Trump Can Correct the Failures of the Bush and Obama Eras and End the Afghan War

Daniel L. Davis

Security, Middle East

Both of Trump’s predecessors had two terms each to make the “America first” call and both failed.

Across the street from my old headquarters building on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump addressed about fifteen hundred U.S. troops on a surprise Thanksgiving Day visit.  “We don’t play for ties,” he told the cheering crowd. “We are winning like we haven’t won in a long time.” The quickest and surest way Trump could turn that claim into ground-truth reality, however, would be to set the date for our full, professional, and speedy withdrawal.  Anything less will extend our losing streak and prevent “winning.”

The United States reopened talks with the Taliban, Trump told reporters, because the Taliban “wants to make a deal.” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, meanwhile, told AFP it was “way too early,” to talk about resuming talks, and that they would “give our official reaction later.” The last round of discussions with the Taliban lasted from October 2018 until Trump ended the talks this past September.  There is little reason to expect any new round of talks to be any more successful.

Rather than hoping to coax the Taliban to end the fighting on terms, we could accept—and there is little reason to believe that will ever happen—there should be one overriding objective for Trump: preserve American interests to the maximum extent possible by ending the war, on our terms, and militarily withdraw. Both of Trump’s predecessors had two terms each to make the “America first” call and both failed.

President George H. W. Bush’s initial commands in Afghanistan actually set achievable military objectives. In October 2001 he ordered the military, “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” Those twin objectives were both justified and successfully accomplished by early 2002.