In a televised address to troops at Fort Myer in Virginia on Monday
night, Trump outlined what he claimed was a new strategy for Afghanistan
and south Asia. But he did not say how many more troops he would send,
how long they would stay, or what their ultimate objective was.
Before standing for the presidency and privately since entering the Oval Office, Trump had argued for a military withdrawal, but in his speech he made a rare admission that he had changed his mind. He avoided saying directly that his about-turn would lead to more soldiers being sent to Afghanistan, but his speech made clear that would be the outcome.
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“The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory,” Trump said. “They deserve the tools they need, and the trust they have earned, to fight and to win.”
In June the Trump White House gave the Pentagon authority to deploy another 4,000 more troops to bolster the 8,400 there already, but the defence secretary, James Mattis, delayed ordering the deployment until there was a clearer expression of the administration’s strategy.
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In his own statement issued after Trump’s speech Mattis said he had ordered US military chiefs to “make preparations to carry out the president’s strategy” and that he would be talking to Nato allies, “several of which have also committed to increasing their troop numbers”.
“Together, we will assist the Afghan security forces to destroy the terrorist hub,” Mattis said.
Note EU-Digest: There they go again, as if they have not learned that US military "interventions or expansions" for the sake of "democracy", as the US likes to call it, has not worked anywhere in the world, with very few exceptions. In Europe the ongoing military operations have only resulted in a massive refugee problem for the EU and Turkey.
Unfortunately many of the EU member states still continue to support these totally destructive US military policies in the Middle East. As someone said recently: "The sentence "collateral damage" to cover-up millions of innocent civilians killed in US bombing raids was invented by the US military".
Democracy never can come out of the barrel of a gun, it only comes by example and war is not one of those examples.
Hopefully the EU will stop supporting these unwinnable wars.
Read more: Trump to expand US military intervention in Afghanistan | US news | The Guardian
