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A war hero has died 12 years after being blown up in Afghanistan.

Corporal Davey Timmins, 39, lost an eye and suffered brain damage in Helmand in 2009.

Doctors gave him 24 hours to live but he recovered and won the Queens Gallantry Medal in 2010.

But he developed PTSD and was discharged that year.

After years of illness he died in his sleep at his parents home in Barrhead, Scotland.

Mum Cathy, 67, a retired health worker, said: We wont know what Davey died from until there is a postmortem.

But I think his body could no longer cope with the mental trauma and physical pain.

"He took 14 tablets twice a day.

I dont want to speak badly of the Army but once he was medically discharged he got no help whatsoever.

"None of those soldiers who need help get it.

Twice-married dad Davey, a bomb disposal expert, joined the Royal Logistic Corps in 1999.

The Sunday People is campaigning for better treatment for mentally scarred veterans.

The Ministry of Defence said it took veterans health extremely seriously and will respond accordingly to the coroners report.

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War hero blown up in Afghanistan dies 12 years later as 'body couldn't take more pain' - Mirror Online

WASHINGTON (FOX 5 DC) - The head of the National Guard says at least 10,000 troops will be deployed inD.C.by Saturday, and an additional 5,000 could be requested from other states.

National Guard members are pouring into DC ahead of the Inauguration. On Wednesday, some National Guard members took a break within the Capitol building itself - one week after it was assaulted by pro-Trump protesters.

As the Military Times reports, that figure is twice the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

There are currently 6,200 Guard members in the city from D.C. and five nearby states. The increase in requests for Guard members on Monday comes as officials brace for more, possibly violent protests surrounding the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

READ MORE:National Guard deploying at least 10K troops to DC

Last week, the Guard helped erect a seven-foot non-scalable wall around the previously besieged Capitol building.

They have also helped to secure the inauguration perimeter, which includes not only the Capitol, but stretches into the District as well.

READ MORE:DC officials now working to secure inauguration perimeter before Saturday

Earlier this week, photos of National Guard members resting in the Capitol went viral. The D.C. National Guard released a statement on the Guardsmen being armed and resting during their shifts.You can read it in full here.

Excerpt from:
Twice as many troops in DC for inauguration than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined - FOX 5 DC

As the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan reaches the two-decade mark this year, NATO officials have made clear that they have bigger fish to fry. In the alliances new Strategy 2030 report, Afghanistan is mentioned just six times.

Yet as NATO positions itself for the next decade, the alliance has been transformed by its experience in Afghanistan and the lessons it learned there.

The cooperation of the 50-plus nations involved was a growth experience for the alliance, says Ian Lesser, executive director of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. The bloc learned a lot ... in terms of habits of cooperation and interoperability that were tested everyday. Member forces also made use of some high-tech systems that many nations wouldnt have been exposed to in peacetime.

The alliance's lessons in Afghanistan may be in recognizing the corrosive effects of corruption and the ways in which the U.S. and its NATO allies inadvertently encouraged it, says retired Col. John Agoglia.

The billions of dollars that flooded into Afghanistan after the invasion made graft commonplace. We need to understand how we put money into an environment who were giving it to, what are the oversight mechanisms?

Brussels

As Americas longest war reaches the two-decade mark this year, one of President-elect Joe Bidens first orders of business will be figuring out a way forward in Afghanistan and, by extension, a roadmap for NATOs mission in the country.

Neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda is at the top of Americas national security threat list anymore, and NATO officials, too, have been clear about their belief that they have bigger fish to fry. In the alliances new Strategy 2030 report, Afghanistan is mentioned just six times in 40 densely-packed pages.

The war in Afghanistan is a mission on which the success or failure of NATO was once thought to hinge. In its early days, the war was billed as not only a post-Cold War rebirth of the alliance, but also its 21st-century evolution.

No longer. The new security agenda, according to the report, will be dominated by competing great powers, in which assertive authoritarian states with revisionist foreign policy agendas in other words, China and Russia seek to expand their power and influence.

Yet as NATO prepares for the next decade, its challenges will be tackled by an alliance transformed, for better or worse, by its experience in Afghanistan and the lessons it has learned there. The question, analysts say, will be whether it chooses to heed them.

Afghanistan became NATOs marquee mission with the U.S. invasion in 2001, the first time in history that the alliance invoked Article V, which declares that an attack on one is an attack on all. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was ultimately composed of allies from 50-plus countries, including non-NATO partners.

In the early years of the war, the running joke among U.S. forces, however, was that ISAF stood for I saw Americans fight, or I sunbathed at FOBs (forward operating bases, which are heavily fortified and largely safe). The underlying critique was that some allied governments used restrictions called caveats to prevent their troops from carrying out night missions, for example, or from deploying to certain more violent parts of the country and, as a result, U.S. and other fighting forces carried a heavier load.

Still, the cooperation was a growth experience for the alliance, says Ian Lesser, executive director of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. These caveats did in some ways hinder the ISAFs ability to operate, but it operated nonetheless, and learned a lot by that in terms of habits of cooperation and interoperability that were tested everyday.

At the same time, the experience transformed the militaries of many NATO member nations. In Germany, some 90,000 troops have deployed to Afghanistan over the years. Theres no German general today who doesnt have military or even fighting experience there, says Markus Kaim, senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. The same goes, too, for a generation of soldiers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Canada.

Member forces grew accustomed to collaborating on intelligence sharing and mission planning that made use of some high-tech systems that many nations wouldnt have been exposed to in peacetime, says Anthony Cordesman, defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This in turn, led to a much better appreciation for allied capabilities.

And it led to an even greater appreciation for allies themselves including non-NATO partners, many of whom, like Australia and South Korea, took part in the Afghanistan war.

If we think about any military engagement of NATO going forward, well conceptualize it not as 30 member countries of NATO, but as a loose platform that includes other organizations and non-NATO partners as well, Dr. Kaim says. NATO needs partners, he says, because NATO is aware that it cant shy away from deep political changes were seeing.

The NATO 2030 report emphasizes making the bloc a more political alliance, which means making it a place where core security concerns of all sorts are discussed, Dr. Lesser says. The Asia-Pacific region, especially China, is a case in point. Its a recognition that the definition of what bears on Euro-Atlantic security has expanded tremendously.

This focus on great power competition, coupled with the varying levels of disenchantment with missions that dont end cleanly, means that the appetite for launching military operations again anytime soon will differ across the alliance.

It starts with the question of whether NATO members consider Afghanistan a success. Was it worth all the effort, the blood? Most people would likely answer not really, Dr. Kaim says. Militarily, an alliance with impressive weapons uprooted Al Qaeda but did not defeat the Taliban, which, though an effective guerrilla force, was never a highly sophisticated threat. On the nation-building front, You spent an incredible amount of money to achieve remarkably little, Dr. Cordesman says.

Yet the definition of success itself reflects the different strategic cultures within NATO. While America is deeply uncomfortable with the notion of not winning, for many NATO allies, analysts say, it was enough to show solidarity, to be present, and to make a contribution.

More broadly, Afghanistan was seen as the price to pay, and the right thing to do for NATO in return for the reassurance those countries get from the alliance on the bigger existential threats they face, Dr. Lesser says. The fact that theyve been present in Afghanistan is simply part of the insurance policy, and you have to pay these premiums over time.

And even as most members came out of their Afghan experience more cautious about exporting democracy, the 2030 report acknowledges, it also argues that its nonetheless vital that NATO doesnt allow democratic erosion.

For this to happen, NATO must take some key lessons of Afghanistan, including the corrosive effects of corruption and the ways in which the U.S. and its NATO allies may inadvertently encourage it, says retired Col. John Agoglia, former director of both the U.S. Armys Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute and the Counterinsurgency Training Center-Afghanistan, both in Kabul.

The billions of free-flowing Western dollars that flooded into Afghanistan after the invasion made graft and fraud easy and commonplace. We need to understand how we put money into an environment who were giving it to, what are the oversight mechanisms? What could be the second and third order impacts?

Corruption "undermined the legitimacy of the Afghan government, reduced its effectiveness, and created a source of resentment for its own population," which in turn drove Taliban recruitment and made it "much more difficult" for NATO to achieve its key mission goals, "from security to effective governance," Karolina MacLachlan, policy officer at Transparency International in London, wrote in NATO Review.

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At the same time, in bolstering some former Soviet republics to help resist Russian democratic undercutting and influence, as in Afghanistan, we may have to deal with some people who have blood on their hands, some who are corrupt, some who are trying to reform, Colonel Agoglia says. Weve learned a lot about understanding the limits of power, how to shape it as best you can, and how to take what you can get and its not always going to look pretty.

I get the great power competition, but its won and lost in the trenches doing these things so that if you actually do have to go into combat, he adds, you own the day.

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War in Afghanistan: What has NATO learned from 20 years of fighting? - The Christian Science Monitor

Zareena, 30, holds her fifth child, 1-year-old Fariba, at the ward for malnourished children at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

An Afghan woman stands over her granddaughter in a Kabul hospital ward for malnourished children. Parvana, just 18 months old, keeps vomiting, but she's too weak to move on her cot. So the vomit dribbles down her neck and pools into the hem of her worn velvet tracksuit.

"We didn't have enough to feed her," says her grandmother, Haji Rizva, who pats away the mess with the fringe of her scarf. She came to the hospital on behalf of Parvana's mother, who is at home and pregnant. "Sometimes we only have tea for two, three days. We don't even have bread." (The women are only referred to by their first names because of the discrimination they could face if identified.)

Parvana, 18 months old, lies on a gurney at a ward for malnourished children at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

Haji Rizva says her sons can't find work. To get to the hospital, she had to borrow $8 for the taxi a huge sum for her. The medical treatment is free, but Haji Rizva didn't know that. So she left Parvana's baby brother at home with the family. She says the boy is too weak from the hunger to move but she didn't think she could afford to treat them both.

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A December report from the United Nations finds that nearly half of all children younger than 5 in Afghanistan, a total of some 3.1 million, are facing acute malnutrition. That's a 16% jump since June 2020.

Of those children, nearly a million are believed to suffer from severe acute malnutrition effectively, starvation and need food urgently to survive.

"COVID has actually accelerated a very difficult situation to begin with," says Melanie Galvin, the chief of nutrition in Afghanistan for UNICEF. "We've seen an escalation over the past year, even in the past few months, in estimated children in need," she says.

"We have a huge number of children that are wasted. You can call it starvation. It's synonymous with starvation," she says.

The line is thin between hunger and starvation, and Afghanistan's weak economy, dealt a blow by the pandemic closures, threatens to push more families over the edge, like Shaista's. She requested NPR only use her first name, like other Afghan women in this story. Last month, in her tiny home in a crowded muddy lane on the outskirts of Kabul, she boiled a pot of water on the wood-burning stove to make them think that supper is coming.

Shaista sits in her tiny home on the outskirts of Kabul. Her youngest, a 3-year-old girl, sits on her lap; some of her other seven children sit beside her. Behind them, she is boiling a pot of water on the wood-burning stove. But she's told the children it is dinner, and she tells them, "just wait for your father." Then she hopes they'll fall asleep, because there's no food to give them. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

Shaista sits in her tiny home on the outskirts of Kabul. Her youngest, a 3-year-old girl, sits on her lap; some of her other seven children sit beside her. Behind them, she is boiling a pot of water on the wood-burning stove. But she's told the children it is dinner, and she tells them, "just wait for your father." Then she hopes they'll fall asleep, because there's no food to give them.

"Just wait for your father," she tells the children when they ask for food. "Then they fall asleep," she says. "I cry at night, thinking of how I can't feed them," she says, as her brood crowds around her in their one-room home. Her oldest, 15, sits protectively by the door, and her youngest, a 3-year-old girl, sits on her lap.

She estimated her age at around 35, and said of a hard life, this year was the hardest. Her husband was injured in an accident. Her son began selling firewood to support the family. But he hasn't sold much, because the pandemic hit and Kabul shut down for weeks in the spring.

Shaista's 15-year-old son looks out onto a muddy alleyway on the outskirts of Kabul. He began selling firewood this year to help out his family after his father was injured in an accident. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

"Corona made everything worse," says Shaista. The economy hasn't recovered, and her son still doesn't sell much wood.

Many other families are suffering. In a poor Kabul neighborhood, women with their babies line the stairs of a building unmarked for safety reasons where Care International runs a free medical clinic. Nooria, 25, waits with her 9-month-old daughter Nargis, who has a cough she can't shake.

Nooria used to be a teacher, but after the pandemic began, she says her employers couldn't pay her, so she quit. "I didn't even have biscuits and tea to feed my daughter," she says. Her husband's work as a rickshaw driver dried up, and it hasn't really picked up since the lockdown ended.

Her family eats when there's money for food. That includes her two children she's also got a young son. "They eat when we eat," she says. "Whatever we have has to be enough."

Nooria says the nurses here counseled her before, a few months ago when they told her Nargis was malnourished."They say you have to feed her nutritious food. But if there's no money how can we feed her?"

The counseling is important, health workers say, because hunger in Afghanistan is more than a lack of money to buy food. In traditional households, men eat first, leaving women and children with the remains. That mindset particularly hurts pregnant and lactating women, who need more calories. The counselors advise women about the importance of breastfeeding and when to wean their children, and male health workers raise awareness with men about ensuring the women and children in their families eat well.

Two posters on the glass partition in a ward for malnourished children at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul show the correct way to breastfeed a child. Proper, frequent breastfeeding is key to avert malnutrition among babies, but health workers say many Afghan women don't know that. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

One midwife at the clinic, who could not be named for security reasons following Care International rules, said she saw about 35 babies every day with their mothers. Of those babies, she estimates that about six to 10 were malnourished.

Many of the most severe cases of malnourished babies are referred to the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in central Kabul, where, on a recent December day, women clad in burkas clutched swaddled babies as they waited to see a doctor.

Inside, grandmother Haji Rizva was here with her granddaughter Parvana. So was Zareena, 30, who watched over her fifth child, 1-year-old Fariba, who cried every time her mother put her down.

Zareena says for months, she was giving her daughter water mixed with non-dairy creamer. She says she thought it was cheap milk powder: she's illiterate and so is everybody around her. She also spooned her daughter the remains of vegetable stews and sometimes gave her bread and tea.

Her husband used to earn small change by hauling groceries for customers out of crowded bazaars, but the work dried up. Now, her oldest boy sells old plastic bags: other families buy them to burn for fuel. He's lucky to make $2 a day. Some days he brings home 50 cents.

Scenes like this jar with the sheer amounts that the U.S. spent in Afghanistan some $2 trillion, according to Brown University's Costs Of War Project, which investigates how much the U.S. spent on the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of that spending was military-related, but Congress also appropriated nearly $138 billion since 2002 for Afghanistan's reconstruction. About a third of that was drained out by waste, fraud and abuse, according to the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which audits and investigates that spending. And yet that still leaves billions. So why are Afghans starving?

"It's a million dollar question, isn't it," says Heather Barr, co-director of the women's rights division at Human Rights Watch, who has done research in Afghanistan for the group. She says for years, international aid spending in Afghanistan was chaotic and largely focused on short-term goals. It wasn't meant to solve complicated problems like malnutrition, which isn't just about providing food aid. It must be addressed by other development efforts ranging from improved access to water to educating women about proper nutrition.

Diplomats meant to oversee programs often stayed no longer than a year. And as violence escalated, even good programs were thrown into disarray.

"The cumulative effect of all that is pretty disastrous. We have a country which has still got some of the worst development indicators in the world after an extraordinary amount of money being spent, but a lot of that money wasn't really spent on programs that could have led to real recovery," says Barr.

And now, the United States and the broader international community are giving less even as the crisis escalates. This year, a pledging conference for Afghanistan promised $12 billion to $13 billion dollars to the government over the next four years, 20% less than what the international community pledged in 2017, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

So of those nearly one million children who are starving, Galvin of UNICEF says the group hopes to help a third through food aid and medical treatments with the funding it has.

"The international community is largely done with Afghanistan," Barr says. So is America, she says. "There's just no realistic expectation that the U.S. is going to remain interested in Afghanistan, ready to continue bankrolling Afghanistan's deeply financially dependent government."

And already, kids like Parvana, who are lucky enough to be treated, face an uncertain future. Her grandmother Haji Rizva says when they go back home, Parvana will eat what they eat. But the cruel reality is that often, that's nothing at all.

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'I Cry At Night': Afghan Mothers Struggle To Feed Their Children In The Pandemic - NPR

America won in Afghanistan years ago, but the analysts in think tanks, the press, and the intelligence agencies missed it. Sound confusing? Let me explain. The Afghan security forces and their leadership have always been the key to victory, and the winner of the war was decided when the U.S. and NATO decided to make a long-term investment in a professional security sectorthat happened in 2002 and 2003. But claiming an ultimate American or NATO victory has never been important to the war effort.

The Afghan people are the only ones that can assign victory or defeat to this war. They do so by sustaining human rights and democratic principles while constantly building a secure environment for education, healthcare, and other societal advances to occur. This is all enabled by the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). The ANDSF is the foundation for a peaceful Afghanistanit always has been.

I saw another evergreen headline recently, celebrating the strength of the Taliban movement, and its ability to outlast a superpower in Afghanistan. This demonstrates clearly that the pundits never understood the mission in Afghanistan, and unfortunately that has not allowed American citizens, or Afghans, to fully understand it. This has never been about America or NATO versus the Taliban; its about the Afghan people versus those who commit violence and crime in their nation.

The war in Afghanistan was never Americas to win. It has always been the Afghan peoples victory to achieve. The analysts and critics of the war have been vainly trying to prove that America could never win the war in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan was technically won by the U.S. the moment it decided that building the Afghan security sector was the path to helping the Afghans achieve victory. The United States is the supporting actor in this war. The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) are the lead actor and are the path to victory, if it can be found. Analysts need to focus on the Afghan and Taliban efforts to determine the ultimate winner.

When did I realize that the key to victory was the success of the ANDSF? In 2002, when the U.S. started its first formally named Security Sector Reform mission in Afghanistan beside the Interim Afghan government and empowered by the United Nations.

I recalled on my journey home from Afghanistan in 2003, the time a visiting Pakistani delegate in Kabul told my boss, dont waste your time building a large Afghan army, it wont matter. That 2003 Pakistani comment was the second time I realized the ANDSF was the path to victory for the Afghan people. In South Asia, whatever Pakistan suggests you do for Afghanistan should be seen as the opposite of sensible. The creation of and 19 years of mentoring and fighting beside the ANDSF has been the most essential act of the war for peace in Afghanistan.

In 2001 when the U.S. entered Afghanistan about six weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks on Americans, the mission was to find and destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and anyone that aided them. That goal was achieved quickly. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was killed, hid, or ran towards other nations. The invasion and campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan clearly didnt stop terrorism worldwide, but it shut down AQ in Afghanistan as a headquarters.

But that wasnt the entire U.S. mission in Afghanistan. America had three major goals:

Headlines today seem to have added a 4th U.S. goal, Fighting the Taliban until the last Taliban member is dead. This was not and is not a U.S. goal. The 3rd American goal negated that idea from the start. The U.S. was clear they were there to help Afghans, to be able to help themselves to ward off the Taliban and any other anti-Government or anti-Afghan enemies. The main effort in Afghanistan from 2002 onwards was the 3rd US strategic goal.

I got to Afghanistan in 2002 and was on MG John R. Vines staff as an engineer. I sat in the operations meetings daily. Our mission at the 82nd Coalition Task Force was to hunt and kill terrorists and their allies. I flew around Eastern Afghanistan ensuring infrastructure was in place to support that mission for a few months. After we finished the airfield at FOB Salerno, I was picked to join MG Karl Eikenberry on the other U.S. mission, to help build the new Afghan National Army and other security organizations.

As I left MG Vines team, he gave me a handshake and friendly punch, and said you are now joining the main effort, Jason. Building the Afghan Army is how we end our fight.

I didnt fully appreciate his words. I was a lieutenant at the time, but I would soon figure out what the press and pundits and many military leaders never seemed to. But those confused military commanders luckily didnt write U.S. policy; the three major U.S. goals in Afghanistan remain unchanged today.

At MG Eikenberrys side for the next 10 months, we worked with the Afghan government to reform their entire security sector (military, police, courts etc.) and build the first corps-sized element of the Afghan Army (a division in U.S. terminology). MG John Vines would return shortly, replacing LTG Dan McNeill, as the senior commander in Afghanistan, and then he joined us in meetings with Afghan leaders as we built their security forces. A year later, when I left Afghanistan in 2003, I looked at the Afghan security sector that had been created, and it was pretty good for a one-year-old militarymuch better than the U.S. Army on its first birthday.

That 3rd part of the U.S. policy to help the Afghans to help themselves, became the main effort in 2002 and although most failed to notice it, that was the only part that mattered when you look forward to how the war will end.

The Afghan security forces, known today as the ANDSF have grown in capability and professionalism since the first battalion was created in 2002. They grew so large and capable that in 2014, NATO agreed with the Afghan government and determined the ANDSF were strong enough to take over the full leadership role of the fight against Afghanistans enemies in 2015.

Since 2015 began, the NATO mission, with America making up the bulk of the force, has switched to a supporting role while the Afghans themselves became the main effort. This is exactly in accordance with the original strategy for Afghanistan. If historians are looking for the moment when the U.S. goals were met, it will be this hand-off in the war. Until this moment, the Americans (and the NATO-plus coalition) on the ground had fought Afghanistans enemies, sometimes alone, but often beside their Afghan partners. These U.S. operations were meant to give the Afghans the precious time they needed to build their force up.

Today, the ANDSF is confident and highly capable, and they are responsible for over 90% of the ground attacks against the Taliban and the terrorists in Afghanistan. Their Air Force is the last force the U.S. helped to create, yet they are now flying the majority of the attack missions.

Historians can also mark in their notes the moment the Afghans, through their ANDSF champions, defeated the neo-Taliban movement, that returned shortly after the American/United Front forces ejected them in 2001. That moment was when the Taliban publicly admitted they would enter a peace process with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. That was the moment the Taliban quietly admitted to themselves that they cannot defeat the ANDSF militarily, so they better try a diplomatic strategy.

Now that the U.S. goals have been met in Afghanistan, they have a decision to make. It is much like the decisions in the early 1990s when the U.S. partnered with Afghan Mujahedeen to drive out a violent regime. The U.S. faltered after helping to force out the Soviet-backed communist regime from Kabul. The U.S. decided to leave the region and decrease the funding to the Afghans before the nation was stabilized.

As the U.S. (and NATO) remove advisory and other forces, they must decide if they are going to continue to fund their ANDSF allies for the next few years at full strength so they can make sure the current peace process finds a durable peace. The risk of cutting all funding off quickly, is that the Taliban, supported by Pakistan, may be able to gain enough strength to destroy the fragile peace that may appear in the next few years. Funding the ANDSF might also include funding a South/Central Asia regional counterterrorism and SOF center of excellence in Kabul. That is another decision on the table for Afghan partners.

So, America can finish helping the Afghans win their war against the Taliban movement, or walk away and pay the price later if the terrorist groups in the region once again make Afghanistan their home base. The ANDSF have earned our trust, they have bled beside us, and for the last five years, they have fought the Taliban until the Taliban movement did the unthinkableenter peace talks with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

The choice seems clear for every partner of Afghanistan today: win the peace through long-term economic, security, and diplomatic engagement or set the region ablaze again and pull too much support from the Afghan government and people.

So, when the pundits tell you the Taliban are just about to win the war, ask them why the Taliban havent done it already? The Taliban and Pakistan will tell you, if they are honest, that the ANDSF is too large and too capable. The pundits might tell you that the Taliban have cities surrounded, as if that means they could actually take, hold, and govern the population centers of Afghanistan. The evergreen analyst view of the Afghan war is that the Taliban are always building strength, and they have the ANDSF surrounded. That is stated as if it means the Taliban are some highly-capable force that is well trained for urban combat and has the logistics capability and reserve fighting forces to take and hold a large city.

How would you assess a thief that has sat in his car outside a mansion for 19 years claiming that he could break in and rob them blind anytime he wants to? You could say he is a master-thief just waiting for the right moment. You might also have to admit, he is an amateur with a good PR firm that cant seem to find the will or capability to actually jump the fence and enter the house.

If you want to know who will win the war in Afghanistan, it is better to look at the indicators of long-term capability. Until a peace agreement is reached and a comprehensive ceasefire is enacted, these are some areas worthy of study.

The Taliban has an excellent propaganda machine. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is struggling to match them. As morale wins wars, this is a useful thing to study. Can the Republic convince the right number of Afghans to stop supporting the Taliban dream? Only time will tell. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan must at least improve its ability to make public statements in the Western Press (where the development funding comes from). I am always dismayed by how quickly the Taliban can get its messages into the AP or NYT, while the Afghan government struggles to quickly write and publish a simple Op-ed.

The ANDSF must continue to recruit, train, and deploy forces across the nation to stop Taliban, criminal, and terrorist activities. The Taliban must also continue to grow and sustain its militias. While many are angry that they cannot easily access the ANDSF numbers that might help see the future of force generation, they should be working equally as hard to look at the Taliban data on this topic. At the moment, the ANDSF seem much more capable of turning civilians into proficient war-fighters. In the end, the ability to stay on the battlefield will determine victory. It would be beneficial to the ANDSF to make their numbers more publicly available. Although some of the negative ANDSF statistics will be used in Taliban propaganda, the possibility of future foreign funding of the ANDSF will hinge on their progress. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan must open the books to show donors how they are doing.

Earning the trust of the people is another critical assessment topic. Surveys about this topic by the Asia Foundation are very illuminating. At the moment, the Afghan people surveyed (they surely didnt interview as many in the Taliban strong holds) trust the ANDSF much more than the Taliban. The constant focus of the ANDSF to respect their citizens human rights and to be their guardians, and not their masters, has had an effect. If the Taliban continue their trend of daily war crimes against Afghan civilians and allowing other terrorists to target Afghan women and children, I dont expect the trust of the people in the ANDSF will be decreasing any time soon.

There are many other ways to assess the progress in and the future of the Afghan war. Its important to move beyond labeling the Afghan war as an American or NATO victory or loss, and it needs to be the first step taken in discussions regarding the war. Look at the ANDSF and Taliban force generation, where the Afghan people place their trust, and who is winning the public relations and propaganda battles daily.

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America Already Won in Afghanistan But We Missed the Victory - ClearanceJobs