Notes Made During the President's Speech on Afghanistan

I've made no effort to edit or make sense of this. It's just what I jotted down at the time.

He is in his reading-carefully-from-the-teleprompter mode.

"Horrors on the scale of September 11, and we can never forget that, have not been repeated on our shores."

"The American people are weary of war without victory."

Criticized nation building, not interested in re-creating other countries so that they are "in our own image."

His first instinct was "to pull out," but ... he has come to distrust his instincts.

Three conclusions

1) our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome...

2) consequences of a rapid exit are predictable and unacceptable. [But isn't this what HRC was saying? She took flak on that both from Sanders and then from Trump himself.]

3) security threats we face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense.

With regard to the "broader region," he soon brings in Pakistan and a little later brings in India.

US can't allow safe havens for terrorists and can't allow nuclear materials to get into their hands.

"Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary time tables ..." must be our guide.

It may be possible to have a "political settlement" that includes "elements of the Taliban," though nobody knows whether that can happen.

He comes back to Pakistan, and how "we can no longer be silent" about how it has been harboring criminals and terrorists. "The Pakistani people have suffered greatly from terrorism and extremism."

The US has been paying the govt there, while they are "housing the very terrorists that we are fighting." That will change.

Further development of a strategic relationship with India. India makes "billions of dollars in trade" with the US, and Trump thinks the US is entitled to greater cooperation from them.

Our troops "will fight to win" he says, then repeats the phrase. Question: did it appear twice here in the text.

Calls his view "principled realism," which sounds like he wants it to be The Take-Away.

"The government of Afghanistan must cover their share of the ... burden." The patience of the US government "is not unlimited."

My take-away? Trump wants to bully both Pakistan and India into bearing the onus of the war in Afghanistan. In the case of India, he is proposing to use the threat of a trade war to do the bullying.

The good this will do? None whatsoever. But our President is not motivated by any desire to accomplish anything, other than attention and ego gratification.

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