US forces may not be leaving Iraq or Syria, but there aren’t a lot of ISIS targets for them to hit anymore. This has led to a precipitous decline in the number of US bombs dropped on those two countries, and has the military’s priorities shifting eastward, to Afghanistan.
ISIS has lost virtually all of its meaningful territory, and to the extent the group’s forces have fled into the desert, they still aren’t convenient targets for US warplanes. In Afghanistan, the US-backed government controls only about 50% of the territory, leaving open a lot of enemy territory to target.
In recent decades, the Pentagon has kept Afghanistan in its back pocket for when things slow down elsewhere. When the 2003 US occupation of Iraq slowed down, a surge was announced in Afghanistan. When the ISIS war in Iraq and Syria ratcheted up, Afghanistan was on the back-burner, but now is facing a new escalation.
Unlike ISIS, where their control over territory was always very tentative, the Taliban has a lot of territory in Afghanistan which they have a long-standing stranglehold on, and where they won’t be readily displaced. This makes Afghanistan every bit the long-term project it was 17 years ago when the US invaded.
Are you actually trying to push the line that the US was bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq?
This year the US has done virtually no bombing of ISIS in the area the US controls, allowing IS to grow to the extent that Syria and its allies got together with Iraq and agreed Iraq would start bombing Isis in Syria , in the area controlled by the US.
This article discusses it. http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/syria-iraq-us-cuddles-isis-others-plan-for-the-final-fight.html
The other part is that the Kurds don’t have time for fighting Isis.
Regress in Afghanistan must progress, but it can progress only by inserting more troops into it.
Presumably, the regress now 17-years of the youthful age [and to become of old-age sometime in 2121] saves countless of butiful American babies, women; else, US would have left Afghanistan to fight by its lonesome self.
“Assad must go” has been abandoned for the time being in favor of “Rouhani and Khamenei” must go plus “Maduro must go” plus perhaps “Kim must go”. Taking on so many “must go’s” simultaneously smells of megalomania.
The problem in Afghanistan is the USA doesn’t have Shia militias fighting for them, that is what changed the facts on the ground in Iraq and Syria.