Trump shifts Afghan war stance, OKs more troops
He once supported withdrawal but will now deepen U.S. role.
WASHINGTON — President Trump, admitting he came into office wanting to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, said Monday he had changed his mind and had approved what amounted to an open-ended military commitment to prevent terrorist safe havens there.
“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all of my life I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office,” Trump said, in a rare acknowledgment of the unique pressures and vantage of his office.
“The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable,” Trump said, adopting the rationale that his predecessors, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, had used to justify 16 years of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.
“A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists — including ISIS and Al Qaeda — would instantly fill, just as happened before Sept. 11.”
Trump’s speech — in a televised prime-time address before an audience of troops at Ft. Myer, across the Potomac River from Washington in Virginia — marked a shift to a much more traditional Republican foreign policy by a president who ran for office disparaging what he often referred to as the “stupid” decisions of the past.
Although he campaigned on pulling back U.S. involvement overseas, Trump’s green light to send additional troops to Afghanistan means the president has now increased the military’s role in every combat theater he inherited — Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, as well as Afghanistan.
Reading from a teleprompter in sober tones, Trump did not provide details for increased involvement, saying he would publi-
cize neither troop levels nor timetables for deployment. But his military advisors are seeking 4,000 more troops, a 50% increase, and steppedup counter-terrorism operations.
Currently, there are about 8,400 U.S. and 5,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in the country, advising Afghan security forces. Some NATO allies have also pledged to send more troops. The American troop levels are down from a peak of more than 100,000 during President Obama’s first term.
Trump said he would not provide a “blank check” for U.S. support to Afghanistan’s government. But he also said he would not adhere to any schedule or specify benchmarks for when U.S. involvement might end.
He also fired a strong rhetorical volley at an erstwhile U.S. ally, Pakistan, which he accused of providing a safe “harbor for criminals and terrorists.”
By contrast, he offered warm words for Pakistan’s long-standing rival, India, with which he said the U.S. would “further develop its strategic partnership.”
Committing thousands more troops to the nation’s longest war presents a new political challenge for the president at a time when his public approval — and credibility — has been damaged by a succession of missteps and misstatements in his young administration. Americans by and large are divided over the war and its effectiveness.
With his decision, Trump is in the awkward position of taking ownership of a conflict he has long criticized.
His shift signals the influence not just of Pentagon commanders, led by retired Marine general and now Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, but of the current and retired generals whom Trump has brought into the White House — in particular H.R. McMaster as national security advisor and John F. Kelly as chief of staff.
And it ref lects the waning influence of the nationalist faction that had been led by White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who was ousted Friday but had advocated a retreat from long-standing alliances and expensive commitments overseas.
His position drew praise from some frequent critics, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who called it “a big step in the right direction” that was long overdue.
Calls for more troops and money will almost certainly run into resistance from an unusual but consistently strong coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarianleaning Republicans who reject a muscular military presence overseas.
On Monday, hours before Trump’s address, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was among deficit hawks reminding the president of the opposition he would face from the GOP far right.
Massie wrote on Twitter: “In addition to $ trillion+ war, we’ve spent $113 billion rebuilding Afghan … that’s 2x our own $50 billion annual federal highway spending!”
Lawmakers may have difficulty approving more funding for the new strategy if the administration sends a supplemental spending request to Capitol Hill this fall. Senators, in particular, have made it clear they will require a more fully developed strategy before committing to more troops; the question now is whether Trump’s remarks meet that test.
McCain recently outlined his own plan out of frustration with Trump’s delays, and senators were preparing to debate it when they returned from their August recess next month.
Congress is also under pressure to revisit its nearly 16-year-old authorization for the war, approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Backers of a new authorization, which might put limits on the president’s discretion, have increasing momentum amid concerns about broader military entanglements abroad — concerns that candidate Trump had stoked. Trump’s move almost certainly will spur their effort.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia on Monday said that both the Obama and Trump administrations had failed to outline a clear strategy for the region.
Kaine, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, cited an early failure “by everybody to say, ‘OK, what’s the continuing rationale for being here?’ ” He added, “What we need to do is make sure Afghanistan isn’t a breeding ground for things that can come back and hurt us.”
After lawmakers hear Trump’s plans, “we’re going to be kicking the tires about it when we come back in September,” Kaine said.
Trump made his decision over the weekend after a meeting with his military advisors on Friday at Camp David.
He was presented with three options, according to a former national security official familiar with the internal administration deliberations: scale back to a skeletal presence; deploy only a robust counter-terrorism operation headed by Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA; or increase troop levels by 4,000 to 5,000 while at the same time increasing counter-terrorism operations.
Trump seems to have chosen the third option. Bannon was said to have favored a fourth idea, using private contractors to fight alongside Afghan troops.
The troop increase in Afghanistan is supposed to create more time for training Afghan forces and bolstering Afghan government institutions. Yet the administration is ill-equipped for the enhanced mission: The State Department has not filled key senior positions that would be in charge of handling the Afghanistan and Pakistan portfolios. Trump still has no U.S. ambassador in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
“No amount of denial, exaggeration and obfuscation by State and USAID can substitute for a concerted effort to deal with the civil side of the war,” Anthony Cordesman, a former civilian advisor on past Afghanistan strategy reviews, said in a new report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Put bluntly, half a strategy is not better than none.”
Trump’s plan to boost troop levels by 50% after the drawdown of the Obama years was recommended by his military advisors, including Mattis and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Army four-star Gen. John W. Nicholson.
As much as he would like to signify a break with his predecessors, Trump, in effect, is following strategies similar to those of Presidents Bush and Obama, to work more closely with Afghan security forces and target Taliban leaders moving over the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Militants serving the Taliban, Islamic State and other militias have wrought more violence and instability in Afghanistan over the last year, increasing pressure on Western forces brought in to bolster overmatched Afghan security forces.
Trump’s public salesmanship in the life-and-death matter could be undercut by reminders of his own past views on Afghanistan.
“We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!” Trump tweeted in 2013, in one of several similar statements he made that year.
The U.S. has spent more than $840 billion on the conflict in Afghanistan since 2001, according to the analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Other estimates put the cost in Afghanistan at more than $1 trillion.
Although Trump criticized Obama’s plans for Afghanistan in 2013, during his 2016 presidential campaign he largely avoided the subject, speaking more often about the need to win wars, while disdaining efforts at nation-building abroad.
Meanwhile, many Americans share the skepticism that Trump previously expressed about Afghanistan. In a December 2014 poll by ABC and the Washington Post, for example, respondents by 56% to 38% said that “considering all the costs to the United States versus the benefits,” the war had “not been worth fighting.”
Within his own party, however, Trump’s previous skepticism was not so widely shared. Liberals and Democrats were the most likely to doubt the usefulness of American involvement in the war. Among Republicans, opinion was the mirror image of the national view — 56% said the war had been worth fighting and 38% said it had not been.
Despite the skepticism, however, a majority of those surveyed at that time supported keeping 10,000 U.S. service members in Afghanistan to train and assist that country’s security forces. That figure is not far from the approximately 12,400 U.S. troops that will be in the country under Trump’s proposal.
brian.bennett@latimes.com noah.bierman @latimes.com Times staff writers David Lauter, Lisa Mascaro and Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report.
‘My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all of my life I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.’ — President Trump, on his Afghan war strategy