“They are not losing right now, I think that is fair to say,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the Taliban during a discussion at a security forum in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “We used the term stalemate a year ago and, relatively speaking, it has not changed much.”
Dunford said that while there would never be a “military solution” on its own to bring peace to Afghanistan, the United States and its Nato partners are working to leverage military, political and economic pressure to convince the Taliban it is in their interest to negotiate a political solution to the crisis with the government in Kabul.
“Without going into detail here, we do believe the Taliban know that at some point they do have to reconcile,” he said. “The key to success is to combine all that pressure to incentivize the Taliban” to negotiate.
While Dunford said recent elections in Afghanistan were “largely successful” and noted the importance of next year’s presidential election there, he added, “I think we are a long way,” from being able to say that point of reconciliation with the Taliban has been reached.
As part of the administration’s strategy to bring about a political resolution to the 17-year war, President Donald Trump announced an increase in US troops last year that brought the total number in the country to about 14,000.
But progress toward ending the decades-long conflict has proven elusive.
And Afghan security forces who took the lead from the US in 2014 on efforts to secure the country are still suffering a high number of casualties in their battle against the Taliban.
Defense Secretary James Mattis told an audience in Washington last month that Afghan forces had sustained “over a thousand dead and wounded” in August and September in their effort to protect Afghan parliamentary elections in October.
“They stayed in the field fighting, and the Taliban has been prevented from what they said they were going to do, which was to take and hold districts and provincial centers, and also disrupt an election that they were unable to disrupt,” Mattis said.
Source : Nbcnewyork