The American presence only strengthened the Taliban. This is stated in the report of the US Special Inspector General for the restoration of Afghanistan. Excerpts from the document are cited by The New York Times.
At the same time, the publication emphasizes that the US administration has not been in a hurry to spread about its dubious achievements in this area recently. Moreover, many information, including data on casualties among Afghans, generally preferred to be classified.
This report is one of the latest sources of information on the US Afghan campaign. And even he clearly demonstrates the failure of the Americans. So, the publication drew attention to the fact that at the end of 2019, militants of the Taliban terrorist organization and other groups launched a record number of attacks. All this happened against the background of the statements of Donald Trump that the American armed forces “hit harder than ever in the past decade.”
“The total number of enemy attacks, as well as their effectiveness for the fourth quarter of 2019, exceeded the figures for the same period of any year since these statistics were kept in 2010,” the document says.
In total, more than 8.2 thousand attacks were recorded, more than a third leading to casualties. It is noteworthy that these figures coincided with a record number of strikes from the United States. So, in 2019, American aviation used more than 7.3 thousand bombs in Afghanistan. Such a number of blows has not been all the time since 2006, when they began to count.
Thus, we have to admit that the USA failed to weaken the Taliban. Neither ground military operations nor airstrikes contributed to this. The group still retains the combat potential that it had ten years ago.