The former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, explains that President Trump has sentenced more soldiers and Marines to death by listening to misguided generals rather than his gut instinct on Afghanistan. Scheuer writes:
Mr. President, your ghastly Afghanistan address on 21 August 2017 contained the same old nonsense of your predecessors, such as the mujahedin are thugs and losers who have nothing to with Islam, and Pakistan is the key to Afghanistan. It also contained a death sentence for more of our soldiers and Marines, and the utter double crossing of those non-interventionists who voted for you.
You obviously talked to no American who knows something about Afghanistan, and listened to generals who have lost the Iraq and Afghan wars…
Good God, man, where were your wits? Did you even bother to ask the generals why, in nearly seventeen years, they have not been able to secure the Afghan capital of Kabul?…
Did they tell you that if the United States simply gets out of the way in Afghanistan, the Chinese will soon be tied down there, wasting lives and money until they realize that they are defeated?….
Did they tell you that , if the United States leaves Afghanistan, there is every chance that China and Russia will, before long, contain themselves by becoming militarily tied down in an intractable Islamist insurgency in Central Asia and Afghanistan, thereby steadily wasting lives and money, limiting their ability to cause trouble elsewhere in the world, and increasing the already existing Islamist unrest in Central Asia and western China?….
You are the last shot for America First, Mr. President; that is an enormous responsibility but one you sought. Your performance is likely to determine the fate of the republic, and you were elected because the citizenry sensed that and trusted your rhetoric and your instincts. Now get to work and depend on your commonsense, not the advice of generals who never have and never will win anything.
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