President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

The funny part is that I don't think the Afghanistan strategy would be a lot different if Hillary had been elected. It's a bagful of bad choices. Keep trying to stand up an Afghan government and press the Pakistanis to quit allowing their border to be a safe haven and to stop covertly assisting the Taliban.

The biggest problem is that you have the citified Afghans in Kabul against the Pashtuns up in the mountains, and that's another war that's been going on for hundreds of years and won't end soon no matter what we do.

 

They're not magic words. Using them won't solve the problem.

 

Afghanistan is not country where wars are won. We can base soldiers there, have a more effective presence there - but this strikes me as an unfocused strategy without clear goals. It isn't like intelligence has ID'd targets in the region and we've just taken a pass because we don't have the troop there. At best, the confidence in the possible targets hasn't justified the risk or reward of sending in troops.

 

Wait, so now those outlets are credible? I can't keep up. It's almost as if you only want news that supports your views.

Trump read a speech off a TelePrompter that someone else wrote. He's likely already forgotten about it and will say and do many contradictory things in the next few days.

 

Enough is enough! If we're still in Afghanistan in 2028, Russia will boycott the L.A. Olympics.

 

Obama did that shit for eight years. Who cares?

 

And we had eight years of Republicans taking shots at him for it.

 

I've never been one of those people who think if the US just stops fighting we'll have "peace." But I also have a hard time comprehending that a war we've already been fighting for 17 years can suddenly be "won" (whatever that means) with renewed political will. The consensus behind the Trump plan seems to be political will was why our efforts have flagged. There will be no "armistice" to mark the end of this conflict, so I'm guessing we win when the White House tells us we won.
I guess I just have a hard time thinking that Kelly, Mattis and McMaster - three people who have led troops on the ground in battle, studied, drafted and carried out war plans and know what works and what doesn't - now suddenly have the game plan to make victory a reality? That the whole counterinsurgency stuff was bunk?

Anyway - this the best read I've seen on the situation.
How the Brass Talked Another President into a Losing Strategy

 

This is starting to feel like how the no transgendered military members policy came to be. He's just announced what he wants done, the rest is just details for someone else to figure out.

 

He just wants more winning, but he's tired of thinking about how to do it. So he just ordered everybody to win more.

 

You are responding to an imaginary post.

(What we used to call a "strawman.")

 

With the surge, start expecting the stories where U.S. soldiers are being killed off in twosies, twosies.