The Taliban's steady gains

What the Taliban hasn’t managed to do is hold that territory for any meaningful length of time—almost certainly because of the U.S. military support for the Afghan government and its forces. About 15,000 U.S. military personnel are still in Afghanistan serving in advisory roles. That’s significantly less than the 100,000 who were in the country in 2010, at the height of the U.S. presence, but more than enough to wear down the Taliban. Indeed, if there is a consensus over what is happening in Afghanistan, it is that as long as the United States remains in the country, the Taliban cannot win. “The Taliban will have made the point they sought to make,” Johnny Walsh, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace, told me about the fighting in Ghazni. “The tragedy of it is that so many people died or were wounded for an incident that ultimately is not likely at all to move the needle in the larger military conflict.”

The militants certainly recognize this: In June, they declared a three-day cease-fire to mark Eid, which coincided with a similar truce called by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Recent news reports have suggested Ghani may order another cease-fire; the Taliban is reportedly considering reciprocating once again. “Both sides understand the principle of fight and talk,” Walsh said. “And whenever there were moments of hope in the peace process in the past, they have often coincided with moments of extreme violence on the ground in Afghanistan because there’s very much still a war going on. And that can very much go in either direction.”

Walsh said the danger is that the Taliban’s battlefield gains in Ghazni might embolden some hard-liners in the movement to think they can win the war after all, and compel them to say that peace talks are not necessary or to take an unrealistically hard line in talks. “That would be a misguided assumption, in my view,” he said. As I wrote last month, part of the reason for this is that the United States also recognizes that the Taliban cannot be fully defeated and so has made significant diplomatic overtures to the militants, combined with increased military pressure.

‘A sudden burst of movement’ on the Afghan peace process

That recognition is a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s South Asia strategy, which the president unveiled nearly a year ago. It envisioned bringing peace to Afghanistan by pushing the Taliban into dialogue with the Afghan government while simultaneously bombing it. At the same time, the strategy called for increased pressure on Pakistan, which is believed to have some influence over the Taliban. Under Donald Trump’s approach, the United States said it would remain in the country until the Afghan government takes full control of its territory. That could take some time. According to the most recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Afghan government controls about 65 percent of the country’s districts and the Taliban controls 12 percent (the rest are contested). These numbers are unlikely to change under the Trump administration’s strategy, as The New York Times reported last month. The United States is urging Afghan troops to withdraw from sparsely populated areas and focus, instead, on protecting cities.