Trump Needs an Afghanistan Plan

The news from Afghanistan is as relentless as it depressing: six aid workers murdered by Islamic State, at least 20 dead from a suicide bombing at the Supreme Court, more territory lost to the Taliban, more opium growing in the fields. Maybe that explains Donald Trump’s silence on the war since becoming president. But it does not excuse it.

The Trump administration has yet to set out a strategy for fighting America’s longest conflict, which has already claimed more than 2,300 American lives and close to a trillion taxpayer dollars. Trump’s previous statements on the war -- calling it a “total disaster” that the U.S. should abandon altogether -- make his reticence now particularly corrosive and dangerous.