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KABUL: American warplanes dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 than at any other time in at least a decade, according to the US Air Force, as Washington intensified attacks in the country amid withdrawal talks with the Taliban.

In 2019 alone, the US dropped 7,423 separate munitions on targets in Afghanistan, where the US has been enmeshed in fighting several militant groups since it invaded the country following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The figure - published online by US Air Forces Central Command -represents a dramatic surge in bombings in Afghanistan compared to the peak of President Barack Obama's "surge" in 2009, when 4,147 bombs were dropped.

Since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016 the US has ramped up bombing runs over Afghanistan as the White House removed earlier restrictions that provided greater oversight over air raids aimed at preventing civilian casualties.

The UN and rights groups have repeatedly voiced concerns that the increase in air strikes across the country by US and Afghan forces have resulted in a major upswing in civilian casualties.

During the first half of 2019 pro-government forces, including the US, killed 717 civilians, an increase of 31 percent from a year earlier, the UN reported last year.

Most of the deaths came from US and Afghan air strikes, often in support of national forces on the ground, the report said.

The increase in bombings comes as Washington and the Taliban continue to wrangle over a possible agreement that would see US troops begin to leave Afghanistan in return for security guarantees.

The Taliban have been pushing to reach a withdrawal agreement with Washington by the end of January and are prepared to "scale down" military operations ahead of signing a deal, their chief spokesman said earlier this month.

The two sides had been negotiating an agreement for a year and were close to an announcement in September 2019 when US President Donald Trump abruptly declared the process "dead", citing Taliban violence.

Taliban sources told AFP earlier this month they had offered to initiate a brief ceasefire of seven to 10 days in order to restart the talks formally, but there has been no announcement of the proposal by either party.

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US bombing of Afghanistan hits 10-year high - CNA

The removal of Qassem Soleimani from the regions political chessboard will have implications not only across the Middle East and its various conflict zones but is also likely to reverberate through South Asia, affecting the conflict in Afghanistan and Irans bilateral ties with Pakistan.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force has remained an active player within the Afghan theatre since the days of Afghan Jihad, yet it remained a marginal player during the 1980s as its overwhelming focus was the western front with Iran. It was only in the mid-1990s that it became an active player. Iran was concerned by the ascendancy of the Taliban and sought to undermine the Sunni fundamentalist regime that had appeared on its eastern border.

It was during this time that Qassem Soleimani emerged as a prominent player in Afghanistan. When Soleimani became the chief of the IRGC's Quds Force in 1998, Iran and the Afghan Taliban government were on a war footing. And the confrontation only got worse: the 1998 Taliban takeover of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif from the Uzbek warlord Abdur Rashid Dostum resulted in the killings of nine Iranian diplomats and a journalist. Yet Soleimani argued against the use of direct force and advocated instead for increasing the support for the Northern Alliance, the main anti-Taliban front at that time.

Meanwhile, Iranian ties with Pakistan remained on a downward trajectory during the 1990s as the country witnessed some of the worst sectarian violence perpetrated by Sunni and Shia militant groups backed by Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively. As Pakistan was one of the erstwhile supporters of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, Tehrans active support for the Northern Alliance was not well received in Islamabad.

The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban regime was finally removed from Kabul and the political factions associated with the Northern Alliance were back in power. Yet, for Tehran, a bigger problem was the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan. This led to Irans multifaceted engagement with a range of political and militant actors within Afghanistan. Soleimanis successor, Ismail Qaani, also played a significant role in Irans strategy.

Iran has traditionally supported and held stronger ties with the ethnic Hazara Shia community in Afghanistan. As the Hazaras suffered severe persecution during the Taliban days, they found a natural patron in Iran. Iran also exercised influence over Tajiks in Afghanistan, particularly in the western province of Herat which borders Iran. But the most spectacular aspect of this Iranian engagement was their courting of the Afghan Taliban who resurrected themselves as a powerful insurgent force challenging the authority of the Afghan government and NATO troops across the length and breadth of the country.

Recently disclosed pictures circulating in the Afghan media suggest that General Qaani was operating as the deputy ambassador of Iran to Afghanistan as late as 2018, a story which only emphasises his prime role in managing Irans Afghan policy. This does nothing to improve Irans relationship with Pakistan, which maintained strong links with the Taliban leadership and considered this incursion by the Iranians as an effort to weaken its hand within Afghanistan.

If Iranian manoeuvres in Afghanistan raised eyebrows in Islamabad, developments on the IranPakistan border further weakened the bilateral relationship. The 2016 capture of the alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Yadav, who entered Pakistan from Iran, was an eye-opener for Pakistans security establishment. The episode meant that the PakistanIran border could not be considered a safe zone anymore, and the alleged Indian presence in the Iranian port of Chabahar was a potential threat to Pakistans security and strategic interests. It is highly unlikely that the Quds Force was unaware of these activities. Pakistan lodged a strong protest against this development with the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and demanded that Iran was not used as a launch pad for actions against Pakistani national interests.

As IranPakistan relations soured following the Kulbhushan affair, another issue involving the Quds Force came up on the radar of Pakistans security circles. This was the recruitment of Pakistani Shias to fight for the Bashar Al-Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. These fighters were grouped under a militia named Liwa Al-Zainabiyoun (or the Zainabiyoun Brigade). General Qaani was a central figure in this recruitment drive in Pakistan. The Pakistani authorities eventually clamped down on a charity organisation that was used as a front group for these activities.

Yet another episode where the Quds Force and the Pakistani authorities had a face-off was the border security situation across the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan and Pakistani Balochistan. The Jundullah, a Sunni Baloch separatist organisation, had waged a low-intensity insurgency within Sistan-Baluchestan, and although Pakistan helped Iran in apprehending its chief, Abdolmalek Regi, the bilateral distrust on the issue never went away. The deaths of 27 IRGC troops in an attack on their bus near the border town of Zahedan in early 2019 prompted a severe response from Iranian authorities. Soleimani cautioned the Pakistani government to stop cross-border terror attacks from its territory and vowed a strong response from Iran if significant progress hasnt been made by Pakistan on the issue.

The government of Imran Khan in Pakistan tried to address the trust deficit issue with Iran, yet there was no structural change on any of these clash points. Instead of acknowledging and appreciating Pakistans efforts to defuse regional tensions, when the Pakistani prime minister visited Iran in October 2019 in an effort to mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Iranian supreme leader advised Imran Khan to focus instead on addressing the border security issues between the two sides.

The assassination of Soleimani has propelled General Qaani, the Quds Forces eastern front commander, to the position of overall leader. This development has serious implications for the security situation in Afghanistan and Irans relationship with its eastern neighbour.

Under the Trump administration, Pakistan and the US have developed a working relationship and both sides have agreed upon the need for a negotiated settlement of the Afghan conflict. Pakistan has used its influence with the Taliban, essentially keeping the Doha Dialogue, which takes place periodically in the Qatari capital, alive even after President Trump cancelled talks with the insurgent group.

Yet, Pakistan has been wary of Irans attempts to sway the Taliban away from the negotiating table and towards a renewed confrontation with the US on Afghanistans battlefields. With Qaani now in charge someone who knows the Afghan political landscape just as Soleimani knew that of Iraq there remains a serious possibility that Iran could exact its revenge on the US, not in the Middle East as most commentators have alleged, but in the Afghan theatre, by attempting to derail the Afghan peace process. For Pakistan, ominous signs are already there, with the public appearance of an IRGC spokesperson in a press briefing with the Zainabiyoun groups flag behind him, alongside the banners of Irans other proxy forces across the region.

Perhaps this posturing from Iran has been a direct response to Pakistans rather cautious and restrained reaction to the killing of General Soleimani, which evidently infuriated Iran. It also appears that close deliberation between US officials and the Pakistani government on the Soleimani affair has not gone down well in Tehran. By openly admitting its patronage of the Zainabiyoun militia, Tehran has sent a clear message to Islamabad, reminding Pakistan of its capabilities and willingness to use proxy forces against Pakistani interests.

These new developments require enhanced coordination between the US, Pakistan and all other stakeholders involved in Afghanistan to ensure that the Afghan peace process is not derailed, and that Afghanistan does not become a new front in the USIran rivalry.

Umer Karim is a Visiting Fellow at RUSI. He is also a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham.

BANNER IMAGE: Courtesy of Maryam Kamyab, Mohammad Mohsenifar / Mehrnews.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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Death of Qassem Soleimani: What to Expect in Afghanistan and Pakistan - RUSI Analysis

A U.S. Air Force (USAF) E-11A Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) aircraft crashed in Afghanistan on Jan. 27, 2019.

The E-11A, which is a converted Bombardier BD-700 Global Express Business jet equipped with specialized communications equipment, went down in a Taliban-controlled area of Ghazni Province, north of its operating base at Kandahar Airfield. The E-11A serial number 11-9358 was assigned to the 430th Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron, a geographically separated unit of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram Airfield.

There are no indications the crash was caused by enemy fire, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan spokesman Col. Sonny Leggett said in a statement. Taliban claims that additional aircraft have crashed are false.

According to Air Force Magazine, the USAF maintains a small presence of four E-11 aircraft at Kandahar. The BACN works to ensure a consistent and effective form of communication in nearly any location or environment, significantly reducing the possibility of communication failure and increasing the rate of mission success. The payload, or package of sensors carried on the E-11A, allows command and control to get in contact with the troops on the ground, and vice versa, to enable mission accomplishment. The aircraft was developed as an urgent operational need after communication shortfalls were identified during Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan in 2005. The operation became well known following the success of the book and subsequent movie Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL and the only surviving member of the mission.

Speaking to reporters, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein confirmed the E-11 crash Monday morning, but said he did not have details on the status of the aircrew.Five crew members were on board, FOX News said.

Unlike most other USAF aircraft, E-11 crews come from other airframes and often fly the plane the first time while deployed. The aircraft flies over Afghanistan constantly it surpassed 10,000 sorties in 2017 about eight years after deploying to the country for the first time.

The following video was posted onlineand shows the wreckage, with the cockpit and main fuselage heavily damaged and burning. The tail of the aircraft is largely intact, with the tail markings of the Air Combat Command seal, tail number 11-9358, and USAF roundel clearly visible.

Photo credit: U.S. Air Force

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Video Surfaces of USAF E-11A BACN aircraft crashed in Afghanistan - The Aviation Geek Club

Afghanistan Politics of War

What is winning?

That is a question that GeneralDan McNeill asked when he was the newly installed commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2006. As Craig Whitlock of theWashington Postexplained to Dave Davieson NPR's Fresh Air, McNeill asked further, "What do you want to accomplish in Afghanistan? And he said nobody could define it for me. They just said, go over and do your best and try and do good things."

McNeill was not the only one at sea on this Afghanistan. Years earlier, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hadpennedin one of his now-famous snowflake memos, If we don't come up with a plan, we'll never get our troops out. And then he ended the memo, the snowflake, with one word. It was help, exclamation point.

The stalemate, or quagmire if you will, that is Afghanistan situation today, is reminiscent of cases where companies get themselves into binds because they don't know what they were doing strategically. As a result, like the U.S. in Afghanistan, they do a great many things tactically but fail to focus on results. Tragically time, treasure, and lives are lost.

To date, the war in Afghanistan has cost the lives of over 2,300 U.S. troops and at least 160,000 Afghani lives. It has cost trillions, and after 18 years, the war seems as untenable now as it did when it began in 2001. Whitlock was the lead reporter on theWashington Postteam that published an account, adapted fromLessons Learnedthe Pentagons own account of the Afghan war.

What is admirable about the report is the frankness that the military shows with itself. From officers on the ground to commanding generals, everyone interviewed in the official documents conceded that mistakes were made and that the war was not being won. The problem was that point of view was not embraced by successive presidential administrationsBush, Obama, and Trump. Each administration kept pushing for victory, even though, as General McNeill had pointed out, no one knew what "victory" meant.

As it relates to Afghanistan, every officer who served knows strategy and the consequences of not operating with one. But due to an inept bureaucracy and poor civilian oversight, the strategy proved elusive. NATO forces did good things. They began rebuilding the infrastructure, roads, hospitals, and schools. They also provided humanitarian aid. The one thing they did not do was defeat the Taliban, or prevent aid money from being siphoned off by senior members of the Afghan government.

It's easy to throw stones from 7,000 miles away, but the lesson that emerges from Post's reporting is those good intentions fail when there is no stated end goal. In fairness, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan because Al Queda, operating there, had masterminded the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. was defending itself.

What to Know

There are pragmatic insights to be gained from the Pentagons Lessons Learned that can help civilian managers make better decisions.

Know the situation.Before you invest in the project, study the issues as well as the competition. Know what you can offer and why it matters.

Know your resources.How much can you invest? Initiatives begin with funding that often proves insufficient when you do continue to invest or pull the plug.

Develop a strategy.What does success look like? If you can answer it quickly, then you are on the right path. If you dont know the end-game, you know that you are headed for more trouble.

Revise your strategy.When the situation changes, re-examine your approach. What do you need to do differently, and why.

None of these ideas are new or unique. The problem is we may overlook them in our rush to complete a project. The challenge for leaders is to hew the path but also know when to step off the path when it is no longer clear.

Finally, follow a dictum of Harvard Business School professorMichael Porter, considered a seminal thinker on strategy, who wrote,The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.Keep focused on the mission and align everything toward it. Avoid the distractions of the "next big thing." Strategy is a discipline, and without it, missions are destined to flounder.

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What Afghanistan Teaches Us About The Need For Strategy - Forbes

The Washington Posts Afghanistan Papers is the latest contribution to a growing argument over whether the conflict or any of the forever wars was worth the cost.

Who gets to tell the story of the Afghanistanwar?

Is it angry veterans and war-weary journalists? Is it Pentagon public relations pros, putting the spin on the best story they can for Washington politics and the public? Is it the ground troops and their families who led their men and women through combat, took terrain, won hearts and minds, killed the enemy, and then came home to heroically saveeach other once again, yet this time from their demons? Is it the Hollywood movies that dont get the story quite right? Is it the 4-star generals who still methodically and earnestly warn politicians and the public that this war, like all of the United States contemporary missions against worldwide violent extremism, will be messy, complicated, and take much longer than 18 years to win? Is it Americanvoters?

The latest retelling of the war, and most assuredly not the last, is the Washington Posts Afghanistan Papers investigation. It landed with a splash in December, revealing raw documents obtained from John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR. He is a man whose office for years has been a respected and unflinching presenter of overwhelming evidence of the wars unfulfilled promises to American taxpayers. Here comes another Sopko report is frequently uttered in newsrooms when the next email hits their inboxes. There have been so many, frankly, that theyve lost impact. But with an eye-catching digital format, the Post presents the SIGARs latest findings, and their own reporting, as a major scoop. Indeed, the paper touted the package as a modern-day version of Pentagon Papers. In that legendary news moment of the 1970s, a contract analyst for the Defense Department, Daniel Ellsberg, amassed, copied, and leaked to reporters 7,000 pages of classified analysis revealing that U.S. leaders for years during the Vietnam War secretly had believed it to be an unwinnable morass but constantly and deliberately lied to the American people to keep itgoing.

As quickly as it caught attention, the Posts work drew criticism from veteran war leaders, politicians, scholars, and journalists, both for the comparison to the Pentagon Papers and for its essential argument and conclusion: that contemporary U.S. officials across the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have for 18 years lied to the American public in a purposeful conspiracy, either with willful deceit or with crafty spin to paint the rosiest-possible pictures of what it claims was a constantly failing effort. Even Sopko said that goes toofar.

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Why arent the two papers the same thing? In December, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, asked twice about the report, shot down its claims and premise. Esper said the insinuation that theres been this large-scale conspiracy isridiculous.

Milley, a true believer in keeping U.S. military forces in Afghanistan to prevent terrorist groups from orchestrating another 9/11-level attack on the United States, was having none of it. I know theres an assertion out there in some sort of coordinated lie over the course of, say, 18 years. I find that a bit of a stretch. More than a bit of a stretch, I find that a mischaracterization, Milley said, because it assumes the participation of hundreds of people across DOD, CIA, and more, and it would be impossible to get that level of coordination to do that kind ofdeception.

I know that I and many, many others gave assessments at the time, based on facts we knew at the time, and those were honest assessments never meant to deceive the Congress or the Americanpeople.

Milley called Post reporter Craig Whitlocks work a good piece of investigative journalism, but I also think it is not the Pentagon Papers. Those papers, he said, were written in advance of decision making whereas the Afghanistan ones were post-event reviews, which is fundamentallydifferent.

Ok, even if one accepts their explanations, what they were asked is not the real question. The real question, asked by the website Task and Purposes Jeff Schogol, is: Has the United States been throwing away Americanlives?

Thats the realquestion.

I dont think anyone has died invain. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Absolutely not, not in my view, Milley said. I couldnt look myself in the mirror. I couldnt answer myself at two or three in the morning when my eyes would pop open and see the dead roll in front of my eyes, so no I dont think anyone has died invain.

As far as military victory, for years we have clearly stated that there is not going to be a rational reasonable chance of a military victory against the Taliban or the insurgency, something like signing the surrender documents on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. President Bush said that early on before Christmas in 2001, and that remains true today. Theres only one way this is going to end, and thats a negotiatedsolution.

In a sense, Milley is right. Thats the entire war, simply put. And thats the same description, same plan and same anticipated result that Pentagon leaders have been telling the public to expect for years. The only thing that has changed is the publics willingness to believe leaders like Esper and Milley, or to accept the insistence of five successive White House staffs that say a long-war in Afghanistan has to be theway.

The story of the Afghanistan War, by now, has become as much about the length of its duration and what it has not accomplished than it is about what it has. Sorting out whats right and wrong, worth it or not, moral or not, secure or not is an ongoing debate in todays commentary-sphere, even in the 2020 presidentialcampaign.

But which narrative wins? How the story of Afghanistan is told matters most, perhaps, to Americans. The way that they come to view Afghanistan shapes elections and future policies. If the war has been worth it, the mission should be worth continuing. If it was all a waste, the mission should change, dramatically. Its clear that American voters care little about Afghanistan when they pull their Election Day levers. But they do care about forever wars, and whether their government leaders are being honest about their toll a frequent complaint heard from Democraticcandidates.

Some critics say the military needs to heed the lessons of this long war and be more honest with the American public about the bleak chances for Afghanistan peace talks with the Taliban. Here, a Trump critic claims theres a direct line from the government-based deception in the Afghanistan Papers to the rise of Trump and Trump culture. Here, retired Col. Andrew Bacevich, a longtime war opponent and Gold Star father, writes that the Posts work is yet more evidence that warrants Trumpsimpeachment.

Brookings researchers who criticized the Posts assertion of a widespread coverup wrote that in Afghanistan the problem was not the publics misperception of the truth, it was their indifference to bad policy and their leaders unwillingness to walk away: When failure became inevitable, U.S. leaders didnt look for an acceptable off-ramp, and the public didnt pressure them to do so. No doubt a future president will confront the question of whether to launch an ambitious project abroad with uncertain hopes of success. By then, Americans need leaders who can tell them how and when they will decide to pull theplug.

Everyone has anopinion.

The night before Espers December press conference, Democratic candidates were asked in a primary debate if Afghanistan was worth it. That question would not have come without the Posts investigation and the end forever wars that is a platform by most of the Democrats andTrump.

Do you believe that you were honest with the American people about it? former Vice President Joe Biden was asked. Biden said his critical view of the war was well-known to Obama at the time and, eventually, to the public. I was sent by the president before we got sworn in to Afghanistan to come back with a report. I said there was no comprehensive policy available. And then I got in a big fight for a long time with the Pentagon because I strongly opposed the nation-building notion we setabout.

The frustration with Afghanistan is only part of the wider frustration with all U.S. military interventions since Sept. 11, 2001, including the unrelated Iraq War and ongoing Middle East counterterrorism operations against ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and others, including now the worry of war with Iran or its proxies. In December, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to Biden by saying that the vice president had helped lead us into the disastrous war in Iraq. What we need to do is, I think, rethink and the Washington Post piece was very educational what we need to rethink is the entire war on terror. He also said he was wrong to vote in support of the Afghanistan war at the time. I was wrong. So was everybody else in theHouse.

There are too many people with too many experiences in Afghanistan that any accounting of the war is going to please all of them. But its the telling that is a current issue. Its the telling that could change enough American minds as to whether and when this war ever ends. The long war in Afghanistan has had many battles. The battle over whether it was worth it may be the longest ofall.

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Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Afghanistan War? - Defense One