President Trump Tells Tucker that He Wants to Get out of Afghanistan

President Donald Trump told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that he would prefer “to just get out” of Afghanistan.

But he did highlight how Afghanistan is a “lab for terrorists”, which makes it difficult for an immediate pullout.

During an interview of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on July 1, 2019, Trump was asked about “how much longer” American troops would stay in Afghanistan.

Trump told Tucker, “I’ve wanted to pull them out. And you know, I have pulled a lot out. We were at 16,000. We’re down to about 9,000, which a lot of people don’t know.”

After lauding the destruction of ISIS, Trump talked about the length of American involvement in Afghanistan.

With Afghanistan, it’s 19 years and we should not have been there 19 years and if we were, you know, it would be nice to fight to win. But it’s just 19 years. They’re building hotels, we are. I mean, we had a Holiday Inn that cost numbers that would be ten times what it should have cost.

They built a gas station, a pretty famous deal where it costs like $80 million to build a gas station.

Trump continued, “And we have the greatest fighters in the world. But when you’re 19 years, you’re really becoming like a police force. So we have pulled it back. We’re actually negotiating with various people. But we want to get out. We want to get out of a lot of areas that we’re in. We shouldn’t be there. We shouldn’t be there. We’re the policeman for the whole world.”

Carlson pressed Trump on the issue by asking him “Could you see getting out entirely?”

Trump responded:

I’ll tell you the problem is, look, I would like to just get out,” said Trump. “The problem is, it just seems to be a lab for terrorists. It seems — I call it the Harvard of terrorists. When you look at the World Trade Center, they were trained. They didn’t — by the way, they attacked the wrong country. They didn’t come from Iraq, all right. They came from various other countries. But they all formed in Afghanistan, and it’s probably because it’s at the base of so many countries, but they all formed and it’s rough mountains and you get a lot of — you know, you get a lot of good hiding places.

Although Afghanistan is a very dangerous place, it’s time for the U.S. to concede that it won’t change Afghanistan’s culture anytime soon.

Instead, the U.S. should be focusing more on its national defense and fine-tuning its immigration policies in a way that it doesn’t become a magnet for migration from Third World countries that have proven to produce terrorists and other violent criminal elements.

Nation-building only lines up the pockets of the defense industry and stretches America’s defense resources thin.

Trump needs to pull out of Afghanistan immediately.