President Trump said Monday he had “plans” that would win the 19-year-old Afghan war in as little as a week — but that the US would have to “kill 10 million people” and the country “would be wiped off the face of the Earth.”
But the president, speaking at the White House during an appearance with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, said he’d rather work with Pakistan to end the war through negotiations.
“If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people. Does that make sense to you? I don’t want to kill 10 million people,” Trump told reporters.
“I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth, it would be gone. It would be over in literally in 10 days, and I don’t want to go that route. So we’re working with Pakistan and others to extricate ourselves,” he said.
“Why would we kill millions of people? It wouldn’t be fair. In terms of humanity, it wouldn’t be fair. So we’re doing very well and I think Pakistan will be a big help.”
He then criticized US nation-building efforts in the country of 35.5 million that were pursued by previous administrations.
“We’ve been in there not fighting to win, just fighting to — they’re building gas stations. They’re rebuilding schools. The United States, we shouldn’t be doing that, that’s for them to do,” Trump said.
“But what we did and what our leadership got us into is ridiculous. But we will — I think we’ll have some very good answers on Afghanistan very quickly,” he continued.
Khan said there was no military solution for Afghanistan and that negotiations were key.
“This is the closest we’ve been to a peace deal in Afghanistan, and there is no military solution in Afghanistan. We hope that in the coming days, we will be able to urge the Taliban to speak to the Afghan government and come to a solution,” Khan said.
Trump then recalled when the US military dropped a 15,000-pound “Daisy Cutter” — the largest non-nuclear weapon in America’s arsenal — in Afghanistan during the early hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“A lot of you don’t know this, but we dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever built in history. We dropped it in Afghanistan. This left a hole that was — it took out a lot of the tunnels and everything else, but it left a hole in the earth that looked like the moon,” the commander-in-chief said.
“People heard it 15 miles away, they said what was that? It shook the earth. They were going to make many of them and I said no. I don’t want to drop them. I don’t want to do that. That’s actually the easy solution. They’d come in and say let’s have peace, but you don’t have to do that. I think we’ll be very successful without having to go that route.”