The US President started 2018 with a biting tweet lashing out at Pakistan and is ending the year with a fine New-year present to the hawks of this land. The US President, who was never fond of American military entanglements abroad, has reportedly decided to bring home roughly half of the 14,000 US service members deployed in Afghanistan. In hindsight, many missed this withdrawal coming.

While a formal announcement is yet to be made, news reports indicate that the pullout, which will be a more planned affair as opposed to the abrupt Syria withdrawal, would begin in January and continue over the next few months. While the US was never expected to remain engaged in a forever war, the timing of and the manner in which the Afghan withdrawal plans have been made public raise disturbing questions.

Recall, a peace process, which took months to get started, had raised hopes of a breakthrough last week. (Read ‘The Afghan question,’ published December 20 2018). This latest development, though, puts that process in jeopardy. What could a major troop-withdrawal announcement, right in the middle of difficult parleys among intransigent parties, possibly gain for the US interlocutors? Will it not encourage the Taliban to talk less, fight more and watch the US gradually depart the longest war theater in its history?
https://www.brecorder.com/2018/12/20/460457/the-afghan-question/

Many US foreign-policy/defence experts fear that this move will undercut the US influence in Afghanistan both politically and militarily. But there are also some observers who see this move as the US extending an olive branch to the Taliban, who are adamant on US troop-withdrawal as a precondition for meaningful talks. But the way Trump White House made this decision – they didn’t consult their NATO allies and then communicated the decision without articulating it properly – suggests haste, a sign of weakness.

Whether or not the Taliban view this as a confidence-building-measure, one thing is clear: it hands the militants a major propaganda victory, on the lines that they have defeated another great empire. Now there are cries of betrayal from among Afghans, who fear that insurgents will ride all the way to Kabul once US and its perplexed NATO allies pack up and leave by 2020.

Kabul currently has a fractious central government supported by a weak security infrastructure. Those are two very conducive conditions to have a deadly civil war break out return to the multi-ethnic land. The fate of the presidential elections in April 2019 now looks uncertain. Just as it is unclear if the Taliban and the NATO’s advice-and-assist mission will agree on a ceasefire in the run-up to that election.

None of that is good news for Pakistan – no matter how much local strategists gloat about the imminent US ‘defeat’.

Hopefully, lessons would have been learnt from what had happened across the Durand post-Soviet withdrawal (1989/90) and the impact that cross-border instability has had over here. Arguably, some US presence is required in Afghanistan to maintain equilibrium among multiple parties to eventual peace charter – otherwise a militant kingdom right next door will haunt Pakistan in the years to come.

Meanwhile, with this pullout business, Trump, the master of distraction, seems to have positioned himself nicely for 2020 re-election. Seeing the Afghan and Syrian missions coming to an end, Trump’s base will notice that he kept his ‘America First’ promise. As the odds of a major terrorist attack inside the US are low, Trump feels confident withdrawing from those regions against the advice of his generals. A lot still depends on how a withdrawal strategy shapes up in the coming weeks. But the die has been cast.