WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has yet to announce a plan for Afghanistan, and delays in unveiling his strategy point to deep rifts in the White House on how to handle America’s longest war.
Such is the uncertainty about what to do — send thousands more troops into a nearly 16-year conflict, or take the opposite tack and pull out — that Trump has reportedly even suggested firing the general in charge of the war effort.
“We aren’t winning ... we are losing,” Trump complained to top officials while upbraiding his military advisers at a White House meeting last month, NBC News reported, citing senior officials.
Trump’s generals have called the Afghan conflict a “stalemate,” and even after years of intensive help from the US and other NATO nations, Afghanistan’s security forces still are struggling to hold back an emboldened Taliban.
In an early move to address the situation, Trump gave his Pentagon chief, Jim Mattis, broad powers to set troop numbers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But several months later the level remains stuck at about 8,400 US and about 5,000 NATO troops.
Mattis wants to wait until the White House has come up with a coherent strategy for not just Afghanistan but the broader region, notably Pakistan and how it deals with terror groups, before he commits to any adjustments.
Mattis told lawmakers on June 13 he would present a detailed Afghanistan plan by mid-July — but that timeframe came and went with no announcements.
“This is hard work and so you got to get it right. And that’s all there is to it. So, we’re working to get it right,” Mattis told Pentagon reporters on July 21.
According to NBC, Trump a day earlier had told Mattis and General Joe Dunford, who is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they should replace Gen. John Nicholson, who heads up US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The White House declined to comment, and Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said only: “Secretary Mattis has confidence in General Nicholson’s leadership.”
Several lawmakers spoke in Nicholson’s defense Thursday and two weeks have passed since the meeting, with the general still in position.
Meanwhile the situation in Afghanistan is as deadly as ever, with more than 2,500 Afghan police and troops killed in from Jan. 1 to May 8.
US forces — who are supposed to be in a non-combat role — are still dying too, with nine killed in action so far this year, including two in Kandahar on Wednesday. The tally for 2017 is now the same as for all of 2016.
In signs of broader divisions in the White House, Trump’s National Security Adviser Gen. H. R. McMaster — who is helping lead the push for a new Afghanistan plan — on Wednesday fired Ezra Cohen-Watnick, his senior intelligence director.
That comes on the heels of the departure of a contentious top Middle East adviser, Derek Harvey, who left in July. And chief strategist Steve Bannon was himself ousted from his seat on the National Security Council, which decides issues of war and peace.
According to the New York Times, Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have pushed an idea to let private contractors conduct security work in Afghanistan instead of American soldiers.
Pentagon officials have said Mattis is weighing sending just shy of 4,000 troops to Afghanistan to operate in a non-combat role assisting local forces.
Military Times on Wednesday cited an Afghan government official as saying that Eric Prince, who was the former head of a controversial private military firm once known as Blackwater, had even offered to supply a private air force.
Senior Republican Sen. John McCain, a longtime critic of the Obama administration’s war fighting policies, this week expressed exasperation over Trump’s lack of Afghanistan policy.
McCain said if a new plan had not been fleshed out by September, he would offer his own one — based on the “advice of some our best military leaders” — that he’ would tack onto a massive military spending bill.
“There still is no strategy for success in Afghanistan,” McCain said, though he provided no details on what his might be.
When Trump visited the Pentagon last month, a reporter asked him whether he would be sending more troops to Afghanistan.
“We’ll see,” he said, before changing the subject.
Delay in Afghanistan policy points to White House rift
Delay in Afghanistan policy points to White House rift
Near record number of small boat migrants reach UK in 2025
- The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday
LONDON: The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday.
The tally comes as Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party Reform UK surges in popularity ahead of bellwether local elections in May.
With Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer increasingly under pressure over the thorny issue, his interior minister Shabana Mahmood has proposed a drastic reduction in protections for refugees and the ending of automatic benefits for asylum seekers.
Home Office data as of midday on Wednesday showed a total of 41,472 migrants landed on England’s southern coast in 2025 after making the perilous Channel crossing from northern France.
The record of 45,774 arrivals was recorded in 2022 under the last Conservative government.
The Home Office is due to confirm the final figure for 2025 later Thursday.
Former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak vowed to “stop the boats” when he was in power.
Ousted by Starmer in July 2024, he later said he regretted the slogan because it was too “stark” and “binary” and lacked sufficient context “for exactly how challenging” the goal was.
Adopting his own “smash the gangs” slogan, Starmer pledged to tackle the problem by dismantling the people smuggling networks running the crossings but has so far had no more success than his predecessor.
Reform has led Starmer’s Labour Party by double-digit margins in opinion polls for most of 2025.
In a New Year message, Farage predicted that if Reform got things “right” at the forthcoming local elections “we will go on and win the general election” due in 2029 at the latest.
Without addressing the migrant issue directly, he added: “We will then absolutely have a chance of fundamentally changing the whole system of government in Britain.”
In his own New Year message, Starmer insisted his government would “defeat the decline and division offered by others.”
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, urged people not to let “politics of grievance tell you that we’re destined to stay the same.”
- Protests -
The small boat figures come after Home Secretary Mahmood in November said irregular migration was “tearing our country apart.”
In early December, an interior ministry spokesperson called the number of small boat crossings “shameful” and said Mahmood’s “sweeping reforms” would remove the incentives driving the arrivals.
A returns deal with France had so far resulted in 153 people being removed from the UK to France and 134 being brought to the UK from France, border security and asylum minister Alex Norris said.
“Our landmark one-in one-out scheme means we can now send those who arrive on small boats back to France,” he said.
The past year has seen multiple protests in UK towns over the housing of migrants in hotels.
Amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment, in September up to 150,000 massed in central London for one of the largest-ever far-right protests in Britain, organized by activist Tommy Robinson.
Asylum claims in Britain are at a record high, with around 111,000 applications made in the year to June 2025, according to official figures as of mid-November.
Labour is currently taking inspiration from Denmark’s coalition government — led by the center-left Social Democrats — which has implemented some of the strictest migration policies in Europe.
Senior British officials recently visited the Scandinavian country, where successful asylum claims are at a 40-year low.
But the government’s plans will likely face opposition from Labour’s more left-wing lawmakers, fearing that the party is losing voters to progressive alternatives such as the Greens.
