Trump Just Can't Quit Afghanistan

IMAGINE BEING A U.S. citizen who believes that America should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan after nearly 18 years of increasingly pointless war.

- Matt Welch

Shouldn’t be too hard, since that describes 61 percent of Americans—and an eye-popping 69 percent of veterans—polled in October 2018 by YouGov.

But let’s also stipulate that by some glitch in the time-space continuum you become president of the United States, and that in one of your first major post-election interviews you observe that “nothing is going well” in Afghanistan. Wouldn’t you think those troops would be home more than two years after that?

This is where we find ourselves in the spring of 2019—with a president who accurately declares in his State of the Union address that “great nations do not fight endless wars,” even while 14,000 of the troops under his command still suffer and inflict death more than 200 months (and 2,300 Americans killed) after U.S. forces first overthrew the Taliban government.

“We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” Trump tweeted as far back as March 2013. “No more wasted lives.” He was right then, and presumably still leans that way now. To invert the old Madeleine Albright quote, what’s the point of these superb executive powers if you can’t use them to withdraw troops?