Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) reviewed President Trump’s speech on Afghanistan strategy with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily.
DeSantis looked back to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, when “he would always rail against having initially gone into Iraq, but he also said, ‘Look, once we were in, Obama made a huge mistake to pull us out, allowing ISIS to come in and really set up a safe haven.’”
“He’s actually done a good job as president to help destroy ISIS in that region,” DeSantis said of Trump. “I thought about that because in Afghanistan, as he admitted when he gave the speech, his instincts are we’ve been there a long time, we’ve been spinning our wheels, we need to get out and worry about what’s going on here at home. But I think what drove him was, I think he fears creating more space for terrorists in that area, the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, if he were to just simply announce a withdrawal.”
“Overall, the strategy he outlined I think is better than Obama, what Obama did in every respect, including – just as somebody who has been on the ground in these situations – the ability to unshackle our military from restrictive rules of engagement. If you’re going to put them in harm’s way, don’t do the Obama plan where if they see a terrorist, they might not even be able to shoot the terrorist. You’ve got to say, ‘Hey, you’re at war, go kill the enemy,’” he said. (DeSantis served in the U.S. Navy, and was deployed to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge.)
“I think enlisting India, leveraging India, I think is smart. It should have been done a long time ago, being frank and clear-eyed about Pakistan,” he added.
“I think the issue will be though, in terms of whether it’s successful or not, is we can do everything right, we can achieve everything that we personally have control over as Americans. The strategy does still seem to hinge on the Afghan government being in control, and Afghan fighting forces being at a level that – I don’t know that that will get there. And so I think the drawback was just the realization that, hey, we’re still hoping and praying that Afghanistan will be a decent government. History just hasn’t suggested that that’s going to happen,” said DeSantis.
DeSantis agreed with Marlow that Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be compared on an exact “one to one” basis.
“In some ways, there is more danger in the Afghan area, and then in other ways you had – when I was in Iraq, for example, I was in the Sunni Arab area, and it was the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq during the troop surge that was the big deal. A lot of those guys that weren’t killed fled to Syria, and then they started recruiting there in that eastern part of Syria. Well, once U.S. forces moved out, it was very easy for them to come back in,” he explained.
“If you look in the Afghanistan situation, the movement to and from Pakistan, and then the Pakistani government being in possession of nuclear weapons – if things get really bad there, that could have some really far-flung implications,” he warned.
DeSantis summed up by saying that while the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are not perfectly comparable, “there are dangers if you allow terrorists to really start running the show in Afghanistan.”
“And look, the number of troops we’re talking about here – I think the mission should drive the troops, so it’s like the number of troops in and of itself isn’t the most important thing, it’s what the mission is,” he said, noting that over 100,000 troops were in Afghanistan during the middle portion of President Obama’s term.
“We’re going to be down into 15,000. If you’re doing it right, then you’ll have more there to provide background stability, rather than necessarily having enemy forces shooting at them all the time. We can get this right initially, really overwhelm the enemy,” he advised. “In that sense it’s similar to Iraq because at the time in 2009, 2010, 2011, our forces were really just a stability force in case things got out of hand. They were not necessarily going outside the wires much.”
“I think we can get to that point in Afghanistan. Having troops in that situation to me is less concerning than if we’re putting them into combat every day with restrictive rules of engagement,” DeSantis said.
Marlow noted that President Trump did not mention Islam or Islamic terrorism at all in his speech on Monday night.
“I think it was more of a military speech. I don’t think that that was intentional,” DeSantis commented.
“If it was intentional, then that obviously is concerning because when you’re talking about that part of the world, then I think this president has always realized that yes, there is a battle with individual terrorists, or a terrorist cell that wants to do physical harm to people, but there’s also a step below that, an ideological foundation that really breeds the terrorists,” he continued.
“You ignore that at your peril. You simply will not be able to ultimately defeat the jihad if you’re not understanding that,” he cautioned.
“One of the things I think should have been done already by this administration is to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist group,” DeSantis advised. “You know, the Brotherhood’s reach is more significant in kind of the heart of the Middle East, but if you look at what’s going on in Europe, the Brotherhood has laid the foundation for a lot of these people who are over there committing terrorist attacks.”
“If the policy is in fact divorced from understanding that, then I think that’s going to be a big negative. But I just think the setting was more of the military setting, and he wanted to amount those military changes. This is a president that instinctively understands that the ideology is a big problem,” he said.
Another aspect of Afghanistan that was not discussed in President Trump’s speech was the booming opium trade, which provides the Taliban with enormous financial resources.
DeSantis agreed that drug production has increased by “huge percentages over the last four or five years,” becoming “a major lifeline to everyone in Afghanistan that is up to bad things.” He said failing to deal with the drug trade would be a “major hole” in any Afghanistan strategy moving forward.
When Marlow asked why Afghanistan is suddenly a top agenda item for President Trump, after barely surfacing as an issue during the 2016 campaign, DeSantis said “the decision was thrust upon him.”
“As he mentioned in the speech, he inherited a messy situation from Obama. Obama campaigned on Afghanistan being the good war, said he was going to deal with it,” DeSantis recalled. “He did plus-up the troops. We took a lot more casualties under Obama than we had under Bush. But Obama’s heart was never in it. I think he really went through the motions on Afghanistan.”
He said Afghanistan was a problem President Trump could not have ignored.
“I think he went through a review that challenged some of his instincts, and ultimately I think was very frank about his decision, having been facts when you’re sitting behind the Oval Office that you’ve got to act,” he said. “If this consumes everything else – I don’t think it needs to, but if it does, then obviously that’s going to be something that is going to make it more difficult for him to come through on his campaign promises.”
“Here’s the thing: that Afghanistan strategy should not excuse the Senate from failing to repeal and replace Obamacare,” he added. “It should not excuse the Congress from providing funding in this funding bill coming up in September for construction of the border wall. It should not excuse Congress for failing on tax reform.”
“In that sense, the agenda is there, but a lot of this is on Congress. Some of the senators who have given him a lot of problems, like Senator McCain, they’re happy. They think it was a good decision, what he did. So maybe they’ll be willing to work a little more constructively on health care, on the wall, and some of these other issues that are always trying to be a thorn in the president’s side,” DeSantis suggested.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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