Just two Americans died in combat in Afghanistan in the first nine months of 2016. But since then, 11 U.S. servicemembers and civilians have lost their lives.
Despite that, Afghanistan received barely a mention on the campaign trail, and it’s unclear what President-elect Trump’s plan is for leaving American forces in the country.
About 10,000 American troops are in Afghanistan. That number, which was supposed to drop to 5,500 by 2017, is set to decrease to 8,400 by the end of the year under President Obama’s revised drawdown plan.
That means thousands of Americans will still be serving in the country when Trump takes office, yet the conflict there came up only in passing mentions at the first presidential debate, and not at any official debate thereafter. The mention at the first presidential debate on Sept. 28 was with respect to NATO and Trump’s assertions that he might not support allies who did not pay their fair share.
“NATO as a military alliance has something called Article 5, and basically it says this: An attack on one is an attack on all,” Hillary Clinton said. “And you know the only time it’s ever been invoked? After 9/11, when the 28 nations of NATO said that they would go to Afghanistan with us to fight terrorism, something that they still are doing by our side.”
Afghanistan was mentioned seven times at the Commander in Chief Forum, hosted in September by NBC, but several of those were in introductions for servicemembers asking questions who had served there and in thanking Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which helped to host the event.
“Just touching on something casually in the debate is not a serious discussion,” said Tony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The fact is, it’s the kind of war that people have not forgotten, but they’ve learned to ignore.”
Evelyn Farkas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said it’s the biggest defense issue facing the next president that was totally left out of the campaign conversations, noting that the Taliban is aware of the U.S. election and is looking to see what Trump will do once he gets in office.
“That’s a really big question mark because he never even made any kind of broad sweeping statements,” she said at an event hosted by Bloomberg about the National Defense Authorization Act.
Discourse about the American fight in Afghanistan didn’t happen during debates at the highest level, and it didn’t happen at a lower level either. Clinton’s Twitter account, which was created in April 2013, tweeted about Afghanistan only once, in July: “Outraged by today’s attack in Kabul that killed dozens who were peacefully demonstrating. We stand with the Afghan people against terror. –H.”
Trump last tweeted about Afghanistan in 2013 and the Taliban in January 2012. His previous tweets suggest that he would further withdraw U.S. troops from the country, but those views will be nearly four years old by the time he takes office and the security situation in the country will look very different.
“Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA,” he tweeted on Jan. 11, 2013.
But Cordesman warned that presidents always have “a very different perspective” once they take office and that Trump’s thoughts could change once he starts receiving briefings and getting intelligence that was previously inaccessible. There are arguments for both Trump’s original plan to pull out entirely and to provide more support, he said.
“It has been a very long, very expensive war and so far it’s not clear that you have a path to victory,” Cordesman said. “There’s also an argument, and perhaps a good one, for providing better forms of U.S. military support …
“If you provided adequate air support and provided enough advisers to actually serve with major Afghan combat, you could create an effective Afghan force in spite of all of the problems they’ve encountered.”
