There Is No Solution in Afghanistan

Analysis: The road to Kabul goes through Islamabad and New Delhi

The American predicament in Afghanistan is at once ridiculous and tragic. More than 8,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, prosecuting the longest war in our nation's history. Overlapping networks of insurgent groups—most prominently the Taliban—had a good year in 2016, seizing terrain and conducting terror strikes to destabilize the U.S.-backed Kabul government. The American commander in the country wants a "few thousand" more troops. Despite the supporting role that the U.S. contingent is meant to play, casualties are still being sustained, sometimes in places with depressingly familiar names—as in Sangin, seized from the Taliban a few years ago at the expense of gallons of British and U.S. Marine blood. Two Americans were wounded there last week.

The Taliban's efforts in Sangin appear to be part of a larger campaign to seize the entirety of opium-rich Helmand Province, including its capital Lashkar Gah, a small city that was untouchable during the period of peak U.S. operations but which now is battling the insurgency on its very streets. According to a U.S. government watchdog, eight out of 14 districts in Helmand are under insurgent "control or influence." One of these is Marjah district, where seven years ago today I was fighting alongside a few thousand other U.S. Marines on behalf of the Afghan government. We were told we were bringing a "government-in-a-box," and by 2011 there were manifest gains in the district's security, about which the Marines who fought there can be proud.

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