Monday on CNN’s “The Lead,” while discussing President Donald Trump’s upcoming speech on Afghanistan, former CIA and NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden said Trump’s strategy in Afghanistan was likely “the decision that President Obama would have made.”
Hayden said, “You know what the goods news is? It’s that the decision the president is going to announce tonight is the product of what I would call regular order. This isn’t a tweet in the middle of the night. This is a result of long deliberations within the national security council, discussions with the president, a decision by the president. And now the president is going to lay out the decision in a full-fledged speech so that he can put it into a broader context. So that’s the good news with regard to what’s happening tonight.”
He added, “Frankly, this is probably the decision that President Obama would have made, harvesting the lessons for his 2011 decision in Iraq, but he delayed it. He deferred to the incoming administration for what I think are quite legitimate reasons. But now we have President Trump, who quite often campaigned with a completely different tone, embracing what I think the previous administration would have done.”
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