For the past several years, the Obama administration’s strategy for Afghanistan has rested on the basic assumption that although no reasonable amount of U.S. money or troops could win the war against the Taliban outright, a limited American commitment to Afghanistan’s security forces and government would enable Kabul to hold on long enough to reach a negotiated truce with insurgent leaders.
This “hold and talk” strategy was not Washington’s first choice. It was born of frustration and exhaustion after more than a decade of war, including the Obama administration’s own military and civilian surge of 2010-11. It reflected a downsized vision of U.S. ambition in Afghanistan coupled with an assessment that the threat posed by international terrorism had grown more diffuse and less Afghanistan-centric in a new era of turmoil throughout the Middle East. However unappealing, the strategy was at least logically and politically defensible.
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