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President Trump is not wrong on Afghanistan. During a contentious July meeting with his top military and national security advisors, he repeatedly questioned the quality of advice he was given, asserted that we were losing in Afghanistan, and repeatedly berated the American commander in Afghanistan, General Nicholson, as a loser.

On the first two points Trump is absolutely right. We are losing in Afghanistan and it is past time to ask hard questions of those who seek to double-down on the failed strategy of the past 16 years. However, on the third point he is wrong to paint Nicholson as the loser of Afghanistan. Our failures cannot be laid at the feet of one commander. Our failures have been executed by bureaucratic committee, with enough different commanders rotated through Afghanistan that each can claim incremental success without anyone owning the overall failure.

Over the last 10 years there have been eight different commanders in Afghanistan, with the average tenure being just over a year each. And while it is true that these rotations of senior commanders have never been entirely within the militarys control, this is a problem that the military has compounded by rotating subordinate commands through even more often. In practice this has meant that the chain of command from senior leader to soldiers on the ground has never been stable for longer than three to six months making it impossible for the military to focus beyond short-term tactical gains.

McCain unveils strategy for Afghanistan while attacking Trump for inaction: "Americans deserve better" https://t.co/piPX1UtqkH pic.twitter.com/HAErIrBgIL

This rotation policy has led to many inside jokes, as everyone can claim, We were winning the war when I left while the sum total of our efforts has been a slow glidepath to failure. For senior commanders and the architects of our current strategy, it has always been easier to blame corruption, or the Afghans supposed lack of will to fight, than to ask the hard questions about the fundamentals of our approach. This is another way of saying that our strategy for Afghanistan would be working perfectly, if only Afghanistan was a different country.

For years the United States has been propping up Afghan security forces with American airpower and fire support. In doing so we have given a false impression of Afghan capabilities and ignored the fundamental weaknesses of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

Despite our efforts, the Afghans have been unable to hold their own against an enemy with zero air assets and dramatically less firepower. This is because that while, on paper, the ANSF looks like a western security force with a clear chain of command, in practice it is managed through informal and long-standing patronage networks. These networks are opaque to American advisors and often run counter to the stated mission and structure of the ANSF. It is because of this mismatch in structure and practice that the Taliban are able to win local battles for political legitimacy and continue to gain ground.

This failure of the ANSF to hold ground against the Taliban highlights the futility of trying to establish a western-style military within a state without the bureaucratic structure, rule of law, educational system, and supply chains necessary to support one. But for years we have stuck with this plan because it is the easiest template to follow as units rotate in and out of Afghanistan, and losing slowly has been easier than reconciling the differences between American ideals and Afghan capabilities.

US to send more Marines to Afghanistan: report https://t.co/DHrd2ozh95 pic.twitter.com/S6GvFkDzx0

Thus far into his presidency, Trump has failed, as the two presidents did before him, to make the hard choices about what is truly attainable in Afghanistan, leaving our default setting as trying to achieve everything, for everyone. At least in this the advocates for current troop increases are correct, building an Afghanistan that looks like the United States will take at least a generation, if it is even possible. And while Trump has made it clear that hed prefer not to be there much longer, pulling out sooner will require deep understanding of the conflict and hard trade-offs between American values and our security interests.

These are the hard decisions that only he can make, and Trump cannot complain about not winning without first defining exactly what winning means.

Given his limited exposure to the intricacies of the Afghanistan and reported lack of interest in understanding the nuances of the conflict, it is clear that he will need someone he can trust at the helm someone who can help him understand the conflict, articulate clear goals for our involvement, and to take our efforts to fruition. Through no fault of his own, this personwill likely not be Nicholson, as it needs to be someone Trump trusts.

Luckily for Trump, and for us, the right man for the job is already in the administration. National security adviser H.R. McMasterhas forcefully argued for an extended presence in Afghanistan, and spent a previous tour there in an anti-corruption task force, meaning that he likely has a better understanding of the realities of Afghan politics than most. So instead of just doubling down on the same policies that led to this failure, Trump should send McMasters to Afghanistan, give him the latitude to direct the fight, and keep him there until we win.

Jason Dempsey is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, an organization that develops national security and defense policies.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

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OPINION | Trump's right we are losing in Afghanistan - The Hill (blog)

20th Century Angel of Mercy. D. R. Howe (Glencoe, MN) treats the wounds of Private First Class D. A. Crum (New Brighton, PA), H Company, 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during Operation Hue City, Vietnam, 1968. (Public Domain/USMC)

Just shy of fifty years ago on November 7, 1967, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, met in executive session to assess the progress of the ongoing Vietnam War. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was the sole witness invited to testify. Even today, the transcript of Rusks remarks and the subsequent exchange with committee members make for depressing reading.

Responding to questions that ranged from plaintive to hostile, Rusk gave no ground. The Johnson administration was more than willing to end the war, he insisted; the North Vietnamese government was refusing to do so. The blame lay with Hanoi. Therefore the United States had no alternative but to persist. American credibility was on the line.

By extension, so too was the entire strategy of deterring Communist aggression. The stakes in South Vietnam extended well beyond the fate of that one country, as senators well knew. In that regard, Rusk reminded members of the committee, the Congress had performed its functionwhen the key decisions were madean allusion to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a de facto declaration of war passed with near unanimous congressional support. None too subtly, Rusk was letting members of the committee know that the war was theirs as much as it was the administrations.

Yet Fulbright and his colleagues showed little inclination to accept ownership. As a result, the back-and-forth between Rusk and his interrogators produced little of value. Rather than illuminating the problem of a war gone badly awry and identifying potential solutions, the event became an exercise in venting frustration. This exchange initiated by Senator Frank Lausche, Democrat from Ohio, captures the overall tone of the proceedings.

Senator Lausche: The debate about what our course in Vietnam should be has now been in progress since the Tonkin Bay resolution. When was that, August 1964?

Senator Wayne Morse (D-Ore.): Long before that.

Senator Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.): Long before that.

Senator Fulbright: Oh, yes, but that was the Tonkin Bay.

Senator Lausche: For three years we have been arguing it, arguing for what purpose? Has it been to repeal the Tonkin Bay resolution? Has it been to establish justification for pulling out? In the three years, how many times has the Secretary appeared before us?

Those hearings, those debates, in my opinion, have fully explored all of the aspects that you are speaking about without dealing with any particular issue. Now, this is rather rash, I suppose: If our presence in Vietnam is wrong, [if] it is believed we should pull out, should not one of us present a resolution to the Senate[?] . [Then] we would have a specific issue. We would not just be sprawled all over the field, as we have been in the last three years.

Put simply, Senator Lausche was suggesting that Congress force the matter, providing a forum to examine and resolve an issue that had deeply divided the country and that, Rusks assurances notwithstanding, showed no signs of resulting in a successful outcome. No such congressional intervention occurred, however. As a practical matter, Congress in 1967 found it more expedient to defer to the wishes of the commander in chief as the exigencies of the Cold War ostensibly required.

So the Vietnam War dragged on at great cost and to no good effect. Not until the summer of 1970 did Congress repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Even then, the gesture came too late to have any meaningful impact. The war continued toward its mournful conclusion.

To characterize congressional conduct regarding the Vietnam War as timorous and irresponsible is to be kind. There were individual exceptions, of course, among them Senator Morse who had opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and Senator Fulbright who by 1967 openly regretted his vote in favor and recognized Vietnam for the disaster it had become. Collectively, however, legislators failed abjectly.

Well, with the passage of a half century, here we are again, back in the soup (or perhaps more accurately, the sand). With the United States currently mired in the longest armed conflict in the nations historyconsiderably longer than VietnamSenator Lausches proposal of 1967 just might merit a fresh look.

Of course, the Afghanistan War (ostensibly part of a Global War on Terrorism) differs from the Vietnam War (ostensibly part of the Cold War) in myriad ways. Yet it resembles Vietnam in three crucial respects. First, it drags on with no end in sight. Second, no evidence exists to suggest that mere persistence will produce a positive outcome. Third, those charged with managing the war have long since run out of ideas about how to turn things around.

Indeed, the Trump administration seems unable to make up its mind about what to do in Afghanistan. A request for additional troops by the senior U.S. field commander has been pending since February. He is still waiting for an answer. James Mattis, Trumps defense secretary, has promised a shiny new strategy. That promise remains unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the news coming out of Kabul is almost uniformly bad. The war itself continues as if on autopilot. Lausches sprawled all over the field provides an apt description of where the United States finds itself today.

Where is the Congress in all of this? By all appearances, congressional deference to the putative prerogatives of the commander in chief remains absurdly intactthis despite the fact that the Cold War is now a distant memory and the post once graced by eminences like Truman and Eisenhower is now occupied by an individual whose judgment and attention span (among other things) are suspect.

A citizen might ask: What more does the Congress need to reassert its constitutional prerogatives on matters related to war? Surely there must be at least a handful of members who, setting aside partisan considerations, can muster the courage and vision to offer a rash proposition similar to Senator Lausches. Doing so has the potential not only to inaugurate debate on a conflict that has gone on for too long to no purpose, but also to call much needed attention to the overall disarray of U.S. policy of which Afghanistan is merely one symptom. Otherwise, why do we pay these people?

Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam Veteran, is TACs writer-at-large.

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Yes Congress, Afghanistan is Your Vietnam - The American Conservative

In a recent meeting, President Trump correctly told his generals that they were losing the war in Afghanistan, rejected their proposed strategy, and sent them back to the drawing board to create a new one.

Like chronic alcoholism, compulsive American meddling in the affairs of other countries can only be recovered from by admitting the problem exists in the first place.

President Trump has partially accomplished this first step by recognizing what has been obvious for years, but an even more enlightened conclusion would be that the war has been lost for quite some time now and the only solution is to withdraw U.S. forces as quickly as possible.

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However, that is not the new strategy that the generals will likely come up with. Instead, as in Vietnam, they will continue to sayand probably even believethat a turnaround is still possible. They have had 16 years to win the war, but have abjectly failed to do so.

In any counterinsurgency war, if the insurgents are not losing, they are winning. Fighting guerrilla style means that insurgents use hit and run tactics against the weak points of a generally stronger enemy (usually government or foreign forces) and then flee before the stronger side can catch them.

Over time, the guerrillas are hoping to make the stronger party exhausted, and if it is a foreign occupier, make the war so costly in lives and money that that participant eventually goes back home.

The Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are not only winning by not losing and hanging on, they are winning absolutely by capturing and holding more of the Afghan governments territory.

Thus, after 16 years of fighting, approximately 2,400 American military deaths, more than 20,000 wounded, 1,200 U.S. civilian contractor deaths, and a whopping half trillion dollars wasted in this quagmire, instead of cutting its losses, the Trump administration seems to be willing to let the military re-escalate the war by sending 3,000 to 5,000 additional U.S.troops in.

Such forces would continue to advise and assist chronically illiterate, incompetent, corrupt, and AWOL Afghan security forces. And despite their job description, U.S. forces do fight in combat and still continue to take casualties.

If 100,000 U.S. troops could not subdue Afghanistan, the only way U.S.-trained Afghan forces could do so is if they were impeccably honest and competent forces who knew the pulse of the Afghan peopleso they could get good intelligence on who the clandestine insurgents are and neutralize them. Yet, this pipe dream is not even worth fantasizing about.

But if the United States withdraws completely from Afghanistan, wont the country go back into chaos and be a haven for future terrorist attacks against the United States? After all ISIS is now in Afghanistan, and some sources say the group is now cooperating with the Taliban to attack U.S. and Afghan targets.

Also, in western Afghanistan, Iran is now trying to keep Afghanistan unstable by supplying the Taliban with weapons, funds, and fighters to use against U.S. and Afghan forces. (U.S. ally Pakistan has always supported the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan to do the same.)

The major problem with U.S. foreign policy is that, like an addict in perpetual denial, no questions have been asked about why Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda perpetrated the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan in the first place.

President George W. Bush told us that al Qaeda had attacked us because of our freedoms, which enraged bin Laden, who then rhetorically asked why he hadnt attacked Sweden instead.

No one chose to hear what bin Laden kept repeating: he attacked the United States because of the U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land of Saudi Arabia and U.S. treatment of Muslim countries U.S. meddling in the Middle East.

To understand bin Ladens motivation for the attacks is not to condone such brutal atrocities but to attempt to find a quieter change in U.S. policy that might take the fire out of the Islamist jihad.

The US government should have introspectively reached the conclusion that U.S. interventionism in the Middle East had helped create the problem, or at least exacerbated it, and had directed it more against the United States.

Donald Rumsfeld, then George W. Bushs secretary of defense, famously asked after 9/11, Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing?

No one has ever answered that question, but the correct answer was and is Yes, especially after the invasion of Muslim soil in Iraq and the air wars against terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria that have now spanned three U.S. presidential administrations.

Even before that, the Carter and Reagan administrations helped create al Qaeda by funding the radical Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas in the 1980s and George H.W. Bush motivated bin Laden to begin his war with the United States by unnecessarily leaving U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.

The United States also created what eventually became ISIS, which arose as resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In Pakistan, the U.S. war in Afghanistan spilled over into that country and thus created the Pakistani Taliban.

US soldiers walk at the site of a Taliban suicide attack in Kandahar on August 2, 2017, after a Taliban suicide bomber rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of foreign forces in Afghanistan's restive southern province of Kandahar. JAVED TANVEER/AFP/Getty

In Somalia, U.S. support for an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia created the virulently Islamist al Shabab group.

In Yemen, empirical documentation has shown that U.S. bombing of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has increased the number of fighters being recruited by the group.

Currently, the United States is at war in at least seven Islamic countries. Non-Muslim forces fighting on Muslim land angers even moderate Muslims.

Before the American fracking boom, even when the United States was more dependent on foreign oil, it was cost-ineffective to use massive military forces to safeguard what was best provided by the world oil market, but now that policy is even more absurd.

If anyone doubts that a lower U.S. profile in Muslim countries would reduce blowback terrorism, the case of Lebanon in the 1980s needs to be examined. The Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah was attacking U.S. targets regularly, but after the United States withdrew its forces from that country, the attacks gradually attenuated.

The United States needs to get out of Afghanistan for good and end its other air wars in Muslim countries. None of these countries are strategic to the United States, and wars there merely generate unwanted blowback. These brushfire wars left over from the War on Terror, which actually increased terrorism, distract and take resources from U.S. efforts to counter a much more important potential foreign policy problem: a rising China.

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of "The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom Won."

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We Have Lost the War in Afghanistan. We Should Get Out Now - Newsweek

The U.S. Department of Defense funded more than $76 billion dollars of weapons, communication devices, and other security equipment to the Afghan security forces since 2002, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office(GAO).

Yet, according to top U.S. military commanders and other experts, the Afghan military is still unprepared to operate independently.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. has allocated funding for nearly 600,000 weapons to be put in the hands of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), according to Defense Department data. Nearly 81 percent of these weapons were rifles and pistols. The firepower funding also included more than 25,000 grenade launchers and almost 10,000 rocket-propelled weapons used by the Afghan Border Police.

Additional items given to the ANDSF included 162,643 pieces of communications equipment and nearly 76,000 vehicles. These vehicles were primarily light tactical vehicles like Ford Ranger pickups and cargo trucks, but also included more than 22,000 Humvees, according to the DOD data.

When the equipment reached Afghanistan, it was divided between the two main security forces: The Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police.

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The Pentagon has shipped 110 helicopters and 98 plane since 2007, when the Pentagon authorized sending aircraft. These aircraft could have carried the 314,000 unguided rockets, 8,700 "general-purpose bombs" and 1,815,000 helicopter rounds, which was also funded by the Pentagon, according to their data.

Even with all of this equipment, Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan,told Congress in Februaryhe needs a"few thousand" more troops to properly train and advise the Afghan military so they can eventually operate independently.

Claude Chafin, communications director for the House Armed Services Committee, told CBS News the GAO reportwas sought as "an objective review of major weapon systems and equipment provided to ANDSF to evaluate the extent to which such equipment supports the ability of ANDSF to provide security for the Afghan people."

Stephen Tankel, an American University professor and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, said to CBS News that he agrees with top U.S. commanders that the Afghan military is still unprepared after more than a decade of American military guidance.

The "U.S. continues to spend money every year, our forces continue to die, and the mission continues to drift," Tankel said.

Some in Congress are now calling on President Trump to change U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,announced in a press release Thursday a new amendment to the 2018 defense authorization bill that aims to "strengthen the capability and capacity of the Afghan government and security forces."

While no funding specifics were outlined in the release, McCain said that "adopting a clear policy and strategy in Afghanistan, backed with the authorities and resources necessary for success, would be a critical step toward restoring that kind of leadership, which has been absent for far too long."

The conflict in Afghanistan is still claiming the lives of American troops. A suicide attack in Kandahar killed two U.S. service members last week.

The Trump administration has said it will soon release its plan on the path forward in Afghanistan, but no details have surfaced yet.

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US spent $76B on weapons and equipment for Afghan security forces - CBS News

Donald Trumps administration is said to be considering radically changing the way it conducts war in Afghanistan, and may move away fromthe US military running the show in favour of laying that responsibility on private contractors.

The unprecedented proposal would put 5,500 private contractors in charge of advising the Afghan military in the 16-year-old war that Mr Trump has inherited from his two predecessors. Most of those contractors would be former Special Operations troops, though their private contractor status would likely mean they are not bound by the same rules of engagement as the US military. There are an estimated 8,400 US soldiers currently in Afghanistan.

Erik Prince, the founder and former CEO of private contracting company Blackwater USA, has put forward the plan. Speaking to USA Today, he said he had met frequently with administration officials to discuss his plan. However, with misgivings by Mr Trumps National Security Adviser, H R McMaster, and Defence Secretary James Mattis, it is unclear whether there would be a way forward for such a plan, despite Mr Trumps frustration at the lack of progress in the country. At least one senior official, chief strategist Steve Bannon, is said to be open to the use of private contractors.

Contractors working for Blackwater were involved in a deadly incident during the Iraq War, when they open-fired in Baghdads Nisour Square while escorting a US convoy in 2007, killing or injuring at least 31 Iraqi civilians. Those events led the State Department to revoke the companys license to operate in the country. One of the contractors recently had a murder charge overturned and a new trial ordered over the incident, while three others who had been handed 30-year prison terms after being convicted of voluntary manslaughter will be re-sentenced after their prison terms were voided. Defence lawyers argued the convoy was under fire from insurgents, a claim prosecutors denied.

But in addition to accountability concerns posed by giving broad agency to non-military, private contractors to conduct war such a revised strategy in Afghanistan could send the wrong message in Afghanistan, Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told The Independent.

International troops have been involved in Afghanistan for 16 years,following an invasionin October 2001. However, over the past year the Talibanhave made gains and violent attacks have increased in a number of areas leaving few signs of the stability the US craves.

It would be a political signal to Afghanistan including the Taliban, that the United States is really not willing to stick it out, Ms Felbab-Brown said of the plan over privisation. So, I think the will of the Taliban will be strengthened and the will of those who resist the Taliban will be weakened.

Mr Prince whose sister is Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has argued that the US should cede control of the fight in Afghanistan to private contractors because, as the efforts there lack leadership. The efforts arent working, he says, and the Pentagon is spending a lot of money to do it.

Who has really been in charge of Afghanistan? Nobody. Its been extremely fragmented. Weve had up to 140,000 troops in the country and were now spending, the Pentagon consumes more than the entire defence budget of the UK just in Afghanistan and were losing, Mr Prince, a retired Navy SEAL, said on CNN.

His plan is to establish a viceroy in Afghanistan that would correspond with American troops there, and has said that the basic set up should be modelled after the British East India Company. He says that the plan costs a fraction of American military involvement, and could work around what the Department of Defence. Private contractors could also stay long-term without the political risks associated with having troops on the ground.

Ms Felbab-Brown said that ducking that political risk would still be degrading for efforts there. Already in Afghanistan, citizens are concerned that the US military is simply taking Afghan resources Mr Trump has said that the US should simply seize natural resources in the region and would be wary of a set up modelled after Britains colonial empire, she said.

Still, she concedes that there doesnt appear to be a surefire path forward for the US in Afghanistan. Completely withdrawing would forfeit huge American investments in the country while giving up control to the Taliban. Staying could simply be an exercise in hoping that the Taliban slowly falls apart through repeated mistakes.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged this week that the White House is looking for a new strategy to bring Americas longest war to an end.

To just say were going to keep doing what weve been doing, the president is not willing to accept that, and so he is asking some tough questions, Mr Tillerson said earlier this week in Manila during an Asia trip.

The top US commander in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, has recommended that several thousand more troops be deployed to Afghanistan, primarily to bolster the advisory mission and stop the Taliban gaining more territory.

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Trump administration considers privatising war in Afghanistan - The Independent