Politics often does not make sense, so I’m not sure why that should be the standard for judging this.
I suspect the driving motivation for Trump is probably something along the lines of “I campaigned on killing terrorists, and so we’re not going to quit killing them in Afghanistan. In fact, we’re going to kill more of them, and faster.”
I doubt he personally has a solid enough grasp of geography and combat ranges of our attack aircraft to appreciate any tangential benefit that may be accrued by maintaining airbases east of Iran, but some of his military advisers may have clued him in on that.
America has to stay there to protect, I mean destroy the poppy fields.
What we need is a permanent deployment of robot soldiers. To hell with Elon Musk.
As someone who spends a significant part of my days working closely with developers, I’d be more worried about another human-led organization hacking the robot soldiers and turning them against us than them evolving into SkyNet and Terminators on their own. That’s probably because I’ve spent umpteen hours fixing shitty code with security holes, and have never really seen any of that shitty code evolve itself into anything better than shitty code.
This was a couple years before the campaign, but I don’t think his message during the campaign was markedly different:
“We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!”
Eventually we’re going to go that way of every other foreign invader since Alexander the Great.
Were not that far from the point where we’ll be sending boys (& girls) over there who weren’t even born when the when the war started. 
Apparently, the Prez is going to continue on in Afghanistan as usual…but with more hand gestures.
I actually trusted Trump about this sort of thing during the campaign. Not enough for me to vote for him (given his serious issues both in terms of ideology and personal ethics), but enough for me to withhold my vote from Clinton and figure Trump wouldn’t much worse than Clinton would have been.
Well, I guess he was lying about isolationism the same way he’s lied about a lot of other things over a long and happy life.
Donald has decided to send in more troops:
He also seems to be picking a fight with Pakistan; it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.
Good job, Donald.
beep Agreed beep
Are you surprised to hear that that’s not what he said?? He said, as much as I can parse, that they would take a condition based rather than a time based approach so we would leave when the time was right and while he might send in more troops he wasn’t going to tell. And a lot of blustering about Pakistan helping. And India. They can work together to help Make America Great Again. And no nation building.
And lots of blah blah blah about how great the troops are and how terrorists should cower in fear and how we should stop yelling at each other because of the troops.
But I think they did something to make his hair look more human. And I got caught up in watching his hands … it isn’t so much that the HANDS are small, they’re smallish but not freakish - but the fingers are about half the size of normal fingers.
As long as it’s just a counter terror mission there’s no reason to ever leave other than Afghanistan no longer being a haven for terrorists. That’s the nature of war when you’re attacked: you fight until you win, no matter how long that takes. Should we have stopped WWII after Guadalcanal because it was too hard? We seem to have this impression that we can choose when wars end without winning them. Just decide, “eh, we don’t feel like it anymore.” Doesn’t work that way. If we allow Afghanistan to become as luxurious a haven as it was pre-9/11, we’ll get attacked from there again and we’ll just end up going back. We’ve got a similar problem in Iraq, we leave, we have to go back because the job wasn’t finished.
All that being said, I’m confused about Trump’s “strategy”, but then I guess I shouldn’t expect him to have one. None of the three Presidents who have presided over this war have had a clear mission for the troops.
I had an inkling that he might be sending more troops. A friend of mine told me on Friday that he was getting deployed to Afghanistan in September.
The first rule of Trump Club is…you don’t talk about Trump Club.
Nothing substantive except threatening Pakistan. Why am I not surprised?
Afghanistan: Where empires go to die.
As I indicated, he doesn’t decide in this case. You think the American war machine can be turned on and off like a switch ? I doubt even if he would be allowed to nuke NK without approval. Whatever a president wants goes through a lot of ‘advisers’.
Anyway the pacific sites like Anti-War and CounterPunch still feel Hillary was the greater risk — for foreigners .
An article from the latter after the election:
*Neither is there much point in debating which of the two, Clinton or Trump, actually was the lesser evil.
For most liberals, the answer is obvious: Hillary was. I disagreed – mainly, but not only, because I thought that she was the more likely of the two to unleash a Third World War. I still do; and that trumps all.
Trump is hardly a pacifist or an anti-imperialist, but while running for office, he did, for the most part, advance anti-interventionist positions. Who knows if he meant any of it – like any good huckster, he says what he intuits his marks want to hear, and now that the campaign is over, he seems to agree with whomever he spoke with last.*
Must We Now Rethink the Hillary Question? Absolutely, Not
and
*Libya, Syria and Iraq are the jewels in the crown of the Queen of Chaos, as Diana Johnstone has aptly described her. But nearly everything that the Madam Secretary did at State went awry. She is the Empress of Ineptitude too.
And yet, conventional wisdom has it that she is a foreign policy whiz.
Conventional wisdom is often wrong, but this is extreme. How did it come about that the conventional wisdom and the truth got to be so wildly out of line?*
Hillary: Ordinarily Awful or Uncommonly Awful?
At least Trumpo the Magnificent hasn’t started any more new wars.
That ain’t new. And not unexpected in Pakistan.
Which means tha Pakistan is likely tomove closer to Russia and China.
I had to laugh when Trump stated he wanted more Indian involvement in Afghanistan. Clearly the Donald (or more likley his advisors) have been spending too much time with the erstwhile Afghan exiles. Yes, a Hinduvata Government in India, one which is bannig cow slaughter is going to helpwin over a country of conservative muslims.