Although he may send a few thousand more troops, there are
no signs of a major shift in strategy.
Trump’s announcement caps months of debate that illustrated
a basic problem in Trump’s Afghanistan decision: As a candidate he criticized the war and said the U.S. should quickly pull out, but he also campaigned on a vow to start winning wars. Exiting now, with the Taliban resurgent, would be impossible to sell as victory.
“I think there’s a relative certainty that the Afghan government would eventually fall,” says Mark Jacobson, an Army veteran and NATO’s former deputy representative in Kabul.
And while Trump has pledged to put “America First,” his national security advisers have warned that the Afghan forces are still far too weak to succeed without help. That is especially important as the Taliban advance and a squeezed Islamic State group looks for new havens beyond Syria and Iraq.
Even now, Afghan’s government controls just half the country.
Wary that the president is prone to last-minute decisions, officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department remained tight-lipped about the plan ahead of Trump’s 9 p.m. EDT televised address from Army’s Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall.
But early statements from advisers and military officials suggested
Trump had lined up behind a plan the Pentagon put forward earlier this year, involving sending close to 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to boost the roughly 8,400 there now. At its peak, the U.S. had roughly 100,000 forces there, under the Obama administration in 2010-2011.
The Pentagon does not claim the troop increase will end the conflict, but military officials maintain it could help stabilize the Afghan government and break a stalemate with the Taliban.
Connect With Us