It has been months in the making and now President Trump is building up the drama in anticipation, with the White House saying that the commander in chief will announce “an update on the path forward for America’s engagement in Afghanistan and South Asia” on Monday at 9 p.m. The setting will be made for television as Trump is set to deliver his message directly to armed forces at the Fort Myer military base in Arlington, Virginia.
Although the White House is remaining tight lipped, Trump is expected to announce an increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The address will come after top Pentagon and White House officials considered whether the U.S. military needs to take a more aggressive role in Afghanistan and add to its current footprint of around 8,400 troops. Earlier, reports claimed Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was set to push for a plan to deploy as many as 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
On Sunday, Mattis said that Trump had come to a decision on the country’s strategy for Afghanistan, but he refused to provide any details. “I am very comfortable that the strategic process was sufficiently rigorous and did not go in with a pre-set position,” Mattis told reporters travelling with him to Jordan. “The president has made a decision. As he said, he wants to be the one to announce it to the American people.” The review was led by National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who has lots of experience in Afghanistan.
Trump took to Twitter on Saturday to announce that the strategy for Afghanistan was one of the issues he decided with top officials at Camp David on Friday.
Earlier this year, Mattis famously told a Senate panel that the United States is “not winning in Afghanistan.” At the time Sen. John McCain harshly questioned Mattis about the lack of a strategy for the war. “We want a strategy, and I don’t think that’s a hell of a lot to ask,” McCain said at the June hearing. “We’re now six months into this administration. We still haven’t got a strategy for Afghanistan. It makes it hard for us to support you when we don’t have a strategy. We know what the strategy was for the last eight years: Don’t lose.”
If the president does end up approving more troops for Afghanistan it would mark quite a change in his way of thinking from a few years ago. Trump had advocated for U.S. troops to “leave Afghanistan immediately” to prevent “more wasted lives.”
