ABOARD AIR FORCE TWO: The war in Afghanistan may be entering its 17th year, but screams of military jet engines in the twinkling skies above Bagram Airfield show no sign of quieting.
This city-scale military base just north of Kabul has — like similar facilities in Kandahar and Jalalabad — become central to Donald Trump’s promise to succeed where his predecessors failed, and end the Afghan war on favorable terms.
Trump concluded a months-long strategy review in August. During that soul searching, the White House came to believe that the Obama administration underutilized America’s total aerial superiority. The skies, they believe, could hold one key to unlocking the conflict.
Trump will likely send a few thousand more troops to the country — a development sure to grab the headlines — but the days of having 100,000 US military personnel in the country are over.
The ground war is likely to fall more and more to Afghan government forces, and early political efforts will be trained, in part, on getting Pakistan to stop providing safe havens for militants across the border.
But the first tangible moves have been a significant increase in the tempo and intensity of airstrikes, an effort to take the war to the Taliban.
The US, which is the only foreign force in Afghanistan carrying out airstrikes, targeted the Taliban and Daesh militants with 751 bombs and missiles in September, the month after the strategy review.
That was up 50 percent from August and the highest since October 2010, according to US Air Force data.
US Air Force personnel on the ground in Afghanistan report a significant shift in how airpower is being used.
Before, jets patrolled for up to four hours waiting to provide air support to ground forces. But they often returned to Bagram without having fired a shot in anger.
Today, according to Capt. Lyndsey Horn, they are much more likely to come back having engaged the Taliban, Daesh or having targeted an opium production facility.
“For a long time here we stagnated,” said a second officer. “The effects so far are positive, the long term effects are harder to tell.”
Vice President Mike Pence, who on Thursday became the most senior member of the Trump administration to visit Afghanistan, says the strategy is starting to make a difference in Taliban morale.
“President Ghani informed me that in 2017 we have eliminated more senior leaders of the Taliban than were eliminated in all the prior years combined,” Pence said after his meeting in Kabul.
“They have begun to see a sea change in the attitudes among the Taliban” he added. The Taliban “are now beginning to question their future, and our hope is, as we take the fight to the enemy ... that eventually the enemy will tire of losing and will be willing to come forward.”
Lofty claims of progress are hard to verify, and the Taliban were able to lift their momentum even after the deaths of their first two chiefs, including Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who was killed by a US drone strike in 2015 ordered by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.
Afghan forces, beset by desertions and corruption, have seen casualties soar to what a US watchdog has described as “shockingly high” levels since NATO forces officially ended their combat mission in 2014, and the figures are now classified in an effort to save morale.
The Taliban continue to control or contest 45 percent of the country’s territory, according to a September analysis by the respected Long War Journal, and have stepped up raids on security installations across Afghanistan.
No recent arrival at Bagram, and certainly not Trump’s Afghan-savvy former generals who had a hand in the new strategy — namely National Security Adviser HR McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — believe the Taliban is about to surrender wholesale.
But the White House hopes overwhelming force will exacerbate divisions in the Taliban ranks and help lure more members to the negotiating table, where America’s diplomats will be waiting.
Officials admit the US strategy is not without risk, and the longer it runs the more costs will accrue.
More bombing almost invariably means more civilian casualties, which could further mobilize Afghans against the US.
And while the US recently wiped out 10 Taliban labs used to process opium into heroin, counter-narcotics experts believe three million Afghan farmers make their living from the crop, which has been described as “a low-risk crop in a high-risk environment.”
Trump looks to the sky to force Taliban to the table
Trump looks to the sky to force Taliban to the table
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
