Donald Trump, fresh off the golf course, gave a rare speech to the nation on Monday night to reveal his new plan for Afghanistan. In a half hour teleprompter plod, through text Trump gave every sign of never seeing before, he revealed no troop numbers, no dates, no goals, no … anything. He did say that the troops would be fighting “to win,” because Trump apparently believes that previous administrations told the troops that losing would be peachy. He also spent quite a bit of time saying, without really saying, that he was backing out of all the promises he made previously about pulling troops from the area.
“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts.” … “I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office.”
What the person who nicely wrote this up for Trump really means is that everything he said before was BS without a hint of reason behind it. Oops sorry, America. The entire “strategy” offered up by Trump was that he would stop “nation building” and get down to “terrorist fighting.” Though beyond throwing out these terms he provided not a single detail of what this would mean.
Earlier, Trump had said he would leave Afghanistan to the generals, but the plan that they returned to him was clearly not something he liked.
President Trump was frustrated and fuming. Again and again, in the windowless Situation Room at the White House, he lashed out at his national security team over the Afghanistan war, and the paucity of appealing options gnawed at him.
Trump considered options, including firing the leadership and installing Erik Princes’ mercenary army solution. But in the end, Trump came around to … doing as he was told.
Five weeks later, at a Camp David summit, the commander in chief arrived at his decision. A president obsessed with winning has now settled on simply trying not to lose.
Trump’s speech acted as a simple confirmation: He had no bold plan, no new approach. He didn’t even have the conviction to follow through on the pullout he promised over and over before taking office. It was an extraordinary speech only in that it revealed a Trump who had nothing more to offer than nothing new.
“Tonight, the President said he knew what he was getting into and had a plan to go forward. Clearly, he did not,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “The President’s announcement is low on details but raises serious questions. When President Trump says there will be no ceiling on the number of troops and no timeline for withdrawal, he is declaring an open-ended commitment of American lives with no accountability to the American people.”
Mostly neglected in the coverage of Trump’s Afghanistan speech was the effect this “new strategy” would actually have on Afghanistan and on the troops that fight there.
"Not only is it important to hear from those who've seen war, but the coverage seems to be disproportionately about the impact of tonight's speech on the President rather than those whose lives are on the line," Allison Jaslow, an Iraq war veteran and the executive director of IAVA, told me via email Monday night.
"I'd also say that while I'm grateful for many outlets starting the day understanding the gravity of the President's address to the nation and its human impact, the coverage in total seemed to wane mid-day, and veteran voices notably went missing. Put simply, this reaffirmed my belief that our nation's wars and the less than 1% of Americans that are fighting them, aren't weighing on the public's consciousness as they should."