Peace Through Bombings: The U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan

Pummeling someone into reconciliation might seem like a curious strategy. But that’s what the Trump administration is proposing to do to the Taliban as it seeks to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan.

“We will do everything we can to support the ANDSF fight against the Taliban in order to drive them to the negotiating table,” Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense, Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referring to the Afghan National Defense in an interview with : “This is all part of our overarching strategy to continue to put pressure on the Taliban until they realize they’ve basically got a binary choice: They can negotiate and reconcile, or live in irrelevance and die. We’ll continue to go until the Taliban reconcile.”