Throughout the entire length of the administration’s internal debate about Afghanistan, President Donald Trump was torn between two competing impulses: his desire to end the 16-year-long war, and his need to win. When it came time to make a decision on Afghanistan, which he will announce in a televised address Monday evening, Trump had heard nearly every voice on his National Security Council say that withdrawal now or in the near future would be a disaster. The prospect of repeating in Afghanistan what happened after Barack Obama pulled troops out of Iraq in 2011 was too much for Trump to bear, even if it has always been his inclination to avoid foreign wars.
In the end, he was convinced that authorizing more troops was the best way out of a bad situation.
In his address, which he will deliver from Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, Trump plans to outline a strategy to increase U.S. troop levels for Operation Resolute Support, the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, by around half. There are currently about 8,500 U.S. forces currently in country, with an additional 2,000-plus special forces conducting counterterrorism missions. There will likely be no significant increase in counterterrorism forces under the new Trump strategy. The president may cite al Qaeda’s continued and strengthened presence, aided by the Taliban, in Afghanistan. He’s also likely to emphasize the United States will not be pursuing nation-building as a mission.
Trump arrived at his new strategy over the course of several meetings of the NSC: in the White House Situation Room, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and at the presidential retreat of Camp David in Maryland. It was at Camp David, on Friday, that Trump made his decision. He had pulled Mike Pence away a day early from the vice president’s foreign trip to join the meeting. The other principals, including Defense secretary James Mattis, secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security adviser H. R. McMaster, CIA director Mike Pompeo, Joint Chiefs chairman Joseph Dunford, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, had said their piece in favor of more troops. Only Attorney General Jeff Sessions was reluctant to support an increase, arguing that Trump’s campaign promise not to escalate foreign wars was important.
The president may have been spiritually with Sessions and his now ousted chief strategist Steve Bannon (who wanted a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan). But I’m told neither that idea nor the proposal Bannon was pushing near the end of his White House tenure—a privatized war, as proposed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince—was ever seriously considered by his aides. Bannon had already been fired by the time the NSC assembled at Camp David on Friday. Prince, Politico reported, had been “blocked at the last minute” by McMaster from attending the final meeting.
For rest of Trump’s advisers, their aim was not to talk Trump out of a determined decision to pull troops out, but instead to assure him that raising troop levels would be the least-bad option for a president resistant to being involved at all. If there’s one thing Trump wants to avoid, it’s being known as the president who lost Afghanistan.
News to Watch—“Ten sailors were missing after a Navy destroyer collided with a merchant ship east of the Singapore and Malacca Straits, authorities said Sunday.”
Trump returned to the White House Sunday night from his August vacation that was anything but a break. He’ll spend all day Monday in Washington, leading up to his Afghanistan address, before heading to Phoenix on Tuesday for his big rally that night.
Trump Tweet of the Day
Heading back to Washington after working hard and watching some of the worst and most dishonest Fake News reporting I have ever seen!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2017
Mark It Down—“I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling . . .” – Steve Bannon, on President Trump, August 18, 2017.
2020 Watch—John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, remains a vocal critic of Donald Trump. On Sunday, Kasich denied he had any plans to run against his former rival in the 2016 GOP primary in 2020.
“I don’t have any plans to do anything like that,” Kasich told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I’m rooting for him to get it together. We all are. We’re only like seven months into this presidency.”
The question came after Willie Geist of the Today Show reignited rumors that Kasich was gearing up to run again.
NEW: Sources close to @JohnKasich tell me, after Charlottesville, there is growing sense of “moral imperative” to primary Trump in 2020.
— Willie Geist (@WillieGeist) August 16, 2017
Kasich’s is a classic of the non-denial denial genre, not categorically ruling out another presidential run while insisting he doesn’t “have any plans.”
Song of the Day—“Jailbreak” by Thin Lizzy.
