by Bob Woodward
If a political settlement became a top priority, that would require compromise. Was President Trump willing to do so?
Was all of this a fig leaf so the United States could continue doing what it wanted to do? Was a democratic or stable government needed in Afghanistan? How invested was the U.S. in a real political settlement?
Another State Department representative noted that the central government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan public, the lowest in 10 years, according to polling done in the country. He observed that the illicit economy, opium and illegal mining, was the size of the regular economy, and a significant portion was under control of Taliban insurgents.
After 9/11, the CIA and military had paid off the Afghan warlords to go after the Taliban. Some of that money had been used to target political opposition. Now the U.S. was spending about $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. Was the government, which was deeply corrupt, just taking money from the U.S. and the allies to fund themselves? Was the large level of assistance taking away the Afghan government’s incentive to develop real reforms and the political will to take on opium and profits from mining? American money was one of the poisons in the Afghan system.
A larger question loomed: Should the United States be playing to win in Afghanistan, or merely not to lose?
After one meeting they took whiteboards and broke into three groups to attempt to define the problem and state vital strategic objectives. Common to all three was the goal of preventing further attacks on the homeland.
They raised additional questions: What kind of government did Afghanistan need? And what kind of stability did the U.S. need to achieve the goal of preventing further terrorist attacks?
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Initially, in meetings with representatives from the Pentagon, State Department and the intelligence agencies, McMaster laid out his four frames or goals: 1. Achieve political stability that will include a political settlement with the insurgent Taliban. 2. Push for institutional actions by the Afghan government to counter the Taliban. 3. Increase pressure on neighboring Pakistan, which was playing a double game—nominally allied with the United States, but also supporting terrorists and the Taliban. 4. Maintain international support from the 39 countries allied with the United States in a coalition.
Casting about for a middle ground on more troops, McMaster considered a proposal for adding thousands more, perhaps 3,000 to 5,000, to prevent another terrorist attack. One staff proposal called for thinking about eventually adding tens of thousands.
At a Principals Committee meeting—so-called because unlike a NSC meeting, the principals meet without the president—Attorney General Sessions erupted at everyone, including McMaster, over the idea of more troops.
You’re basically walking the president into exactly what he doesn’t believe in, to a place he doesn’t want to go, Sessions said. We’re losing too many lives in Afghanistan. I don’t understand what you guys don’t get. This is not where the president’s at.
Priebus said, You have not spent the time working with the president on what his basic philosophy and foreign policy positions are, and why. With the president, he said, “why” is the most important part. Why are we here? Why are we doing this? What do you want to happen? And what exactly are we trying to accomplish?
This was precisely the question that Peter Lavoy had been asking in the Obama administration. Neither Priebus nor Lavoy received a satisfactory answer.
The principals’ consensus settled on adding up to 4,000 troops.
“Has anyone told the president,” Priebus asked, “that the option you’re choosing basically says we’re going to be in Afghanistan for decades? If you explain it to him, he’s going to go crazy. Who’s talking to him about these details?”
Silence.
Afterward, Priebus called a meeting of the key players.
“Look,” he said, “we’ve got a problem. We are not connecting with the president over the more basic issues. Why do you want to be there? What is the purpose? What is the fundamental value to the United States for risking American lives? You have to come to a fundamental understanding and agreement on those basic issues before you start talking about how many troops are we going to have in Afghanistan. You guys are like 10 steps ahead of yourselves.”
It was not enough for McMaster to declare the objective was to prevent another terrorist attack. The question was simple: How would several thousand more troops help to achieve that?
There were four missions in Afghanistan: train and advise the Afghan Army and police; logistical support; counterterrorism; and the intelligence mission. McMaster had to craft a strategy that avoided escalation, or the appearance of escalation. It could not directly or brazenly challenge Trump’s stated desire to get out, but had to softly market a new approach that soon would be called “stay the course.”
On March 28, McMaster proposed what became known to the NSC staff as the R4s: reinforce, realign, reconcile and regionalize. These were the components of the Afghanistan strategy he was proposing, and they fit neatly within his concept of four frames. Reinforcing meant more equipment and training; realigning meant targeting funding for areas under control of the Afghan government, rather than contested areas held by the Taliban; reconciling meant trying to get the Afghan government to be inclusive, hold elections and work with power brokers; and regionalizing meant the U.S. working with regional actors such as India.
By May, the proposed plan had settled on the middle ground of adding 3,000 to 5,000 more troops. Some would come in “off the books,” meaning they would not be counted in official public numbers.
The plan would be counterterrorism-centric. An aviation battalion would be available to help the Afghan Army when they were in a serious fight with the Taliban. The rules of engagement were being altered—previously, U.S. forces could only use force if they were threatened; now they could be used when the Afghan Army was threatened.
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Around the same time, Senator Lindsey Graham was pushing Trump for more troops. Graham and Trump had three conversations about Afghanistan in May.
“Do you want on your résumé that you allowed Afghanistan to go back into the darkness and the second 9/11 came from the very place the first 9/11 did?” Graham asked. It mirrored his argument to Trump about North Korea.
“Well,” Trump asked, “how does this end?”
“It never ends,” Graham said. “It’s good versus evil. Good versus evil never ends. It’s just like the Nazis. It’s now radical Islam. It will be something else one day. So our goal is to make sure the homeland never gets attacked from Afghanistan. Look at the thousands of extra troops as an insurance policy against another 9/11. Listen to your generals.” Graham landed on a metaphor that he knew Trump would love. “General Obama was terrible. General Biden was terrible. General Susan Rice was awful. General Valerie Jarrett . . .” But “General Trump is going to be no better. General Graham is not better. Listen to your generals or fire them.”
At one point, Vice President Pence called Graham to say, “You’ve got to tell him how this ends.” It would never end, Graham repeated.
Graham was aware of the internal warfare in the White House. General Kellogg, NSC chief of staff, was siding with Bannon, arguing to get out. That meant Kellogg was at war with McMaster, his own boss.
Graham saw the stories Bannon or someone else was leaking to the press, calling this “McMaster’s War.” He called Trump at once.
“This is Trump’s war, my friend,” Graham told the president. “Nobody in history is going to remember McMaster or Bannon. They’re going to remember you.”
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In Bannon’s eyes, the old order would do what it always did—stay the course or retreat in disgrace. He wanted to find a way to mitigate the downside risk, providing cover for Trump.
In a May 31 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial defense contractor Blackwater, declared “Afghanistan is an expensive disaster for America.” H
e proposed the creation of a “viceroy” to lead all military efforts in Afghanistan and the replacement of all but a small special operations command of the U.S. military with “cheaper private solutions,” contractors who would make multiyear commitments to train the Afghan security forces. “The U.S. should adjust course from the past 15-plus years of nation building and focus on pounding the Taliban and other terrorists so hard that they plead for negotiation. Until they feel real pressure and know the U.S. has staying power, they will win.”
This did not get very far because it meant private contractors like Prince, a brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, would make lots of money.
Bannon asked CIA Director Mike Pompeo if he could find a middle solution. Pompeo agreed to go to Afghanistan in the first week of August.
For years the CIA had run a 3,000-man top secret covert army in Afghanistan. The CTPT, short for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were Afghans paid, trained and controlled by the CIA. They were the best Afghan fighters, the cream of the crop. They killed or captured Taliban insurgents and often went into tribal areas to eliminate them. They conducted dangerous and highly controversial cross-border operations into neighboring Pakistan. Could this CIA paramilitary force be expanded, making a troop increase unnecessary? Could the CIA paramilitary force and several thousand Army Special Forces do the job so the big regular ground force of the U.S. Army could get out?
Mattis called Senator Graham. A proposal was forthcoming, he explained. The military would coordinate with the CIA. “The CIA has got some high-value targets that they want to hit.” There were four operations: “Two on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”
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When McMaster tried to sell a slimmed-down version of concepts like “frames” or the R4s, Trump was cruelly dismissive. He had one question: “What the fuck are we doing there?” But he had an idea for Secretary Mattis and Bannon. “I want to get some enlisted guys, some real fighters, over here who are not officers.” He wanted their on-the-ground views of Afghanistan.
Mattis rolled his eyes.
Bannon, always looking to history to serve his purposes, was reminded of President Lincoln’s almost mystical devotion to hearing from soldiers as commander in chief.
On July 18, Trump had lunch at the White House with three soldiers and an airman who had served in Afghanistan. Trump, Pence and McMaster sat on one side of the wide, gleaming table in the Roosevelt Room; on the other side sat the four young men in their dress uniforms, looking uncomfortable as cameras documented their visit.
The president said, “I want to find out why we’ve been there 17 years, how it’s going and what we should do in terms of additional ideas. We have plenty of ideas from a lot of people but I want to hear it from people on the ground.”
Afterward, Trump summed up their views for Bannon: “Unanimous. We’ve got to figure out how to get the fuck out of there. Totally corrupt. The people are not worth fighting for . . . NATO does nothing. They’re a hindrance. Don’t let anybody tell you how great they are. It’s all bullshit.”
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The National Security Council gathered in the Situation Room at 10:00 the next morning, July 19, to brief Trump on the Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy.
McMaster spent the initial part of the meeting identifying objectives and framing issues for discussion. Trump looked bored and seemed disengaged. After about five minutes, he interrupted. “I’ve been hearing about this nonsense about Afghanistan for 17 years with no success,” he said before McMaster had finished laying out the issues. We’ve got a bunch of inconsistent, short-term strategies. We can’t continue with the same old strategy.
He brought up his meeting with the troops the previous day. The best information I’ve gotten was from a couple of those line soldiers, not the generals, he said. “I don’t care about you guys,” he told Mattis, Dunford and McMaster.
We’re losing big in Afghanistan. It’s a disaster. Our allies aren’t helping. Ghost soldiers—those paid but not serving—are ripping us off.
NATO is a disaster and a waste, he said. The soldiers had told him that NATO staff were totally dysfunctional.
“Pakistan isn’t helping us. They’re not really a friend,” despite the $1.3 billion a year in aid the U.S. gave them. He said he refused to send any additional aid.
The Afghan leaders were corrupt and making money off of the United States, he insisted. The poppy fields, largely in Taliban territory, are out of control.
“The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you,” the president told his generals and advisers. “They could do a much better job. I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”
It was a 25-minute dressing-down of the generals and senior officials.
“Look, you can’t think of Afghanistan in isolation,” Tillerson said. “You’ve got to think about it in a regional context. We’ve never before taken this sort of multilateral approach to Afghanistan and the region.”
“But how many more deaths?” Trump asked. “How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?” His antiwar argument, practically ripped from a Bob Dylan song lyric, reflected the desires of his political base whose families were overrepresented in the military forces.
“The quickest way out is to lose,” Mattis said.
Trump pivoted. Prime Minister Modi of India is a friend of mine, he said. I like him very much. He told me the U.S. has gotten nothing out of Afghanistan. Nothing. Afghanistan has massive mineral wealth. We don’t take it like others—like China. The U.S. needed to get some of Afghanistan’s valuable minerals in exchange for any support. “I’m not making a deal on anything until we get minerals.” And the U.S. “must stop payments to Pakistan until they cooperate.”
Mattis described their strategic framework and goals for nuclear nonproliferation. We need a bridge strategy until we’re able to empower the Afghans, he said.
“Why can’t we pay mercenaries to do the work for us?” Trump asked.
“We need to know if the commander in chief is fully with us or not,” Mattis said. “We can’t fight a half-assed war anymore.” In order for the military to succeed, Mattis needed Trump to be all-in on the strategy.
“I’m tired of hearing that we have to do this or that to protect our homeland or to ensure our national security,” Trump said.
The official full written NSC record of the meeting said simply that Trump “endorsed” the use of a “mix of tools” to pressure Pakistan to abandon its covert support of the Taliban. Contrary to his words, the document stated the U.S. would continue to engage Pakistan where there were mutual interests, and civil assistance to Pakistan would continue, while military assistance would be conditioned on better behavior. Rhetorically and operationally it would be a new, get tough strategy.
Later in the day those who had been in the meeting huddled in Priebus’s office to discuss Afghanistan and South Asia strategy. McMaster worked to frame things in a way that showed he had heard the president’s views and was trying to execute on the general orientation of them in as responsible a manner as possible. He tried to be upbeat. But it was clear that he, Mattis and Tillerson were close to their wits’ ends.
That evening, Priebus hosted a dinner strategy meeting. Bannon seemed to be driving the agenda. Priebus, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a young, hard-line policy adviser and speechwriter who had previously been Jeff Sessions’s communications director, complained about the NSC process. McMaster didn’t seem to want to implement the president’s viewpoints, but was trying to convince Trump of his own. Bannon wanted to replace McMaster with Kellogg, the NSC chief of staff, whose worldview aligned more closely with the president’s and his own.
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Graham told Trump that Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, would allow him to have as many counterterrorism troops as he could want, plus CIA bases wherever he wanted. It was the best listening post and platform to attack international terrorism in the world. “They would take 10
0,000 troops,” Graham said, exaggerating. “You should jump for joy that you have a counterterrorism partner in Afghanistan which will prevent the next 9/11.”
“That’s not nation building,” Trump said.
“We’re not going over there to try to sell Jeffersonian democracy,” Graham agreed. His worry was the increasing, endless tension between Pakistan and India. “Pakistan is spending a lot of money to build more nuclear weapons. It’s getting really out of control.”
Graham had recently visited Afghanistan and left depressed. “We don’t have a game plan in Afghanistan on the diplomatic side.” There was no special representative, the role that had been filled by Richard Holbrooke in the first part of the Obama administration. “We don’t even have an ambassador.” For all he could tell, there was only one person at the State Department on the South Asia desk.
“We’re going to fail on the political,” he said. A peace settlement with the Taliban was the only way out. “The Pakistanis are going to double deal until they see the Taliban losing.”
Trump had a solution. Did Graham want to be the ambassador to Pakistan?
“No, I don’t want to be ambassador to Pakistan,” Graham said.
They left it at that.
At the White House, Trump began repeating a line he had heard at a meeting: “The way we’re going to win is to run an insurgency against the insurgency of the Taliban.”
Trump loved the idea of a renegade operation, a campaign that the establishment was sure no one could win. The president said, “These guys in the 1980s against the Russians on horses.” Perfect.
Bannon added fuel to the renegade fire by criticizing the weak Afghan Army. “We spent a trillion dollars to take the world’s best fighters,” Bannon said, “and turn them into the world’s worst army.”