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This week, the largest city in the north, Mazar-i-Sharif, was in turmoil after Asif Mohmand, a provincial councilman, posted on Facebook the week before to scold a supporter of the famously vain governor of Balkh Province, Atta Muhammad Noor, whose picture has been pasted all over the northern capital on giant posters. There is not even an election going on.

Twenty times I told you not to put up another poster of that pimp and miscreant Atta, Mr. Mohmand told the supporter in a video online. This time when I catch you, Ill kill you, you shameless fool, Ill pump 30 bullets into your forehead, and then help myself to you. (It was not clear what he meant by the last phrase.)

Mr. Mohmand then tauntingly posted a selfie on his way to Mazar from Kabul on Monday afternoon, just in case his enemies did not know where to find him.

Governor Atta, a notorious warlord himself and hardly one to shy away from a fight, sent his gunmen and a contingent of police officers to meet the provincial counselors plane when it landed, only to encounter Mr. Mohmands own armed supporters there to defend him from arrest. The ensuing firefight raged through the terminal and its parking lots, killing two, wounding 17 and temporarily shutting down Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport.

These violent disputes in Balkh and Takhar Provinces are the most recent evidence of the infighting that is diverting resources from the fight against the insurgency and undermining public support. Similar outbreaks among government supporters have taken place in other parts of the country, including the capital, Kabul, where the first vice president, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was forced into exile this year after the authorities charged him with the kidnapping, torture and rape of a political opponent.

The infighting could be traced to ethnic tensions, grudges dating back to the civil war in the 1980s and 90s and the governments shaky American-brokered coalition of bitter political rivals that is long past its expiration date. Parliament should have been disbanded two years ago and the executive branch is split between two antagonistic leaders President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

The result is the central government does not really control large swaths of its own territory, even where the Taliban is not a factor. Instead, it cedes authority to warlords, some in government and some just aligned with it, who are too powerful to be subdued and often too angry at one another to focus on their common enemy, the Taliban.

Such infighting among the warlords is precisely what helped catapult the Taliban to power in 1996. And many of those warlords are still on the scene, on the government side.

Most of these political parties have illegal armed men, and its a threat to the government, said a retired general and military analyst, Abdul Wahid Taqat. They could force the government to collapse and also open a path for the Taliban to return to power.

In remote Takhar Province, in Cha Aab on the border with Tajikistan, the problems started after the Afghan government formally made peace this year with the Hizb-e-Islami party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamic fundamentalist group that had been conducting a low-level insurgency against the government. Like President Ghani and his supporters, Hizb-e is dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group.

The other faction in the Afghan government, led by Mr. Abdullah, is aligned most closely with the Jamiat-i-Islami party, another fundamentalist grouping identified with Tajiks and other northerners.

Cha Aabs mullah, Muallawi Mahfuzullah, considered a Jamiat man, began preaching against smuggling and violence by Commander Qanet, who as a Hizb-e commander is now on the governments side. The commanders men ordered Mullah Mahfuzullah to stop, and after he refused, sacked his home and killed another mullah from his mosque, the police said.

At prayers last Friday, Mullah Mahfuzullah spoke under the protection of 30 officers drawn from the Afghan police and the National Directorate of Security. But Commander Qanets militia forced their way in and opened fire on the worshipers provincial police officials said.

Even the police stood by and watched like victims and did not even try to stop the firing, said Qurban Mohammad, 45, a laborer who was present. They were like wild beasts.

Commander Qanet, reached by telephone, was clearly unhappy to take the call. He complained that Mullah Mahfuzullah had declared him an infidel, but denied attacking him. My fault is this, that I voted for Ashraf Ghani in the election, he said. All the allegations against me are false. Then he abruptly hung up.

Some of the same players were involved in the fighting at the Mazar-i-Sharif airport. Governor Atta, a longtime stalwart of the Jamiat party, has formed an alliance with General Dostum, plotting to return from exile in Turkey. General Dostum is the leader of the Junbish Party, which represents the countrys powerful Uzbek minority.

Historically, Junbish and Jamiat, like General Dostum and Governor Atta, are bitter opponents who have killed thousands of each others followers. Now, however, they are in an enemy-of-my-enemy alliance. Both oppose to the predominantly Pashtun faction around President Ghani.

Mr. Ghani has long tried to oust Governor Atta from office, and also pushed the rape prosecution of General Dostum. Mr. Ghani has publicly called General Dostum a known killer, even though they were running mates in the 2014 elections.

Then there is Mr. Mohmand, the provocative provincial councilman. He enjoyed the support of the Hizb-e-Islami faction at the Mazar-i-Sharif airport, who apparently provided the muscle that protected him for a while. The national police refused to arrest him, because they said there were no valid criminal charges. But Governor Attas men, including the border police, captured him and, under pressure, turned him over to the Afghan intelligence agency, which in Mazar is run by an Atta follower. While in custody, he later claimed, Governor Attas son bit off his ear.

Some saw Mr. Mohmands visit as a conspiracy by Mr. Ghanis supporters to so weaken Governor Atta that they could succeed in removing him a move that has a new urgency, now that the governor has aligned himself with General Dostum.

So far, the ploy, if indeed there was such a ploy, seems to have failed. But Mr. Mohmand was released Thursday and returned to Kabul, ready for another episode.

Jawad Sukhanyar and Fahim Abed contributed reporting from Kabul, and Najim Rahim from Kunduz, Afghanistan.

A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2017, on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Infighting Among Afghan Warlords Resembles a Destructive Game of Thrones.

Excerpt from:
In Afghanistan, a Destructive 'Game of Thrones' - New York Times

National security adviser H.R. McMaster (left) and Vice President Mike Pence (right) seek to persuade President Donald Trump to accept commanders' proposals to beef up the 8,400 American troops in the country. | Evan Vucci/AP

Top administration officials in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan teamed up ahead of a high-level meeting on Friday to persuade President Donald Trump to step up American military involvement in the 16-year-old war, two sources told POLITICO.

Vice President Mike Pence and national security adviser H.R. McMaster rehearsed their pitch heading into the Camp David strategy session in an effort to persuade Trump to accept commanders' proposals to beef up the 8,400 American troops in the country, the sources said.

Story Continued Below

But as of Friday evening, the president had not announced a decision on his plans for Afghanistan, where the Taliban have grown in strength and Al Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist groups have a foothold. And no announcement appeared imminent.

The two sources an administration official and a senior White House aide also confirmed that Erik Prince, founder of the former Blackwater private security firm, had been scheduled to attend the session but that he was blocked at the last minute. The administration official said McMaster was the one who blocked Prince.

Prince has been urging the administration publicly and privately to outsource much of the war effort which primarily involves training and advising Afghan security forces. Prince had the backing of Steve Bannon, who was ousted Friday from his role as the chief White House strategist.

Also among the options being considered were staying the current course and withdrawing U.S. troops.

Pence's office denied that he had done any rehearsals with McMaster on a pitch to Trump, saying the most recent time the two men spoke was before the vice president's trip to Latin America this past week, which he cut short to return for the Camp David session.

"The vice president views his role on this as an honest broker," a top aide to Pence said Friday. "The vice president has not weighed in on any side other than to make sure that the options presented to the president are fully fleshed out and objective."

Trump's indecision on the war this summer has frustrated some of his advisers and commanders in the field eager to bulk up their support for their Afghan counterparts, who have been engaged in a pitched battle with militants in large areas of the country. The president has been hesitant to authorize a troop surge.

McMaster enlisted the vice president's help about six weeks ago, according to a third official, asking him to help build consensus within the administration and to work with him to make the case to the president.

Pence landed back in the United States very early Friday morning, just after midnight, according to a pool report.

The administration official said the rehearsal with McMaster took place partly via Pence's secure phone line on his plane. The vice president also had representatives attend White House meetings on the matter ahead of time, the official said.

The administration official said a memo distributed Friday morning to the other attendees of the session laid out the road toward persuading the president to send more troops.

"The whole point with the rehearsals was to work out and, to be crass, was to get the president to agree to this proposal that hes been against before," the official said of Pence and McMaster's plans. "Theyre not giving any credence to the other ... options. Theyre going ahead with the troop increase option."

It was not immediately clear whether the effort convinced Trump either way. In a statement issued after the Camp David session, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump had been briefed extensively on what steps he could take.

"The president is studying and considering his options and will make an announcement to the American people, to our allies and partners, and to the world at the appropriate time," Sanders said.

Wesley Morgan contributed to this report.

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Sources: Pence, McMaster team up to push more troops in Afghanistan - Politico

I hope President Trump, unlike his predecessor, will not put our military in a bad spot in Afghanistan," Sen. Lindsey Graham said. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sen. Lindsey Graham warned President Donald Trump on Friday that pulling troops out of Afghanistan could lay the groundwork for another 9/11.

Trump is traveling to Camp David on Friday with his chief national security aides to discuss the path forward for the 16-year-old U.S. war there.

Story Continued Below

The South Carolina Republican urged Trump in a statement to listen to his generals an apparent request for the president to prioritize the views of military commanders over those of his just-dismissed chief strategist Steve Bannon, who reportedly wants to replace U.S. troops in Afghanistan with private contractors.

If we were to pull all our troops from Afghanistan it would be a disaster for our national security interests and set the stage for another 9/11 on American soil, Graham said. I hope President Trump, unlike his predecessor, will not put our military in a bad spot in Afghanistan. He should give them the tools and support they need to confront the rising terror threats in Afghanistan.

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On Thursday, Defense Secretary James Mattis told reporters the administration was very close to a decision on the next steps for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

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Link:
Graham to Trump: Afghanistan pullout could cause another 9/11 - Politico

Nearly 16 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States is nearing a seminal moment in its involvement in Afghanistan, as President Donald Trump gathers at Camp David today with his national-security team to determine what to do about the deteriorating stalemate he inherited in South Asia.

The Trump administration is reportedly weighing several competing proposals for Afghanistan. While military commanders have recommended an increase of several thousand U.S. troops to enable increased support for the Afghan military and counterterrorism operations, the White House is also considering alternative approaches that could entail the reduction or even the complete exit of American conventional forcesrelying instead on special operations forces, paramilitaries, and contractors.

To an unusual degree, the debate over the future of the Afghan war is really about its past: specifically, why a decade and a half of military operations has failed to turn the tide. It is a fair question, and President Trump has been correct to press for answers before deciding on a way ahead.

Some argue the problem has been America's unrealistic ambitions in Afghanistanundertaking a costly nation-building campaign in the hopes of transforming a broken countryand that the best course, therefore, is to scale back military involvement and minimize further entanglement in this graveyard of empires.

The problem with this argument is that it inverts the history of what has actually happened in Afghanistan since 2001. In fact, the consistent theme of U.S. Afghan policy for 15 years has not been nation-building, but exit-seeking. From nearly the moment the first U.S. forces arrived in the wake of 9/11, Washington has been trying to hand off responsibility for the country and draw down its military presence. In doing so, it has inadvertently thrown a lifeline to the enemies it went to Afghanistan to defeat, encouraged regional powers to hedge against it, and needlessly compounded the difficulty of this mission. The key question now is whether Trump recognizes this mistake, or repeats it.

It's Time to Make Afghanistan Someone Else's Problem

The story of U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan begins in late 2001 with the Bush administration, which fiercely resisted any kind of large-scale military commitment to stabilize the country after the Taliban regime retreated from Kabul and Kandahar. In addition to its interest in keeping forces in reserve for its anticipated showdown with Iraq, the Bush administrations embrace of a modest footprint for Afghanistan, as then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it, was rationalized as a repudiation of the Clinton administrations peacekeeping interventions in the Balkans during the 1990s. A large U.S. presence in Afghanistan, it was argued, would spur Afghan xenophobia and foster unnatural dependency on foreigners, while its absence would encourage a quicker transition to Afghan self-sufficiency.

In fact, as a consequence of this initial hands off approach in Afghanistan, the country soon found itself in a kind of political and security free fall. To his credit, President Bush changed course in 2003, initiating a U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign that closely integrated military and political lines of effort, and began to yield hopeful results. But with Iraq itself melting down by 2005 and the White House eager to show it was bringing troops home from somewhere, the White House dropped this brief experiment in favor of transitioning ownership of Afghanistan to NATO. In doing so, the Bush administration argued the Taliban was a spent force, that NATO allies were up to the task of shouldering responsibility for vital terrain like southern Afghanistan, and the United States therefore could look to reduce its own military presence.

All three assumptions were disastrously wrong. NATO lacked the command structure, authorities, and capabilities, to wage the nationwide counterinsurgency campaign required to keep pressure on the Taliban, which quickly came roaring back. In his eagerness to extricate his administration from Afghanistan, Bush paved the way for an even bigger quagmire.

The Obama administration entered office pledging to reverse Bushs failures in Afghanistan, only to replicate the most fundamental of them in arguably even more spectacular fashion. While Obama reluctantly backed a surge of U.S. forces at the urging of his commanders, he coupled this with a fixed date for their withdrawal. In an ironic echo of Rumsfeld, Obama justified this move by arguing that it would incentivize the Afghans to take responsibility for their country. Instead, it discouraged a wary populace from siding with a U.S. military presence designed to be fleeting, while signaling to the Taliban (and its Pakistani backers) that time was on their side.

Obama then redoubled this unforced error by announcing an even more draconian drawdown of U.S. troops in 2014, not on the basis of on-the-ground military conditions, but with the political timetable of getting all troops out by the end of his own tenure. The predictable result was that security conditions deteriorated, eventually forcing the White House to stop short of the complete withdrawal it had promised, but only after U.S. forces had been severely pared back, the Taliban had reclaimed momentum, and regional powers had stepped up their support for insurgents in anticipation of a post-American Afghanistan.

What Washington has never attempted in Afghanistan, over the course of more than 15 years there, is the one policy that has been necessary from the outset: an explicit commitment to a sustainable, sustained U.S. military presence in the country.

Making such a commitment would send the unequivocal message to the Taliban that it cannot hope to prevail on the battlefield and must therefore pursue political reconciliation seriously. It would also position America for the tough diplomacy to convince Afghanistan's neighbors, foremost Pakistan, to stop backing insurgent groups in preparation for an American exit.

The strategic paradox of Afghanistan is that the more the United States has sought to leave, the more it has fostered the conditions that have forced it to stay. By contrast, the sooner Washington can convince all parties to the conflict of its long-term intent to remain, the sooner it can set the conditions to drive the conflict towards an end game.

To be clear, a sustained U.S. military presence in Afghanistan alone is no guarantee of success. But repeating the mistakes of the past by trying to withdraw troops from the country is a surefire recipe for more failure.

Can Americans stomach an open-ended military commitment to Afghanistan? Didnt they, after all, elect Trumpand for that matter, Obamain part because they promised to diminish Americas overseas burdens? Wont they demand a date by which all of U.S. forces come home?

This is, in some respects, a strange argument. More than 60 years after the end of the Korean War, tens of thousands of American troops are still deployed therein the shadow of Kim Jong Uns arsenalwithout any hint of domestic controversy, because Americans long ago accepted that this was in the national interest. So too with the enduring U.S. military presence in Europe and Japan after World War II, and across the Middle East since the early 1990s.

In truth, the foremost responsibility of any president is to keep Americans safe. Preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a terrorist sanctuary from which attacks on America can be launched is as clear-cut a vital national interest as any in the world. If the price for this is a sustained military presence thereand the alternative, withdrawal, is more likely to result in a terrorist victory along the lines of what happened in Iraq after America leftthat is not seemingly a prohibitively difficult case to make to the American people. On the contrary, it is telling that, almost 16 years after 9/11, there is no great groundswell of public protest or opposition to Americas current operations in Afghanistan. In a perfect world, of course, U.S. forces wouldnt be required to stay in Afghanistanor anywhere else for that matterbut as Americans long ago internalized, that is not the world they live in.

To his admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump has promised to be a revolutionary force in U.S. foreign policy, prepared to overturn longstanding practices if they do not advance Americas interests, and to deliver tough truths to the American people. That is precisely the opportunity, and the imperative, that now exists in Afghanistan. Rather than following the example of his predecessors in searching for an exit from the outset of his presidency, he can learn from their experience and commit to stay. In addition to being the only plausible path to a decent outcome in Afghanistan, it also has the virtue of never before having been tried.

Link:
America Needs to Stay in Afghanistan - The Atlantic

The Pentagon has identified the U.S. Army Green Beret who was killed Wednesday battling Islamic State militants in eastern Afghanistan.

Staff Sgt. Aaron R. Butler, 27, of Monticello, Utah was killed by an improvised explosive device in Nangahar Province, the Pentagon said in a statement late Thursday. An unknown number of U.S. troopswere also injured during the fighting as wereseveralAfghan troops working alongside their American counterparts.

[A U.S. service member is killed, others wounded, fighting ISIS in Afghanistan]

Butler belonged to a Special Forces team from 19th Special Force Group and was based out of Camp Williams Utah. The 19th Group is an Army National Guard unit with detachments all over the United States, including Washington and Colorado. A Green Beret from 19th Group, Staff Sgt. Matthew McClintock, was the first U.S. combat deathin Afghanistan for the year 2016.

Butlers death brings the total of Americans killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan this year to 10. Seven of those deaths were directly related to fighting Islamic State militants in the eastern part of the country.

The U.S. military has invested considerable resources and troops in battling the Islamic States Afghan affiliate. Yet despite numerous offensive operations and a concerted bombing campaign that involved the use of a 22,000-pound bomb and several surgical strikes against the groups leaders, about 1,000 of the militantshave remained dug in along the Pakistani border, according to U.S. military officials in Kabul.

In bid to beat back the Taliban, Afghanistan starts expanding its commando units

This is what a day with the Afghan air force looks like

The Islamic State is fighting to the death as civilians flee Raqqa

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Pentagon identifies Special Forces soldier killed battling Islamic State in Afghanistan - Washington Post