At Bloomberg View Eli Lake struggles to distinguish between Donald Trump’s Afghanistan policy and Barack Obama’s:
Every disclosure about the Trump administration’s forthcoming Afghanistan strategy triggers a chorus like a Passover seder: Why is this strategy different from all other strategies?
The goal is the same. Like President Barack Obama’s initial Afghanistan surge, the objective for Trump’s strategy is to force the Taliban into peace talks and to push for a negotiated settlement to the conflict on terms favorable to the elected government.
The means are essentially the same. Like Obama in setting his second-term policy, President Donald Trump has signaled he does not want to send a large force to take back the country, province by province.
He identifies some distinctions:
- Trump doesn’t want to “telegraph” U. S. moves
- Emphasis on blunting Russian and Iranian involvement
- Working more closely with India
- More flexibility granted to the military
Since I don’t think there a victory to be had in Afghanistan, at least not as we generally define victory, I think this is all temporizing.
Mostly repeating what Obama did 8 years ago. Didn’t work then. Wont work now. Wait, didn’t Trump say he knew more about this than the generals did? Now he is letting the generals run things?
Steve
Look at the bright side, the REALLY really really bright side of things — these people who know so much about governing Iraq and Afghanistan and keeping the costs down so the taxpayers won’t object and the American body count down so voters won’t notice — they weren’t around or didn’t count for much seventy years ago when we had to come up with governments for Germany and Japan and Korea and other places.
When it really counted, we and our allies had the strength necessary to govern half the world — and govern well. World War Three doesn’t seem to be in the offing, so maybe that these days we’re governed by clowns doesn’t matter.
Germany and Japan had a long history of functional government. Not trying to rain on your parade, but not really seeing much of analogy here.
Steve
I think what our Afghan policy really needs is more cowbell.
I think it has altogether too much cowbell.