• James Fallows in The Atlantic:

“It’s like any of the speeches that other politicians could have given about Afghanistan, which the pre-presidential Trump ridiculed for having no end point or concept of victory. He was right then.”

Mr. Fallows found President Trump’s previous resistance to intervention and “defiance of convention” when it came to Afghanistan to be “the most refreshing thing about him.” In his view, Mr. Trump’s “ ‘normal’ speech about Afghanistan is a shortcoming rather than an achievement.” Read more »

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• Fred Kaplan in Slate:

“But nowhere in the speech did Trump lay out how the pounding might lead to the winning of the war and the settling of the peace.”

Mr. Kaplan heard little in the way of an actual plan to win in Afghanistan on Monday night. As the president made clear in his speech, he is more interested in “killing terrorists” than “nation-building.” Which leads Mr. Kaplan to wonder, “What is he going to do about the Afghan nation?” After all, “killing is only the beginning of winning a war.” Read more »

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• Corey Robin in Jacobin:

“But while everyone will be talking about the ‘insanity’ of this presidency and this moment, there’ll be almost no discussion of the real insanity of this moment: that yet another US president continues, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, the longest war in US history.”

In this column, written just before the president’s address, Mr. Robin correctly predicted that many pundits will see his plan to increase troop levels and prolong the war in Afghanistan as “normal,” a conventional foreign policy from an unconventional president. The “real insanity,” he writes, is continuing to fight a war “simply because no US president wants to be the one who lost Afghanistan.” Read more »