Hours before President Donald Trump delivered his speech on the war in Afghanistan on Monday, I told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that he needed to do more than just say we have to win. After almost 16 years in the graveyard of empires and countless tweets about how the United States needed to “get out,” the president delivered a roughly 25-minute speech — “win” (mentioned 6 times), “victory” (4), “won” (3), “defeat” (7) — that guarantees the United States will stay the course a while longer. “Trump’s barely-different Afghanistan war plan” was the perfect summation in a headline for a piece by Kevin Baron, executive editor of Defense One.
Jonathan Capehart: Trump's Afghanistan speech and its empty allusions to Charlottesville
