Trump Suggests He Could Wipe Afghanistan Off the Face of the Earth to End the War if He Wanted

Donald Trump told the White House press on Monday that he has a plan to win the war in Afghanistan in a week, but he won’t put it into action because he does not want to kill 10 million people.

He’s so benevolent.

Trump made the comments during an Oval Office pool spray just before a meeting with Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan.

The president was talking about his desire to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, where the nation has been mired for almost 18 years, and his hope that Pakistan could help:

“I think Pakistan is going to help us out to extracate ourselves. We’re like policemen, we’re not fighting a war. If we were going to fight a war in Afghanistan, I could win that war in a week, I just don’t want to kill 10 million people. Does it make sense to you?…I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth. It would be gone, it would be over in literally ten days. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go that route.”

It sounds as if Trump is, in a backhanded way, threatening to nuke Afghanistan, and it is only his own munificence that is keeping him from ordering the military to do just that.

Later, the president seemed to assure everyone he was not talking about nuclear bombs, but conventional ones. Specifically, he talked about the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), a conventional weapon that nonetheless has tremendous power and destructiveness.

“We dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever built, in history. We dropped it in Afghanistan. We were getting ready to make many of those bombs…It left a hole in the earth that looked like the moon. It looked like a crater from the Moon…The largest ever made by far and they were going to make many of them and I said no. We don’t have to. I don’t want to drop that. I don’t want to do that.”

So it would have to be nukes then. Got it.

Watch the videos above, via MSNBC.