A few days after the Camp David meetings, on August 21, the president explained his decision and the strategy to the American people and the world in a speech at Fort Myer, Virginia. On Afghanistan, he acknowledged that the “American people were weary of war without victory” and stated that his “original instinct was to pull out.” He summarized the dangers associated with a premature withdrawal, including the growing strength of terrorist organizations including ISIS and Al-Qaeda as well as the other twenty U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations active in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He noted the presence of nuclear weapons in such a volatile area. He addressed the contradictions in Pakistan policy, stated clearly that Pakistan offers safe haven to terrorist organizations, and outlined an approach that would deny terrorists control of territory, cut off funding, and isolate them from sources of ideological support. The new policy recognized the war as a contest of wills and aimed at the defeat of those organizations that threatened the United States. There would be no more artificial time lines, and the United States would no longer fall over itself trying to talk with the Taliban. President Trump pledged to support the Afghan government and military as they fought the Taliban while making clear Afghan responsibility to “take ownership of their future, to govern their society, and to achieve an everlasting peace.”45 Emphasis would be on aligning the elements of national power to include diplomatic, economic, and military efforts. After sixteen years of war, the United States had articulated a realistic, sustainable strategy. On August 21, 2017, I met with the president and First Lady in the residence and then jumped into the presidential motorcade as we made the short trip across the Potomac. As we passed Arlington National Cemetery and entered the gates of Fort Myer, I thought it was a fitting venue for the president to give a speech that for the first time clearly articulated how the sacrifices of America’s young warriors in Afghanistan would contribute to an outcome in that country and across South Asia worthy of those sacrifices.
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AS I had feared, however, the strategy did not last. Those who were deeply skeptical about America’s long war in Afghanistan convinced President Trump to abandon it. Soon after I departed the White House in 2018, those who misunderstood the nature of the war, underappreciated the threat, and were ideologically predisposed toward disengagement from “forever wars” convinced him that a sustained and sustainable military effort in Afghanistan was futile and wasteful.
In July 2019, Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, visited Washington. Khan had strong anti-U.S. credentials and had been the clear choice of the Pakistan Army to be the country’s nominal leader. When President Trump asked publicly for Khan’s help in bringing the war to a conclusion, it seemed as if another American leader had fallen for a Pakistani counterpart’s effort to pose as a partner in counterterrorism. Khan even got a bonus as the president offered to mediate between Pakistan and India on Kashmir. President Trump went so far as to claim that Prime Minister Modi had asked him to mediate. But any observer of South Asia knows that Modi would never have done any such thing, as India had long-opposed outside mediation of the Kashmir dispute, primarily because past initiatives by the United Nations on the issue had proven disadvantageous to India. India is the status quo power when it comes to Kashmir, while Pakistan seeks to weaken India’s grip over the territory. The visit must have gone better than expected for Khan, as Pakistan regained its role of both arsonist and fireman in Afghanistan and South Asia.
Shortly after the Khan visit, President Trump, indulging in a common misconception of the war, said, “I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.”46 His statement betrayed a misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. America and the broad international coalition were not fighting against Afghans in an effort to subjugate popular will; they were fighting with the vast majority of Afghans to prevent the forcible return to power of a small, unpopular minority that had governed Afghanistan through terror and brutality. The Afghan peoples, like peoples across South and Central Asia and the Middle East, were the principal victims of the Taliban and jihadist terrorists. Despite this obvious distinction between the twenty-first-century war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and historical Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation in the twentieth century and in the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century, the narrative associated with Afghanistan as the “Graveyard of Empires” persisted.
Sadly, the president’s statement cheapened not only the sacrifices made by the more than 58,000 Afghan soldiers and police who died defending their country and their families from the Taliban, but also the sacrifices of the more than 2,300 American servicemen and women who lost their lives in the war.47 The loss of will to sustain the effort in Afghanistan led to rationalization of the decision to withdraw and the resurrection of the flaws and contradictions that undercut U.S. policy there almost from the start.
In September 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, as special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. The self-delusion that the Taliban would forswear any connection to Al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist organizations had returned. In January 2019, the same month that Khalilzad told the New York Times that the Taliban would restrain Al-Qaeda, a UN report observed that Al-Qaeda “continues to see Afghanistan as a safe haven for its leadership,” and the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment noted that Al-Qaeda continued to provide support for the Taliban. Another UN report, in June, warned that the Taliban “continues to be the primary partner for all foreign terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan.”48 Meanwhile, as the United States pursued talks, the Taliban intensified its attacks. In July, as Khalilzad sat down with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, a truck bomb in Ghazni city killed 12 and wounded 179 others. At the eleventh hour, the U.S. administration avoided the embarrassment of hosting Taliban terrorists at Camp David to finalize America’s surrender and abandonment of its partners on, almost incomprehensibly, the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The president canceled the planned meeting with a tweet on September 7 after learning of a Taliban car bomb attack that killed one American soldier and eleven others. Trump would go on to demand a Taliban cease-fire and a sharp reduction in violence as a precondition for resuming negotiations. Although there would be no immediate U.S. withdrawal, Trump made his intentions clear, stating that “We’ve been policemen there for a long time. And the government is going to have to take responsibility or do whatever it is they do.”49
Later that month, the first emir of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Asim Umar, was killed in a joint Afghan-U.S. raid on a Taliban compound in Helmand Province. Haji Mahmood, a Taliban military commander, the AQIS chief for Helmand, and Umar’s courier to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, fell next to him. The Department of Defense suppressed a press release that would have announced the death of Umar because of concerns that it “would complicate further negotiations” by exposing once again the interconnected nature of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Self-delusion was back in full force.50
It got worse. Khalilzad resumed negotiations with the Taliban, and after a “one-week reduction in violence” to demonstrate the Taliban’s control over its fighters and terrorists, would sign an agreement that offered the conditional withdrawal of U.S. forces in exchange for a sustained reduction in violence and other promises from the Taliban. These dubious promises include the commitments from the Taliban not to host, cooperate with, train, recruit, or fundraise for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that threaten the U.S. and its allies. The Taliban also agreed to take immediate action against threats that the U.S. deemed as urgent. It is difficult to understand how any American familiar with the nature of the Taliban, its ideology, and its record would believe those promises.
In the run-up to the agreement, the New York Times lent its editorial page to the deputy emir of the Taliban’
s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and specifically designated (by the FBI) global terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani. The man who leads the Taliban military arm, facilitates Al-Qaeda, and who has the blood of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocents on his hands blamed America for the war that began, in part, because his father helped cement the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The author’s assurances to permit women’s education and employment were tepid. And the failure, in the agreement or in the op-ed, to recognize the Afghan government or the Afghan Constitution indicates that the Taliban has not given up its ambition to regain power through violent means.
What was particularly tragic was that the Trump administration strategy announced in August 2017 was working. The Afghans were taking the brunt of the fighting. Although every U.S. loss is a tragedy, casualties per twelve-month periods fell from a high of 499 in 2010 to fewer than 20 in the twelve months prior to the president’s statement that he intended to withdraw all forces.51 The annual cost of the war fell from a high of $120 billion in 2011 to an estimated annual cost of $45 billion per year in 2018.52 The plan was to reduce that cost by half again as allies pledged to assume more of the financial burden. Afghanistan had not become Denmark, but government reforms, especially in the security ministries, were progressing. Amrullah Saleh, a no-nonsense leader, had taken over as interim minister of the interior. The January 2018 suspension of security assistance to Pakistan meant that Pakistan, at least, could no longer have it both ways, posing as a U.S. ally while supporting our enemies. The Taliban was under significant military pressure and no longer could simply wait out the U.S. withdrawal time line. Afghanistan was not a pretty situation. It was still a violent place, and Afghan, U.S., and coalition soldiers were still taking risks and making sacrifices; however, the United States had set conditions for its entering a future negotiating process from a position of strength, not desperation.
The September 2019 Afghan presidential election was not pretty. The Afghan government conducted the election under duress. The Taliban threatened anyone who voted. In addition to charges and countercharges of fraud, voter turnout was low. After nearly five months, Ghani was declared the winner by a slim margin. But the election happened. The result presented the United States and other nations with an opportunity to support an elected government and the 82 percent of Afghans opposed to the return of the Taliban and to bolster the will of those fighting on a modern-day frontier between barbarism and civilization.53 It seems the Trump Administration chose not to take advantage of that opportunity.
Khalilzad continued to pursue negotiations in 2020, perhaps to get the best deal possible given the American president’s desire to withdraw. But any deal meant primarily to fulfill that desire was bound to rest on the self-delusion that the Taliban would be an effective partner in countering terrorist organizations. Such an agreement would also empower the Taliban and weaken the Afghan government and security forces as the U.S. exited. That is why if the decision is to withdraw all U.S. forces, regardless of what happens afterward, it would have been preferable to do so with no deal.
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THE PROBLEM set in South Asia is connected to other security challenges. It is a region in which cooperation with Russia and China is possible, as both countries would suffer the consequences of a growing terrorist threat emanating from the region. Russia, China, and other states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and European nations have an opportunity to pose Pakistani leaders with a clear choice between isolation as a pariah or partnership in an effort to take advantage of the region’s tremendous latent potential and address its grave problems in the areas of energy, climate change, environment, and food and water security. These are problems that affect Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the majority of the subcontinent. Multinational cooperation on South Asia’s problems is also important to convince Iran to play a less destructive role not only in South Asia, but also across the greater Middle East, where a sectarian civil war created a humanitarian catastrophe and a cycle of violence that strengthened jihadist terrorist organizations globally.
Conflicts evolve based on interactions with enemies and on other factors, such as declining public support and the will of leaders. By 2019, it was clear that the person most critical to sustaining the first long-term strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia was not determined to give the strategy he approved an opportunity to succeed. Responding in large measure to a vocal group within his political base, President Donald Trump abandoned the psychological gains that had strengthened the will of America’s partners and diminished the will of the Taliban enemy and their supporters. The mantra to “end the endless wars,” however, expressed a sentiment that was gaining momentum. As one who not only fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and bore witness to the horrors and sacrifices made there, but who also saw my daughter and son-in-law deploy to those same conflicts, I, too, wanted them to end. But I also knew that there was no short-term solution to South Asia’s long-term problems. What we owed our nation and the sons and daughters who fight in our name was a long-term strategy capable of delivering an outcome that would keep our nation safe at an acceptable cost.
Tragically, as American soldiers who were not yet born on September 11, 2001, deployed to Afghanistan, America was still fighting its longest war one year at a time. But the results of striking a deal with the Taliban for the purpose of withdrawing from America’s longest war are likely to be far worse than a sustained commitment under a sound strategy.
Part IV
Middle East
This will not stand . . . WAR IN THE GULF: U.S. BOMBS BAGHDAD . . . KURDS IN CLASHES WITH IRAQ TROOPS . . . NO FLYZONE IN IRAQ. WHY? . . . There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . WAR’S ON . . . military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger . . . There are known knowns . . . there are known unknowns . . . there are also unknown unknowns . . . THE CAPTURE OF HUSSEIN: INSURGENCY ATTACKS GO ON . . . It is clear that we need to change our strategy . . . AMERICA’S MILITARY EFFORTS IN IRAQ WILL END . . . MALIKI GIVEN 30 DAYS TO FORM GOVERNMENT IN IRAQ . . . We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq . . . IN TUNISIA, ACT OF ONE FRUIT VENDOR SPARKS WAVE OF REVOLUTION . . . Egypt will never be the same . . . After a lot of blood spilled by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and secure itself has become real . . . HOSNI MUBARAK RESIGNS . . . QADDAFI, SEIZED BY FOES, MEETS A VIOLENT END . . . Qaddafi’s grip of fear appeared to give way to the promise of freedom . . . 500,000 PEOPLE FLEE IN NORTHERN IRAQ . . . A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving . . . America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat . . . U.S. CONCLUDES SYRIA USED CHEMICAL WEAPONS . . . Are you truly incapable of shame? . . . MOSUL WAKES UP TO A DAY WITHOUT ISIS . . . GREEK REFUGEE CAMPS NEAR CATASTROPHE . . . U.S. STRIKES ON SYRIA . . . It is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars . . . TRUMP THREATENS TO “DEVASTATE TURKEY ECONOMICALLY” IF IT ATTACKS KURDS . . . Baghdadi’s demise demonstrates America’s relentless . . . we’re talking about sand and death . . . PROTESTERS STORM US EMBASSY COMPOUND IN BAGHDAD . . . The United States will protect and defend its people . . . TRUMP TO OPEN MIDDLE EAST PEACE DRIVE . . .
Chapter 7
Who Thought It Would Be Easy? From Optimism to Resignation in the Middle East
This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can’t wish it away. No strategy of winning “hearts and minds,” no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can’t conciliate these furies.
—FOUAD AJAMI
ON MARCH 20, 2017, exactly one month after I entered the White House, Prime Minister of Iraq Haider al-Abadi visited Washington. I looked forward to seeing him. He was a respected friend whose country was in turmoil. Iraq was at the center of the fight to defeat ISIS, the latest version of the Sunni jihadist terrorist organizations that had inflicted so much pain and suffering not only in the
Middle East, but across the globe. The country was also on the front line of Iran’s effort to extend its influence across the region. And along with Syria, Iraq was at the epicenter of a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni Muslims that was strengthening terrorist organizations, perpetuating state weakness, and inflicting human suffering on a colossal scale. The 2003 invasion of Iraq did not create the centripetal forces that were tearing the Middle East apart. But the invasion, lack of preparation for the war’s aftermath, and precipitous withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 contributed to a contagious breakdown of security. Abadi’s visit was important because a stable and secure Iraq that was not aligned with Iran was essential if the Middle East was to emerge from multiple crises and we needed to understand better how the United States could support Iraqi leaders who shared these goals.
The day of Abadi’s visit was typical. There was a routine mid-morning Oval Office session with President Trump, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Pompeo. I then sat down with Doug Silliman, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, in preparation for the Iraqi delegation’s arrival at 3 p.m. From 2011 to 2013, Silliman had been political counselor and deputy chief of mission in Baghdad as Iraq unraveled after the U.S. withdrawal. He returned to Baghdad as ambassador toward the end of 2016 in the midst of the campaign to defeat ISIS, the terrorist group that had gained control of large portions of Iraq and Syria to establish its so-called caliphate.
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