President Trump will be making a decision soon—though likely not this week, I’m told—about whether to send at least 3,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That’s the main element of a proposal presented to Trump by the National Security Council’s principals committee (the whole of the president’s national security and military advisers) late last month. Read Eli Lake for more details about the plan’s provisions, including increased funds for the Afghan police and military.
“Most important,” Lake writes, citing administration sources, “the strategy would jettison President Barack Obama’s approach of setting arbitrary deadlines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces and instead would link the participation of U.S. troops inside the country to meeting clear conditions on the battlefield, such as winning back territory from the Taliban and denying safe haven to al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other bad actors.”
The goal, should the president adopt the plan, would be to stabilize the government in Kabul led by President Ashraf Ghani against a resurgent Taliban as well affiliates of ISIS and al Qaeda operating in Afghanistan. That’s what national security advisor H.R. McMaster, one of the plan’s main proponents internally, told reporters last week.
“What has happened in Afghanistan is the Afghan army is taking the brunt of the fight against these transnational terrorists and the Taliban,” McMaster said. “And so we are working with our allies to figure out what more we can do to have a more effective strategy in Afghanistan, what are options we can bring to the president to be more effective in meeting our objectives in Afghanistan, and what more can we ask our allies to do which we’re asking them now.”
Trump’s entire national security team has recommended the plan, but the decision is still the president’s to make. So who is advising him against it? At the top of the list is Steve Bannon, the senior White House counselor and former head of right-wing news site Breitbart.
Bannon has been expressing skepticism toward increasing military action in the region, criticizing McMaster’s “quiet effort” earlier this year to convince Trump to send troops into Syria. And although Bannon did not speak up at the NSC meeting where the president decided to bomb the Syrian airfield where the Assad regime had launched a chemical attack in April, Bannon, according to one administration source, was privately against the strike and told others in the White House so. As the Washington Post reported last week, the Afghanistan proposal has been dubbed by its critics in the White House as “McMaster’s war,” and Bannon has been the primary force pushing that line. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Breitbart’s story on the proposal used that term in its headline.
But beyond Bannon, whose influence is allegedly waning in the West Wing, it’s unclear who else is against the plan. Jared Kushner, the senior advisor and son-in-law of President Trump, is close with one of McMaster’s deputies, Dina Powell, and remains very high on the national security advisor himself. Reince Priebus, as White House chief of staff, is a member of the principals committee and presumably supports that group’s plan, as would Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
