‘We will win’ in Afghanistan, Trump promises

Speech heralds new strategy but offers no specifics on timeline or troop increase

WASHINGTON— Declaring the U.S. will win “in the end,” President Donald Trump vowed Monday night to keep American troops fighting in Afghanistan despite his earlier inclination to withdraw. But he insisted the U.S. would not offer “a blank cheque” after 16 years of war, and he pointedly declined to say whether or when more troops might be sent.

In a prime-time address billed as the unveiling of his new Afghanistan strategy, Trump said the U.S. would shift away from a “time-based” approach, instead linking its assistance to results and to co-operation from the beleaguered Afghan government, Pakistan and others.

Still, he offered few details about how that approach would differ substantively from what the U.S. has already tried unsuccessfully under the past two presidents.

“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” Trump said. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on.”

Ahead of his speech, U.S. officials said they expected the president to go along with a Pentagon recommendation to send nearly 4,000 new troops, boosting the total of 8,400 in Afghanistan now. At its peak, under the Obama administration in 2010-11, the U.S. had roughly 100,000 there.

Trump said his “original instinct was to pull out,” alluding to his longexpressed view before becoming president that Afghanistan was an unsolvable quagmire requiring a fast U.S. withdrawal. Since taking office, Trump said, he’d determined that approach could create a vacuum that terrorists including Al Qaeda and Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL) could “instantly fill.”

Trump said the American people are “weary of war without victory.”

“I share the America people’s frustration,” Trump said at the army’s Joint Base Myer—Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from the White House. Still, he insisted that “in the end, we will win.” Trump’s speech concluded a months-long internal debate within his administration over whether to pull back from the Afghanistan conflict, or to embroil the U.S. further in a war that has eluded American solutions. Several times, officials predicted he was nearing a decision to adopt his commanders’ recommendations, only to see the final judgment delayed.

Former White House chief strate- gist Steve Bannon, who was ousted last week, had advocated a proposal to gradually swap out U.S. troops and use private contractors instead to fight in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has argued the U.S. must remain engaged to ensure terrorists can’t again use the territory to threaten America. Afghan military commanders have agreed, making clear they want and expect continued U.S. military help.

If the U.S. completely withdrew from the country, “I think there’s a relative certainty that the Afghan government would eventually fall,” said Mark Jacobson, an army veteran and NATO’s former deputy representative in Kabul.