A U.S.–Taliban deal will leave many American troops in Afghanistan. "Under the proposed deal, the initial withdrawal would include roughly 5,000 of the 14,000 U.S. troops in the country," The Washington Post reported Thursday.
"We're going to keep a presence there," Trump told Fox News' Brian Kilmeade yesterday. "We're reducing that presence very substantially. We're not fighting a war over there. We're just policemen."
But this comes after an announcement from Trump last December that the U.S. would be withdrawing 7,000 from Afghanistan within weeks. That didn't pan out. The new plan is the latest in what's becoming a Trumpian habit: promising a different path than his predecessors in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, only to cave to the more militaristic forces in his party and in the broader media/corporate/political establishment.
In this case, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has been one of the harshest critics of Trump's impulses to pull back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the Middle East. "Graham, one of Trump's closest allies on Capitol Hill, has repeatedly warned the president not to trust the Taliban to control al-Qaeda and other militant groups in Afghanistan," notes the Post.
Like Bolton, spending money that California will not produce in taxes. So the more these dimwits drive up the deficit, the greater the tax rebellion, and Graham is fairly clueless.
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