Wait?
Didn’t President Trump say he wanted out of the place?
Now that Biden has pulled out?
He wants back IN?
The Taliban is allowing Americans to still leave the place….
They want relations with Americans and the West….
But Trump?
John Q. Private citizen wants to go back to war ?
Donald Trump spent years arguing that America’s “endless wars” were draining the country of resources and lives. But in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, that’s changed.
The former president has privately sensed an opening to attack his successor for the chaotic and bloody situation on the ground there. And in a statement last week, he declared that if the Taliban didn’t return mostly defunct American military equipment, “we should either go in with unequivocal Military force and get it, or at least bomb the hell out of it.”
It was a shift for Trump. In other statements, he had boasted that he would have executed a more “dignified” withdrawal from the 20-year war, largely in the context of defending the deal that his administration struck that set the conditions for the U.S. to ultimately leave Afghanistan in May. The call for more military confrontation came, notably, at a time when other Republicans — including some who served in his administration — were airing criticism of that original deal, arguing that it was problematic in its own right and that the party would be well served to track another course….
…
The argument over who got it right and wrong on Afghanistan — alongside Trump’s embrace of a future need for military intervention there — is a key point of a larger debate now happening within the Republican Party; a debate over just what its foreign policy should be. And it is revealing a more complicated reality about the past five years: despite proclamations otherwise, there has never been an easily-defined Trump doctrine….