The US military has stepped up operations against militants in Afghanistan on the orders of President Donald Trump following the very public collapse of peace talks with the Taliban, Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters Friday.
“We did step up our attacks on the Taliban since the talks broke down,” Esper told reporters traveling with him back to Washington from Louisville, Ky. “The president did want us to pick up in response to the heinous attacks that the Taliban and others conducted throughout Afghanistan,” including Kabul.
The remarks constitute the Pentagon’s first public confirmation of Trump’s recent pronouncements that US military operations have picked up in recent weeks.
“We did pick up the pace considerably,” Esper added.
The Trump administration last month suspended negotiations with the Taliban that were designed to wind down the 18-year-old conflict after Trump tweeted he was canceling a secretly planned visit by Taliban negotiators to the presidential retreat at Camp David in rural Maryland.
The meeting was intended to finalize an agreement under negotiation since last fall in which the US would cut its troops in Afghanistan from the current official total of 14,000 to 8,600 in exchange for a Taliban pledge to enter direct peace talks with the Afghan government and renounce international terrorist groups like al-Qaida.
In a Sept. 7 tweet announcing the cancellation of the visit, Trump blamed a Taliban suicide attack in Kabul that had killed a US soldier and 11 other people two days earlier.
Esper declined to provide details of the stepped-up US operations but said they include both “air and ground” attacks. He also stressed that “Afghans lead these operations on the ground” with US troops present in an advisory role.
Since the suspension of talks, Trump has asserted repeatedly that US forces were striking the Taliban harder.
“The last four days, we’ve hit our enemy harder than they have ever been hit before, and that will continue,” Trump said during a ceremony at the Pentagon marking the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Trump repeated the claim the following week.
But the US military headquarters responsible for operations in Afghanistan has not acknowledged any new instructions from Trump to launch more strikes and raids.
Esper also said the Pentagon is still considering cutting its troop levels in Afghanistan.
“My ambition would be to get the troop level down to a level by which we know we can contain and do the core mission,” he explained.
The Pentagon describes counterterrorism operations against terrorist groups al-Qaida and the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate as its core mission in the country. That’s as opposed to the broader mission of helping the Afghan government fend off the Taliban insurgency.
“If a commander feels confident that he can reduce forces, I will look at the right timing to do that, whether it’s there, whether it’s Africa, you name it, to make sure I can get down to a more manageable level,” he added.
Gen. Austin Miller, the top commander in Afghanistan, has already trimmed troop levels from the official total of 14,000 to closer to 13,000, POLITICO reported in August.
