The Pentagon's top official made an unannounced visit to
Afghanistan on Monday to meet with US commanders and Afghan leaders amid a push
for peace with the Taliban.
Pat Shanahan, the recently installed acting secretary of
defense, said he has no orders to reduce the US troop presence, although
officials say that is at the top of the Taliban's list of demands in
exploratory peace negotiations.
Shanahan said he is encouraged that President Donald Trump's
administration is exploring all possibilities for ending a 17-year war, the longest
in American history.
But he stressed that peace terms are for the Afghans to
decide. Thus far the Taliban have refused to negotiate with the government of
President Ashraf Ghani, calling it illegitimate. Washington is trying to break
that impasse.
“The Afghans have to decide what Afghanistan looks like.
It's not about the US, it's about Afghanistan,” Shanahan told reporters
traveling with him from Washington.
Later, Shanahan flew to a military base ringed by
snow-capped hills where he met Afghan army commandos, who are regarded as the
most capable element of the Afghan military.
He told reporters the US-trained commandos are increasingly
on the offensive against the Taliban.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration's special envoy for
Afghan peace talks, said on Friday that although talks are in an early stage,
he hopes a deal can be made by July. That is when Afghanistan is scheduled to
hold a presidential election.
Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who had never been in
Afghanistan until Monday, was scheduled to meet with Ghani and other top
government officials.
Shanahan took over as acting secretary of defense on Jan 1
after Jim Mattis submitted his resignation in December. Shanahan had been
Mattis' No. 2.
Shanahan's views on the Afghan war are not widely known. He
said he would use this week's visit to inform his thinking and to report back
to Trump.
In testimony before Congress last week, Gen. Joseph Votel,
the commander of US Central Command, offered a largely optimistic view of
Afghanistan, saying the current maneuvering between US and Taliban negotiators
is “our first real opportunity for peace and reconciliation since the war
began.”
Votel noted that the Taliban are still capable of inflicting
significant casualties on Afghan government forces. Just last week the
insurgents killed some two dozen Afghan troops in an attack on an army base in
northern Kunduz province.
In addition to battling the Taliban, US and coalition forces
in Afghanistan are focused on a militant Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Khorasan.
“Left unchecked,” Votel said in his report to Congress,
ISIS-Khorasan “will continue to grow as a threat to our homeland.”
In his remarks to reporters during his flight to Kabul,
Shanahan said that although the militant Islamic State presence in Syria “has
been decimated,” local Syrian security forces are needed to ensure stability.
He said IS still has a global presence.
“If something hasn't been completely eradicated, there is a
risk of it returning,” he said.
Trump has taken an ambivalent approach to Afghanistan,
saying his instinct upon entering office in 2017 was to withdraw.
Yet he chose instead to add about 3,500 troops in 2017-2018
to bolster the US effort to train and advise Afghan forces.
After Mattis resigned in December, Trump insisted that he
had been unhappy with how Mattis handled Afghanistan. Since then, the
administration has said it achieved a tentative “framework” for fuller peace
negotiations with the Taliban.
“We do not know whether we will achieve an agreement,” Trump
said in his State of the Union address to Congress last week, “but we do know
that after two decades of war, the hour has come to at least try for
peace.
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