Rand Paul on Afghanistan, Yemen: Trump Should Trust ‘Instincts,’ Stop Listening to Generals
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Exclusive — Rand Paul on Afghanistan, Yemen: Trump Should Trust ‘Instincts,’ Stop Listening to Generals ‘Who Talk in His Ear’
by MATTHEW BOYLE
15 Sep 2017
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News exclusively in an interview in his U.S. Senate office on Capitol Hill this week that he is troubled by the bad advice President Donald Trump is getting from the military generals who surround him on matters of war.
“I think the president’s instincts, his instinct as he said the other day was to end the Afghan war and not to get more involved,” Paul told Breitbart News. “His instinct all along has been that the Iraq war was a mistake, and he’s said the same thing recently about the Afghan war. I think he still believes that, but I think the problem is he’s surrounded by people who talk in his ear that are from the military who all think it is a military solution. I just think that a war for the country of Afghanistan is not winnable because Afghanistan is not really a country; it’s a bunch of different tribes and they don’t really want to be a country. They’re only a country because the West drew a circle around them and said ‘hey, you’re Afghanistan. You’re a country.’ But they never really were, historically, a country.”
Trump, of course, broke a campaign promise recently by pledging a troop surge in Afghanistan—after campaigning all last year to end the war. Paul believes that Trump should stop trusting those who are biased on the issue in his inner circle, and go back to his “instincts” that he campaigned on last year.
“I think that we can hope that the president will go back to his instincts, and hire people around him who—I think he’s getting all one-sided advice right now and he’s not hearing from people who were on the campaign with him, who heard him say thousands and thousands of times that ‘we’re going to build things at home, we’re going to take care of our people first, we’re going to take care of America first. We’re going to rebuild our roads and bridges here at home,’” Paul said. “I think that’s one of the reasons he got elected—he told people he would take care of the people at home here in America, and that America would be first before Afghanistan, first before all the money we spend overseas. I think he still believes that. It’s just a matter of, I think, his supporters need to be loud and remind him of what he said and see if we can get him to harken back to it. But in Congress we have our own responsibility to try to assert ourselves and say ‘hey, we need to be involved in this war-making power.’”
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...lk-in-his-ear/
