Cernovich: McMaster practicing staged debate to fool Trump and get Bannon gone

Trump needs to promote McMaster somewhere.

it seems as if Trump was told that Bannon is perceived like the WH's ValJar- the President- I think this ticked off Trump.

so Pence, POTUS and McMaster are doing exactly what at camp david?

Sounds like they all agree on a plan of action and are preparing to advise him.

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If that plan of action involves us continuing the war in Afghanistan then McMaster can go frick himself. No more American lives are worth losing 16 years after the fact.

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McMaster wants a huge troop increase to afghanistan and bannon wants USA out.

Something is going to go down soon. I think Bannon wins, but that is just my guess based on all the trump connected folks saying Trump wants out of afghanistan ASAP.

Cernovich hit rock bottom a few weeks ago

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If you say so. He is still nails when it comes to NSC news/leaks.

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Didn't Bannon say himself that he only planned on being with the WH for 8 to 12 months?

Link to more about what is going on at camp david. Afghanistan is definitely on the docket.

LINK /

Erik Prince thinks he can turn around the war in Afghanistan, and he’s got a PowerPoint deck to explain the whole thing. The Blackwater founder brought it with him to the Corner Bakery on North Capitol Street in Washington last Thursday, printed out and placed in a presentation binder. He’s been shopping it around D.C. And on Friday, when President Trump huddles with his advisers at Camp David to plot a way forward, it will be in the mix.

The 16-year-old war in Afghanistan has become a central point of conflict in the White House as the administration passes the half-year mark without having settled on a new strategy. Trump has so far rejected the proposals brought to his desk. The troop increases favored by his generals, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, are strongly opposed by his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and the president himself is skeptical of such approaches.

The “America First” ethos on which Trump campaigned is bumping up against the approach of his military brass. But an answer may finally be at hand. Trump and top administration officials will gather at Camp David on Friday to discuss South Asia strategy. Vice President Pence is even cutting his Latin America trip short to join the talks.

But this is not just an argument between warring elements within the administration. Plans to privatize the war proposed by two businessmen with ties to the White House have become a linchpin of the debate. Prince is proposing to send private contractors to Afghanistan instead of U.S. troops, and have the entire operation overseen by a “viceroy.” The billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg has also submitted a proposal using contractors. Both have met with top administration officials on the matter. Their involvement was first reported by The New York Times last month. In recent weeks, their lobbying effort has ramped up, as Trump signals he is nearing a decision. And Trump is said to favor using at least some of Prince and Feinberg’s proposals.

However, a document has circulated within the National Security Council and to Cabinet members this week, according to a senior administration official who reviewed it. It offers notes from meetings ahead of Friday’s showdown, summarizing a plan to convince the president to agree to the “R4+S” escalation plan. The document, this official said, characterizes the surge as the only credible option for Afghanistan, dismissing the other options of withdrawing completely or using contractors or paramilitaries with a minimal U.S. counterterrorism presence. Asked about that characterization of the document, NSC spokesman Michael Anton said it “sounds wrong to me.”

When I met Prince, he was coming from a morning of TV hits. Prince has been campaigning hard in favor of his proposal, as well as shopping it on Capitol Hill and in the White House, where he was headed next.

Prince calls his proposal “A Strategic Economy of Force.” It entails sending 5,500 contractors to Afghanistan to embed with Afghan National Security Forces, and appointing a “viceroy” to oversee the whole endeavor. Prince said some version of the idea had been percolating in his mind since he first went to Afghanistan in 2002; he knew then, he said, that the Pentagon wasn’t going to be able to resolve this. But it wasn’t until the Trump administration that he felt it really had a shot; “There are some phone calls where it’s not even worth wasting the electrons on,” he said when I asked why he hadn’t proposed this idea during the Obama administration. Obama approved a substantial troop increase for Afghanistan in his first term.

Prince wouldn’t let me keep a copy of the plan, though he showed it to me and walked me through it, and let me take photos of a couple pages—especially the page comparing his idea to Trump’s turnaround of the Wollman Rink in New York. “Make sure to get the Wollman Ice Rink,” Prince said. “Please be sure to use that in the article.”


Prince’s proposed plan (Rosie Gray)
Under Prince’s plan, the viceroy would be a federal official who reports to the president and is empowered to make decisions about State Department, DoD, and intelligence community functions in-country. Prince was vague about how exactly this would work and which agency would house the viceroy, but compared the job to a “bankruptcy trustee” and said the person would have full hiring and firing authority over U.S. personnel. Prince wants to embed “mentors” into Afghan battalions. These mentors would be contractors from the U.S., Britain, Canada, South Africa—“anybody with a good rugby team,” Prince quipped. Prince also wants a “composite air wing”—a private air force—to make up for deficiencies in the Afghan air capabilities.

Prince said McMaster’s office called him to discuss his ideas after he wrote an op-ed outlining the plan in The Wall Street Journal in May. But McMaster “hates it,” Prince said. Since then, Prince has met with McMaster to discuss the proposal. “He remains committed to more troops and more money,” he said. “We’ll leave it at that.”

The same can be said for the other military brass playing key roles on Afghanistan policy.

“The adults hate it,” said a congressional aide who has seen the plan, referring to McMaster, Mattis, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Mattis acknowledged that his analysis of the problems in Afghanistan is correct, Prince claimed, while disagreeing on his recommendations. On Monday, Mattis confirmed in a press gaggle that the contracting proposals were under consideration. A Pentagon spokesperson didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

According to officials familiar with the proposals, Mattis, McMaster, Tillerson, and others in the administration have two main objections to the Prince plan: One is that they believe Prince is downplaying how much it will truly cost, and the other is that they assume allies will ditch the U.S.-led effort once a switch is made to contractors instead of uniformed troops.



It is Bannon and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who have advocated giving Prince and Feinberg’s ideas a hearing. Prince said he had not yet met with the president himself on the issue. “I know he’s seen part of it. I know he liked my op-ed,” Prince said. According to a source familiar with the process, the Prince proposal hasn’t been formally presented to Trump.

Feinberg, on the other hand, has met with Trump, as well as with Kushner. One senior administration official said Feinberg has met more than once with Trump in the Oval Office. Through his investment firm Cerberus Capital, Feinberg controls the huge military contractor Dyncorp. He is also a confidant of Trump and has known him from business circles since before Trump became president. Feinberg was considered for a czar-type position overseeing an intelligence review earlier this year, but the idea was stymied by a vehement backlash from the intelligence community. Feinberg does not have an intelligence background.

Feinberg is proposing ideas similar to Prince’s; Prince said the two were 95 to 98 percent in agreement, though “he wrote his thing, I wrote mine.”

A source close to the situation said Feinberg had been asked to submit a “strategic recommendation” for Afghanistan that is “materially different with respect to the use of independent contractors from the plan Erik Prince proposed.”

Sean McFate, a Georgetown professor and former DynCorp contractor, described Feinberg’s plan for contractors as “more status quo. He wants to take the current mission and just make it bigger.”

But according to one senior administration official, Feinberg is angling to be the “viceroy” described in Prince’s plan.
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