The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump: "We Are Not Nation-Building Again" In Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 22, 2017

In a primetime address, the President announced his strategy for Afghanistan. Instead of nation-building, "we are killing terrorists." This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and National Security editor Phil Ewing. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or the morning news podcast from NPR. Up First is about 10 minutes produced and posted at 6 a.m. every weekday. Make it a part of your morning routine. Listen on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here to talk about President Trump's Monday night primetime address, announcing plans to increase the American troop presence in Afghanistan. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

And I'm Phil Ewing, NPR's National Security Editor. All right, so we're recording this at about 10 o'clock on Monday night. The president spoke about a half hour ago, saying that, frankly, Americans are weary of the war in Afghanistan. My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life, I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. But Trump said the U.S. still has key interests in Afghanistan,

and he's going to increase the troop presence there and try to turn things around. But Trump said he's increasing that military commitment with an America First spin. We are a partner and a friend, but we will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live or how to govern their own complex society. We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists. So, guys, there's a lot to sort through here. But I think first we need to talk about two big things. And, Tam, first big thing with you, this doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. And this is a speech that the president chose to deliver in prime time on all the TV networks after a really rocky stretch, to put it mildly. I mean, big speeches like this can serve as a reset. And I feel like it's fair to say that President Trump really needs a reset. Yeah. I mean, this comes after his working vacation that ended up being a working lots of controversy, including firing his advisor, Steve Bannon, someone who had been chief executive of Trump's campaign for a critical period starting in August of last year, and then was a top advisor in his White House, someone who had a lot of opinions about Afghanistan. And this also comes after last Tuesday, President Trump had this press

conference where he talked about what happened in Charlottesville, and basically seemed to be saying that there are multiple sides and gave comfort to white supremacists who cheered on that press conference and caused a lot of Republicans and others to try to distance themselves from the president on that in particular. And so this speech actually started seemingly alluding to what happened in Charlottesville. Yeah, that was really interesting. Let's take a listen to that for a bit. Heads up, this is about a minute and a half from the president's speech. The soldier understands what we as a nation too often forget,

that a wound inflicted upon a single member of our community is a wound inflicted upon us all. When one part of America hurts, we all hurt. And when one citizen suffers an injustice, we all suffer together. Loyalty to our nation demands loyalty to one another. Love for America requires love for all of its people. When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry, and no tolerance for hate. The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home. We cannot remain a force for peace in the world if we are not at peace

with each other. As we send our bravest to defeat our enemies overseas, and we will always win. Let us find the courage to heal our divisions within. So just to pull back the curtain a little bit, before the show, we were trying to decide which clips to play from that particular part of the speech and how long to hear from the president. And just like real talk, you're not in a position that often where you're like, oh, this is an eloquent thought from President Trump. Let's listen to his extended deep thought on this one topic. I mean, he's just an off the cup person. He's a Twitter person.

He's the person that you see at press conferences or statements like last week. He's not often giving these long Obama like thoughts and speeches. I just thought that was a really interesting moment. But Scott, this is teleprompter Trump. Yeah. And so many people like add on to the layers of conversation and that by saying he read a speech well, you're saying and therefore nothing else in the past matters and therefore it's totally reset. Like he gave a good speech here. He gave a good speech to Congress. But we saw what happened in Congress. He immediately tweeted about the wiretaps a couple of days later. Oh, yeah. Yes. So who knows what will happen in the next couple of days?

But this was a speech read from a teleprompter that included interesting allusions to, you know, his thought process and included, you know, the president of the United States coming out there and saying we are going to win. So, Phil, you're the national security guy here. That's right. To put it mildly, Afghanistan is not a place of the world that that many Americans seem to be regularly thinking about checking in on. I feel like that's fair to say. Yes, that is fair to say. In fact, it's a conflict in a part of the world that many Americans have deliberately not been paying attention to. And Trump's speech this evening is the end of a long chain of events that began earlier this year when the top commander in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, came to Congress and said in a very clear testimony, the war there is in a stalemate. I need thousands more troops. I need

billions of more dollars or we, the United States and our international allies, will lose. The Taliban insurgency that the U.S. and its allies have been fighting since 2001 is too strong, especially in the East and the South. It can beat back the government forces that the United States has been training and supporting and equipping all this time. And unless the United States takes some new action, which the president referred to in his speech tonight, the war will end in failure, and Trump doesn't want that to happen. So I think the last time Afghanistan was really in the headlines a lot was when President

Obama tried to do a surge there, tried to recreate that strategy that worked in Iraq, in Afghanistan. How many troops are in Afghanistan right now, and how does that compare to the height of the Obama administration? Under the height of the Obama era, there were more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. They were all over the place. They were on patrol. They were taking part in active operations, again, especially in the east and the south, where they would go out and find and kill the Taliban insurgents and then stake the claim to the ground that they had captured and hold it

and try and help the local Afghans continue to control that territory. That strategy and that approach changed over the Obama years as American troops began to float home. Instead, they would have the local Afghan forces do it instead. And they just have not proven adept at holding the ground that they captured or that the Americans captured. And they've been losing steadily ever since to these Taliban insurgents. So last big picture question before we dig into the announcement and the speech itself. We've focused so much on ISIS, and ISIS has been the group that's been doing all these terror attacks throughout Europe. But we went to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Where do those

two groups stand right now in terms of their strength, in terms of how much they've been able to claw back or not? Well, they're not as strong as they were before the U.S. invasion, but they're stronger than they've been in several years, and they sense that they have the momentum, the forward progress recently in this conflict. The Taliban leadership is able to take refuge in Pakistan, which means that it can be safe from much of the brunt of the American and Afghan government effort. And in the case of the terror group al-Qaeda, it's scattered and in much worse shape than it was certainly under the bin Laden era before the U.S. invasion. But at the same time, the U.S. intelligence community still says it remains potent. It still tries to launch operations. It still tries to work with groups elsewhere in the world, in North Africa, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria. And clearly, the president's decision in sending more troops to Afghanistan is predicated upon the danger that if the Taliban could use

Afghanistan again as a safe haven to launch attacks on the United States, that would be, in his view, an unacceptable danger. So you're talking about about 4,000 more troops. That is the news of today. Though, Tam, it is news that was not in the speech itself. And Trump made a point to say, I'm not going to get into that. Yeah. And that is classic Donald J. Trump. Before he was president, he was deeply critical of President Obama for sort of telegraphing what he was going to do when, you know, when President Obama announced the troop surge, he also announced that it was going to have a time certain to end. And of course, President Obama did the troop surge, he also announced that it was going to have a time certain to end. And of course, President Obama did move some of the artificial deadlines that

he put into place. President Trump in this speech said, there will be no artificial deadlines. This will be about conditions on the ground. And we will attack, he said, but I'm not going to tell you when. That is the single biggest change from Obama to Trump in terms of the U.S. outlook in Afghanistan. There'll still be a large troop presence. The number of American forces after this surge by the president is going to go to 12,500. Plus, there are thousands more contractors and diplomats and aid workers and other Americans in Afghanistan. With the difference that under Obama, the calculation was, I have to give the Afghan government a ticking clock and say that by a certain point in the future, your American assistance will be gone, which means you, the Afghan government in Kabul,

need to step up your efforts to take this conflict on your own. Now, President Trump is saying that timetable is now gone. American troops presumably will stay as long as they need to, which means that ISIS and the Taliban and other extremist insurgents groups can't wait out these deployments. There's no place on the calendar they can get to when the Americans will start to go away. So what's the best way to think about this increase? Because 8,500 to 12,500, is that just kind of tweaking the current strategy? Is that a substantial increase? Like, how should

I think about this? Well, the United States couldn't defeat the Taliban and ISIS and Al-Qaeda and these other groups with 100,000 troops over Obama because they can melt away into the populations because they can take safe haven in Pakistan. And this isn't a situation where the United States could just deliver an overwhelming amount of force and bring about a military defeat because Obama tried that. Essentially, what this boils down to is Trump calculating that the U.S. has to retain a baseline security commitment to Afghanistan in perpetuity, because if it doesn't, the government will collapse and all these extremist groups will come back. And not only would that cause chaos in the neighborhood in South Asia, but it also could create these ungoverned spaces that terrorists could use to attack the United States, winning by not losing.

And Phil, you mentioned the surge that Obama did. ISIS didn't even exist when that surge took place under President Obama. And now it does. President Trump in the speech is saying that the U.S. is going to defeat ISIS. It's going to defeat al Qaeda. It's going to prevent the Taliban from spreading in Afghanistan. And he's basically committing to a whole lot. One of our colleagues, Tom Bowman, who's one of the Pentagon correspondents, was talking to a senior military official today. He asks, so how does this end? How long is this going to go on? And the official says, well, how long have we been in Korea? Since 1953. So that gives you a sense of the scale that apparently

the White House and the Pentagon have begun to contemplate here. The difference is, sadly, for the United States, the places the American troops stayed after World War II in Korea became stable, prosperous, democratic allies. You're talking about Italy, you're talking about Germany, you're talking about South Korea. These are places that are quite nice and where a lot of people would like to live. That is not something that you're going to be able to say about Afghanistan anytime soon. So, Phil, what are these additional troops going to be doing? Because the president talks about, you know, we're going to kill terrorists, that we're going to attack.

But aren't the current troops on the ground just sort of advising and training the Afghan military? That's right. Most of them are. What's going to happen is most of the new troops are going to be focusing on training Afghan soldiers how to do basic things, how to shoot their rifle, how to shoot a mortar, how to move, shoot and communicate on the battlefield. A small number of them will be focused on counterterrorism missions, though. They'll be flying into a village in the middle of the night in a helicopter. They'll kick down a guy's door and put a bag over his head and drag him onto the helicopter and fly him back to a base to be interrogated. They'll also be using new authorities that the president talked about,

where they can use air power to go after terrorists with drone strikes or with human-piloted aircraft. So the impression we have is that they'll be doing what the forces in Afghanistan today are doing. They'll just be more of them doing more of it. So let's get back to the speech, because there was an interesting tension that was there the whole time. Trump saying, I initially wanted to pull out, but here's why we need to stay. Let's listen at length to a bit more of those two dual sides that Trump kept going back to. He did note pretty clearly that many Americans are frustrated by the fact that we're still in Afghanistan. I share the American people's frustration. I also share

their frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly, lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations. But Trump said after a lot of meetings with military advisors, he's on board with the idea that the U.S. needs to stay put and do more. And he laid out several different reasons for that, including this one. Second, the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable. 9-11, the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because that country was ruled by a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists.

A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al-Qaeda, would instantly fill. Trump then pointed out that you could argue that's exactly what happened in Iraq when the U.S. left Iraq. That was very popular with most voters, I think. And several years later, we've seen ISIS fill in the gaps. Right. It was classic Trump in the sense that all this is Obama's fault. He's trying to clean up Obama's mess. Obama made all these problems. And at one point in the speech, he said, I had a lot of problems that I inherited as president,

but I'm going to tackle them because that's what I was elected to do. The knock against Obama was that he went along with a plan for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011, which had been negotiated by his predecessor, George W. Bush. And then in the view of a lot of critics, that created a weak Iraqi state whose army that had been bankrolled by the United States collapsed, which gave rise to the Islamic State first in Syria and then in the north and west of Iraq, and became the huge war that the U.S. has also continued to fight in Iraq and Syria. And that's what Trump says could happen in Afghanistan if American troops withdrew.

You could just have the same thing happen again. Now, Tam, Trump said that this was the result of a lot of meetings and conversations with his military advisers. One advisor who had opinions on this and is no longer there as of Friday is Steve Bannon, who was the chief proponent of the America First strategy, that America can't solve all the world's problems, that America should have a smaller footprint. How do you think the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican Party or Bannon himself would have viewed tonight's speech? Well, let me look at the headline on Breitbart. Now, of course, Steve Bannon does not write all the headlines that we know of, but he returned almost immediately after leaving the

White House. Like hours later. Literally within hours was like, yeah, I'm back and I'm leading an editorial meeting here over at Breitbart, which is the conservative website that he led before joining Trump's campaign. Here is the top headline, big, bold, red letters. Trump reverses course, will send more troops to Afghanistan, defends flip-flop in somber speech, unlimited war. Unlimited war and flip-flop. Oh, gosh, the flip-flops. No, but so Breitbart News is at least partially not thrilled with what's going on

here. The Bannon school of thought and Trump's own thinking, according to his speech, was if this war is lost, if Afghanistan is a lost cause, why not rip off the bandaid and pull out American troops? And there's also kind of a geostrategic case to be made, according to some people in foreign policy circles who say that an American withdrawal would actually impose a lot of costs on Iran, Russia, and China, because they're the neighborhood hegemons in that part of the world. And they don't want to see a power vacuum. They don't want to see extremists. They don't want to see ISIS or Al Qaeda. Let them handle it, according to this view. Ultimately, that's not the way the Pentagon thought. And they advocated for this true plus up that the president agreed to.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk a little bit more about this strategy and also what happens next politically. Support for NPR and the following message come from Newsy. Newsy offers a fresh take on what's happening in the world through quick, smart, candid video news. Newsy is passionate about context, solutions, and challenging bias to bring facts, not speculation, to its video news coverage. Visit Newsy.com slash watch for the latest. I'm Linda Holtz. And I'm Stephen Thompson. There's more stuff to watch and read these days than any one person can get to. That's why we make Pop Culture Happy Hour. Twice a week, we sort through the

nonsense, share reactions, and give you the lowdown on what's worth your precious time and what's not. Find Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. So, Phil, the speech was about Afghanistan, but toward the end, President Trump talked a lot about Pakistan. And it seemed like less of Trump laying out a new strategy and more of saying, here's how tough the current situation is for the United States. Yeah, that's right. It's going to be an interesting test for him and his diplomats, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the State Department, to try and figure out a way to use diplomacy in addition to these additional forces in Afghanistan to try to make a change there.

The president described how he wants to put pressure on Pakistan, which is where the Taliban leadership is based safely over the border from the American troops that can get at them, and also India to try and change the calculus in South Asia somehow. The White House was very keen to make this be a South Asian strategy, not just an Afghanistan strategy. And as we're talking after his speech, we really don't know how these two nuclear armed arch nemeses, Pakistan and India, are going to respond to this call from the United States for them to change their behavior. President Trump wasn't really clear about how he wants the State Department and his diplomats to do that. He alluded to the military assistance the U.S. has given Pakistan for many years, many millions of dollars, billions of dollars. And he could try and reduce those payments to try to get the Pakistanis to change their behavior.

But other presidents have tried that before. And the Pakistanis have been very reluctant to cut off their support for extremist groups because for their own purposes, they make sense in terms of fighting in Afghanistan or potentially even fighting against India. Does he want India to take on the nation building role that he says the US isn't going to do? That's a great question. He had a section in his speech about the trade relationship between the United States and India. And he appeared to indicate that he wants in recompense for that some additional pressure or work by the Indian government as it relates to Pakistan and India. But that wasn't clear from the speech. And it's

going to be a very difficult tightrope to walk for the State Department to get out there and travel to these capitals and get diplomatic and governmental changes in addition to the military strategic changes that he can authorize on his own as commander in chief. So one more thing to talk about with this speech, and that is three key words that have become kind of a litmus test when it comes to talking about the terror issue. And Tam, those words are radical Islamic terrorism. And I have searched the transcript of the speech just to make sure we didn't miss it. And it's not there. And that matters because throughout the campaign and going into this year, not just Trump, but a lot of his key conservative allies always said that President Obama and Democrats were being

soft on the issue of terrorism by not saying these words. I don't know. It's not like they're magic words. But what was the argument there? And why does it matter that he did or did not say this? Well, and they sort of were magic words to candidate Trump that, you know, you have to say it, he would argue. And he didn't talk a lot about Afghanistan policy during the campaign. So it's interesting that in a speech where he talks about 9-11, and he talks about ISIS, and he talks about terrorism, he doesn't say those three words. In one of his other big speeches during his presidency, and there haven't been a bunch of these sort of set piece type speeches, but the one that he gave to a joint session of Congress, there was a big question about whether he would say radical Islamic terrorism. And when they put out the speech

excerpts, it wasn't in there. And there was a lot of like, oh, wow, he's not going to say it because there had been a fight about whether he would say it. And then ultimately, when he gave the speech, he did say those words. Well, now there's no telling exactly what changed. Steve Bannon is out. H.R. McMaster, the national security advisor, has been endorsed and reendorsed by the president and certainly has the support of Chief of Staff John Kelly. But it is just notable that those words didn't appear. So these words matter politically because they become this flashpoint. Phil, in the national security realm, does it matter or not,

whether you phrase it one way or the other when you're talking about this issue? It doesn't make a difference in terms of practical policy, but in terms of the messaging for his base or messaging for the voter that he wants to communicate with, that's the reason to include or not include these various phrases. In Trump's speech that we heard tonight, there were a lot of these codes and messages that were designed to resonate with Republicans who remember the Vietnam era frustration with micromanagement from Washington.

That was one of the knocks on the war or the nation building that we talked about earlier. And those are signals to people that he's repudiating his predecessors. He's repudiating a kind of war making that he has decried as being the wrong way to do things. And he's trying to tell people, we're not going to do that this time.

This time we're going to do things my way. So, Tam, you mentioned that speech to Congress at the beginning of the term. That was kind of a high water political mark for Trump, I think it's fair to say. In that speech before Congress, he was focused. He acted, frankly, much more like a traditional president than you had seen before or since. And I think that after all of the criticisms that Trump got over the last couple of weeks, especially from members of his own party, words like stability came up a lot, words like composure, the fact that he was speaking off the cuff. When he said those statements, kind like composure, the fact that he was speaking off the cuff when he said those

statements, kind of drawing comparisons, saying equal footing between white supremacists and the people protesting them. I think given all those criticisms and how much of them seem to circle back to his temperament, I think the fact that he gave this speech kind of talked about broad things a lot of people can agree on, spent a lot of time talking about unity and talking about the troops and patriotism and typical kind of checkmark things that presidents talk about. I feel like that probably could do him some short term good, especially in terms of the people who are inclined to support him, but who backed away.

I don't know. What do you think? I think tomorrow he is going to have a rally And that will be more of a test than this. Yeah, this is in Arizona. Tonight, he was standing in a room full of service members wearing military uniforms, American flags. This was like, if you're going to feel like a president of the United States in a moment, other than sitting behind the Resolute desk, it's probably standing in a room full of service members. So tomorrow night, President Trump is going to Arizona. He is going to the border. And then he is going to a rally in Phoenix. And this is a rally that is

sponsored by his campaign. And to me, there's a big question because the rally I went to with him in West Virginia a couple of weeks ago, right before he left on his working vacation, he stuck to the teleprompter the whole time and didn't make a ton of news and didn't tell random stories that he normally tells in the campaign. And the question I have about the Phoenix rally is, will it be entirely scripted or will we see campaign rally Trump? And there's two political hotspots that people have a lot of questions about in terms of what Trump's going to talk about in Arizona. And one of them is Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who's a Republican, but just published a book bashing Trump. And Trump has been

really critical of to the point where he's basically endorsed someone who's going to run against the flake in a primary next year. So that's one. And the other is the question that he might pardon Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who was just recently convicted. Trump told a Fox News reporter that he's thinking about it and then retweeted the story on his Twitter feed. So that would be an interesting move at a political rally that maybe would undo any forward progress he made tonight. And it's an interesting thing because it's not

clear that he really is considering pardoning Sheriff Joe. Aside from saying it, there's some reporting from the L.A. Times that Arpaio hadn't been invited to the rally and wasn't planning to attend. Can we just pause on the fact that you said he might not be considering it even though he said it? Like, I think we should still point out things like that. Like, he said it. He did say it, but it's not clear that it's really happening. And I don't know, like in a day, if he doesn't if he doesn't pardon Sheriff Sheriff Joe Arpaio, then is the conversation going to be, well, look at that. He showed restraint. And the other big question is what happens outside the rally? Things have obviously been tense across the country and we know a lot of counter protests are planned. Yeah, that's right.

And in fact, in Phoenix right now, where Trump will be speaking, there's been a big debate over removing Confederate statues, which was the big controversy that he waded into last week. He came out on the side of keeping them up. And he's going to be arriving in Phoenix and Arizona at a time when that debate is still very much alive. And there's the prospect of who knows what taking place inside or outside this arena where he speaks because there'll be protesters

and counter protesters and nobody knows what kind of scene that's going to be. Yeah. And Phoenix is not West Virginia. Phoenix is a diverse city that has had a lot of conflict about immigration and race and has this diverse population that is ready to protest. All right. Well, whatever happens in Phoenix, we will talk about it on Thursday in our weekly roundup. Before then, we will talk about it on your real live radio and writing about it on NPR.org. All right. That is it for tonight. Thanks for listening. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Phil Ewing, NPR's National Security Editor. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. We'll talk to you again on

Thursday.