One of the most critical decisions facing (sigh) Donald Trump is how to prosecute our nation's military actions against terrorist groups like al-Qaida, the Taliban, and ISIS. Should the United States increase military activity? Decrease it? Change strategies? We don't know; campaign-trail Trump would only give word salad-esque answers on the subject, and the rhetoric has only gotten muddier since.
We probably should have seen this coming, but it seems the decision he’s come to is that he's going to bag it, go golfing, and give the military the authority to set their own troop levels in whichever direction they want for whatever reasons they want. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis:
Yesterday afternoon, the President directed the Department of Defense to set troop levels in Afghanistan. This will enable our military to have greater agility to conduct operations, recognizing our military posture there is part of a broader regional context. [...]
This decision is part of a broader strategy we are developing that addresses our role in Afghanistan and beyond. We will present this to the President in coming weeks.
Reading between the lines—and while noting that the "broader strategy" is by the administration’s own admission not yet strategized—it appears that what happened is that Trump was asked to set parameters for what ought to be done in Afghanistan, was presented a range of options, and upon being presented with those complex and critical choices got bored or peeved and told everyone else to do it themselves. The military will now set its own troop levels, and the rest of us, Donald Trump included, will wait to be surprised by what happens.
This is, to be clear, an unusual turn of events.
"To just say to Jim Mattis, 'Do whatever you think is best,' and for Secretary Mattis to be able to add 30,000 troops, for example, without having to get the president to approve that, strikes me as unhealthy," [former Pentagon policy official Christine Wormuth] said.
"It certainly could be interpreted as the president kind of distancing himself from these profound decisions and specifically from what we're doing in Afghanistan," she added. "I have long been bothered by the fact that the Afghanistan war has become the silent war. ... I don't think most Americans are even aware of it, and this (decision) is not going to help that."
That said, we are in very strange times and whether this defenestration of a core duty of the commander in chief is good news or bad news for the rest of us is … open to debate? For the most part, the civilian commander of our nation's military forces ditching the decision-making process and instructing the military to engage foreign enemies as they see fit is deeply problematic, for obvious reasons. But on the other hand there doesn't appear to be anyone, either in the White House or outside of it, who thinks Trump has the interest or intellectual capability to make these critical decisions in a functional, non-stupid way.
If White House meetings with the unfocused and uninterested Trump are going anywhere as badly as leaks suggest they often do, Mattis may be thanking his stars Trump is delegating the responsibility rather than deciding new troop numbers by picking them out of a small red hat. But it still doesn’t make it business as usual.