Washington wants endless war. Trump just gave it to them.

In his Afghanistan speech, Trump just bowed down to the political establishment

President Trump discusses his strategy for the Afghanistan war
(Image credit: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts)

If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, President Trump on Monday night committed the United States to a few more years of madness in Afghanistan.

Don't be fooled by Trumpian bluster about a brand-spanking-new "plan for victory" that will get "results" and finally enable us to defeat the Islamist "thugs" and "losers" of South Asia. What the president has proposed is a troop surge of unspecified size (this follows George W. Bush's "quiet surge" in the fall of 2008 and Barack Obama's own surge less than two years later) combined with a refusal to state when the intensified hostilities will come to an end. This is an explicit declaration of open-ended war for a conflict that, at 16 years and counting, is already the longest in American history.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.