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Good decisions all around, even though we'll offer a defense of the original Bush focus

Trump on new Afghanistan strategy: We are no longer nation-building, we're killing terrorists



President Trump has apparently been doing more behind the scenes than approving of Nazis. (Right, he's not doing that at all, contrary to what you've been led to believe.) In recent months, the president has been huddling with his top military and foreign policy advisors trying to determine a way forward on Afghanistan. It's about time. We've been there nearly 16 years and we still haven't won. It's the longest war in U.S. history, and while our total number of war deaths is remarkably low for a conflict that long (less than 2,500), it's unacceptable that a single one of those deaths would have occurred in the execution of a battle we can't win, or don't know how to win. So after months of studying the situation and considering options, President Trump (who openly acknowledged his first instinct was to simply get out), addressed the nation last night with a new way forward. It's hard to find a single decision he announced last night that isn't a good one:
The problem in Afghanistan has always been the nature of the country itself, rather than our ability to win military battles. Given a chance to engage the enemy with the full force of our power, there is no enemy in that region who can go head-to-head with us and win. But because of the tribal divisions and the backward economic realities that characterize much of the country, it's extremely difficult to achieve our larger goal of making sure Afghanistan never again becomes a haven and a launching pad for terrorists. Yet that was the stated objective of George W. Bush when we first when in during October 2001, just under a month after 9/11. Driving the Taliban from power was a worthy goal, and we achieved it quickly. But we also found out quickly that driving the bad guys from official positions of authority is not the end of the battle in a place like Afghanistan, where it's extremely difficult to maintain law and order throughout the country because of loyalties to tribal factions and warlords. Over the course of 16 years, we still haven't found and successfully executed a strategy to accomplish this with finality. You can maintain the upper hand at a moment in time, but can you ever really win in the sense that once you go home the situation won't revert to the status quo ante prior to 9/11? I'm not sure President Trump laid out a clear and unmistakable path to victory by that definition, but what he did do is refocus our efforts on the things we can do well. We can kill terrorists when and where we can get to them. We can take territory when it's strategically feasible. And we can help the Afghans with economic development efforts, but we're not going to take primary responsibility for it. Expecting more out of India and Pakistan makes sense as well, as both countries have a lot at stake in the pursuit of a stable Afghanistan.

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A lot of the strategy was not specific, which is as it should be. We don't know all the restrictions placed on the military by Obama and now lifted by Trump, but Obama routinely made decisions concerning Afghanistan that were political rather than strategic. The most blatant of these was his advance announcement of a total pullout in 2013, which merely alerted the enemy to the time it would need to wait before overrunning its targets. Democrats used to claim while we were also in Iraq that Afghanistan was the "good war" because "that's who attacked us on 9/11." They didn't really believe that. It was merely a way to bludgeon the Bush Administration. Once they were completely in charge they didn't want to commit themselves to victory in either battle, and that's why ISIS was able to take so much of Iraq, and why we're 16 years into Afghanistan and we still don't know how to win. Finally, I want to say a word in defense of what's been derisively called nation-building. President Bush believed a key root of Islamic terrorism was the fact that people grew up under oppressive regimes where they learned to be radicalized. Bush believed the spread of freedom and democracy in these regions would seriously weaken the impulse to such radicalism. I continue to believe he was not wrong about that. I also think a lot of people misunderstood how he thought it needed to happen. Bush saw this as a very long-term effort that would see U.S. policy over time choose priorities large and small that reward steps toward democracy and sanction moves in the other direction. That doesn't mean we were trying to make every one of these countries just like the United States. But once we made decisions like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan to use military force to take down oppressive regimes, we owned the mess there and felt the need to take responsibility for building something better. That proved to be an endeavor for which we were not that well prepared, and the level of resistance I think surprised the Bush team.

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I still think U.S. foreign policy should favor free, democratic regimes, and I suspect that under Trump it will. But he's right that our military focus has to be on killing terrorists. Even with all that, I wish I could more clearly envision what victory in Afghanistan looks like. I guess it's a nation with a rapidly growing economy, higher levels of education, a stable government and capable law enforcement that makes it implausible for terrorist outfits to operate with impunity. Aside from killing the people who don't want this, I'm not sure how much the United States can do to bring it about. The Afghans have to do it. Economic pressure from other nations will help, but it's their country. The Soviets found that out in the '80s and we've been finding it out since 2001. It's time to see if they can do it.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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