tough with Pakistan, dealing with India, handling Russia – can be accomplished without a fully-staffed and engaged State Department,” he said. […]
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