James Jeffrey

Now that referendum is over, it might make it easier for Erdogan to accept, but before it would have been impossible, the administration was wise to wait. We need Turkey on board for Raqqa.

We're in a really serious global security situation with Syria and Turkey is critical to that -- and that weights toward utility vs. values, to be very blunt.

This limits Erdogan's ability to try to cut deals of any sort on the Kurds, he doesn't want to see the Kurds expand their territory. He doesn't want the US to be a permanent supporter of the Kurds and thinks the Americans are naive to work with them.

It has left a bad taste in their mouths, they read all those books and it is people’s dreams to go over there and do it. Some of these guys have worked their whole lives to do this one hunt.

10,000 is at the low end of the number … it’s not the safe number that everybody wanted -- probably like 17,000-20,000 -- but it’s a number that’s enough to keep the U.S. in the game. we withdrew all of our forces and the Iraqis were OK with that at the time, then ISIS came in and the result is we got our troops back in there … we don’t want to lose one third of Afghanistan to the Taliban; let’s keep the troops [there].

They are certainly going to try. Unfortunately, once again we’ve put a deadline at the end of 2016 for the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. forces … Taliban will then try to sweep things up after then.