A BREAK FROM THE PAST

The most astonishing thing about U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-awaited overhaul of the obviously failed and broken Obama-era strategy in Afghanistan is that in its details, it is not a jumble of lies and imbecilities. It is also remarkable that Trump’s Monday night speech setting out the new U.S. approach did not at all come off in the usual way of Trump’s speeches, like the shoutings of a dangerously deranged megalomaniac.

In that respect, it was amazing, and surprising too that Trump admitted he’d actually been wrong about something. His consistently stupid troops-out inanities, uttered in loud and illiterate outbursts going back several years, could not withstand the real-world burden of responsibility that comes with being an American president. It turns out that “decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office,” is how he put it.

As usual, it’s not easy to determine which bits of the speech had been written for Trump to read and which bits were Trump’s weird riffing, but for the most part Trump stuck to a script written by the few grown-ups in his administration, most obviously the recently-hired White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis (both former Marine Corps generals), and Army Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster, now Trump’s national security adviser.

The most encouraging break with Obama’s eightyear muddle in Afghanistan is a subtle thing embedded in the explicit absence of timelines and troop levels in the new policy. It is a clear and reassuring signal to the Afghan people and their government that “conditions on the ground” will determine the degree and extent of American military commitment. Troop levels and assignments are being largely left up to Mattis. The most discouraging part: Trump’s unfortunate regurgitation of an American folly that goes back to Bush-era Secretary of Defence Donald “we don’t do nation-building” Rumsfeld, which continued through Barack Obama’s “America, it’s time to focus on nationbuilding here at home” attitude. In Trump’s iteration: “We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.”

This could be just Trump’s tendency to oafish frisson. It could also be that it was intended to sustain the inclinations of the incompetent dullard Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state, who appears determined to avoid making any foreignpolicy use of himself or of his department’s nation-building capacities. Whatever the case, it was a stupid thing to say. Among other things, “nation-building” is necessary to ensure that Afghanistan’s parliamentary and presidential descent into the most menacing and treacherous kind of geopolitical hybridity: part failed state, part theocratic nuclear power, part state sponsor of terrorism. The Taliban was an invention of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in the first place, and despite the U.S. lavishing Islamabad with more than $32 billion in military and economic aid over the past 15 years, the ISI continues to coddle and curry favour with the Taliban and its various crackpot mutations. Trump says all this has to stop “immediately.” Nice to hear.

We’ll see, but the Trump administration appears at least to be breaking with the consistently catastrophic American insistence that Afghans, in the interests of “peace,” must devote themselves to some sort of reconciliation with the Taliban. “Someday, after an effective military effort, perhaps a peace-talks pantomime in Mecca, and Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud himself attempted a peace-talks jamboree in Medina. The Talibs took their fancy meals and enjoyed the flattery from their fancy hosts and said, no thanks, we want to carry on killing infidels. Japan tried. A Japanese institute arranged for Afghanistan High Peace Council official Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai to come to Tokyo to listen to Taliban windbag Qari Din Mohammad Hanif drone on and on about “the policies of the Islamic Emirate,” about which Stanekzai was already quite familiar. Nothing changed.

The search for closet peaceniks among the Taliban’s top-tier gangbangers has been so manic that in 2010, a humble shopkeeper from Quetta with a knack for impersonation managed to convince Hamid Karzai that he was Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, second only to Mullah Mohammad Omar in the Taliban hierarchy. NATO arranged for his flights to Kabul, where he attended several meetings with Afghan and NATO officials. Before his scam was detected, the impostor absconded with a large sum of money, intended as a peace-talks inducement to the Taliban’s godfathers.

Then there’s the sad story of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the venerable former Afghan president who agreed to take on the hopeless job as head of Karzai’s High Peace Council. On Sept. 20, 2011, Rabbani received a Taliban delegation at his heavily-armed compound in Kabul. The Talibs said they wanted to talk peace. One of them had hidden a bomb in his turban. Rabbani and four of his officials died in the explosion, along with the Talibs.

NATO officials are expressing relief and contentment with the Trump administration’s new approach. Some of Trump’s harshest critics in the American foreign-policy establishment are admitting they’re impressed.

Omitted from Trump’s speech was any hint at how his administration intends to stop the rapidly spreading gangrene of Khomeinist and Russian influences in Afghanistan. But it’s a start. The inattention and indifference of the final Obama years is behind us. That’s better than nothing.