Aftandilian Publishes Op-Ed on Trump’s Syria Strategy
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published an Op-Ed on the potential backlash facing United States President Donald Trump following his remarks indicating he intends to pull U.S. troops out of Syria “very soon.”
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “Trump’s Pledge to Withdraw Troops From Syria May Be Delayed After All,” was published in The Arab Weekly on April 8, 2018.
From the text of Op-Ed:
To the surprise of the Pentagon and the State Department, US President Donald Trump declared he was going to withdraw US troops from Syria “very soon” because the Islamic State (ISIS) has been defeated there.
“Let other people take care of it now,” Trump said. He also announced that he is holding up $200 million in recovery funds for Syria. Trump’s speech was supposed to be about infrastructure spending in the United States.
Why Trump went off script and made this declaration is a mystery to Washington political insiders. When pressed by journalists shortly after Trump’s remarks, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the department was unaware of plans to pull troops out of Syria.
Ironically, a CNN report stated that the Pentagon had been working on plans to send dozens of additional troops to Syria and thus also was caught off-guard. In the field, one unidentified US military commander was angry because he believed US and allied forces were close to achieving “total victory” against ISIS but that “now [with the Trump announcement] it’s coming apart.”
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).