Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump's Plan to Save the Afghanistan Bush and Obama Built

As a candidate, he opposed nation-building. As president, he proposes "nation-preserving."

August 22, 2017 at 7:49 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Plenty of rebuilding to do here.
Photographer: Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images

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In a sense, President Donald Trump threaded a rhetorical needle Monday evening explaining why he will prolong the war in Afghanistan that he had opposed as a candidate. America will no longer fight for girls' schools and democracy. Instead, it will fight to destroy terrorists.

"We will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live, or how to govern their own complex society," he said. "We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists."