The Long War

by David Loyn

  PLAN FOR VICTORY

  The new president trusted his instincts over his advisers, and his instincts were to quit Afghanistan. It was a “loser war” he said in an infamous encounter in “the Tank,” the secure meeting room in the Pentagon in July 2017. Surrounded by the flags of the most powerful military in the world, broken along one wall by The Peacemakers, a painting that depicted President Abraham Lincoln and his chiefs of staff in 1865, the president railed at their successors. “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies,” he is reported to have shouted to the assembled generals. “You’re all losers.”6 The meeting had been called to find a way forward in Afghanistan and ranged more widely into U.S. global interests, angering the president, who wanted to withdraw from most of them. Trump said of Nicholson, who was not in the room, “I don’t think he knows how to win.” Dunford tried to explain the strategy of reducing the footprint while training Afghan forces, but was cut off with the words, “We don’t win wars anymore.” The tirade by a president who had dodged the Vietnam draft on questionable medical grounds challenged the most fundamental compact of those in uniform, that they obeyed the commander in chief. Only Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke up to defend the generals. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.” After the meeting, Tillerson was overheard calling the president a “moron.”

  Those trying to keep a coherent Afghan strategy together were already concerned about the president’s open contempt for NATO. Reliance on NATO allies to cover the whole of Afghanistan was proportionally greater as the American presence reduced. Troops from Germany, Italy, the UK and Turkey were the largest contingents alongside American troops in Afghanistan. But during the 2016 election campaign, Trump had mused, “It’s possible we’re going to have to let NATO go,” calling it a Cold War relic.7 His first visit as president to NATO’s gleaming new Brussels headquarters in May was disastrous. He gave no reassurance of America’s continued resolve, instead calling on NATO countries to “pay up,” saying, “Most of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years.”8 This clearly misunderstood the nature of the alliance, which does not require members to pay dues but commit to spending 2 percent of GDP on their own defense. Other leaders laughed publicly, enraging the thin-skinned American president.

  But only a month after the tirade in the Tank, Trump delivered a speech on Afghanistan that ticked all the boxes his generals wanted. The “grown-ups” in his White House, in particular the national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, both of whom had served in Afghanistan, had turned round the president’s declared instinct for withdrawal. In a rerun of the conversations in 2009—the first year of the Obama presidency, which resulted in the surge—a new president who wanted to pull out of a war not of his making was persuaded to give it one more heave. Mattis made changes to the speech after the first draft from the White House adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller came straight from the “America First” Trump playbook. Miller’s draft lacked any reference to the role of allies and talked of “waging war on Afghanistan,” not on terrorism.9 Mattis put his speechwriter Guy Snodgrass onto it, telling him, “America first doesn’t mean America alone.”

  On August 21, 2017, at 9:00 p.m., in front of his cabinet and an audience of troops at the historic Fort Myer, Arlington, Virginia, President Trump stood up to reset the Afghan campaign. The Snodgrass rewrite retained much of Miller’s language, calling terrorists “nothing but thugs, and criminals, and predators, and—that’s right—losers.” Trump said there were “big and intricate problems” in the region, but “I’m a problem solver.” He said the “American people are weary of war without victory,” and he “shared their frustration.” Things would change. “We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.”

  Beyond the bombast, in the meat of the speech, Trump detailed the threats that had made him change his mind about pulling out—twenty-one foreign terrorist organizations in the region, the unresolved India-Pakistan nuclear standoff, and the language now came from Mattis, not Miller. “We will work with allies and partners to protect our shared interests.” The war was not about a victory on the battlefield but building conditions for peace talks. “Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country. But strategically applied force aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace.”

  Breitbart news agency, opponents of the war and backers of Trump’s America First stance, reported contemptuously that the speech was a sign of “the swamp getting to him.” Other reporting of the speech said the strategy had gone back to CT-plus, Vice President Joe Biden’s plan rejected during the McChrystal review in 2009. But it was more than that. Mattis and Dunford were patiently constructing the enduring commitment to Afghanistan they wanted. Nobody knew if peace talks would happen. Meanwhile, “America will continue its support for the Afghan government and the Afghan military as they confront the Taliban in the field.” Dunford saw the campaign as “an insurance policy” for the U.S., that he thought affordable in the medium term.10

  The most important change in the speech, which Trump called a “plan for victory,” gave Nicholson expanded authority to go on the offensive against terrorist and criminal networks across Afghanistan. “Micromanagement from Washington, D.C.,” the president said, “does not win battles.” Even before the speech, in the early summer of 2017, he had given Mattis the right to determine troop levels. Now he went further. “Retribution will be fast and powerful, as we lift restrictions and expand authorities in the field.” To Dunford, the change meant that “the Afghans saw that they were getting all the support that General Nicholson could possibly provide.”

  The tight head count on uniformed troops led Nicholson to improvise, maximizing the number in frontline roles, while bringing in contractors behind them. This had the effect of significantly increasing costs, and reducing long-term capability, as troops who might have come to Afghanistan in maintenance roles were left behind. Nicholson liked to quote the example of a combat aviation brigade from the 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas. Pilots came to Afghanistan with their helicopters, but ground staff were left behind to keep the number of uniformed troops at the set level. “This contract for maintenance runs into the tens of millions of dollars,” he said. “The soldiers who were trained to be mechanics are sitting back at Fort Riley, not having the opportunity to do their job. So this has a direct impact on Army readiness.”11

  “War is a contest of wills,” Nicholson said. “Since 2011, we have announced we were leaving, and we were steadily drawing down our forces all the way until last December”—that is, until the end of the Obama presidency. He said that the new policy sent a different signal to the Taliban: “We will stay, and we will only leave based on the conditions being right.”12 The long, anguished debates over troop numbers were over. That was no longer the only metric that mattered. For the first time, the Afghan campaign was genuinely based on conditions, not on a timetable. By the spring of 2018, there were more than fourteen thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 50 percent up on the figure at the beginning of the Trump presidency. They were not there to win the war as in the heady days of the surge but to set conditions for peace talks. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis thought the change in policy sent a clear message to the Taliban. “You will not win a battlefield victory—we may not win one, but neither will you—so at some point, we have to come to the negotiating table and find a way to bring this to an end.”13

  Another factor that made the continued presence of U.S. troops inevitable was the emergence of Islamic State in Afghanistan. President Ghani said that with the rise of Islamic State, “the situation has changed, the context has changed.”14 He talked up the threat, wanting to internationalize Afghanistan’s plight to keep international troops in his country in the face of what he called a fifth wave of terrorism, “Terrorism 5.0.” And al-Qaeda had not gone away. The chance discovery of a huge al-Qaeda tr
aining camp that took several days to destroy, in the trackless wastes of the southern Kandahar desert, was cited as another reason not to abandon Afghanistan.15

  BLACK FLAGS IN THE LAND OF KHORASAN

  The first appearance of Islamic State in the region was a statement by a disaffected member of the Pakistani Taliban, Hafiz Saeed Khan, on January 11, 2015, in a video shot in the frontier region of Pakistan, in front of the IS black flag. There is little evidence that the early leaders of what became known as Islamic State–Khorasan, IS-K, were in contact with the headquarters of the “Caliphate” in Iraq. They were freelancing, changing the white flag of the Taliban for the black flag of IS to try to recruit fighters to the more violent cause. Within months, they formally joined the global movement, celebrating by beheading a police officer in Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan.

  The black flag and use of the term Khorasan were powerful lures for young men drawn to extreme violence in the name of religion. There is an Islamic prophecy that before the end times, the Mahdi, the returning messiah, will appear bearing black flags in the “Land of Khorasan,” an old name for the region including western Afghanistan, a strip of Central Asia to the north, and the eastern part of modern Iran. Another story credits the black flag to Abu Muslim al-Khurasani, an eighth-century warrior famous for rising up against corrupt Arab Muslim rulers and founding a dynasty in the Khorasan region.16

  A year after the emergence of IS-K, in a conflict where symbols matter, they staked their claim to be the main international jihadi opposition to the West, moving into the former al-Qaeda cave complex at Tora Bora. As the capacity to operate in Iraq and Syria reduced, Afghanistan’s importance to the organization grew. When Khan, the first leader, was killed in a drone strike, Nicholson tracked intelligence showing consultation over the succession with the headquarters of IS in Iraq. “There is a degree of command and control provided from the parent organization to the satellite.”17 By 2018, the Center for Strategic and International Studies were reporting that Afghanistan was the “top destination for foreign terrorist fighters in the region, as well as fighters leaving battlefields in the Levant.”18

  American focus on killing leaders was relentless. In the first three months of 2016, up to 80 percent of U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan were against IS targets, mostly in Nangarhar. But they were still far less intense than against IS in Syria and Iraq. David Petraeus, one of the signatories of the two open letters, cowrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for U.S. troops to once again go on the offensive against the Taliban in the field. “We need to take the gloves off.”19 He wrote that the U.S. was failing to use its asymmetric advantage.

  Nicholson changed that. The number of bombs and missiles dropped from the air in 2017 was five times the number in 2015, the first year of the “post-combat” operation. And they almost doubled again the following year—to 7,362, or 20 a day—the highest annual total of the war, far higher than when there were 150,000 troops in 2010, and Petraeus was “killing and capturing” every night. Nicholson hit other records, dropping 24 precision guided missiles from a B-52 on one raid, the largest number to date to be released from the Cold War–era bomber.20 In April 2017, he made the first use of the largest nonnuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast—more commonly known as the “Mother of All Bombs.”

  The MOAB exploded by design in the air over a large complex of caves in Nangarhar where IS-K fighters were dug in, sending a shock wave down into cave entrances across a wide area, and there was no doubt of its tactical effect. At the time, I had recently started a one-year contract to advise President Ghani’s office on strategic communications, and witnessed the unusual sight of tribal elders from Nangarhar appearing in the Arg with a white horse—a gift to the president as a great war leader. But IS-K would not be defeated by a single devastating attack, and their radio station claimed a propaganda victory, since the dropping of the huge bomb proved their jihadi status. The message was “skillfully tailored for young radicals,” wrote the analyst Borhan Osman, “since for them American hostility is a stamp of a group’s credibility.”21 Nicholson had no reservations. “This was the right weapon against the right target. The enemy had created bunkers, tunnels, and extensive minefields, and this weapon was used to reduce those obstacles so we could continue our offensive.”22

  IS continued to spread to several districts in northern Afghanistan, picking up commanders and fighters disaffected by the Taliban or other jihadi groups. And pressure on them continued, with an attack every day of the year against al-Qaeda or IS-K sites. By the end of the year, Nicholson claimed to have reduced the Islamic State footprint, but they were not defeated.

  THE BATTLE FOR KABUL

  On May 30, 2017, I had just arrived for work in the Arg, when I felt what I first thought was an earthquake as the air in the building moved. I heard it an instant later—the largest suicide bomb yet to be detonated in the center of Kabul. Explosives had been packed into a sewage truck—smart cover since it would have been waved more quickly through checkpoints who wanted it out of the way. The truck came very close to the secure zone, leaving a huge crater in the roundabout where it was detonated when stopped at the last major checkpoint. It lifted a line of blast walls into the air, devastated the German embassy, and damaged the Iranian embassy. But as always, the main casualties were Afghan civilians. The bomb was detonated at 9:00 a.m., and the streets were full of people on their way to work and children going to school. The damage covered a wide area, destroying the headquarters of 1TV, the Roshan mobile phone company, and a quixotic Kabul landmark, the office of the World Philosophical Mathematical Research Center. Around 150 people were killed. The blast was close to the offices of the CEO, Abdullah Abdullah, and former president Hamid Karzai, and broke windows across a wide area, including in the Arg compound. It set off a week of events when order seemed close to spiraling out of control.

  It’s easy to look at Kabul as a permanent war zone from outside, but I have been there at some point in every year since the mid-1990s, and the intensity of the violence from 2016 to 2018 was of a different order, and had a more damaging effect on morale, than anything since the worst days of the pre-Taliban civil war. There were attacks on government buildings across the center of the city, parliament, the Four-Hundred-Bed hospital, and a siege at the American University. Suicide bombs were often followed by gun battles in complex attacks that sometimes took hours to quell. Attackers went room to room at the Intercontinental Hotel, killing guests, after accomplices who had smuggled weapons inside created a diversion to allow them through checkpoints. There were several attacks on Shia mosques, including one when many of the casualties jumped from high windows as the building was ablaze, and once again, the city held its breath hoping there would not be revenge attacks, sparking Sunni/Shia conflict.

  Many of the attacks, including the sewage truck bomb, were traced to the Haqqani network. But Islamic State attacks were now frequent in the capital. An ambulance was detonated in a crowded street, killing ninety-five people. In another IS attack, a suicide bomb blast was followed by a second, targeting journalists who had gathered to report the incident. The second bomber was carrying a TV camera packed with explosives. Nine journalists were among the twenty-five killed in the double bombing. In this atmosphere, security forces became jittery. The private guards of one of Abdullah’s deputies, Muhammad Muhaqiq, opened fire on a passing wedding procession when they thought they were coming under attack, killing the bride.

  Public anger at the government’s failure to quell the violence spilled over after the sewage truck attack, and demonstrators marched toward the Arg, to be faced by police firing live rounds. Several were shot dead, including the ringleader, who turned out to be the son of the deputy speaker of the senate, the Meshrano Jirga. This put a harsh political spin on the events that followed. A number of senior figures, including Abdullah, were at the dead protestor’s funeral when it was targeted by a suicide bomber. Fifteen people died, and many othe
rs were injured.23 Protestors set up camp in the center of town, pitching tents across the road, paralyzing the center of Kabul, and demanding the government should resign. It would be several days before they could be cleared.

  On the day of the sewage truck bomb, Nicholson visited the bomb site, shook hands with relief workers, and talked to journalists at the scene. The president remained hunkered down, made a long statement broadcast too late at night, and visited a hospital for security forces injured in the attack, but did not take Afghan press with him. The government media machine did not advise him to do more. They put up senior generals from both the police and army side to talk at a press conference daily in the days after the attack in an attempt to rebuild public confidence, but the opportunity for the president to reconnect to the people was lost.

  “WHO DO I TRUST?” REDUX

  Although personally a gifted communicator, the president did not have the strategic communication tools to wield the power of his office to do the vital task of building confidence in the nation. This left a vacuum, and the response of many Afghan citizens was to fall back on a short-term view of the future, damaging the capacity of the economy to grow. In states experiencing conflict, instead of Adam Smith’s hidden hand of the market creating wealth and encouraging equilibrium, self-interest at times when confidence is low undermines economic opportunity, compounding millions of short-term decisions to create a general air of despair and hopelessness. Instead of building and investing in permanence, people keep assets as liquid as possible, expecting things to get worse.

  The price of flour is about as good an indicator of confidence there is in Afghanistan. In the wholesale market, a large warehouse in a maze of streets near the river, the market manager sits cross-legged, Buddha-like, in a box mounted above eye level, completely coated with white flour on his face and turban and clothes, like a street performer, as he watches over sacks of flour coming and going on the shoulders of porters below him. He knows when fear is growing of the Taliban’s return, as the price goes up. People buy in bulk, wanting a sack to be able to put on the back of a donkey and run. But when confident of the future, they buy smaller amounts from market stalls, so the price goes down.