Trump backs off Afghan withdrawal

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump cleared the way for the deployment of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan on Monday, backtracking from his promise to rapidly end America’s longest war, while pillorying ally Pakistan for offering safe haven to “agents of chaos”.

In his first formal address to the nation as commander-in-chief, Trump discarded his previous criticism of the 16-year-old war as a waste of time and money, admitting things looked different from “behind the desk in the Oval Office”.

“My instinct was to pull out,” Trump said as he spoke of his frustration with a war that has killed thousands of US troops and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars.

But after months of deliberation, Trump said he had concluded “the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable” leaving a “vacuum” that terrorists “would instantly fill”.

While Trump refused to offer detailed troop numbers, senior White House officials said he had already authorised his defence secretary to deploy up to 3,900 more troops to Afghanistan.

He warned that the approach would now be more pragmatic than idealistic.

Security assistance to Afghanistan is “not a blank check”, Trump said, adding he would not send the military to “construct democracies in faraway lands or create democracies in our own image”.

“We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists.”

The US has grown increasingly weary of the conflict that began in October 2001 as a hunt for the 9/11 attackers has turned into a vexed effort to keep Afghanistan’s divided and corruption-hindered democracy alive amid a Taliban insurgency.

“If America doesn’t withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, soon Afghanistan will become another graveyard for this superpower in the 21st century,” Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

Trump also indicated that the singleminded approach would extend to US relations with Pakistan, which consecutive US administrations have criticised for links with the Taliban and for harbouring leading militants like Osama bin Laden.

“We have been paying Pakistan billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting.

“That will have to change and that will change immediately,” he said, warning that vital aid could be cut. – AFP