WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The new CIA "hunt and destroy" policy in Afghanistan will backfire and generate more support for the Taliban rather than eliminating them, retired US Army major and former military lawyer Todd Pierce told Sputnik on Monday.
"Let’s not use euphemisms. These ‘kill teams’ have been accused of indiscriminately killing Afghan civilians in raids and with airstrikes," Pierce said. "It is predictable that these kill teams’ only effect will be to increase the number of insurgents, the Taliban, just as similar US policies had that result in Vietnam."
US policymakers still failed to acknowledge that they had no hope of winning the now 16-year-old war in Afghanistan being conducted against the wishes of most of the country’s people, Pierce explained.
"Intelligent people, as distinguished from ‘intelligence,’ have learned from time immemorial that without a corresponding demographic advantage, a foreign military and an unpopular minority population cannot overcome the inherent advantage held by the majority and dominant population," he said.
In Afghanistan, that inevitably dominant majority was represented by the national insurgency led by the Taliban, Pierce observed.
However, today the US armed forces had no hope of establishing that kind of advantage over the almost 35 million population of Afghanistan, he said.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s administration has given the CIA the go-ahead to expand its covert operations in Afghanistan, including deployment of small squads of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants.
In August, US President Trump announced a new Afghanistan strategy in which he pledged to continue US support for the Afghan government and military. Trump also said the authority of US troops to target terrorists in Afghanistan would be expanded and he approved sending an additional 4,000 troops to the country.
