KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — Winter usually means a lull in the fighting here. Taliban fighters blend back into their villages, where it’s warm, and U.S. forces hunker down through the holidays.
But for the first time in 16 years, the cold has not slowed the war in the air. U.S. and Afghan forces conducted 455 airstrikes in December, an average of 15 a day, compared with just 65 the year before. Even in December 2012, when there were nearly 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, barely 200 strikes took place.
All told, 2,000 airstrikes were carried out between August and December of last year, nearly as many as all of 2015 and 2016 combined.
The huge spike in airstrikes is the product of new rules of engagement, adopted as part of a strategy that President Donald Trump announced in August. U.S. forces can now strike Taliban targets at will, whereas under the Obama administration they were restricted to defending Afghan forces under imminent attack. As more than a half-dozen U.S. military officers put it, “The gloves are off.”
The blitz is set to intensify as U.S. military operations draw down in Iraq and Syria and assets such as jets, field advisers and surveillance drones are redeployed in Afghanistan. Numerous military officers used a phrase often repeated during this war: “We’re at a turning point.”
But whether the new strategy is a decisive step toward forcing the Taliban to the negotiating table or just another curve along a seemingly endless road of war depends on whom you ask.
A year ago, the U.S. Air Force was preoccupied with bombing the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa, and the KC-135s were flown out of an air base in Qatar, concentrated mostly on that effort. That meant combat pilots in Afghanistan might often be able to stay in the air for just an hour at a time before running out of fuel. Under the new strategy, KC-135s are based in-country at Kandahar Airfield, enabling combat pilots to stay out much longer.
That luxury of time is new. Many of the recent airstrikes have taken full advantage of the new rules of engagement. Dozens of them, for instance, have targeted labs where the Taliban turns poppy into narcotics such as heroin, which it uses to finance its operations. Hundreds of Taliban fighters have been killed.
The new strategy presupposes that U.S. and Afghan forces can pound the Taliban so hard that it has no choice but to relinquish its war against the Afghan government and instead join it in some sort of power-sharing agreement.
