Trump faces tough time on getting troops out of Syria
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump surprised his top aides last week when he said he wanted U.S. troops out of Syria “very soon.” His subsequent silence — and pushback from key advisers — suggests he won’t get that wish. And it won’t be the first time.
Like his predecessor, Barack Obama, Trump is struggling to square his desires to quickly get out of foreign entanglements with the reality on the battlefield. Even if there’s little chance of a traditional “victory” in places like Syria and Afghanistan, Trump is realizing that a withdrawal could undermine other objectives — like the defeat of the Islamic State or the containment of Iran.
“The tough reality is that military wins on the ground only take us so far,” said Mona Yacoubian, senior adviser for Syria, Middle East and North Africa at the United States Institute of Peace. “In order to consolidate and sustain those wins, it is essential to engage in the far more difficult and complex task of stabilizing these liberated areas. Otherwise, we may find ourselves back once again fighting the same fight.”
Stabilization and reconstruction, though, aren’t on Trump’s agenda in Syria. That will be more of a job for “countries in the region and beyond, plus the United Nations,” according to a Wednesday statement from the White House.
Officials within the National Security Council, the Defense Department and the State Department were caught off-guard by Trump’s comments at a rally in Ohio last week, and again at a press conference on Tuesday, in which he predicted an American departure from Syria “very soon.”
He told the crowd in Ohio that “We are going to get back to our country, where we belong, where we want to be.”
While the comments aligned with remarks Trump made as a private citizen and presidential candidate, they appeared to go against much of what the administration had previously said on Syria. Speaking at Stanford University earlier this year, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — whom Trump fired last month — said the U.S. needed to “continue our commitment to the complete defeat of ISIS” and keep up stabilization efforts, including defusing unexploded ordnance and restoring electricity.
After Trump spoke, the White House issued a statement saying the mission to wipe out the Islamic State in Syria was “coming to a rapid end” but offered no timetable for withdrawal. Trump had criticized Obama for setting deadlines for troop withdrawals from Iraq, saying it allowed enemies to hunker down and wait America out.
“The president has been very good in not giving us a timeline,” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday. “We’ve always thought that as we reach finality against ISIS in Syria, we’re going to adjust the level of our presence there. So in that sense, nothing actually has changed.”
Trump’s aides — including Chief of Staff John Kelly — have managed to persuade him that there is more work to be done, even if the Islamic State has been ousted from nearly all the territory it once held, according to people familiar with the discussions. The problem, according to a State Department official who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations, is that the extremist group is entrenched in the remaining territory it holds in Syria.