Tabnak – As the afghan people are suffering a renewed wave of terrorism in their country, the question of how the will the US pursue its Afghan strategy is gaining more significance. Now, all eyes are on Donald Trump to announce its new strategy to tackle the increasing challenges in Afghanistan.
American news website The Hill quotes a White House statement saying that US President Donald Trump will address the nation on Monday night in a prime-time address on his plans for Afghanistan and South Asia.
According to the website, Trump is likely to announce an increase in US troops in Afghanistan. The US president has been meeting with advisers on the issue, most recently at Camp David on Friday. He is expected to add 4,000 troops to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan.
In a separate report, CNN suggests that Donald Trump will ask Americans to trust him on his new Afghanistan strategy, exercising a president's most somber duty, a decision on waging war, at a time when his own political standing is deeply compromised.
CNN believes that tonight’s speech will test the President's capacity to convince Americans that he has settled on the right course of action on a major national security issue, and to unify the nation around it, despite his own depleted approval ratings and behavior that has alienated many voters in his first seven months in office.
Meanwhile, General John Nicholson, the top U.S. Army commander in Afghanistan, speaking before the White House announcement, signaled his belief in a long-term US commitment during a ceremony to inaugurate a new Afghan special operations unit. "I assure you we are with you in this fight. We are with you and we will stay with you," he said at Camp Morehead, a training site for Afghan commandos southeast of Kabul.
The developments come as Afghan security forces have recently struggled to prevent advances by Taliban insurgents. The war stymied the Obama administration, which committed an increase of tens of thousands of US troops to reverse Taliban gains, then committed to a troop drawdown, which ultimately had to be halted.
However, since the new administration came to power, Trump gave Defense Secretary James Mattis the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan, opening the door for future troop increases requested by Nicholson. The general, who leads US and international forces in Afghanistan, said in February he needed "a few thousand" additional forces, some potentially drawn from US allies.
This is while, Afghan forces have suffered from complacency and corruption. They take orders from a fragile and fractured government, and they lack intelligence-gathering capabilities and air power to ward off attacks.
US-backed forces have been in Afghanistan since invading following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States carried out by Al-Qaeda militants, whose leaders were being harbored by the Taliban-led government.
The coalition drove the Taliban from power, but the militant group has been resurgent in recent years and controls large portions of the country.
