First of all, it's the same as Bush's and Obama's plan: don't lose. Rex Tillerson, Trump's putative secretary of state, admitted this in an unusually candid press conference. Addressing the Taliban, Tillerson said, “You will not win a battlefield victory. We may not win one, but neither will you.”
Now, this is probably true. It's always been true.
The war in Afghanistan will not end unless there is an all-out invasion, waged not by one country, but a huge international coalition with troops from NATO and Muslim countries, removal of the Taliban from Pakistan, a peace treaty agreed by all Afghan parties, Pakistan and India, followed by massive post-war intervention at every level of society, assistance from all the surrounding countries and a commitment to keep thousands of international peacekeeping troops (mostly Muslim) there for fifty or a hundred years, similar to what we did in Germany, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea.
Despite all his bragging about what a great deal maker he is, Trump is totally incapable of negotiating something that big and complex, much less understanding it. Instead he announced that he has given up on nation building. He's only going to kill terrorists. He's going to give our soldiers free reign to do whatever the hell they want in Afghanistan.
This will increase the number of civilian deaths and Afghan military casualties due to friendly fire. But every time we kill a civilian or a government soldier we make their families into Taliban sympathizers. Every time we kill an Afghan family, we motivate another Afghan soldier to shoot Americans eating lunch in the mess hall.
Trump's screw-'em-all attitude gave us the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which was likely the turning point in the Iraq War. In that debacle Americans tortured Iraqis in humiliating ways -- and took pictures of the torture, laughing the whole time. After Blackwater's slaughter of Iraqi civilians in Nissour Square there was no way that Iraq would trust our forces to stay in the country. George W. Bush could not convince the Iraqis to renew the status of forces agreement, and agreed to remove all American troops from Iraq by 2011.
Republicans blamed Obama for not trying hard enough to keep our troops in Iraq, but after Nissour Square the Iraqis refused to give American troops immunity to prosecution for civilian deaths. At home it was clear that the American people were tired of our troops dying in Iraq getting stuck between Iraqi Sunni and Shiite factions who keep trying to kill each other. So Obama did what Trump was screaming for him to do: pull out of Iraq.
Trump rightly criticizes Pakistan for giving Taliban terrorists refuge across the border in Pakistan. I have said for 16 years that this war will go on forever until Pakistan stops supporting the Taliban. The problem is that Pakistan has neither the will nor the ability to root out those terrorists. And it's not just because they're cowards and incompetent. They want Afghanistan in chaos. They have been playing both sides of this war since the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Back then it was the United States and Pakistan backing the conservative Islamic revolutionaries of the proto-Taliban and Osama bin Laden's proto-Al Qaeda organization. We fought to take down a modern secular government backed by Trump's pals, the Russians. Women used to wear miniskirts in Kabul before we started meddling there. With our help Afghanistan collapsed into the Middle Ages.
Pakistan is starting to align with China against the United States. China wants rare earth metals in Afghanistan to supply their manufacturing. Instead of getting Asian countries to side with us against the Chinese, Trump canceled the Trans-Pacific trade pact, driving them into China's orbit.
But the biggest mistake Trump made in his speech was to brag about how he's going to get India to "help" in Afghanistan. Trump doesn't seem to understand that the main reason Pakistan has been letting the Taliban run riot in Afghanistan for almost 40 years is that they're afraid India will gain a foothold there.
Now Trump stupidly announces that he's going to actively pursue Pakistan's worst nightmare: handing Afghanistan over to its arch-enemy, India, and surrounding Pakistan with a sea of Indian allies.
Trump must think this is a smart negotiating tactic that will trick Pakistan into kowtowing to us. They almost certainly see this as a total betrayal by the United States. But they can't be surprised. They've seen how incompetent Trump has been dealing with the people in his own political party: as a political negotiator he has proven to be an idiot who talks big and can't get anything done because he can't pay attention, has no knowledge of the issues, has no follow through and keeps screwing over his allies.
Then Trump threatens to cancel foreign and military aid to Pakistan, making us seem that much less reliable, giving them no reason at all to stick with us. He is driving Pakistan further into China's orbit.
On other fronts, Trump is weakening the United States by alienating our NATO allies, who have been a big part of the war in Afghanistan. Trump has spent the last year trashing NATO, bullying Australia and lashing out at Canada over NAFTA, threatening to cancel it.
Given Trump's self-admitted reluctant embrace of the mission in Afghanistan, how much political capital will our NATO allies invest in helping Trump in a war that he hesitated for seven months to continue, which his most rabid supporters don't want him to fight at all? Will they let him go hang when he asks for more help, or will they demand something outrageous in exchange?
Trump can't stay on message for two days, much less two years. When Afghanistan starts going to hell (again), and Trump starts taking heat for dead American soldiers, corrupt Afghan politicians, and Afghan allies who hold boys as sex slaves, does anyone believe he won't cut and run, like he has every other time the going gets tough?
I outlined the only path to success in Afghanistan above, but no one is interested in doing the right thing: everyone has their own agenda to undercut their enemies, including Trump.
In the end Trump's plan isn't even a half measure, it's a recipe for failure. Worse, instead of just failing, it will almost certainly backfire, worsening the conflict and drawing other combatants into the war, perhaps Russia, Iran and India. In the end Trump himself is almost certain to bail on it.
Then, as now, Trump will start blaming everyone else for his mistakes, issue snarky Twitter rants, and demand resignations. You can't run a war that way. Or a country.
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