Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said Tuesday that President Donald Trump “reached the right conclusion” on his Afghanistan policy.
Trump announced Monday night that he was no longer going to publicize how many troops were in Afghanistan or what their plans were, but also promised the goal in the region would no longer be “nation-building.”
On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Tuesday morning, Cotton, who was once deployed to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, praised the president’s decision.
“The President made a good speech, which resulted from a very good policy making process driven by General McMaster,” Cotton said. “And I think he reached the right conclusion. We cannot allow Afghanistan either to fall the way Mosul fell to the Islamic State in 2004, nor can we allow it to be, come under the influence of Iran the way Iraq increasingly has.”
“We’re not trying to forge a Western European nation-state out of very disparate kinds of tribes and lands. We’re not trying to create a Western market-based economy,” he continued. “We’re not trying to create a constitutional democracy, as good as all those things are. Those are things for the Afghan people to choose and do among themselves.”