American ground forces have engaged in a flurry of activity in Afghanistan since October, The New York Times reported Thursday, in a “spike in raids” that clashes with how the Obama administration is characterizing ongoing US operations in the country.
US troops were “playing direct combat roles” in the missions, despite the Obama administration’s claims that American troops would, at the start of this year, only be supporting their Afghan allies.
“It’s all in the shadows now,” one former Afghan official who still advises Kabul’s security forces told the Times. “The official war for the Americans — the part of the war that you could go see — that’s over. It’s only the secret war that’s still going. But it’s going hard.”
The paper reported that American troops have a lot of leeway in deciding who to target. The commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, is ordering attacks against militants who have “in the past been associated with attacks or attempted attacks on American forces” since the war started, in 2001. The distinction is one among many that Campbell and his charges use to determine which insurgents “pose an immediate threat to coalition troops or are plotting attacks against them.”
There has been an uptick in US-led activity between now and last autumn—a period of cold weather when there is typically a lull in the fighting—because coalition forces in October recovered a laptop that led them to a treasure trove of intelligence. The Times said that the computer was obtained by the US and its allies after a raid that killed Abu Bara al-Kuwaiti–a man with ties to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri who performed managerial duties for the extremist group.
American forces have also been given increased political cover to carry out attacks since the September ascension of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. His predecessor, Hamid Karzai, was much more wary of allowing coalition forces to operate, due, in part, to civilian deaths caused by carelessness and malice.
Afghan forces themselves had run into trouble assuming a greater role since President Obama started scaling back the size of the US contingency. In November, at a press briefing where he conceded that the role of US forces in 2015 were “yet to be defined,” an American commander of the now-defunct International Security Assistance Force said that Afghan security forces were taking fatal casualties at an “unsustainable rate”–roughly 4,500 annually over the past two years.
Despite the reports of US troops’ direct involvement in fighting, President Obama has repeatedly claimed publicly that this is no longer the case.
“After more than 13 years, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over, and America’s longest war has come to a responsible and honorable end,” he said last month.
Read The New York Times’ report on US raids in Afghanistan since last October here.
UPDATE: A previous version of this story described the “unsustainable rate” of Afghan fatal casualties as “roughly 4,5000 over the past four years.” We regret the error.
