It was clear from watching, not just the words of that part of the speech but his awkwardness in delivering it that he has no idea of the history of India and Pakistan, the conflict over Kashmir and their respective relations with the US. I think he thinks India can pressure Pakistan as (he thinks) China can pressure North Korea.
It’s possible McMaster did that not because he thinks it’s good evidence, but because he knows it’s far more likely to get through to Trump than anything that’s, y’know, actually relevant. Because Trump doesn’t do subtlety. Cause-and-effect has to be spelled out very plainly for him.
Sure he does! We are going to “win”…by sacrificing more U.S. military personnel in a (civil) war we never should have gotten involved with in the first place. Thanks again, Bush/Cheney, heckuva job.
I think McMaster could have made a better argument if that staged photo showed those women in halter-tops.
BTW, women in Iran were able to dress that "western’ until very recently, as well. The repression of women seems to be most affluent in the culture of our strongest ally in the ME, Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi dress code for women is being implemented full-force in Paul Ryan’s office. Yup. Mr. Ryan is learning quite a lot from those Saudis.
Women in Baghdad dressed in Western attire before we invaded. They had a lot of rights in Iraq since it was the only goddamn secular dictatorship in the Middle East.
So naturally we destroyed it and replaced it with ISIS.
All of this crap about Trump doing this against his better judgement, and having been dragged to this decision by the generals is being circulated for one purpose: so if it fails, or if anything goes badly, Trump can lay the blame on the generals and remain untouched by it. Anything positive happens, he takes the credit.
All trump had to hear that Afghanistan have unlimited mineral resource (same as Cheney). There was, however, one new thing that jumped out in the latter half of the speech:
“In this struggle, the heaviest burden will continue to be borne by the good people of Afghanistan and their courageous armed forces. As the prime minister of Afghanistan has promised, we are going to participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us.”
That’s going to require some additional explanation from the White House. The president hopes to recoup some of the costs of the conflict … how exactly?
Afghanistan has over 1400 mineral fields, containing barite, chromite, coal, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, precious and semi-precious stones, salt, sulfur, talc, zinc among many other minerals.
Mining in Afghanistan - Wikipedia
There is a reason there are no details to go with this war plan. This is not a plan for the Afghanistan war. This is a ruse to go to war against Iran using Afghanistan as a base.