War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

by Ronan Farrow

  PART II

  SHOOT FIRST,

  ASK QUESTIONS NEVER

  SYRIA, 2016

  AFGHANISTAN, 2002

  THE HORN OF AFRICA, 2006

  EGYPT, 2013

  COLOMBIA, 2006

  Do not be deceived: Bad company ruins good morals.

  —1 CORINTHIANS 15:33

  17

  GENERAL RULE

  SEVEN YEARS AFTER Richard Holbrooke died, I walked by the front door of what had once been the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The hospital-white paint job on the wall was the same, and the wooden door with the honey-colored stain. The sign was new: “Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL,” it read. The SRAP team, and Holbrooke’s dream of negotiating with the Taliban, had been quietly shuttered over the course of Donald Trump’s first year in office, and its last employees let go. In the first days of 2018, Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, told me he hadn’t yet made a final decision on the office’s future, but it was obvious that he didn’t think much of it. “Whether we need an SRAP or not, we’re considering that,” he said. Tillerson argued that the conventional roles responsible for Afghanistan and Pakistan—the ambassadors to those countries, and the assistant secretary for South and Central Asia— were “much better than an SRAP. Much better.” But by early 2018, the South and Central Asia Bureau still didn’t have a permanent assistant secretary. If someone was actively championing diplomatic solutions for the region, it wasn’t apparent.

  The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place.

  Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

  America’s relationships around the world, too, took on a distinctly military flavor. In early 2018, the Trump administration leaked its plans for a “Buy American” strategy that would give State Department diplomats around the world a new mandate: drumming up arms sales for defense contractors. American arms sales had already been climbing over the preceding five years. But a spate of new deals under the Trump administration suggested a widening gulf between such sales and any diplomacy that might provide context and direction for them. During a diplomatic crisis between Qatar and other Gulf States in 2017, as Trump excoriated the Qatari government for its ties to terrorists, the Pentagon announced it was selling $12 billion in F-15 fighters to the nation. Secretary of Defense Mattis met with his counterpart, the Qatari defense minister, to seal the deal. State Department officials were barely involved, according to several Pentagon staffers.

  Military exigencies trumped concerns that had been obstacles to such deals in prior administrations. In the midst of a human rights crackdown in Bahrain—including murder and torture by government forces—the State Department announced that it would resume the sale of F-16 fighter jets to that country’s monarchy without any attendant human rights conditions. At the State Department in late May 2017, a reporter asked Acting Assistant Secretary of State Stuart E. Jones—a career Foreign Service officer in a post to which no permanent appointee had been nominated—how the administration reconciled a record-setting $110-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia with that regime’s abysmal human rights record. Jones sighed heavily. “Um. Um . . .” he muttered, glancing around, knitting and re-knitting his fingers. Then he froze for twenty seconds, his face slackened into a thousand-yard stare. He offered a few halting sentences about fighting extremism and another interminable pause before hurrying offstage, head down, like he’d realized he was naked in a dream.

  AGAIN AND AGAIN, President Trump called authoritarian strongmen to sing their praises. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, as he presided over one of the worst human rights crackdowns in the country’s history, was “fantastic” and “we are very much behind [him].” The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, who admitted to murdering opponents and cheerfully encouraged his troops to rape women, was doing an “unbelievable” and “great” job. Trump personally invited both to the White House, breaking with the previous administration. Of all of the living former secretaries of state, only one, James Baker, wholeheartedly endorsed the closer rapport. “Egypt, the Philippines and Turkey are all historic partners of the United States and it is important that we deal with those leaders,” Baker said. “An observation often attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt puts this phenomenon in the proper perspective. ‘He may be an SOB,’ President Roosevelt said of a Latin American dictator, ‘but he’s our SOB.’ ” John Kerry evinced a more typical perspective: “I don’t understand,” he said, “what this president aims to achieve by going so far as to hold up as positives or describe as ‘strong’ things which violate international norms and certainly are unprecedented coming out of the mouth of an American president of any party.” The diplomats once charged with managing these delicate relationships were as surprised as anyone: repeatedly, they weren’t informed.

  “If anyone’s seen the increasing militarization of foreign policy, it’s definitely me,” said Chris LaVine, a career official who had been one of Holbrooke’s special assistants on the SRAP team and was working on Syria policy at State when news of the cuts and firings hit. Stationed in a series of assignments focused on the Islamic State, he witnessed two dynamics that helped to plunge America’s Syria policy into chaos. The first was inside the State Department. The new sign on what was once Holbrooke’s door was not incidental. Counter-ISIL activities had become a whirlpool, pulling in more and more of the Department’s resources and activities. Brett McGurk, the special envoy on combatting ISIL, had become one of the most powerful officials in the building. The second change had come from outside. The Department had yielded more and more of its power to the military. “We ceded a lot of policy ground to the folks doing counter-ISIL, in the Pentagon, in Tampa, and in the building at State,” he said, referring to the Pentagon’s Central Command headquarters in Florida, CENTCOM. “Hard underlying parts of the diplomacy were absolutely ceded, and progress on other policy issues such as human rights concerns, economics, and the bilateral relationship [with Turkey] were largely sacrificed.”

  With no centralized dialogue led by diplomats, and the White House—beginning with Obama and continuing under Trump—vacillating between different half measures, the CIA and the Pentagon essentially built the United States’ Syria policy. This proved problematic as the two agencies set about creating separate and sometimes conflicting relationships with forces on the ground.
The CIA covertly armed and trained the loose coalition of so-called “moderate” rebels in the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The Pentagon set up and began arming a coalition called the Syrian Democratic Forces, dominated by the Kurdish YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel or “People’s Protection Units”).

  Both relationships proved problematic. FSA arms ended up in the hands of terrorist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra. And the YPG was inextricably entwined with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party or PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê)—a revolutionary group labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. “They play shell games with their organizations’ names,” said LaVine. “These guys are one and the same as PKK.” The Pentagon’s unbridled relationship with the YPG also presented a further wrinkle: the Kurds are the mortal enemy of the Turks. “Due to our singular focus on eliminating the immediate threat of ISIL, we’ve exacerbated a thirty-five-year conflict between Turkish security forces and the PKK, which is likely to rage for much longer,” he continued.

  From the barrel-bombed husk that was once the city of Aleppo, an FSA commander named Abdullah Al-Mousa was more blunt: “American policy with the SDF will make a civil war in the future between Arabs and Kurds . . . the US do a very big mistake.” That very big mistake was already apparent on the ground: at several times, the Kurds, Turks, and Syrian rebels were all locked in battle, all undergirded by the United States’ arms and air support. One hot, summery Saturday in August 2016, rockets hit two Turkish tanks in northern Syria, killing one of Turkey’s soldiers and unraveling a delicate web of alliances for the United States. Turkey quickly blamed the YPG, and struck back hard, killing twenty-five Kurdish YPG fighters the next day, according to Turkish state-run media—in addition to twenty civilians. The FSA announced the capture of ten Kurdish villages the same day. Videos circulated online showed US-backed FSA fighters brutally beating US-backed YPG soldiers.

  A month later, Abdullah Al-Mousa, the FSA commander, sheltered in an encampment outside of Aleppo, the shelling audible even through his closed windows, even late at night. “It’s really a chaos,” he said. “When the United States is supporting those groups like the Kurd groups, which don’t fight [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad, and just want to make their country, it’s really a very big mistake.” Unsurprisingly, he viewed his own FSA forces as a more suitable partner—though he conceded fighting the Syrian regime was his first concern, before combatting ISIL at the behest of the United States.

  Free Syrian Army lawyer Osama Abu Zaid said the United States’ presence in the Syrian conflict inspired confusion, with the CIA backing the FSA and the Pentagon backing the SDF and its Kurdish subsidiaries. “There is no direct communication between Pentagon and Free Syrian Army,” he said. The divisions between US agencies led to strange situations within joint command and training centers, with Pentagon officials refusing to talk to confused FSA commanders being armed by the CIA. Abu Zaid said sometimes the Americans seemed to relish the tension. “Sometimes the CIA people here, they were happy, because the Pentagon program is false.” This was what tactics without strategy looked like: deadly farce.

  During the first half of 2017, the Trump administration chose its side, first reauthorizing Pentagon support for the Kurds over the objections of the Turks, then shutting down the CIA’s covert support for rebel elements. The Pentagon seizing control effectively shut the State Department out of what should have been an important mandate: maintaining relations with Turkey, a necessary but difficult regional ally. Military proxy wars replacing diplomacy in the region had been “completely corrosive” from a strategic standpoint, said LaVine. “I worked on managing the Turkey relationship, and the US arming the YPG so overtly has competed with and eroded our bilateral relationship. Turkey perceives the YPG as we would if they were based in Texas and arming the Sinaloa cartel.” It undercut civilian efforts to talk to the Turks on a range of issues. “We had to restrain ourselves on issues of mutual concern we should have been able to address: human rights in Turkey, the clamping down on civil society and mass purges related to the July 2016 coup attempt, and making progress on bilateral issues with a NATO ally,” LaVine added. “Instead, cooperating with the Syrian Kurds dominated the conversation and limited our ability to conduct diplomacy.”

  Hillary Clinton bridled at the suggestion that she had ever been absent from policymaking on Syria. She had backed her military and intelligence counterparts’ case for more muscular intervention. “I thought we needed to do more to support the legitimate opposition to Bashar al-Assad,” she explained. “I got the CIA and the Defense Department on board with that.” But at a working level, multiple officials said the State Department had surrendered so much power that there was little counterbalance from civilian voices—at least those who didn’t fall into lockstep with the requests of the Pentagon or Langley. “You have mostly mil-mil contacts,” at this point, said LaVine. “This is the Pentagon talking to their counterparts. State felt like the fourth or fifth most important agency in foreign policy.” And back on Mahogany Row, there was no alternative perspective left. The most powerful voices in the building were “aligned with the commanders prosecuting the Counter-ISIL campaign at the expense of the longer-term US foreign policy objectives in the region. For State, it’s become impossible to have an honest policy disagreement with the uniform, or you risk being sidelined from the discussion at all.”

  LaVine, “a kid from Brooklyn, who witnessed September 11 and wanted to serve,” had initially intended to leave State in 2010, after his Afghanistan and Pakistan assignment ended. He’d remained there after promising Holbrooke, not long before his death, that he’d stay to fight another day. LaVine left amid the budget cuts and firings in mid-2017, after more than ten years at the Department. “It was clear,” he said, “that we were creating more problems through systemic indecision and inaction, rather than solving them.”

  LEANING ON FOREIGN FORCES and strongmen, a mainstay of the Cold War, was in the midst of a renaissance. It had been for nearly two decades, since the very first days after September 11, 2001. Some of these relationships were born under George W. Bush’s leadership, in a moment of urgency immediately after the attacks. But many were continued and expanded upon over the course of the Obama administration. Ironically, it was Obama’s noninterventionist, “don’t do stupid shit” approach to foreign policy that prompted a double down on these tactics. His was an administration intent on a legacy of low-footprint intervention, and, along with drones, alliances with foreign militaries and militias were at the heart of that legacy. In 2014, he stood at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and described to more than a thousand graduating cadets, clad in traditional gray, his vision for a new era of American engagement in the world. At the center of that vision was proxy war: over and over again, he used the word “partner,” referring to foreign militaries or militias doing the bidding of the United States. Why send American sons and daughters to do work that Yemenis and Pakistanis could be paid to do for us? While the motivations changed from administration to administration, all three presidents since 2001 doubled down on that principle.

  But these relationships invariably carry with them the acute compromises, to human rights and to broader strategic interests, that LaVine witnessed in the United States’ Syria policy. We don’t have to speculate about the effects of those compromises: the trend has already proved disastrous for America’s trajectory in conflicts the world over. Sidelining diplomacy in favor of direct dealings between our military and local warlords was at the heart of America’s declining fortunes in Afghanistan. Similar choices contributed to the unleashing of new terrorist threats in the Horn of Africa. And a policy built around strongmen left us flat footed when revolution struck Egypt, and powerless to stop atrocities thereafter. There were also exceptions: a precious few military-to-military alliances with a more balanced approach integrating diplomatic interests, as was the case with the United States’ interventions in Latin America’s Cocaine Triangle.

 
That cautionary tale seemed largely lost on the Trump administration as it set about its tilt to military-led foreign policy. But it was inescapable for many diplomats who found their work increasingly overtaken by military alliances—including those who worked in Afghanistan. For some of us, that realization began with a warlord, and an unsolved murder.

  18

  DOSTUM: HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH AND DISCOURAGING ALL LIES

  YOU CAN SMELL A MASS GRAVE before you see it. Jennifer Leaning had her knitted scarf, the black and blue and red one she always traveled with, pulled tight around her neck. Her black Marmot jacket was too big for her, concealing her slight frame and letting her pass for a man at a distance; a small safeguard on a dangerous mission. She brought a hat, too, but she’d given that to her local interpreter. He was just a kid, maybe eighteen, and jittery—partly from the cold and partly because he was scared of where they were headed. It was midday and not freezing, as Afghanistan could be in January, but a wind had whipped up. A foul smell carried: the garbage odor of death etched in Leaning’s consciousness from her time as a physician in conflict zones from Kosovo to Somalia. It came from no specific direction. It was like the ground was rotten. Leaning, small under a vast gray sky, felt exposed. The desert here was flat, horizon to horizon; no place to hide. She edged forward, cautious, knowing the ground might be mined. The scene was unmistakable: against the surrounding desert, freshly churned soil stood out, dark and damp and crisscrossed with heavy tire marks. It was dotted with a strange harvest: tufts of black and white and cheerful red. It took Leaning a moment to realize what they were: turbans, clothes, and between them, flip-flops and prayer beads. She stopped cold: “There were fragments of skull. There were pieces of rib cage. Human bones.” By her side, another investigator, John Heffernan, took a picture.