Trump White House split on adding troops in Afghanistan

When President Donald Trump landed in Saudi Arabia on Saturday on his first foreign trip, he brought with him a $110 billion arms deal. When he arrives at the NATO summit in Belgium on Thursday, he will bring mostly questions, many of them about the war in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon is pushing to reinforce the Afghan army with up to 5,000 more U.S. troops. Some administration officials expected Trump to make a decision on a deployment before the NATO meeting, which would have laid down a marker for the other alliance members.

But now the president’s decision has been delayed, officials said, after an intense debate erupted in the West Wing over the wisdom of pouring more soldiers into a 16-year-old conflict.

Trump, they said, wants to gauge what other NATO members are willing to contribute to the military effort before he makes any commitment. The United States is already spending $3.1 billion a month in Afghanistan — a number that aides say weighs on a president who has spoken about the need for greater burden-sharing from NATO allies.

The thornier question is how Trump will reconcile the split between his war Cabinet — led by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, who both served in Afghanistan — and his political aides, among them his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who argue that a major deployment would be a slippery slope to nation building.

The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has been critical of existing U.S. policy in Afghanistan and views his role as making sure his fatherin-law gets “credible options.”

Trump has given the military more leeway than his predecessor, President Barack Obama, signing off on aggressive early moves like commando raids in Yemen and the Tomahawk missile strike on Syria. But he has said little about Afghanistan, either as a candidate or as president.

“The questions they have to ask are: Is that additional force decisive? Are we going to win? Can we force a political settlement?” said Jack Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff, who said he told Trump during the transition that the current policy in Afghanistan was failing.

“I don’t think it is unusual that they would be having a debate,” Keane continued, “particularly given that we have a 16-year war. U.S. policies have largely driven us to a 16-year war.”

Senior Pentagon officials are broadly supportive of U.S. commanders’ request for several thousand additional troops in Afghanistan, but they acknowledge they face persistent questions, if not outright opposition, to the plans from certain corners of the White House.