Afghanistan is now officially James Mattis' war

Americans, supported by NATO forces, have failed to achieve Bush's initial lofty objectives

 

Donald Trump’s speech on his administration’s strategy in Afghanistan – in which he announced the introduction of an unspecified number of new combat troops, without a mission and without a specified end date, in a strategy that abandoned nation building but entailed war-fighting – clearly contravened the principles of his “America First” isolationist election campaign promises.

But for academics like me who spend their time studying American strategic policy, it provided few real surprises. Rather, it merely signaled the latest stage in the cycle of the longest-running war in U.S. history – what journalists and