President Trump wants to have won the war in Afghanistan, but doing something to make that happen is another story altogether. To an unserious president like Donald Trump, military victories are there for the taking, like elimination challenges, so it makes sense that there’s confusion on the part of the commander-in-chief with why he hasn’t been able to bring the hammer down on the 15-year-old conflict. To make matters worse, not only is the American-supported Afghan army not “winning” per se, it’s losing ground as the civilian government in Kabul appears to be losing its grip on the country. It’s a delicate situation that will require complex strategic thinking and leadership. What’s Donald Trump’s solution? Fire the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, naturally.
President Trump’s yearning to ax Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, comes via NBC News, which reported that Trump expressed his frustration with the war effort to his top military advisers during a situation room meeting on July 19th. During the two-hour meeting, Trump complained about U.S. allies in NATO, wondered aloud how the U.S. could swipe some Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, and then questioned whether his military advisers knew anything at all.
Defense Secretary James Mattis has been charged with coming up with a new strategy for the Afghanistan conflict and Trump has notably, some would say recklessly, ceded substantial control of military decision-making to his generals. So, what gives? Trump wants to know. Where’s his win? “We aren’t winning,” Trump complained, according to officials. “We are losing.” To help make his generals better understand what he was talking about the president of the United States compared U.S. policy in Afghanistan to the time his favorite restaurant in Manhattan closed down for renovations in the 1980s.
From NBC News:
Trump told his advisers that the restaurant, Manhattan’s elite ‘21’ Club, had shut its doors for a year and hired an expensive consultant to craft a plan for a renovation. After a year, Trump said, the consultant’s only suggestion was that the restaurant needed a bigger kitchen.
Officials said Trump kept stressing the idea that lousy advice cost the owner a year of lost business and that talking to the restaurant’s waiters instead might have yielded a better result. He also said the tendency is to assume if someone isn’t a three-star general he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and that in his own experience in business talking to low-ranking workers has gotten him better outcomes.
“One senior administration official said the president mentioned the restaurant in an attempt to convey to his advisers that sometimes the best advice comes from those working day-to-day in a place, rather than those who are farther removed,” according to NBC News. “The clear message if you heard the story was: high-priced consultants or high-priced anybody, expensive supposedly-big-brained people, but who are physically far from the source of the problem, often give you much worse advice than the supposedly low-ranking guys who are right there,” the official said.
Yeah, thanks official, I think we get it.
