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Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis went to Brussels last week to convince NATO allies to send around 3,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where they will likely join between 3,000 and 5,000 more American troops expected to be sent there (thats in addition to the more than 8,500 US and 5,000 other NATO troops already in country).

The number of U.S. troops isnt official yet and probably wont be until mid-July, but according to a White House leak last month, that number is 4,000. The mission will be basically the same, to train, advise, and assist Afghan forces, but the intention will be to break what General John Nicholson, current commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has called a stalemate.

We are not winning in Afghanistan Secretary Mattis said in June, and we will correct this as soon as possible.

You might be forgiven for feeling some dj vu. You might also be forgiven for being surprised to hear that were still in Afghanistan. And youd most definitely be forgiven for wondering why.

The reasons that the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan almost 16 years agoto hunt down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagonno longer hold. Special Forces assassins killed Osama bin Laden six years ago in his house in Pakistan. Al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self, and while according to some accounts the organization maintains a presence in Afghanistan, its probably only there because we are, much like the cadres of ISIS-affiliated terrorists who are said to be behind a recent series of attacks in Kabul. U.S. soldiers in Islamic countries tend to draw jihadists like honey draws flies.

The Talibanconsistently the biggest problem for U.S. forces in Afghanistanare indistinguishable from the Afghan people, because they are the Afghan people, and despite years of counter-insurgency rhetoric, the likelihood of a foreign invader forcing the Afghan people to stop shooting at them is pretty close to zero. The Afghan people have a long and honorable tradition of killing foreign invaders, and were not likely to change that. The fact is, there has been no clearly articulated national security interest justifying U.S. military forces remaining in Afghanistan. Yet there they are. And now were sending more.

The sense of dj vu around this new promise to win Afghanistan is captured well by David Michds recent film, War Machine, in which Brad Pitt plays General Glen McMahon, a thinly-veiled fictionalization of General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan whose career famously flamed out after he and his staff were caught trashing the Obama administration by Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.

McChrystal, like General David Petraeus, who replaced him in Afghanistan, and General Mad Dog Mattisnow Secretary of Defensewas worshipped by the media as a warrior scholar, a Jedi Knight, and a warrior monk, who perfectly embodied the repressed desire establishment liberals seem to have for a hard-bodied daddy to tell them what to think and who to kill. He was brought in to take over the American mission in Afghanistan in 2009 because we werent winning, and the Obama administration needed somebody to change that.

As Hastings recounts in his book The Operators, which War Machine is drawn from and based on, McChrystal was more than happy to fill that role. McChrystal was a West Point graduate whod made his career in the Armys insular, hyper-competitive, swaggering special operations community, and made his mark as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command during the bloodiest years of the war in Iraq. His greatest public coup was hunting down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq; his biggest public scandals came from his overseeing torture at Camp Nama in Iraq, and his signing off on a factitious Silver Star award for Pat Tillman which omitted the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire.

Scandals like that should have sunk McChrystal, but in the early days of the Obama transition, holding people accountable for torture or outright lies was seen as partisan and unproductive. The president believed we needed to look forward as opposed to looking backwards, and when he looked forward in Afghanistan, he saw McChrystal as someone who could win. Like General Mattis, whose call sign in Iraq was Chaos, McChrystal was believed to have the discipline, wisdom, and drive a new president needed. We seem to think, post-9/11, that our generals can save us. That sense of dj vu you might be having is the haunting reminder that they never do.

Afghanistan is symbolic of bigger problems in U.S. foreign policy, and Michds War Machine embodies some of the key problems of Afghanistan. Like the war in Afghanistan, the film cant decide what genre it belongs to. It swings from slapstick to combat film to tragedy to political satire to drama, then back again, in much the same way as the story weve been told about the war in Afghanistan. Are we there to bring democracy to the Afghans? Are we there to hunt terrorists? Are we there for womens rights? Are we trying to win, or just trying to get out? Weve turned a corner so many times we dont even know which way were going.

Another way that War Machine embodies the problem of Afghanistan is in its confusions about who were supposed to sympathize with. From his first scene, Brad Pitt plays McMahon as a blustering fool; obviouslyhesnot our protagonist. Nor are any of McMahons cronies very sympathetic, not even Anthony Michael Halls choleric General Pulver (a caricature of General Michael Flynn, who served on McChrystals staff). Ben Kingsleys Hamid Karzai is a one-note joke, andAymen HamdouchisBadi Basim, McMahons Afghan aide, has little to do besides act, you know, Afghany. The voice-over which begins the film is revealed about an hour too late to belong to Scoot McNarys reporter Sean Cullen, the films version of Michael Hastings, which suggestshemight be our hero, or at least a surrogate who can help us make sense of the story, but Cullen disappears off-stage almost as soon as he arrives, and were dumped into a firefight sequence which seeks to enlist our sympathies for both the American marines fighting in Helmandandthe Afghan villagers whose lives are made hell by those same marines. Yet more confounding, when Cullens Rolling Stone story costs McMahon his career, the film seems to want us to sympathize with the general.

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Its the same with Afghanistan. Whos really to blame, and whos the victim of circumstance? Everyone thinks theyre doing the right thing, but no one is innocent, not the hunter-killer teams, not the killer general, not the Talibans killers, not even theRolling Stonejournalist looking for the killer detail.

People have lots of feels for the soldiers, of course, and the poor Afghans, but those feelings are mostly pity, and largely abstract. Does anyone reallycareabout Afghanistan? Does anyone without a professional or personal connection to the war in Afghanistan give a rat's ass what's happening there, or bother themselves about the fact that it's been going on for almost 16 years? I have a hard time believing it. The problem of how to get American viewers invested in a complex story about Afghanistan is less a problem of narrative than a problem with how we think about the war itselfwhich is mostly not at all.

Finally, theres General McMahon. Brad Pitt plays the general with out-sized, lip-chomping brio, but the performance never quite gels. Part of the problem might be that Pitt is too introspective an actor to pull off the kind of bull-headedness that the U.S military inculcates in its officer class.

But the problem is deeper: no matterhowoutrageously Pitt and Michd played up McMahon and his war, theyd never be able to give us a caricature that could match the brutal arrogance of American military leadership, especially self-styled Caesars like McChrystal, Petraeus, and Mattis, or make a movie as FUBAR as the real war in Afghanistan. Its impossible to satirize the absurd.

Why are we still in Afghanistan? Why are we sending more troops there? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg. The ongoing U.S. mission in Afghanistan doesnt make any sense, or at least none that officials are willing to articulate, but the sad fact is just how widespread this is, and how used to it weve become.

American foreign policy stopped making sense 16 years ago, when we turned the hunt for a group of criminals into a global war without end, and it grew even more absurd when we launched an aggressive war against a sovereign nation on a pretext of lies. The chaos of American foreign policy today under Donald Trump is no more than the consequence and continuation of the last 16 yearsFor they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. What really doesnt make any sense is why we keep letting it happen.

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Why Afghanistan? Why Now? - Daily Beast

The window during which President Donald Trump can extricate U.S. forces from the mess in Afghanistan and blame his predecessors for the calamity is rapidly closing. A few more weeks, another surge, and he will be the third president to be saddled with this war; it will become his. The move to allow the military to determine how many more troops to send to Afghanistan would have been a wise onelet the professionals make such tactical decisionsif it reflected the presidents decision to stay the course. Such a decision would follow a review of the war involving not just the Pentagon, but also the intelligence community, the State Department and the staff of the National Security Council, among others. However, that is not the way this president makes decisions. He just left it to the Pentagon to sort out.

The Pentagon has its own agenda. It does not want to admit to having lost another war. It cannot wash its hands of what is happening in Afghanistan and blame its predecessors the way Trump can. At the same time, the Pentagon knows damn well that even when there were twenty times as many troops in Afghanistan as there are now, we did not win the war. The Pentagon seems set on just limping along, which seems better than admitting defeat. No wonder none of the generals refers to winning the war in Afghanistan; they use phrases such as, creating stability (Gen. Allen) and a V-Day for the War in Afghanistan may never be marked on a calendar. Retired Gen. David Petraeus expects us to fight in Afghanistanfor generations, adding we have been in Korea for 65-plus years

Whatever drives the Pentagon to hold the course in Afghanistan, the reasons given for the surge do not pass the smile test. To argue that the Afghan forces need more training and advice after sixteen years raises the obvious question: why would one more year make a difference? Gen. Petraeus argues that the United States should continue its mission in Afghanistan to ensure that [it] is not once again a sanctuary for al-Qaida or other transnational extremists, the way it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned there. The argument that if we do not fight them there, we will have to fight them here is so threadbare it hardly conceals the hollowness of the argument.

First of all, the Taliban (which we organized and armed to fight the USSR) are not a transnational terrorist but a local insurgency. The terrorists who attacked the U.S. homeland in 2001 were not Taliban but Al Qaeda. True, the Taliban hosted them, but they were, for the most part, Saudis whom the Afghans considered foreigners. They did treat them as guests, in line with the very high value the Afghans put on hospitality. The Taliban paid a very heavy price for this mistake. There is no reason in the world to expect that they would seek to repeat it. They are fighting the United States because they want to run their country, not ours.

The notion that U.S. disengagement would turn Afghanistan back into a training base for terrorists also disregards the fact that most recent terrorist attacks in the West have been carried out by locals using makeshift weapons, like cars and knifes, trained (if at all) on the Internet. The suggested surge will do nothing to stop them. Also, now that ISIS has bases in at least half a dozen countries, if we are to deal with terrorists by occupying countries in which they may be trainedthe United States shall need to occupy and stay in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, parts of Nigeria and Mali, among other places. And the Talibans main training takes place in Pakistan, which we have not found a way to compel to help us stop the insurgency.

Last but not least, to repeat an often cited but still wise line, we need to be sure we do not create more terrorists than we kill. The civilian casualties that the war against terrorism causes is a major recruitment tool for those who seek to harm the United States.

In Afghanistan, we can safely let the Afghan people sort out their own fate. There and in other nations, the United States needs to work with moderate Muslims to counter the violent ones. Most of the job to protect us from terrorists will have to fall to the Department of Homeland Security, local police, vigilant citizens, and to mental health professionals and those who promote civility instead of hate. The Pentagon may find some consolation in the observation that the military is not losing the war in Afghanistanmerely the nation-building drive that followed a solid win in 2003 and the elimination of most Al Qaeda in the years that followed.

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor and Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. He is the author of Avoiding War with China, published by University of Virginia Press.

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Time to Say Goodbye to Afghanistan | The National Interest - The National Interest Online

Editors note: Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe as well as the Middle East. He was Chief of the counterterrorism staff and executive assistant to the CIAs deputy director.

Estimates coming out of the Pentagon indicate the likelihood of an additional commitment of several thousand troops to Afghanistan. Before we make any moves in Afghanistan, it is important to look critically at the past and at our motivation for what to do now and in the future.

We got to Afghanistan based on two realities. The immediate catalyst was 9/11. Second, we saw it as a key element in our oil interests in the region a way to get our foot in the door. The outgrowth of that was our fabricated rationale for the invasion of Iraq, which morphed into our current array of difficult dilemmas in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

In short, that momentous decision in 2001 launched us into a region which our government studiously never chose to understand, and which was so incredibly complicated that it flummoxed one U.S. administration after another.

So, what do we want or expect from our continued military involvement in Afghanistan and the Middle East? Apparently, we would like to see a stable region under democratic rule. We never hear U.S. officials talking about self-determination, only about regime change and democracy.

In fact, it makes no ultimate difference what the U.S. wants for Afghanistan and the Middle East. It only matters what they want for themselves, and as long as we are pushing values and ideas that are alien to them, we will never see the end of chaos.

Afghanistans geographic location has made it an important cog in the Middle East. It has been fought over and occupied for millennia by big powers seeking regional hegemony. That has relatively recently included England, Russia and the U.S., none of which has succeeded in changing the country or the minds of its peoples. Over many centuries, those and other struggles have caused hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths and significant resentment.

That momentous decision in 2001 launched us into a region which our government studiously never chose to understand.

Given recent developments in the world, oil no longer plays the role that it did 25 years ago. That alters one of our reasons for remaining militarily engagement in the region.

Terrorism is our other worry. We were hard hit on 9/11, but that sort of operation against us seems to be far better controlled now than it was in 2001. The fact is that the nature of terrorism has changed. It no longer requires hideaways in the mountains or deserts of the Middle East where terrorists can be given rigorous military training. Terrorism today involves self-motivated, highly-disaffected individuals who volunteer to ISIS or any other terrorist organization to carry out suicide attacks. They work with automatic weapons and murderous vehicles. Even bombs are within their reach, and recent operations have shown that those weapons can be developed undetected in apartments in major western cities.

Terrorists have no need for bases like those previously operated in the Middle East. All they need are volunteers and central direction and that can be found, as is now the case, in countries that are not in the reach of US troops assigned to Afghanistan or the Middle East, making them no longer critical to our counterterrorism needs.

What, therefore, could possibly motivate US policy makers to continue and even augment a decades-long war that is today virtually irrelevant to the realities and motivations that got us there in the first place? It would seem that the only rationale that stems logically from that is that we are interested in regime change and the subsequent maintenance of a democracy imposed on them by us. And yet, we know that doesnt work.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that Middle Eastern nations have values that differ from ours. In doing that, we would also have to acknowledge that there are major, conflicting differences between some of the states in that region and that to leave them to the resolution of their own conflicts would likely be a violent process.

Yet, the only real peace and stability that can ultimately exist in the region is that engineered by the people involved. Perhaps we should give them the opportunity to work that out in the absence of on-site U.S. military power while limiting ourselves to diplomatic, political and economic involvements.

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Haviland Smith: On sending additional troops to Afghanistan - vtdigger.org

Alberto Cairo (back row in brown sweater) poses with his staff and players at a basketball tournament in Kabul, Afghanistan. Olivier Moeckli/ICRC hide caption

Alberto Cairo (back row in brown sweater) poses with his staff and players at a basketball tournament in Kabul, Afghanistan.

When he was 10, a war injury put him in a wheelchair. His spine was permanently damaged. He was so depressed there were days he refused to get out of bed.

Now Mohammadullah Amiri can't wait to get up in the morning.

Mohammadullah Amiri, who was paralyzed when he was a child, has transformed his life since he started playing wheelchair basketball in Afghanistan. ICRC hide caption

Mohammadullah Amiri, who was paralyzed when he was a child, has transformed his life since he started playing wheelchair basketball in Afghanistan.

It's all because of wheelchair basketball. Since the 36-year-old from Afghanistan discovered it, he has become a changed man, says Jess Markt, his coach.

"He has this full life. All that has come since he played basketball," says Markt, an American who trains wheelchair basketball teams for the International Committee of the Red Cross in countries like Afghanistan, South Sudan and India. Like Amiri, he has paraplegia.

Since 2011, Markt has been working with Alberto Cairo, head of the Red Cross orthopedic program in Afghanistan, to get people who have been physically injured from war or illness to play sports. Cairo, a physical therapist from Italy, has helped over 100,000 people learn to use prosthetics or re-learn to use their limbs through physical therapy.

Wheelchair basketball has been a game changer for the patients, says Cairo, who has been living in Afghanistan for past 30 years. "Rehab is painful. Learning how to use artificial limbs is painful, too. For the first time with this sport, we were able to give only fun, only joy."

Today, there are 500 recreational players and a national men's and women's wheelchair basketball team across the seven Red Cross rehabilitation centers in Afghanistan. The national teams haven't won any international tournaments just yet, but Markt has his eye on the Paralympics.

Markt, 40, and Cairo, 60, visited NPR headquarters in May to talk about what they've learned from their Afghan patients, how people with disabilities are viewed in Afghanistan and the power of a high-five. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the idea for wheelchair sports come about?

Alberto Cairo: People asked me, "Can you do something for our leisure time?" I was a bit reluctant. In Afghanistan, there are so many things missing [like basic infrastructure]. To waste your time in leisure is something that should not be done. But that's a mistake. So we decided to start some sport activity.

Cairo, a physical therapist, says wheelchair basketball has been a game changer for his patients. "Rehab is painful. Learning how to use artificial limbs is painful, too. For the first time with this sport, we were able to give only fun, only joy." Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Cairo, a physical therapist, says wheelchair basketball has been a game changer for his patients. "Rehab is painful. Learning how to use artificial limbs is painful, too. For the first time with this sport, we were able to give only fun, only joy."

Seems like that turned out to be a good idea. What else have your patients taught you?

Cairo: In the beginning, the physical rehabilitation center was only for war victims. But I remembered, there was a lady. She kept coming, bringing her child with polio. He was not, strictly speaking, a war victim.

That's why you didn't want to treat him.

Cairo: If you are a child with polio, it's because you were not vaccinated. This lady kept coming. She told me: What is the difference between my son, who is paralyzed, and that man sitting over there who is paralyzed because of a land mine? Both of them cannot walk. Then I understood.

The Afghans opened my eyes. I learned to listen to them. Very often, they give me the right path.

Is there stigma around people with disabilities in Afghanistan?

Cairo: In Afghanistan, if you're disabled, you're not rejected from the family and the community. There is a kind of hyper-protection. The family says don't worry, I will take care of you. It's nice in a way, but it's disempowering. Patients should be given the chance to restart their lives.

What has been the impact of the wheelchair basketball program?

Jess Markt: We've seen the players, one by one, go through this transformation as they started to play sports. They no longer think of themselves as disabled people.

Now that they started playing basketball and [achieving] success, people come to watch them. The [audience is] amazed. The ones that are most successful get to play on the national teams, play internationally and have their national anthem played for them. They wear the flag of their country on their back, and people watch them on television.

Jess Markt has been working with Cairo and others to create sports programs for disabled people in war zones. He has his eye on the Paralympics for the Afghan national basketball teams. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

Jess Markt has been working with Cairo and others to create sports programs for disabled people in war zones. He has his eye on the Paralympics for the Afghan national basketball teams.

Tell me more about Amiri.

Markt: He comes from a pretty conservative family. He's got a big long beard, a serious expression; he's quiet, a little stern. As I got to know him, I found out he was the sweetest person.

Amiri was injured during the war when he was a child. He was a patient of Alberto's. When he went home after his rehab, he went back to an environment where he wasn't expected to contribute to his family. He had no active life.

Then he started playing wheelchair basketball [at age 29] and very quickly, he went through this transformation. He said, how could he be sad? He always had basketball practice to look forward to.

He's more severely disabled than a lot of the players. But he worked very hard, and now he's a member of the men's national team. He's an extremely valuable player. He was one of the first to understand concepts like making your teammates better. Instead of always calling for the ball and wanting to score for himself, he found ways to make everyone else score.

He has also benefited from the Red Cross microfinance program, which makes small loans to patients.

Markt: Not only has he become a really great basketball player and coach, he used one of the microcredit loans to start his own automotive parts and repair business. He's the center of his community when he's at his shop.

Cairo: When he decided to get a microcredit loan, he gave back his relief card the card that all disabled people get that entitles them to receive every month some food. He said, "No, I don't need this anymore. That's charity. I have a job now."

Jess, you coach the women's wheelchair basketball team in Afghanistan, one of the hardest places in the world to be a woman. In a society where physical contact between men and women is limited, how did you teach them to shoot hoops?

Markt: I was very lucky in that whatever combination of being a foreigner, a teacher and in a wheelchair allowed me a pass that I could coach them. I had to be careful that I was doing everything within their cultural boundaries. I couldn't just grab a girl's hand and show her how to shoot the ball like I could with a male player or any other player here in the States. I had to describe how to do things but without physical contact. Which was fine, but challenging.

Eventually a few members of the women's national team gave you a high-five, after they saw other female players do it at an international wheelchair basketball training camp in Thailand in April. How did that happen?

Markt: They feel like now they're a part of the international community and can do the things that international players can do.

Were you worried that you might be putting the women in danger by high-fiving?

Markt: I wasn't too nervous. We were in a safe place, the gymnasium, and I definitely wasn't going to stifle their social breakthrough by ignoring the attempt. I didn't have a choice!

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Hoop Dreams: Wheelchair Basketball Is Changing Lives In Afghanistan - NPR

The photo taken on February 9, 2017 shows Afghan nationals waiting to cross the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan at the Torkham Border Post in Pakistan. (Photo by AFP)

Pakistans military has begun erecting fencing along the country's porous border with Afghanistan in order to stop cross-border infiltration and improve security in the region.

According to a high-ranking Pakistani security official, in the first phase, at least 43 border posts havebeen constructed in the northwestern tribal region alongtheborder. Sixty-three others are under construction in Dir Lower, Bajaur, Mohmand Agency, and Khyber Agency border areas.

The plan includes building 338 border posts and army forts along the border.

"There are several legal routes to cross into Afghanistan in Chitral, Dir, Bajaur, Mohmand Agency, Tor Kham Khyber Agency, Kurram Agency, North and South Waziristan, and the Chaman area of Baluchistan, but despite these legal routes, there are over 300 [illegal] crossing points, and terrorists always enter via those hard mountainous routes to carry out attacks in Pakistan and now the army will close them," media outlets quoted the official as saying.

Speaking to local TV media on Friday, Pakistani militaryspokesman, Major General Asif Ghafoor, said the move to fence the border was aimed at curtailing the movement of militants and stopping them from entering the country.

"The Daesh terrorist group has been gaining strength in Afghanistan along the Pakistan border, as we heard media reports that the group has also captured Afghanistans Tora Bora area. Pakistan will never tolerate any terrorist group setting foot on our soil and these are all efforts underway to eliminate terrorist groups," Ghafoor said.

Both countries have long pledged to improve security in the region and go after militant groups based in the rugged and mountainous border areas. But the exact location of the border has long been disputed by Kabul.

Last year, Pakistan started building a barrier at the main border crossing in the northwestern town of Torkham. The move irked the Afghan government.

The Pakistani military hasdismissed Afghanistan's criticism of the fencing plan, saying the activity is being performed well inside the Pakistani territory.

The two countries are in a dispute over the demarcation of the border, which is a key battleground in the fight against the Taliban and other militant groups.

Islamabad recognizes the Durand Line, the 1896 British-mandated border between the two neighbors, but Kabul says activity by either side along the line must be approved by both countries.

Successive governments in Afghanistan have never recognized the British-drawn colonial era border line.

Pakistan and Afghanistan regularly accuse each other of sheltering their enemy insurgents. Both sides, however, deny such an allegation.

Kabulblames elements inside the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence(ISI), for supporting the Taliban militants, while Islamabad blames the Afghan government for giving refuge to militants on its side of the border. The two sides also accuse each other of not doing enough to stop militants engaging in cross-border raids.

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Pakistani army starts fencing border with Afghanistan - Press TV