When President Trump said on Twitter last week that all American troops in Afghanistan could come home by Christmas, he was reiterating a goal that had kept him away for years – and perhaps in the hope that when the military deployment ends, voters would Will give more credit for its messaging compared to its results.
Mr. Trump has long vowed to leave Afghanistan and, more broadly, what he calls the United States’ “endless wars” in the Middle East, revived a key theme from his 2016 campaign that some data suggests played a crucial role. In their election.
But with three months left in his first term, Mr. Trump has nowhere welcomed the last American soldier home. While he has withdrawn thousands of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, there are still thousands more risking their lives – a cause of apparent frustration for the president, hoping to influence the conflict with unprecedented, unprecedented results.
And yet his defenders insist that the U.S. He deserves credit for avoiding any new interventions, making him the first president in decades. Mr Trump has deployed thousands of additional troops in the Persian Gulf in response to growing tensions with Iran, which some analysts warn could lead to a hot war if re-elected. Is. It has also reduced the number of large American military bases in places like Qatar and Bahrain.
The missing part here is that thousands of troops are deployed throughout the Middle East, supporting ongoing operations in the region and beyond, said Dana Strule, a fellow at East Policy near the Washington Institute for Washington. “The president has called on the U.S. government in Saudi Arabia to Has also increased military presence. None of them were able to withdraw during his tenure. His oratory today is in the U.S., stationed in the Middle East. Does not match the reality of the forces. ”
Nevertheless, Mr. Trump believes that the prospect of progress toward eliminating the loss of most Americans abroad will also help the possibility of re-election on his “America First” platform. He and his campaign surrogates have repeated that message at every turn, from his rallies to the Republican National Convention in August on his Twitter account.
“I am withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan. I am bringing our troops back from Iraq. “We’ve gotten out of almost every place,” we said during a townhall event aired on ABC News in September. More than a week later, at a campaign rally, the president “promised to keep America away from these endless, ridiculous, stupid, foreign wars that you have never heard of.”
He reprimanded the theme in a tweet hours before returning to the White House from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last week. “Peace by force (bring our troops home). Vote!” Mr. Trump wrote, As the world is obsessed with its coronavirus diagnosis.
He now heads about 10,000 ground troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria combined, slightly less than the number he inherited at the end of the Obama administration. A Pentagon report said the number had risen to 26,000 by the end of 2017 due to deployments ordered by Mr. Trump.
After President Barack Obama went down to just 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump initiated orders in nearly 1,000,000 more countries in 2011, resulting in about 50,000 today. He also raised military levels in Syria, where American forces were fighting the Islamic State, before Mr. Obama’s advance from about 100 to the current level of 750. In Iraq, troop numbers have remained virtually the same since the end of Obama. Era until last month, when the Pentagon said it would cut its forces there by about half, 3,000.
According to a June 2017 academic study, four years ago there was a strong message of condemning and pledging foreign intervention, which in the 2001 election saw an important and meaningful relationship between the rate of military sacrifice of a community and support for Trump. The authors of the study, Douglas L. of Cornell University. Kriner and Francis X Shane of the University of Minnesota Law School concluded that if Mr. Trump had involved three states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – he would have suffered a “moderately low accident” rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue. And would have sent Hillary Clinton to the White House. “
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. makes less useful foil than Mrs. Clinton. Although Mr. Biden also supported the Iraq war, he is no less involved in the conflict than Mrs. Clinton was. Mr Biden was also skeptical of subsequent military action, arguing within the Obama administration that he opposed military action in Afghanistan in 2009 against US intervention in 2009 and US intervention in Libya in 2011.
On his campaign website, Mr. Biden focuses on his foreign policy platform on rebuilding the United States from within through measures such as education reform, more humane immigration policies and the protection of the right to vote. Echoing Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden also promised to “end the permanent wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us a lot of blood and treasure,” adding that he would “bring most of our troops home from Afghanistan and focus on them.” . Our mission on Al Qaeda and ISIS. “
Presumably to get a clear contrast with his opponent, Mr. Trump surprised senior military and civilian officials last week with an evening tweet speeding up his timeline for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“We should have the number of our brave men and women left to serve at home in Afghanistan by Christmas!” Mr. Trump wrote On Wednesday, the Afghan rebel group appears to have struck a February deal with the Taliban, which is committed to a full withdrawal from the United States next May, only if it meets key conditions. Mr Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told an audience that the United States would increase its troop numbers to 2,500 early next year, just hours after the tweet.
There was no official comment from the White House, but a senior administration official speaking in the background said Mr. Trump made a clear statement and the government is bound to run the commander-in-chief at will.
Senior military officials, however, say they have not received a formal formal order to reduce US forces in Afghanistan to less than 1,000 by the end of November.
Philip H., who served as coordinator of the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region in the Obama administration. Gorden tweeted evidence that Mr. Trump’s management of the military was not a matter of strategic thinking but of political impulse.
“You can’t give him credit for handling the drawdown successfully. It’s chaotic and inconsistent and completely unpredictable, “Mr. Gorden said. Mr. Gorden recalled the way Mr. Trump repeatedly pledged to withdraw a modest contingent of U.S. troops from Syria, urging Pentagon organizers to protect hundreds of troops fighting Russian and Iranian influence. Forced to fight for solutions, Mr. Trump is proud that the troops are now there to “keep the oil.”
Ed King, chairman and founder of Defense Priorities, said: “There are too few troops to achieve anything – and that’s enough to get you in trouble, as we’ve seen with the recent dust on patrols between US and Russian troops. ” , A foreign Washington group that calls for the presence of foreign small American troops. After seven U.S. soldiers were wounded when their armored vehicle was pushed by a Russian soldier in August, the Pentagon sent another 100 troops to the country, bringing the total number of Americans there to 600.
Mr King expressed frustration that Mr Trump had not made much progress towards removing all American troops from the battlefield. But he blamed others, like John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and added that “the hope is with the right personnel who can implement some of the rhetorical objectives that Trump has voiced, some of which can be really fruitful.” . ”
But others warn that in Trump’s second term, the opposite may be true.
Mr Gordon, author of a new book about failed US efforts to achieve “regime change” in the Middle East, said the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran was unlikely to overthrow the country’s government or force it to abandon its nuclear program. Program. That could force re-elected Mr. Trump to use military action to stop the Iranian bombing.
“And that will be the end of the‘ war forever ’,” Mr Gorden said.
Eric Smith contributed to the report.
