Top US commander in Afghanistan: ‘Still in a stalemate,’ but gaining momentum

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said that the war in the country is “still in a stalemate,” but that President Trump’s new strategy provides momentum to the fight against the Taliban and other militant groups.

“We are still in a stalemate,” Gen. John Nicholson told NBC News on Friday.

“We are only 90 days into this new policy, but with the U.S. forces that will be arriving, with the new authority that we have been given, put the pressure on external enablers, with the fact that we are condition based and not time based, we’ve set all the conditions to win.”

{mosads}

In a speech in August, Trump said that despite his initial inclination to pull troops out of Afghanistan, he had decided to continue America’s involvement in the country, though he did not say at the time how many more troops he would send.

The U.S. moved in September to send an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan in an effort to break the stalemate. 

“This change in policy has reversed this decline that we’ve been in since 2011,” he told NBC News. “And what I would say is that we’ve drawn down too far and too fast, we communicated to the enemy that we had lost our will to win, and now with a new policy as of August, we are going to win. And winning means delivering a negotiated settlement that reduces the level of violence and protecting the homeland.”