Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  It was often said that Afghanistan was the forgotten war. Somalia could never earn that distinction, since no one in the United States had ever paid any attention to it. When Trump took office, the U.S. had been at war in Somalia, indirectly or directly, for a decade—McChrystal, who led the first JSOC wave into that country, called targeting al-Qaeda there “sensitive, difficult business”—yet the House Armed Services Committee had made no study of any of it. There was no longer anything unusual about a decade-long war.

  With the tactical possibilities expanded and oversight practically nonexistent, atrocities mounted. In August 2017 U.S. special operators in command of their Somali protégés raided the farming village of Bariire and killed ten civilians, including a child, whom the U.S.-backed government falsely labeled as members of al-Shabaab. Witnesses said the Americans instructed the Somali soldiers to plant AK-47s on the corpses—sloppily; most of the shell cases found on the scene by a reporter were NATO-issue 5.56 mm—which outraged villagers kept unburied until Somali leaders recanted the al-Shabaab accusation. The following May, U.S.-supported Somali soldiers tore through another Lower Shabelle village, Ma’alinka, and killed five locals either directly or through stray fire in a shootout. The drone strikes, rising to 63 in 2019, were similarly devastating. In February 2020 a disabled eighteen-year-old woman, Nurto Kusow Omar Abukar, had just sat down to dinner with her family when a missile tore through their house and killed her instantly. AFRICOM reported that the strike “killed one terrorist.” By then, Amnesty International found, the command was regularly listing absurdly low estimates of civilian casualties. AFRICOM knew it would face no pressure from anyone in power to admit a realistic death toll.

  Bolduc’s observation that U.S. violence in Somalia yielded nothing durable applied equally to the war sprawling across northern, western, and eastern Africa. The CIA turned an air base at Dirkou, in northeastern Niger, into a staging ground for drone strikes in southern Libya, even though the air force had already spent three years and an absurd $110 million to establish its own Nigerien drone base, at Agadez, from which it aided the French war against Islamist guerrillas in Mali. Mali and Niger represented additional fronts in a continental war that expanded by drift, a development concealed by virtue of its principal combatants being Special Operations Forces. One of the officers the U.S. special operators trained to fight West African jihadists, Colonel Assimi Goita, led a coup in August 2020 that ousted Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta.

  In Niger, where some eight hundred U.S. troops now operated, eleven Army Special Forces troops, backed by thirty Nigerien mentees, drove an unarmored and unarmed SUV through the southwest into a devastating October 2017 ambush. A Pentagon investigation found that the team of mostly Green Berets was scheduled to meet with local leaders, but had to change their mission after a drone spotted an Islamic State potentate. Their captain, the target of blame from a Pentagon report that the soldiers’ relatives denounced as a whitewash, expressly warned his superior officer that the unit was neither equipped nor informed enough to execute the raid. More than a hundred militants opened fire on Operational Detachment-Alpha Team 3212. Air support and evacuation did not arrive for four hours, by which time Sergeant First Class Jeremiah W. Johnson, Staff Sergeant Bryan C. Black, and Staff Sergeant Dustin M. Wright were dead. Sergeant La David Johnson was missing, and his body would not be recovered for two days.

  Less than two weeks later Trump called Johnson’s grieving widow. Myeshia Johnson was with her mother and a family friend, Miami congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who paraphrased Trump as saying that Johnson—whose name Trump evidently didn’t remember—must have known what he had signed up for. Trump immediately called Wilson a liar. But it sounded like a garbled version of how Kelly, now Trump’s White House chief of staff, had eulogized two fallen marines in his caustic St. Louis speech in 2010: “they were in exactly the place they wanted to be: among the best men and women America produces.” Kelly, in an extraordinary press conference, assured that Trump had said nothing different from what his friend Joe Dunford told him when informing him of his son’s death.

  Myeshia, pregnant with their third child, tearfully recounted how Trump’s disrespectful call had increased her anguish. “And it made me cry ’cause I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said he couldn’t remember my husband’s name,” she told Good Morning America. “If my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name?”

  Kelly had bitterly valorized Forever War sacrifice by placing it on a higher plane of citizenship. Now he protected Trump against his fellow Gold Star family. Unrestrained, Kelly also falsely accused Wilson, whom he called an “empty barrel,” of inflating her role in the opening of an FBI office in Florida. Wilson, who is Black, received nooses in the mail. Anyone shocked by now at Kelly’s ruthlessness had condescended to him by ignoring his patterns of behavior. “General Kelly needs counseling from a pastor or someone who can help him ask for forgiveness from the nation for all of his insults, not just to me but to the Dreamers who he said were lazy,” Wilson later said.

  Far more disruptive was Mike Flynn. Flynn and his aides, several of whom were his favorites from the DIA, entered an administration full of like-minded people who believed that the vast security bureaucracy they now helmed was implacably hostile. They aligned themselves instead with the nativist wing of the Trump presidency, a particularly strong faction within the White House. Career officials who had been billeted to the National Security Council (NSC) to work on refugee admissions suddenly saw Stephen Miller, who was not a member of the NSC, begin to dominate their agenda. Steve Bannon, the Breitbart nationalist impresario turned White House chief political strategist, even acquired a spot on the NSC. Wandering without portfolio was the theatrical Islamophobic blowhard Sebastian Gorka. A strategist from the surveillance-capitalist billionaire Peter Thiel’s orbit, Kevin Harrington, joined Flynn’s NSC staff and soon proposed withdrawing forces from the Baltics as a gesture of detente to Russia.

  Flynn’s agenda alarmed the Security State. At a meandering White House press conference early on in Trump’s presidency, he notified Iran that it was “on notice.” Islamophobia, along with catechistic right-wing contempt for Iran, offered Bannon and the nationalists a way to reconcile their antiwar postures with their alliance with Flynn. Another Flynn initiative attracted alarm, particularly from Mattis. The national security adviser wanted to expand a U.S.–Russian military communications channel, intended to prevent midair collisions or confrontations in Syria, into an avenue to explore greater detente.

  That wing of the Trump coalition, if not necessarily Flynn himself, was hostile to the war in Afghanistan. Breitbart had considered it a stupid, wasteful conflict, defined by its humiliations, like the Bowe Bergdahl swap. Alarming the military in particular was the influence of Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder. Aligned with Bannon despite doing business with MAGA bête noir China and with the UAE, which cultivated close ties with Jared Kushner, Prince publicly proposed a way out of Afghanistan for Trump: leasing him the war. In interviews, Prince analogized his venture to the British East India Company, sounding like the MAGA version of Max Boot’s 2001 enthusiasm for self-confident Englishmen in jodphurs and pith helmets. Prince neglected the part where Britain nationalized the collapsing enterprise to quell India’s 1857 uprising, but his pitch was less about history than about making money redressing the martial humiliations of white civilization. The Taliban could be beaten by a force made up of soldiers from countries “with a good rugby team,” Prince quipped. Neither Mattis nor McMaster was keen on Prince’s venture.

  Prince and his cohort were dealt a substantial setback less than a month into the administration when Flynn found himself out of a job and in serious legal trouble. Beginning in summer 2016, the FBI had opened a counterintelligence probe, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into the apparent connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
It was bound to investigate Flynn, a disgruntled intelligence chief who had sat beside Vladimir Putin at a gala for Russian state TV, which paid him for a speech. By the election, some within the FBI felt their concerns about Flynn were resolved. But after Flynn became President-elect Trump’s national security adviser designate, the FBI intercepted what they considered alarming conversations between Flynn and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. As the Obama administration expelled various Russian diplomatic and intelligence personnel, Flynn cautioned Kislyak not to escalate a sanctions battle—signalling that Trump did not intend reprisal measures over election interference that had benefited him—lest it jeopardize Flynn’s long-desired U.S.–Russian counterjihadist alliance. “We will not achieve stability in the Middle East without working with each other against this radical Islamist crowd,” he explained to Kislyak on December 23. Kislyak replied to Flynn that he considered the sanctions aimed “not only against Russia, but also against the president elect.” Within days the Security State also discovered that Flynn had lied to the Trump administration and to journalists about the sanctions discussion. Mike Pence, soon to be the vice president, said Flynn had assured him the pair did not discuss the sanctions issue.

  The holdover attorney general, Sally Yates, feared that Flynn’s lies had created a point of Russian leverage, and she hastened to inform the White House counsel. Yet Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, moved forward unilaterally with an interview of Flynn on January 24. Notes later released show Crossfire Hurricane officials who would soon become MAGA villains, FBI attorney Lisa Page and counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok— Strzok was also a leading figure in the Clinton email investigation—fretting over the delicacy the Flynn interview required, including when they might need to inform the national security adviser that lying to them was a felony. As a matter of law they were under no such obligation, which was something a man in Flynn’s position was expected to know. Flynn sealed his fate by lying to the FBI about the Kislyak call, as if a man who had headed an intelligence agency could be unaware that the Security State intercepted Kislyak’s communications. With news stories now emerging about the conversations, Trump accepted Flynn’s resignation less than a month after his appointment, a stunning humiliation only weeks after the general’s redemption.

  It got worse for Flynn. Soon after his firing, Flynn belatedly registered as an agent of a foreign power for his undeclared half million dollars’ worth of lobbying on behalf of Turkey. Both the lies to the FBI and the unreported foreign lobbying were points of leverage for his subsequent prosecution. Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI in exchange for leniency and cooperation. In a rarity for the Trump coterie, the president did not treat Flynn as disloyal, but instead found political value in portraying Flynn as a martyr to a Deep State gone mad.

  Into the national security void at the White House stepped McMaster, a three-star general then in an army training command position. McMaster neither wanted the job nor had a history with Trump: he was given the national security adviser appointment after a JSOC veteran, retired vice admiral Robert Harward, passed on it. McMaster ousted Bannon from the NSC and over the next several months oversaw an exodus of Flynn’s staff from key positions. An island of Flynn loyalism remained in Devin Nunes’s Capitol Hill office, where NSC Mideast chief Derek Harvey landed, while McMaster kept Michael Anton as his spokesman. On the whole, McMaster treated the position as a redoubt against the nativists, and opted to reinterpret Trump’s positions as consistent with traditional Republican internationalism. That meant, among other things, escalation in Afghanistan.

  Although Trump had railed for years against the futility of the Afghanistan war, he yielded to McMaster, Mattis, and the military in nearly doubling the size of the deployment. In an echo of Obama’s 2009 Afghanistan review, senior officers got the time and resources they wanted but had to contend with the president’s distrust that their plan would work. Hours before Trump announced the escalation in August 2017, Security Staters worried he would change his mind. McMaster threaded the needle by portraying a strategy commensurate with the status quo as a departure from Obama: no timetables this time. But Trump’s “clear definition” of victory was less an outcome than a process of “attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” Trump gestured at a “political settlement”—a negotiated accord with the Taliban—but undercut it by musing that “nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.”

  Few in the military paused to reflect that the unlikelihood of the Taliban’s suing for peace discredited McMaster’s strategy of suppressing them until the elusive day when they would. Faith in such a disproven strategy had held strong throughout the Security State for over a decade. Two very different presidents had now acquiesced to it. By November 2017 the eighty-four hundred troops Obama had left in Afghanistan had risen to fifteen thousand. Yet by the following year the Taliban was, predictably, potent enough to infiltrate a meeting of U.S. and Afghan leaders in Kandahar. General Abdul Raziq, Kandahar’s police chief—a title that understated his local influence—was shot dead within sight of the commanding U.S. general, Scott Miller, a JSOC alum and favorite of McChrystal. Seeking a way out of the morass, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Robin Raphel, and Chris Kolenda, a retired army colonel who had been part of the stillborn Obama-era effort to negotiate with the Taliban, shuttled to Doha to discuss the prospects for a settlement to the war with Taliban figures. Kolenda briefed the Pentagon on what he had learned. Trump’s antipathy to the war meant diplomacy to end it was no longer politically toxic.

  There was even more continuity on the other major front of the war. Trump boasted about a secret plan to end ISIS. But in reality, the plan was just the extant By, With, and Through strategy, which was closing in on its endgame for the Caliphate. Trump inherited Brett McGurk as the lead diplomat holding the coalition against ISIS together—as well as Iraqi militias, operating at a remove from their Iranian paymasters, as an auxiliary ground force.

  At the end of the Obama administration, U.S., Iraqi government, and Iranian-backed Iraqi forces began retaking Mosul through intense, block-by-block fighting unseen since the darkest days of the occupation. The U.S. commander, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, called the recapture of Mosul “the most constant heavy combat that we have [seen] probably since before Vietnam.” An encirclement, siege, and advance on the city met determined ISIS resistance that held out for nine months, until July 2017, three times longer than the initial forecasts. The battle devastated the city—credible unofficial estimates reported by the Associated Press put the civilian death toll as high as eleven thousand, more than ten times official tallies—and displaced an estimated nearly 1 million people. ISIS detonated the al-Nuri Mosque, an eight-hundred-year-old treasure and the spot where Baghdadi had declared the Caliphate, rather than let the Iraqi flag fly over it. Writing in Military Review, two army officers drily noted that Mosul’s civilians “did comparatively little to enhance coalition operations.” That left Raqqa as the final capital of the Caliphate, which held out until October. As Raqqa fell to the U.S.-backed Kurds, McGurk gloated, “Once purported as fierce, now pathetic and a lost cause.” It was remarkable confidence from someone with experience watching American advances in the War on Terror evaporate.

  If, as was commonly assumed in Washington, Mattis and McMaster had entered the administration to prevent Trump from foreign policy departures—and particularly from disengagement—then by early 2018 their success looked formidable. But their apparent success revealed what they were willing to tolerate in order to keep the Forever War going.

  The War on Terror had made Mattis into a widely respected figure internationally. His role in the administration was to reassure traditional allies that the United States was not really going to act in the manner that Trump’s tweets suggested. Mattis’s most public success came when Trump
said that “Mad Dog” assured him that returning to a torture policy wouldn’t be necessary. That invested centrists and some liberals in believing that Mattis was broadly opposed to Trump.

  In 2017 Trump unexpectedly tweeted that military service by transgender people was banned, reversing a tentative Obama initiative. There was no pretext to cite; Mattis would later testify that the military had no cases of transgender service members causing any disruptions. Trump simply took an opportunity to show a minority group who disgusted his constituents that they could not presume to possess equal citizenship. Mattis, who had opposed repealing the ban on open LGBT military service, acceded to it, while letting journalists know it hadn’t been his idea. After pausing implementation for a study—interpreted by liberals as welcome bureaucratic subterfuge—Mattis left an “exception” for trans service members to serve in their “biological sex”—that is, in a closet. Multiple lawsuits did not dissuade Mattis from this act of cruelty.

  Mattis had stood beside the president when Trump unveiled the Muslim ban and showed no sign of concern for the Muslim service members separated from their relatives abroad. It wasn’t long before the nativism of the Trump administration targeted undocumented troops. Since 9/11, an estimated 130,000 people had become citizens through their U.S. military service. But post-9/11 nativism was now stronger than post-9/11 jingoism, and Mattis’s Pentagon’s policies reflected it.