Trump ignores the generals and it is why he should be praised
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Politics
PurpleStuff — 6 years ago(December 27, 2019 04:21 PM)
This article below details how Donald Trump bypassed his generals advice in Afghanistan by instead speaking directly to American soldiers on the ground there. They tell a very different story than what the generals did.
They said it was corrupt and unwinnable, and that the generals lie. It turns out the soldiers were right. We learned this year that the generals have been lying to us for years about progress in Afghanistan and that they really have no idea what they are doing there.
Donald Trump had the instincts to not trust them years ago and even called them liars to their face. I'm not a fan of much of what Donald Trump does, but this is something he deserves major credit for. The whole article is worth a read.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-navy-seal-private-meetings-afghanistan-war-2019-12
Months after taking office in 2017 and hoping to get a better understanding of America's longest war, President Donald Trump began taking meetings with enlisted US service members who deployed to Afghanistan.
"I want to sit down with some enlisted guys that have been there," Trump told advisers, according to the national security journalist Peter Bergen's latest book, "Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos."
"I don't want any generals in here. I don't want any officers," Trump added, according to Bergen's book, which was sourced from dozens of interviews with current and former White House officials and military officers. "I just want enlisted guys."
The meetings were intended for candid discussions about the war in Afghanistan, which was nearing its 16th year at the time, with US troops who served on the front lines.
Enlisted service members are typically viewed as the lifeline of the military — they are the men and women who conduct the specific tasks given to them by their officers, whose primary purpose is to lead. Compared with their commissioned counterparts, enlisted troops are also unencumbered by the day-to-day politics of the military and may have given an unfiltered assessment of the war in talks with their commander in chief.
"It's unwinnable. NATO's a joke. Nobody knows what they're doing," the SEALs said to Trump, according to Bergen's book. "We don't fight to win. The morale is terrible. It's totally corrupt."
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization joined the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and it led the International Security Assistance Force of as many as 130,000 troops until 2014. The organization's efforts in Afghanistan have been deeply criticized by those who point toward the continued presence of the Taliban in the region and the 2,400 American deaths in the conflict.
The new details surrounding Trump's conversation with the SEALs also come days after an extensive Washington Post investigation found that senior US officials had long publicly mischaracterized the war. Many of these senior officials, including US Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, were discovered to have held private reservations about the war effort even as the White House and Defense Department publicly advanced an optimistic outlook.
Two years before the publication of the Afghanistan Papers, the Navy SEALs appeared to concur with the views held by these senior military leaders.
"The officials in the government are awful people. They lie to you," the SEALs reportedly told Trump.
Trump appeared to be receptive to the opinions floated during the meeting and said, "I want to do this again," according to Bergen. Trump later met with four US Army and Air Force senior enlisted service members at the White House on July 18, 2017.
"I've heard plenty of ideas from a lot of people, but I want to hear it from the people on the ground," Trump said at a press conference at the time.
One day after the meeting, Trump was said to have met with senior US military officials in the Situation Room at the White House. In the meeting, Trump said the US service members he spoke with knew "a lot more than you generals," and added that "we're losing" in Afghanistan. -
polsci — 6 years ago(December 29, 2019 11:40 AM)
I give Donald Trump some credit here, but we are still in Afghanistan. After the Afghanistan papers came out and revealed that the military believes the Afghanistan war to be unwinnable, yet they mislead the public about it for years, we should have left then. It is a major story that no one really knows about.