By Alexander Clark, '19Today is the 17th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I was five when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in response to the horrific events on that day. In my final year of university, what has become America’s longest war shows no signs of ending anytime soon. It has costed the US government trillions of dollars and resulted in 4,000 American military and civilian contractor personnel deaths. Over 31,000 Afghan civilians have died in the war as of 2016. The war’s objective was to eliminate Al-Qaeda for carrying out the 9/11 attacks along with Afghanistan’s Taliban government for giving the terror group state sanctuary. It has since then developed into a protracted insurgency wherein American long-term objectives and strategy remain mercurious. Before he was president, Donald Trump slammed the ongoing US military presence in Afghanistan and throughout the broader middle east. In 2013, he tweeted, “We should leave immediately.” He agreed with then-President Obama’s expressed desires to end the United States’ military commitment to the central Asian country.As president, Donald Trump has embraced a more hawkish course of action. A little over a year ago, he announced that the United States would send more troops to the country and that it had no timetable to leave, saying, “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on.” However, he did announce a change from previous strategy by shunning any role of nation building for the United States, saying its role in the country from now on would be limited to “killing terrorists.”One year later, conditions on the ground do not indicate any realistic chance of withdrawal in the near, or even distant future. On August 10th, 2018, the Taliban attacked the city of Ghazni, which is 80 miles from the nation’s capital of Kabul and on a strategic highway to the nation’s second largest city, Kandahar. After four days of fighting, with the Afghan government back in control, estimates of Taliban casualties range from 197 dead, 247 wounded to 220 dead just by airpower according to conflicting estimates from the Afghan and US militaries respectively. Between 110 to 150 civilians were killed or wounded according to United Nations estimates.This battle represented the second time since May that the Taliban tried to take an Afghan provincial capital. Albeit this attack was on a far more strategic location, Ghazni being a mere two hour drive away from Kabul and a vital node linking northern and southern Afghanistan.The fact that US special forces were imbedded with the Afghan military in Ghazni and that American airpower was key to driving out the Taliban contradicts Washington’s official line of their role, that US combat missions officially ended in 2014 and that US troops are only in Afghanistan as advisors.Ghazni also poignantly manifested how Pakistan is the complex lynchpin to the ongoing Afghan War. After Ghazni, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani blamed Pakistan for the attack, accusing Afghanistan’s neighbor of sending over many of the fighters who attacked Ghazni.The claims of Pakistan being a safe harbor for the Taliban carry heavy weight. Pakistani influence in Afghanistan goes back decades. During the Soviet-Afghan War, Pakistan was America’s chief ally in supplying weapons and training to Afghan rebel groups, known collectively as the Mujahedin, in their fight against the Soviet 40th army and their Afghan client government. Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, an account of American involvement in Afghanistan from 1978 to 2001, details how American and Pakistani interests began to diverge after the Soviets left in 1989 and the socialist Afghan government fell in 1992. The power vacuum left several different Mujahedin factions vying for power. As America began to disengage from the region, Pakistan continued its policy of arming radical Islamist Mujahideen factions as opposed to secular Afghan nationalist groups. This strategy culminated when the Taliban formed in 1994, in the devoutly religious areas of Southern Afghanistan. Since then, this group has been a vital proxy for Pakistan. In fact, the Taliban’s initial leadership and its first wave of fighters were often educated in Islamic schools, Madrasas, in Pakistan.Pakistan has a deeply influential Islamic society, which initially suggests that Pakistani support for the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban represented an alignment of religious ideology. However, the reality is more nuanced. Coll outlines how the largely secular Pakistani military and intelligence elites saw the Taliban in the geopolitical context of creating a base for loyal, dedicated fighters in Afghanistan who could act as a valuable proxy in fighting India, Pakistan’s long-time rival, in neighboring Kashmir.The issue of Pakistani support for the Taliban is sensitive given America’s current relations with what was once its staunch cold war ally. Kicking off the new year in 2018, President Trump tweeted, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”Despite the Pakistan’s role in helping the Taliban, it initially acted as a key strategic ally for the United States in fighting terrorism after 9/11. Since 2002, America has poured $20 billion into this partnership with the hopes of Pakistan being able to effectively fight terror groups like Al Qaeda with advanced US military technology. However, with the State Department’s announced suspension of $2 billion in US aid to Pakistan at the beginning of this year, and promised Chinese investment of $62 billion into Pakistan’s infrastructure, it seems that America’s ties are fraying at an accelerating pace as the former ally does not feel constrained in its policies and looks elsewhere for partnerships.Pakistan further feels angered at the US given what critics deem a shadowy drone war waged by the US military and the CIA over Afghanistan and Pakistan to target Al Qaeda and other terror groups operating in the region. The use of drones has led to high civilian casualties and significant discontent and protest from the Pakistani public.Still, America has not given up completely on a rapprochement with Pakistan in light of its key importance in bringing peace to Afghanistan. On September 5th, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Pakistan in the hopes of achieving a “reset” in relations, despite the fact that the country has recently sworn in Imran Khan as Prime Minister, who has criticized the US occupation of Afghanistan and called for negotiations with the Taliban. Secretary Pompeo’s visit came shortly after the Department of Defense suspended $300 million in aid to Pakistan, which was meant to signify America’s intent to negotiate from a position of strength in redirecting the country’s anti-terrorism policies.Of course, one visit alone will not reshape a sensitive, complex relationship necessary to secure peace and stability in Afghanistan. While such an improvement will prove to be highly difficult and even contentious, further steps toward peace in Afghanistan could prove even more difficult as the US has begun to signal a willingness to negotiate with the Taliban itself. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis travelled to Kabul on September 7th to assess the American military’s position on the ground and to discuss with Afghan officials, among other topics, the nascent negotiations between them and Taliban, saying that a framework was in place for further progress.This framework was a reference to what happened in Qatar this July, where American diplomats met with Taliban representatives in what was the first major contact between the two sides since previous talks fell through in 2015. Beyond the Taliban and Pakistan, most observers have noted that the great powers surrounding Afghanistan, namely Russia, China, India and Iran, will have to participate in or influence negotiations to create a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan. However, experts such as Fareed Zakaria of the Council on Foreign Relations have noted that America has terrible relations with all of these powers, with the exception of India. President Trump reserves particular disdain and anger toward Iran, having imposed heavy sanctions on the country this August in the context of America’s larger geopolitical rivalry with the Islamic Republic in the Middle East. Meanwhile, America is engaged in an intense trade war with China, and President Trump brags about being far tougher on Russia than his predecessors in response to domestic charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election.Besides the entrenched hostility between these powers and the US, Donald Trump is highly antagonistic toward multilateralism in general, viewing foreign policy largely through a zero-sum nature of America sacrificing its wealth and power at the behest of more greedy, less powerful and less trustworthy nations. President Trump has already withdrawn the US from the nuclear deal with Iran, the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership. With that context, the likelihood of the Trump administration constructing an elaborate framework with the Afghan government, the Taliban, Pakistan and the surrounding regional powers to ensure an American withdrawal from a stable Afghanistan remains highly remote.At least in the short term, America seems locked in to continuing its ongoing commitment to a land that has arguably not seen peace since the Soviet Invasion of 1979. Even before then, Afghanistan was the site of clashes and warfare between several powers, leaving it with the nickname, “The Graveyard of Empires.” The Greeks, the Mongols, the British and the Soviets all fell into that graveyard. If America is not serious about withdrawing from what is now its longest war-which has costed trillions and over 4,000 American deaths-perhaps it could to.