News is just now emerging of an attack on a hospital in Ghor in which 35 civilians were killed. The Taliban have captured the Taywara district where the hospital is located. (I am usually reluctant to link to Press TV, an Iranian government property which is often unreliable. However accounts of this incident are still scant and I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this report.)
And, in this context, I should note that a provincial official in Ghor accuses Iran of assisting the Taliban in seizing Taywara. This seems improbable but who knows?
Head of Ghor provincial council says 100 civilians have been killed by Taliban.
Battles in Kandahar said to leave 12 police and 21 militants dead.
Fred Kaplan writes that the U.S. administration has yet to decide on the purpose of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, let alone a strategy:
What is the aim of our involvement in Afghanistan: to defeat the Taliban (scant chance, given that we couldn’t manage the feat with 100,000 troops during Barack Obama’s first term), negotiate a settlement (with whom, to what end), help reform the Afghan government (we tried doing that for a long time, too, to no end), collaborate with old foes to fight off the growing presence of ISIS (about which much has been said lately), or simply train and supply the Afghan army (which, again, we’ve been doing for a long time, to little avail)? No decision can be made about troop levels without first answering those questions.
After those questions are asked, a more basic question must be answered: How long are we going to keep at this? How many more billions of dollars, or hundreds of lives, is the contest worth? What are the stakes of this fight, compared with the stakes of many other fights and interests in the world?