National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster used a 1972 photo of Afghan women wearing miniskirts to help convince President Trump to stay the course in Afghanistan, according to a report on Tuesday.
McMaster (above left) showed the president a black-and-white photograph of three women walking down a Kabul street in miniskirts to persuade him that Western culture had once thrived in Afghanistan and could again, The Washington Post reported.
The photo was among the arguments the president’s staff used to make the case that he should not pull troops from Afghanistan — the site of America’s longest war, the newspaper said.
Miniskirts were replaced by full-body burqas in the mid-1990s, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and banned Western clothing.
The Taliban now control only parts of the country, but many Afghan women still choose to wear traditional burqas because it makes them feel safer from reprisals for walking around in Western garb.
In a speech Monday night, Trump declared, “We will fight to win” in the war-torn country.
The decision was a U-turn for Trump, who had previously called for withdrawing US troops, writing on Twitter in January 2013 that the war “keeps wasting our money – rebuild the US!”
In his speech, Trump acknowledged he changed his mind about the 16-year-old war.
“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts, but all of my life I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office,” he said.
Officials said Tuesday that Trump’s plan would add 3,900 additional US forces to the 8,400 already there.
The first deployments could take place within days.
“What’s most important for us now is to get some capabilities in to have an impact on the current fighting season,” Gen. Joseph Votel, who spent last weekend in Afghanistan, told reporters traveling with him to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
Most of the new forces will train and advise Afghan forces to improve their combat abilities, or provide security for American adviser teams in the field, Votel said.
US counterterror forces will make up a smaller portion, as will other support forces and medical personnel.
About 460 of the total troops will help train more Afghan special commandos in more locations, said US Maj. Gen. James Linder, commander of US and NATO special operations forces in Afghanistan.
With Post wires