During his campaign, Trump repeatedly complained about the purported “six trillion dollars” that the United States had spent on its post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East. Trump made it quite clear that he wanted to extricate the US from foreign entanglements such as Afghanistan. On the one hand, Trump was advocating pulling America out of its wars—an Obama position and one of the several commonalities on national security that existed between the two presidents once you got beyond Trump’s rhetoric—and on the other hand, Trump was also advocating for a more powerful Pentagon with more funding to fight an unconstrained war against terrorists.
Shortly after Trump was elected, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani called to congratulate him and to make him a pitch about American interests in Afghanistan. Ghani, a savvy technocrat with a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University, told Trump that the Chinese were exploiting Afghanistan’s vast potential mineral wealth, thinking that this might capture Trump’s attention. Ghani calculated that dangling Afghanistan’s minerals might change Trump’s calculus about Afghanistan. Trump was intrigued: perhaps the United States could be repaid for its hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the Afghan War, which was already long past the point of being America’s longest war. Estimates of the size of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth went as high as one trillion dollars; it was rich in copper, gold, iron ore, and rare earth elements.
Trump tasked commerce secretary Wilbur Ross to look into it. Ross wrote a memo to the president that poured a great deal of cold water on the notion of exploiting Afghanistan’s minerals, citing the continuing violence in the country and its rudimentary infrastructure that made extracting the minerals a tricky business proposition. A decade earlier, China had made an expensive effort to exploit Afghanistan’s minerals, purchasing with great fanfare a $3 billion long-term lease on a massive copper mine in eastern Afghanistan, but by the time Trump assumed office it still hadn’t produced any copper owing to the poor security conditions around the mine.
The need to make a decision about what to do in Afghanistan loomed large. In his first months in office, when Trump encountered a national security problem, he tended to ask the same five questions: “Why do we care?” “Why does it matter to the American people?” “Why can’t others do it?” “Who’s paying for it?” “Why can’t others pay?” On Afghanistan, he asked a further question: “Why are we there sixteen years later?” These were all very good questions. They were also unsettling questions for many in the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington because they hadn’t been asked in a long time.
The simple answer as to why the United States was still at war in Afghanistan was that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan was leaving and letting the country revert into a brutal civil war in which the Taliban would take over ever-larger chunks of the country and would then play host to a wide range of jihadist groups, some of which might plot against the United States. After all, ISIS already had a foothold in the country.
Leaving Afghanistan ran the risk of repeating what Trump and his top advisers saw as the big mistake Obama had made in Iraq, which was to not maintain some kind of enduring American military presence there when the Obama administration ended its Iraq mission in the winter of 2011. At that time, General Mattis was the CENTCOM commander overseeing all US military operations in the Middle East. Mattis had advocated leaving eighteen thousand soldiers in Iraq, but he was overruled. Together with his hawkish position on Iran, this made Mattis an outlier among the generally dovish Obama national security team.
McMaster had also been concerned in 2011 that the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq would provide an opening for al-Qaeda. He had forwarded to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs an intelligence assessment that predicted that al-Qaeda was going to come back in a new form and would take over large swaths of territory.
If there was one argument that Trump often found a winner, it was to do the opposite of his predecessor. Trump had already pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—the trade deal with a dozen nations in Asia that was designed to contain the rise of China—as well as the Paris climate accord. Now he could buck his predecessor by reversing the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan instigated by Obama, but this also ran the risk of doing something that Trump hated, which was admitting in some shape or form that his campaign rhetoric about the wasteful wars in the greater Middle East was wrong.
In 2015, Obama had seriously considered completely withdrawing all US troops from the country. After all, Obama himself had run on a promise of drawing down from America’s expensive overseas wars. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, saw her role as executing Obama’s vision to get the United States out of Afghanistan and to leave only a vestigial American military presence there to guard the massive US embassy in Kabul.
However, once you got into the details, that plan didn’t make much sense. American troops were needed to protect the vital Kabul International Airport and also to support US counterterrorism operations, including CIA drones that continued to deploy to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the border with Afghanistan to hunt for members of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders who had found safe haven there.
Also, always in the background of the discussion of the Afghan drawdown in the Obama White House was the fiasco that had unfolded in Iraq after all US troops there were pulled out of the country at the end of 2011. This had contributed to a vacuum in Iraq that ISIS had taken great advantage of during the summer of 2014. No one wanted a replay of that in Afghanistan.
The rise of ISIS across the greater Middle East and the fall of the northern Afghan city of Kunduz to the Taliban in late September 2015, which held the city for two weeks, as well as the extended political crisis between the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and his political rival, Afghan chief executive officer Abdullah Abdullah, had made Obama realize that going to zero troops could be very destabilizing. Obama might then get blamed for “losing” Afghanistan, just as he was blamed for pulling out of Iraq four years earlier.
At President Obama’s final strategy meeting on Afghanistan, it was obvious how distasteful this decision was for him. While Obama wanted to withdraw, he couldn’t just zero out troops in Afghanistan shortly before the next president assumed office, as that would leave his successor with little flexibility for maneuver. Obama cut off any further discussion of a withdrawal, saying simply, “I’m leaving the decision to my successor.” As he left office, Obama authorized a force of 8,400 troops to remain in Afghanistan.
Shortly after Trump had assumed office, General John “Mick” Nicholson, the overall commander of the Afghan War, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that this troop level was insufficient. “We have a shortfall of a few thousand” advisers to train and assist the Afghan army, Nicholson testified. Nicholson also noted that the war was in a “stalemate” with the Taliban. Those comments irritated White House officials as they thought that they had boxed Trump in even before a decision was made about what to do in Afghanistan, in much the same way President Obama had felt boxed in early in his first term in office when a top-secret Pentagon assessment had leaked that asserted that the Afghan War effort needed significantly more troops.
McMaster had a deep interest in Afghanistan. He had led an anticorruption task force there from 2010 to 2012, handpicked by General Petraeus, who had taken over command in Afghanistan from General McChrystal. Fixing corruption in Afghanistan was like trying to stop hurricanes from landing in Florida, but McMaster—a man of enormous energy who didn’t so much enter a room as bound into it—gave it his all and recruited a small group of civilian experts to help him. McMaster and his team targeted the patronage networks that were looting and undermining the Afghan state. When a problem came up in Afghanistan, McMaster told his team, “We’re going to crush this.”
His time in Afghanistan deeply informed McMaster’s views about what to do there once he was in the White House. McMaster had been very frustrated with the Obama administration policy in Afghanistan to publicly announce withdrawal dates from the country. Obama had surged tens of thousands of additional US troops into Afghanistan, but when he gave a speech at West Point on December 1, 2009, announcing the new surge of troops, he also simultaneously announced their withdrawal date. For the Taliban, the Afghan government, and Afghanistan’s neighbors such as Pakistan, the headline of Obama’s West Point speech was not the surge of new troops but this withdrawal date. In McMaster’s view, this had encouraged the Taliban, undermined confidence among Afghans, and affected the hedging strategy of Pakistan’s military intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which had long supported elements of the Taliban.
It was not only Trump who was skeptical about the Afghan War. Much of the American public had tuned it out as an endless, unwinnable quagmire. On April 13, 2017, Afghanistan was suddenly back in the news because a 22,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb—known colloquially as the “Mother of All Bombs,” or MOAB—was dropped near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, aimed at ISIS militants who were hiding out there in caves and tunnels in the mountains. The MOAB, designed to blow up underground tunnel and cave complexes, was the most lethal nonnuclear bomb in the American arsenal.
ISIS had established a presence in eastern Afghanistan two years earlier, consisting mostly of former members of the Taliban who had rebranded themselves as ISIS. The dropping of the MOAB was ordered by General Nicholson as part of Operation Green Sword, the name that the US military gave to its operations against ISIS. Nicholson had the authority to drop such a bomb, but the deployment of the MOAB, which received a great deal of press coverage as it seemed to presage a more aggressive Trump-led Pentagon, in fact, caught the White House by surprise. Trump’s national security staffers had no idea it was going to happen.
The deployment of the MOAB underlined that the Afghan War was not going well. ISIS and al-Qaeda had both established footholds in Afghanistan, while the Taliban controlled around 10 percent of the population, some three million people, and they contested with government forces for control of a much larger proportion, about a third of the population, or around ten million people. Whereas a few years earlier, Kabul, the Afghan capital, had enjoyed a bustling restaurant scene and Westerners could live there and lead relatively normal lives, all that was now gone as a result of the multiple bombings in Kabul by the Taliban, compounded by their targeted kidnapping of Westerners. The resulting exodus of Westerners from the country damaged investment and development efforts in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan was now at its lowest point for the Afghans and their American allies since the Taliban were overthrown in the months after 9/11.
The key point of McMaster’s book Dereliction of Duty was that the Pentagon brass had told President Lyndon Johnson only what he wanted to hear about how the Vietnam War was going. McMaster was not going to make the same mistake with Trump, whose natural inclination was to pull the plug on Afghanistan. It was obvious to McMaster what the United States should do: bulk up its military presence in the country and make no premature promises of withdrawal. Also, because the Taliban had long enjoyed sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, it was time to turn up the heat on the Pakistanis. Finally, something needed to be done about the endemic corruption marbling the Afghan state.
Faced with the worsening situation in Afghanistan, the Trump administration started a strategic review, led by McMaster, of what to do there. As part of his review, McMaster wanted to visit Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan to get a sense of what was happening on the ground. This idea angered Mattis, who felt he owned the issue as secretary of defense. It also irritated Tillerson, who felt he owned the issue as secretary of state. Both of them tried unsuccessfully to torpedo McMaster’s trip. Yet neither Mattis nor Tillerson presented his own substantive views about what to do in Afghanistan during the review process.
In mid-April 2017, McMaster left for Kabul with a team of officials from the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department. In Kabul, the Afghan interior minister briefed McMaster. After half an hour, McMaster told him: “Thanks. Well, you know, I’m really disappointed. These are the same bullshit talking points that I heard five years ago. You guys have major issues in your organizations to do with corruption.”
McMaster asked his team to put together a page of talking points to sell the strategy to increase the troop levels in Afghanistan and also to drive home that there were considerable risks to US counterterrorism operations if there was a precipitous drawdown from the country since much of the infrastructure to locate and kill al-Qaeda and allied groups in the region had been built up in Afghanistan over the past decade and a half.
McMaster’s team added to the talking points a packet of photographs of what Afghanistan had looked like under Taliban rule and what it looked like more than a decade and a half later. The CIA provided photographs of the streets around Massoud Circle, a key traffic intersection in Kabul, during the time that the Taliban were in power and had turned the city into a ghost town and also photographs of how it looked now in 2017 jammed with traffic and pedestrians.
McMaster showed Trump some forty photographs of Afghanistan in various phases over the past half century; a third of the photos were before the Soviet invasion in 1979, when the country was a quiet, bucolic place untroubled by the violence to come. Another third of the photos showed Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, and a third were of more recent vintage. The photos were a visual reminder that Afghanistan hadn’t always been the hopeless case so many believed it to be.
McMaster felt that for too long US officials working on the Afghanistan account pushed for policies that effectively favored the Taliban. Also lingering over all this in his mind was the Obama experience of pulling all US troops out of Iraq, which helped pave the way for the collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of ISIS. This was an important counterargument to the common view that the US should just leave Afghanistan on the grounds that “it’s always going to be a shithole, and they’re killing each other and always going to be killing each other.” McMaster pointed out that an American withdrawal might lead to the collapse of the Afghan state, which would pose a risk to the civilized world and provide a psychological victory for the Taliban and other jihadist terrorist organizations.
Trump wanted to “win” in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon wasn’t really offering a win against the Taliban, which enjoyed a comfortable safe haven in neighboring Pakistan and some measure of support in rural Pashtun areas. What the Pentagon was offering was a strategy to manage the conflict so that the Taliban didn’t take over much of the country and host a number of jihadist groups that they’d long had relations with, including al-Qaeda.
The Pentagon brass knew that a rough rule of thumb to defeat an insurgency was a ratio of twenty troops per thousand of population. Afghanistan had a population of thirty million so that meant six hundred thousand troops were needed to stabilize the country. The roughly four hundred thousand Afghan soldiers and police meant there was still a shortfall of two hundred thousand troops, and filling that gap with American servicemen was a nonstarter, whoever the president was. Insurgencies such as the Taliban could also last many years. It had taken the Colombian government half a century of fighting before it could negotiate a peace deal with the Marxist insurgent group the FARC.
In one of the many meetings about Afghanistan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, made the point that a sustained presence in Afghanistan was like buying life insurance. Dunford said, “No one likes writing the check every year for a life insurance policy, but you do it because the downside risk of not doing it just doesn’t make sense.”
Trump wanted a win. His generals were offering life insurance.
Trump remained convinced that Afghanistan was a futile endeavor, in the name of which the United States had wasted trillions of dollars. He told his advisers, “My New York friends tell me nothing good ever comes out of Afghanistan.” Trump bought the “Graveyard of Empires” narrative that the Afghans had defeated first the British and then the Russians and the United States was just the latest great power that was eventually going to fail there.
Also, Trump hated being railroaded. Trump understood himself as the guy who was making the decisions and he did not want to feel that he was being driven to a decision, or that he wasn’t making the decisions, somebody else was. On Afghanistan Trump felt he was getting railroaded.
McMaster usually exuded a contagious confidence, but as the months went by it was clear that it was not going to be easy to get his Afghan strategy approved. Bannon, Kellogg, and Trump’s homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, all channeled Trump’s extreme skepticism about the Afghan War. Like the president, none of them had ever visited Afghanistan, nor had any of them had any experience fighting jihadist terrorists or any special knowledge about jihadism. Depending on your perspective, this either gave them a fresh pair of eyes to examine “the problem set” or they were simply deeply ignorant about the issue.
McMaster told the skeptics at the White House, “Hey, we’re losing the war, but what we have to acknowledge is that we’ve been operating under a withdrawal strategy for eight years and that might have something to do with us losing. The previous approach was, we’re not going to fight the Taliban. We’re not going to have them as a declared enemy and we’re going to tell them we’re leaving and we’re going to try to negotiate a deal with them while they’re in the ascendancy militarily. How the fuck does that work?!”
White House officials briefed reporters that there would be a final decision about what the plan was in Afghanistan sometime in May 2017. That month, Trump attended his first “principals” committee of the National Security Council to discuss the Afghan War. Surrounded by “his” generals, Trump told them that their plan to stay the course in Afghanistan was bullshit. The generals knew at a deep level about all the blood and treasure that had already been invested in Afghanistan. That was part of their calculus to keep on keeping the faith with the Afghan people and the thousands of Americans who had died there on the battlefield. Trump was a businessman who understood the business concept of “sunk costs.” It made no sense to consider the sunk costs already invested in a project when you were making a decision about whether to continue investing in it since those costs could never be recovered. You just cut your losses and moved on.
May came and went without any decision.
Relations between Trump and McMaster were fraying. McMaster didn’t go to Mar-a-Lago regularly with the president, which meant that he had less face time with Trump than those who did go. Where other senior officials put a premium on presidential face time, McMaster put a premium on making sure that he had closely vetted the papers that were circulated to other cabinet members and their staffs. McMaster was a grind while those who connected with Trump were schmoozers.
Also, McMaster made a point of saying what he believed, and he could also do it at some length. McMaster tended to communicate with Trump by saying: “Sir, I have five points for you.”
Trump hated getting briefed this way and McMaster didn’t seem to read the president well. On Air Force One on a foreign trip, Gary Cohn and McMaster were sharing the same room on the flight. Trump walked in and they both stood up. The president wasn’t wearing a tie and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. His body language said “I’m not working right now.” You could tell he was chilling.
While Cohn made some small talk with Trump about the markets, McMaster immediately launched into “When we land, sir, these are the things that we need to do.”
The president replied, “Ah, yeah, it’ll be great” and promptly walked out of the room.
Cohn poked some gentle fun at McMaster. “Hey, H. R. How’d that go for you?”
McMaster’s inability to click with Trump was puzzling because when he was out of Trump’s presence he was charming, funny, and well liked.
One morning during a White House staff meeting, the gruff, deadly serious chief of staff, John Kelly, asked McMaster if he had read a particular piece of sensitive intelligence. McMaster replied, “Sir, I did not. I was in the gym. You don’t think a body like this just happens?” The staff cracked up.
McMaster could also quote verbatim chunks of A Mighty Wind, a comic mockumentary about folk musicians. When the first draft of the Afghan strategy landed on McMaster’s desk that he deemed too wishy-washy, McMaster scrawled on it, “Did we outsource this to the Taliban?”
Trump frequently raised with Mattis and McMaster the issue of the American THAAD missile battery systems that were deployed in South Korea. This was one of their least favorite discussions with the president, as it would always set him off about burden sharing and the South Koreans ripping off the United States.
Trump asked them, “Do you send them a bill? Do they just pay us? How does it work? My generals don’t know anything about business. How do you think we fucking pay for this stuff? Find out.”
The generals pointed out that the United States owned the THAAD missiles. They had not been “given” to the South Koreans, and they were there to protect the one hundred thousand American citizens living in South Korea. They were also a cheaper option than installing Patriot missiles.
The South Koreans donated the land on which the missiles were stationed. Trump said, “What do you mean they give us the land? They give us some shitty golf courses. Shitty golf courses. No, no, change it. Just change it.” He told Mattis, “Jim, call ’em up. We’ve got to be paid.”
When it came to American defense arrangements overseas, Trump always asked, “What are we getting out of it? Why are we paying for everything?” After all, South Korea had one of the largest economies in the world.
The downward trajectory in the relationship between Trump and McMaster began in late April 2017 when McMaster seemed to publicly contradict the president on the deployment of the American missiles in South Korea. Knowing how strongly Trump felt that the South Koreans should pay for the missile systems, McMaster went on TV to say that the US would pay for the billion-dollar system, as the deal for the missiles had already been negotiated.
This pointed to a problem that McMaster faced; he had remained in uniform while he was national security adviser. As a uniformed officer, he was supposed to stay out of politics, but working at the White House for Trump was an inherently political job, in particular because Trump wanted McMaster to defend him on TV.[*]
This disconnect became obvious in early May 2017 after Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States when they were visiting the White House about ISIS’s capabilities to carry out an attack “external” to Syria, intelligence that had come from the Israelis.
Trump told the Russians, “Our interests align in Syria because the civil war is allowing ISIS to still enjoy safe haven there. Isn’t this an area where we ought to be working together?” Trump added, “We got this intel and it’s telling us there’s this threat to passenger jets from laptops filled with explosives made by ISIS.”
After the story broke in the Washington Post on May 15 that Trump had shared this intelligence with the Russians, McMaster gave a very brief statement to the press outside the West Wing of the White House, saying, “What [he] shared was wholly appropriate. . . . I wanted to make clear to everybody that the president in no way compromised any sources or methods.” Both of these statements were true; the president could declassify whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted because the president was the ultimate declassification authority. Trump also didn’t share sources and methods with the Russians; he didn’t even know what the sources and methods were, as that was a level of detail most presidents wouldn’t concern themselves with.
The fact that Trump was sharing top-secret information with the Russians and that McMaster was publicly defending the president precipitated a chorus of national security experts to criticize McMaster. Retired lieutenant colonel John Nagl, a leading counterinsurgency theorist, told NPR that McMaster was “diminished in some ways. His integrity has taken a bit of a hit.” Pulitzer Prize–winning military journalist Tom Ricks wrote in Politico that McMaster should step down.
A massive truck bomb blew up in Kabul’s diplomatic quarter on May 31, 2017, killing more than 150 people. The bombing underlined the worsening security situation in Afghanistan. Ordinary Afghans blamed the government for their increasing security problems. McMaster and his team were worried that the fragile Afghan government might fracture under the pressure.
Two weeks later, President Trump delegated the decision about whether to add more troops in Afghanistan to Mattis, but Mattis didn’t make any decision about what to do with that authority until it was clear what the president actually planned to do in Afghanistan.
One of the most significant military shifts between Obama and Trump was that Trump changed the rules of engagement in Afghanistan. Under Obama those rules were quite restrictive; American soldiers could engage the Taliban only if they themselves were under attack. Trump allowed commanders leeway to attack the Taliban more or less at will.
As Trump’s national security team met to discuss Afghanistan, the subtext of the discussions was, What could be a policy that Trump would agree to? What would fly with him?
Tillerson, who hadn’t attended any of the previous meetings on Afghanistan, now intervened in one of the Afghan discussions to say, “I don’t know why we’re in such a hurry. Well, you may have this figured out, but I just don’t have it figured out yet.”
During policy deliberations, Tillerson often asked, “What’s the rush?” It was the attitude of an oil executive used to investing in long-term projects that might take decades before they could turn a profit.
Tillerson also seemed incapable of focusing on more than one priority at a time. At one point he was focused on Syria, at another he was focused on the Gulf crisis in which a number of Arab states had blockaded Qatar, a US ally. It was almost as if Tillerson thought everything else in the world could wait, or someone else could just take care of it, while he was focused on his small number of priorities in his systematic, deliberate way.
Tillerson was also largely cut off from the rest of the State Department, dealing almost entirely with only a small coterie of close aides. Strangely, Tillerson also didn’t do much to defend the State Department from a dramatic 30 percent cut proposed by the Trump administration, a rather unusual position for the leader of a government department. Nor did Tillerson do much to inform Trump about what he was doing. Tillerson’s attitude seemed to be, you hired the CEO of an independent company and I’ll report in to the board at the end of the year.
The decision-making on Afghanistan started to get even more complicated by late spring 2017 because an alternative plan was in play that was touted by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and the founder of the notorious contracting firm Blackwater, now “rebranded” as Academi. Prince also happened to be the brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary. Both were major donors to Republican causes. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on May 31, Prince proposed a plan for Afghanistan that would outsource much of the war to contractors on long-term assignments overseen by an American “viceroy.” Prince had two sons who were likely to go into the military, and he did not want them to end up serving in what he thought was a poorly run war.
Prince wrote his Journal op-ed “for an audience of one.” He knew that President Trump read the Journal carefully. Trump circled the op-ed in the paper and asked his advisers to get hold of Prince.
A few days after his Journal article came out, Prince received a call from the White House inviting him to discuss his plan. Over lunch with Bannon, McMaster, and Priebus in the chief of staff’s office, Prince briefed the plan.
Prince identified a fundamental problem with the Afghan War: the relatively short tours for the US military forces that served there. Army units typically deployed to Afghanistan for a year, while marine units went for even shorter tours. The mordant joke about Afghanistan was that the United States had fought a new war there every year since 9/11.
Prince explained, “You’re sending mostly twenty-somethings who have never been out of America before to a very foreign land, where they’re going to have to patrol and live on a firebase. And they are bewildered the first three or four months they’re there. And then they might be productive for a few months, maybe, but driving around and waiting to get shot at. They’re not surprising anybody ever, and then they spend the last few months packing up and making sure everybody comes home. And then you lift that entire unit up, send it home, and you repeat it again. If that’s not the definition of insanity, I don’t know what is.”
Prince’s solution was to contract veteran, retired special operations soldiers who had deployed multiple times to Afghanistan and other war zones who would embed repeatedly with the same Afghan battalion over long periods of time.
Bannon and Priebus loved the plan. Bannon saw it as a way out of America’s longest war.
McMaster agreed with Prince’s analysis of the problems in Afghanistan but thought that what he was proposing about using contractors to fight the war wasn’t feasible from a legal perspective and that the Afghan government needed to weigh in about the plan, which they were likely to be skeptical of.
Prince followed up his Journal piece with a story in USA Today claiming that his plan would cost “less than 20% of the $48 billion being spent in Afghanistan.” Prince went on CNN, Fox, and NPR to publicize his plan, which he said would save considerable money. Gorka also appeared on CNN to defend the Prince plan, saying, “This is a cost-cutting venture. . . . We open the door here at the White House to outside ideas.”
Prince compared the plan to the renovation of Central Park’s Wollman ice-skating rink in 1986, when the New York City government, unable to renovate on schedule or on budget, turned to a brash young developer named Donald Trump, who took over the renovation of the rink and completed it in record time.
Two weeks after their White House meeting, Bannon called Prince, saying, “Hey, the Afghan discussion is still getting some legs. You said you could do it for less than a fifth of what’s being spent now.”
Prince replied, “It’s an estimate.”
Bannon told Prince, “Prove it. Figure out exactly what you would need. Price it. Come back with a detailed concept of operations.”
Prince circulated a detailed account of his plan to senior Trump officials. It called for more than five thousand military contractors to be embedded with each Afghan battalion. The contractors would all be Western special forces veterans hired on contract backed up by a ninety-plane private air force. In Prince’s view, this new force would enable the American troop presence to draw down to two thousand in under two years. Prince’s plan also emphasized the extraction from Afghanistan of rare earth minerals such as lithium, which would be useful for US high-tech manufacturing.
Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire who owned the giant contracting firm DynCorp International, embraced the Prince plan. The plan seemed a little self-serving as Prince and Feinberg were two of the largest players in the war contracting industry, while trial balloons in the press even put Feinberg forward as the possible “viceroy.”
Beyond all that, the Prince plan had some serious legal and political problems. Legally, the Pentagon was not about to contract out its military operations to mercenaries, many of whom wouldn’t even be American citizens. It was one thing to have contractors provide base security or train local police forces, it was quite another to have contractors involved in US military operations where they would be killing people.
Prince had an answer for that objection, which was to take these contractors out from under the control of the Pentagon and put them instead under “Title 50,” the US authorization for covert action. To those who didn’t like Prince’s plan, in some ways this was an even worse idea as it meant that a private army of thousands of Americans and other Westerners under the aegis of the CIA would be fighting alongside the Afghan army.
Politically, Afghan leaders didn’t want an army of thousands of CIA-sponsored contractors running the war in their country, nor did they yearn for the arrival of an American “viceroy,” with all of its implied baggage of the British Empire, which had fought three wars in Afghanistan overseen by the British viceroy in New Delhi.[*]
Prince did get a sympathetic hearing for his plan at CIA headquarters from its director, Mike Pompeo. Pompeo was first in his class at West Point, so he had credibility with the Pentagon. But top officials at CIA were quite skeptical of the Prince plan and worked to kill it.
Pompeo told Prince, “It will take too long for the agency to spool up to be able to do oversight for the plan.”
Prince replied, “The agency would have to only send thirty people. That’s it. You send some financial controllers.”
In early July, Prince went to see Mattis at his office in the Pentagon, spending an hour and a half with him going through the slides of his plan. Mattis observed that the model seemed similar to what the marine corps had done in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic during the “banana wars” in the 1920s.
Mattis, who had seen firsthand the total destruction caused by war in cities such as Fallujah in Iraq, wondered what would happen if a contractor destroyed an elementary school in Afghanistan. Prince suggested that maybe the contractor could be hauled in front of the Afghan judicial system. Mattis looked at Prince quizzically; the Afghan “justice system” was an almost perfect oxymoron.
It was clear to Prince that Mattis had taken the meeting only because the White House had asked him to do so. Mattis made it clear that the Pentagon wouldn’t be considering the contractor option.
National Security Council staffers prepared a memo about the costs of using contractors to wage the war in Afghanistan. They concluded that the promised savings from using mercenaries were likely illusory since a key reason that military veterans took these contractor jobs was the high salaries they paid. The NSC also underlined the legal obstacles to privatizing the war and putting contractors on the front lines. And, not least, America’s NATO allies training and advising the Afghan army would pull out of Afghanistan absent a US military presence.
Several members of Trump’s cabinet were skeptical about the Prince plan, but other key officials were just as skeptical about McMaster’s plan to add more troops. Chief among the latter group was Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions, who had served on the Senate Armed Services Committee for more than a decade, was something of an isolationist, and often asked, “Why are Americans dying in Afghanistan? My sense is the president got elected because he was going to get us out of these foreign wars.”
In the early months of the Trump administration, before he recused himself from the Russia investigation and angered Trump, Sessions was an influential voice on policy decisions that were beyond the traditional purview of the attorney general. Sessions told other officials, “I love the generals. They’re good men, but goddamit I heard this same bullshit; it’s always going to get better in eighteen months. McMaster says the same thing: ‘Eighteen months it’s going to be fine. It all turns around.’ ” McMaster spent hours trying to persuade Sessions of the wisdom of staying in Afghanistan.
Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser and often an ally of McMaster’s, also raised questions about Afghanistan, along the lines of “Aren’t we just throwing good money after bad?”
The debate over the Afghan War devolved into a cage match between Bannon and McMaster. Bannon cast the learned general as a globalist who was betraying Trump and his base, while McMaster considered Bannon a rank amateur. Bannon thought McMaster’s plan was a slippery slope to “nation building.” He also seemed to nurse a grudge that McMaster had eliminated his permanent seat on the National Security Council.
At one meeting on Afghanistan in the Situation Room that was packed with officials from across the government including Mattis and Tillerson, McMaster opened by saying, “The presentation you’ll see today is interagency and I want to tell you this is the finest team that has ever come together.”
Bannon took strong exception to these opening remarks. He responded by saying, “We’ve been at this for seventeen years. In this same room has sat people from the widest differences in ideology, from the Bush guys to the Obama guys. Trust me, every one of those people was just as smart as we are. Even the progressives, with whom I disagree totally ideologically, are just as much patriots as we are and thought they were doing what’s right for our country and for the country of Afghanistan. And all I have to say as we start this presentation is we’re two trillion dollars into this and we’re farther away from victory today than we were seventeen years ago, so I don’t want to hear how brilliant we are or how brilliant this fucking presentation is.”
His eyes bulging out of his bald head, McMaster leaned forward in his seat and stared at Bannon for a full five seconds and said, “Unfortunately, some of us are trying to manipulate the president.” The vitriol between the two men was palpable.
In a barroom fight, McMaster, a stocky, bald-headed former rugby player with the coiled energy of a boxer poised to strike, would likely have made short work of Bannon, who hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in many years and always dressed like an unmade bed.
But Bannon wasn’t going to back down, interjecting, “Let’s get on with the presentation, but let’s cut the bullshit. I don’t want to hear how great we are and how fucked up everyone else is.”
Bannon turned to Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, and asked him, “The Taliban or al-Qaeda: Right now, can they launch an attack on the homeland?”
Bossert replied that it would be “very difficult, but not a no. But still very difficult.”
With the aid of Bossert, Bannon was trying to make the case that the terrorism threat to the United States emanating from Afghanistan was in fact relatively small, while the likelihood that Afghanistan would remain a ward of the United States long into the future was quite large. In this, he was not wrong.
On July 9, CIA director Mike Pompeo made a surprise visit to Afghanistan. Pompeo was there to explore a third option for Trump that wasn’t either a complete withdrawal or the addition of thousands more troops. The third option involved the CIA’s paramilitary arm, the Special Activities Division, expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan to hunt for Taliban leaders, or some aspect of the Erik Prince plan to use more special forces veterans working under the CIA.
Trump told his advisers he wanted to hear from servicemen who had deployed to Afghanistan, “I want to sit down with some enlisted guys that have been there. I don’t want any generals in here. I don’t want any officers. I just want enlisted guys,” he explained. This was the way Trump ran his hotels and golf clubs; he didn’t just talk to the general manager, he also spoke with the doorman and the concierge and the guy doing the greens.
The first group who came to see Trump in early July were Navy SEALs, most of whom had served multiple tours in Afghanistan. They unloaded on Trump, telling him: “It’s unwinnable. NATO’s a joke. Nobody knows what they’re doing. We don’t fight to win. The morale is terrible. It’s totally corrupt. The officials in the government are awful people. They lie to you. You don’t know who’s Taliban or who’s not.”
Trump loved the discussion so much he said, “I want to do this again.” On July 18, Trump met at the White House with four other enlisted servicemen who had served in Afghanistan to get their input about what to do there. Trump told reporters, “I want to find out why we’ve been there for seventeen years, how it’s going, and what we should do in terms of additional ideas. I’ve heard plenty of ideas from a lot of people, but I want to hear it from the people on the ground.”
The servicemen gave the president their version of “ground truth” about Afghanistan, which partly fed into a narrative that Trump already believed: NATO was a waste of time, the NATO guys were just there to punch their tour ticket, the Afghan government and Afghan system were corrupt, and the US didn’t have a strategy. But the soldiers also emphasized that the president should continue to support the Afghan mission because Afghanistan remained a place where jihadist terrorists were finding safe haven. One of the soldiers told Trump, “We need to complete our mission there so my grandchildren don’t have to go. If we leave, we’ll have to go back.”
On July 19, a day after his meeting with the Afghan veterans, Trump met with his war cabinet in the Situation Room. Trump’s national security team had hoped that this meeting would produce some kind of resolution about what to do in Afghanistan. Instead, it turned into a fiasco.
Trump opened by observing that the servicemen he had spoken to a day earlier “know a lot more than you generals.” “We’re losing,” Trump said. He repeatedly demanded that the Pentagon fire General John “Mick” Nicholson, the well-regarded US commander in Afghanistan who had served in the country for a total of five years. Mattis and Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, tried to defend Nicholson’s conduct of the war, while also trying to avoid arguing directly with the president.
Mattis felt that it was his responsibility to deal with Trump and insulate the Pentagon from the gale-force political winds emanating from the White House, so Mattis kept key four-star generals like Nicholson away from the president. Nicholson never met with Trump and as a result he was an easy target. Mattis even kept Dunford largely away from Trump. Dunford had been a frequent visitor to the White House when he served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for Obama. During the Trump administration, the top US military officer rarely went to the White House.
In the Situation Room, Trump then went into an extended riff comparing the Afghan War review by his war cabinet to the renovation of a Manhattan restaurant in the late 1980s that Trump had dined at frequently over the decades, the 21 Club. Trump asserted that the restaurant had closed for a yearlong renovation and had hired an expensive consultant whose sole suggestion was to expand the kitchen.[*] Fresh off his discussions with the group of Afghan veterans, Trump said that soliciting the advice of the restaurant’s waiters would have been smarter than hiring the costly consultant.
It would have been hard to come up with a more insulting analogy to use with the people assembled in the Situation Room. Renovating a chichi restaurant in Manhattan was hardly analogous to fighting a complex war on the other side of the world where three key members of Trump’s war cabinet had served as general officers. It was also a conflict in which thousands of Americans had died, including a young marine who was particularly well known to some of the senior officials in the “Sit Room.”
Three years earlier, General Dunford had been the overall US commander in the theater, and John Kelly, Trump’s homeland security chief, had lost a son in Afghanistan, twenty-nine-year-old Marine First Lieutenant Robert Kelly, who was killed by a landmine in 2010. It was Dunford who volunteered to perform the difficult task of delivering the terrible news of the death of his son to his old friend General Kelly.
Four days after his son’s death, in a speech in St. Louis, Kelly said that the United States’ war against jihadist terrorists would go on for a very long time: “The American military has handed our ruthless enemy defeat after defeat, but it will go on for years, if not decades, before this curse has been eradicated.”
Astonishingly, as the decision about the Afghan War was being debated, Trump once said in Kelly’s presence that the young American men who had died in Afghanistan had died for a worthless cause. Trump said, “We got our boys who are over there being blown up every day for what? For nothing. Guys are dying for nothing. There’s nothing worth dying for in that country.” Did Trump not know that Kelly’s son had died in Afghanistan? Did he not care?
Dunford, Kelly, and Mattis were close, a closeness forged on the battlefields of Iraq where they had all served together. They also were all marine generals, keenly aware that 349 marines were killed in the southern Afghan province of Helmand in a campaign that began there in 2009 and ended five years later.
The meeting ended inconclusively. Trump was pissed off about his options, which boiled down to staying the course for many years into the future as well as adding thousands more troops, or withdrawing and risking the collapse of the Afghan state and the return of the Taliban to power along with their allies in al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. There was also something of a third course emerging that Pompeo was considering, which was accelerating the pace of CIA operations in Afghanistan.
Mattis was fuming as he left the meeting with Trump, but he and the other current and former marine generals at the apex of Trump’s national security team seemed largely content to let McMaster lead the charge for pushing to augment the number of troops in Afghanistan. McMaster would expend much political capital advocating for an Afghan policy about which there was considerable consensus among Trump’s war cabinet yet that was intensely disliked by the president.
An NSC staffer recalled that McMaster “got shot in the face for articulating views that other people also held but were not articulating.”
Holding the gun were the America First nationalists in the White House led by Bannon. As Bannon recalled, “On Afghanistan, I lit those fuckers up every day.”
Trump’s skepticism about the Afghan War was further confirmed when a senior NSC official told him, “We cannot succeed in Afghanistan unless we resolve the Pakistan issue. It doesn’t matter if you bring in twenty thousand troops or ten thousand troops. It doesn’t matter. We are on a treadmill ad infinitum. This has been the same case from the time Obama and Stan McChrystal went in there.” Trump listened but didn’t say anything.
Trump was convinced that the United States had long overstayed its welcome and purpose in Afghanistan. In meetings about the Afghan War, Trump was very critical of Bush and Obama, who had allowed the conflict to continue without finding some way to end it. Trump was intent on bringing the war to a close. Mattis, Tillerson, and particularly McMaster worked to convince the president that anything done precipitously in Afghanistan was going to have profoundly negative consequences in South Asia and Central Asia and would undermine the United States’ standing as a great power.
When Trump thought that he was being manipulated or managed, he responded negatively, sometimes very harshly. Trump became deeply frustrated with McMaster and thought that he was being driven to certain conclusions on Afghanistan. When Tillerson recognized this, he stepped further away from McMaster, not wanting to be in the blast zone.
As the Afghan War decision dragged on, McMaster fired a number of Bannon’s allies at the National Security Council, some of whom were incompetent and others who McMaster believed were ineffective or were trying to undermine him.
The first to go was Rich Higgins, the director for strategic planning at the NSC, who had circulated a bizarre memo rife with conspiracy theories about Trump’s purported “deep state” enemies in the US government whom he characterized as Marxists. In Higgins’s telling, these Marxists were allied to Islamists in a conspiracy that also included the European Union and the UN. The Higgins memo concluded, “This is a form of population control by certain business cartels in league with cultural Marxists/corporatists/Islamists who will leverage Islamic terrorism threats to justify the creation of a police state.” This was not the kind of sober thinking that typically came out of the strategic planning shop at the NSC. McMaster’s deputy Ricky Waddell gave Higgins his marching orders on July 21.
Next to go a few days later was the overall lead for the Middle East at the NSC, Derek Harvey. Harvey and McMaster had known each other for years, but McMaster felt compelled to remove him because he didn’t play well with others. Harvey went back to the House Intelligence Committee, where he had worked for the chairman of the committee, Representative Devin Nunes, before joining the Trump administration.
Another administration official removed by McMaster who was viewed as a Bannon ally was Ezra Cohen-Watnick who oversaw intelligence at the NSC. Cohen-Watnick had been peripherally (and unwittingly) involved when White House Counsel Michael Ellis briefed Rep. Nunes at a cloak-and-dagger White House meeting that US intelligence agencies had picked up the communications of some members of Trump’s transition team suspected of being Russian assets. This briefing was intended to “prove” Trump’s claim that Obama had “tapped” his lines at Trump Tower during the transition. In a statement that McMaster made about Cohen-Watnick’s departure, he said he was “confident that Ezra would make many further significant contributions to national security in another position in the administration.” This is Washington-speak for “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Over the summer, Bannon’s allies in the far right-wing media began a systematic campaign to discredit McMaster, attacking him personally and also attacking some of the staffers who worked for him. A particular target was Javed Ali, senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, who had served for a decade and a half in the US government in various roles at the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and most recently at the FBI. Ali was the highest-ranking Muslim American working for the Trump administration, so he was a particularly inviting target for far-right media.
PJMedia.com, a conservative website, claimed that McMaster had yelled at Israeli officials during a meeting at the White House after one of the Israelis had objected to Ali participating in the meeting because of his supposed pro-Hezbollah leanings. The story was totally false.
McMaster and homeland security adviser Tom Bossert went out of their way to defend Ali from these false attacks.
Another proxy target for the attacks on McMaster was Megan Badasch, a longtime Republican operative who worked on the Trump transition team and then worked at the NSC for McMaster. Badasch was identified by the right-wing site the Daily Caller as the purported leaker of transcripts of calls between President Trump and the presidents of Australia and Mexico. Despite the fact that there was absolutely no evidence for this charge, Badasch started receiving death threats on Facebook. Badasch decided to move out of her apartment in Washington, DC, and informed the Secret Service of the threats.
Breitbart News, which Bannon had run before he joined the Trump campaign, ran a slew of stories about McMaster claiming he was pro-jihad and anti-Israel and that he was sabotaging Trump’s agenda. These views then started migrating into more mainstream conservative circles. Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who both were quite influential with Trump, started tweeting anti-McMaster messages.
The fount of a number of the anti-McMaster stories was Mike Cernovich, a right-wing blogger and conspiracy theorist who was a prominent proponent of the “Pizzagate” story that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza joint. Cernovich launched a website, McMasterleaks.com, on which McMaster was portrayed as the puppet of the Jewish financier George Soros. In the telling of his far-right critics, McMaster was supposed to be simultaneously anti-Israel and a puppet of Jewish interests.
The Russians saw an opening to attack McMaster and a wave of Russian bots amplified the attacks against him on Twitter, so a slew of far-right media stories in the United States aimed at sabotaging an American cabinet official were then amplified by a foreign power.
The attacks on McMaster became so intense that in early August Trump felt compelled to release a statement: “General McMaster and I are working very well together. He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”
Stories leaked to the press suggested that McMaster would be promoted to run the war in Afghanistan as a four-star general. For Bannon, this would at least have had the advantage of pushing McMaster out of the White House half a world away to Kabul. In fact, this notion was never seriously considered, but it was another prong of the campaign to undermine McMaster.
Trump’s war cabinet met again in the Situation Room on July 26 to discuss Afghanistan, this time without the president. McMaster asked Pence to chair this meeting to try to get to some consensus about what to do about the Afghan War. Generally, Pence wasn’t that interested in inserting himself into national security decision-making, but in this case, he was critical to moving the decision on Afghanistan forward.
Pence opened the meeting by asking a favor of Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence and a fellow Indianan, saying, “Could our good friend Dan Coats lead us all in a moment of prayer before we start the meeting?” For some of the senior national security officials gathered in the Situation Room, this was a novel experience. It was the first time that they had said a prayer before beginning their Situation Room deliberations.
Three of the principals in Trump’s cabinet then argued for each of the three “courses of action” that had emerged during the Afghan review. Sessions advocated for the withdrawal option. Pompeo argued to increase CIA’s counterterrorism operations. And McMaster advocated for the “stay the course” option, which also involved adding thousands more troops.
Two days after this meeting, General John Kelly took over from Reince Priebus as Trump’s chief of staff. Kelly, a by-the-book retired four-star marine general with the sober demeanor of a hanging judge, didn’t appreciate the freewheeling style of Trump’s White House and tried to bring some order to it by limiting who could just wander into the Oval Office.
Early in his tenure at the White House, Kelly addressed hundreds of staffers who gathered in the long, echoing nineteenth-century hallways of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to give them an overview of how he conceptualized their work. Kelly told the staff: “Your first responsibility is serving the Constitution of the United States. And below that is your responsibility to President Trump. And below him are your own political views on a topic, which are relatively irrelevant.” Kelly clearly didn’t see his own role as being Trump’s consigliere.
Kelly and Mattis were close. Kelly was Mattis’s deputy during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some White House officials felt that Kelly effectively continued to work as Mattis’s deputy when he was the chief of staff.
The White House was consumed by internal feuds that Kelly aimed to quash. Bannon thought “Javanka”—Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump—were “globalists” who were absolutely against Trump’s policies.
For their part, “Javanka” despised Bannon, blaming him for damaging leaks to the press. This didn’t bode well for the chief strategist. In the court of Donald Trump, the only constant was his family; everyone else was just the help.
The feud between Kushner and Bannon was now becoming untenable. The continued sniping against McMaster by Bannon’s allies on the far right was also angering White House officials. Kelly and Bannon had a conversation about the timing of Bannon’s departure. Bannon hoped to exit the White House around the first anniversary of when he had taken over the Trump campaign in mid-August 2016.
Then came the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, during which a right-wing domestic terrorist rammed a car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old anti-white-nationalism protester. At a press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower three days later, Trump observed that there were “some very fine people” among the white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville.
Trump said, “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. This week, it is Robert E. Lee. And I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
Off to one side listening to the president’s “very fine people” speech was Kelly, who looked like the undertaker at a North Korean state funeral. Kelly bowed his head, folded his arms tightly across his chest, and stared at the floor. Behind Trump was Gary Cohn, stone-faced. Cohn was Jewish, and he knew that hordes of neo-Nazis had gathered in Charlottesville giving “Heil Hitler” salutes and chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” all of which was documented extensively on cable news. These were hardly very fine people. In fact they were some of the worst bigots in the country. Cohn contemplated resigning over Trump’s seeming sympathy for the white nationalists.
Trump and Cohn had a couple of intense discussions about the possibility that Cohn would resign. Trump asked Cohn, as his leader of tax reform in the White House and the person who he felt could help him get it done, to stay. Cohn agreed to stay. (In Trump and Cohn’s lexicon, “tax reform” largely meant lower taxes for corporations and for the very rich.)
During the press conference, Trump was asked about his “confidence” in Bannon. Trump took the opportunity to downplay Bannon’s role in his election victory, saying, “I like Mr. Bannon, he is a friend of mine, but Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through seventeen senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that. I like him. He is a good man. He is not a racist.”
Bannon, a Southerner who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, advised Trump to hang tight and to repeat what he was saying because there were good people on both sides of the debate over the statues of Robert E. Lee. Bannon also talked to Trump about winding up his tenure at the White House. Meanwhile, Trump’s billionaire buddies from Manhattan, such as the real estate heavyweight Richard LeFrak, weighed in with the president, telling him that keeping Bannon on was untenable.
Senior serving generals and admirals almost never comment on domestic political matters, so it was a sign of how deeply the Charlottesville attack had agitated Trump’s top commanders when the chief of staff of the army, Mark Milley, tweeted, “The Army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our Values and everything we’ve stood for since 1775.” Presenting a united front, the service chiefs of the United States Air Force, Marines, National Guard, and Navy all issued similar public statements condemning extremism and racism.
A week after the Charlottesville terrorist attack, Mattis visited Jordan. In an impromptu speech that was caught on video, Mattis spoke to a group of young servicemen, telling them, “You’re a great example for our country right now that’s got some problems—you know it and I know it. It’s got problems that we don’t have in the military, and you just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines. Just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.” “Hold the line” was what officers in World War I would tell their troops as the Germans approached their trenches. Mattis in this speech was using the phrase in a metaphorical sense to mean maintaining the values that the military exemplified and that were not on display in Charlottesville.
On August 16, Bannon helped to seal the timing of his departure when he went on the record with the American Prospect, a left-leaning journal, to opine: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here. They got us.”
There is an old joke in Washington: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth in public.” What Bannon told the Prospect was, of course, correct; there were no good military solutions to North Korea because the nuclear-armed state had a vast conventional military, much of it positioned just over the border from the South Korean capital, Seoul, which could be unleashed in any military confrontation with the United States.
It was only a week earlier that Trump had told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Bannon was now publicly contesting the “fire and fury” narrative, the idea that the president was seriously considering his military options against North Korea.
Bannon departed the White House on Friday, August 18, which meant that he couldn’t attend the crucial final meeting about Afghanistan at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the wooded hills of northern Maryland, held the same day. It was at Camp David that Trump would make his decision about what to do about America’s longest war. With Bannon gone, there was no one with the juice to argue the case effectively that the Afghan War was an endless drain of resources and an unwinnable conflict.
Trump had spent the previous two weeks at his Bedminster golf club on a working vacation. Mike Pompeo suggested that the CIA use this opportunity to have a meeting with the president, not to make any decisions but just to answer his questions about Afghanistan. Pompeo explained the spirit of the meeting as “Let’s talk about what we’re doing. How we’re doing it. Answer some of the questions he always asks, right? Like, ‘What’s in it for us? Why do we care? How much does it cost? Could others do more?’ ”
An idea on the table was that the CIA should assume control of the war and make it a purely counterterrorism mission. But Pompeo and the CIA briefers made it clear to Trump that this approach wouldn’t really work. The main effort in Afghanistan was building up the Afghan army, which was a classic “advise and assist” mission. That wasn’t a CIA function but very obviously was a US military function. Also the CIA station in Afghanistan was dependent on military protection.
The briefers reminded the president that ISIS and al-Qaeda were both already in Afghanistan and any kind of withdrawal could give these terrorism groups the space they needed to plot attacks on America. At the time, there were an estimated seven hundred ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, and a number of al-Qaeda leaders continued to base there.
And so the decision about what to do in Afghanistan was already largely prebaked by Trump’s war cabinet of current and retired senior generals before the Camp David meeting. Kelly, just three weeks into his new job as chief of staff, together with his close friend Jim Mattis, as well as their close colleague the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, and McMaster all agreed on the best way forward.
A one-page “Courses of Action” paper was prepared for the Camp David meeting. In classic military style there were three courses of action proposed, two of which were basically nonstarters: a total withdrawal from Afghanistan, or having the CIA take over the war. The third option was the military’s preferred course of action, to make a long-term commitment to Afghanistan and bulk up the number of troops there.[*]
When it came to the Afghan issue, McMaster was all used up with Trump, so McMaster’s deputy Ricky Waddell—a new face and a new voice to the president—summarized the three options for him. Understanding all the downside risks of withdrawing from Afghanistan or turning the mission over entirely to the CIA, the president went with the third option.
Three days after the Camp David meeting, Trump delivered an unusual prime-time address from Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, about his new “South Asia strategy.”[*] The well-delivered, well-written, and well-argued speech largely reflected the consensus views of the generals and of the American national security apparatus about what to do in Afghanistan.
President Trump conceded in the speech, “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts.” This was one of the few times in his presidency that Trump publicly admitted that he had changed his mind about an issue.
Sticking it to Obama, Trump said, “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al-Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11th. And, as we know, in 2011, America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq. As a result, our hard-won gains slipped back into the hands of terrorist enemies.”
Trump also made clear that the American commitment to Afghanistan would be conditions-based: “A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I’ve said it many times how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin, or end, military options.” This was also a criticism of the Obama administration. As we have seen, President Obama had surged tens of thousands of additional US troops into Afghanistan in 2009, but he also simultaneously announced their withdrawal date.
Trump also made it clear that he could easily walk away from the new Afghan policy. “America will work with the Afghan government as long as we see determination and progress. However, our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check. . . . Our patience is not unlimited. We will keep our eyes wide open.”
Trump came down heavily on Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, a longtime sanctuary for the leadership of the Taliban. “No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target U.S. servicemembers and officials.”
In private, Trump was even more blunt. When the Pakistanis came up, Trump said, “Fuck them. They are getting billions of dollars and they are killing us.” Trump told his national security team to zero out any aid to the Pakistanis. And in early January 2018, the Trump administration announced it was suspending all security aid to Pakistan, a total of up to $1.3 billion.
The Trump administration put considerable pressure on the Pakistanis about the fate of American hostages held by the Haqqani network, an element of the Taliban that had longstanding ties to Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Caitlan Coleman from Pennsylvania and her Canadian husband, Josh Boyle, had gone backpacking in Afghanistan in 2012. They were kidnapped by the Taliban and then spirited to Pakistan. Coleman had three children during the five years she was held hostage by the Taliban.
For the Trump national security officials following the case, the young age of Coleman’s children was a moral imperative to ramp up the pressure on the Pakistanis, because they knew that the kids would likely become permanently traumatized by their captivity were it to be prolonged.
The Trump administration discovered that the ISI was aiding and abetting the Haqqani cell that was holding Coleman, Boyle, and their children. The Pakistani military agency was caught “red-handed” in the words of a senior Trump administration official. The Trump team told the Pakistanis if they didn’t get the hostages out safely, they would send in SEAL Team Six to get the job done. The last time the SEALs had deployed to Pakistan was the raid that killed bin Laden in 2011, which was hugely embarrassing to Pakistan’s military because they had no forewarning of the operation and they also weren’t able to detect the raid that was happening deep inside Pakistani territory until it was wrapping up.
The Pakistani military launched a rescue operation on October 11, 2017, freeing all five of the hostages unharmed.[*]
Trump’s new Afghan strategy caught the attention of the Taliban leadership. This president looked like he was staying to win in Afghanistan. US intelligence agencies picked up conversations among Taliban leaders in which they said versions of “Shit! They are really staying!” The Taliban started talking internally about how it would be smart to get serious about peace negotiations with the Americans.
Four days after Trump announced his new South Asia strategy and a week after his mentor Bannon left the White House, Sebastian Gorka was also pushed out. Kelly took an inventory of who was doing what at the White House and concluded that Gorka was only a talking head on TV, a role he could perform just as easily without a White House pass.
The coup de grace for Gorka was when he went on BBC Radio to challenge Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had publicly said that a war with North Korea was not imminent. Gorka told the BBC, “You should listen to the president; the idea that Secretary Tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply nonsensical.” As secretary of state, Tillerson was the most senior member of the cabinet after Vice President Pence, while Gorka was a relatively junior White House staffer. It was unprecedented for a staffer to publicly criticize a senior cabinet official in this manner. For Kelly, a stickler for hierarchy, dumping Gorka was not a tough call.
Gorka tried to paint his departure as a resignation and gave a letter claiming as much to the right-wing site the Federalist. In the letter, which Gorka addressed to Trump, he wrote that he was resigning, in part, because of the new Afghan policy: “The individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months. This was made patently obvious as I read the text of your speech on Afghanistan this week.”
In fact, Gorka didn’t resign. The Secret Service issued a “do not admit” directive forbidding Gorka entry to the White House the same day that he was fired. Gorka wasn’t even allowed to go back into the White House complex to pick up his belongings, which had to be walked out to his sports car parked nearby. The license plates on Gorka’s car read “ART [of] WAR,” the title of Sun Tzu’s classic treatise on strategy. Gorka was always desperate to be taken seriously as a big-think strategist, to be the George Kennan of the war on terror, but in the end, he was its George Costanza.
The decision to stay the course in Afghanistan and the departure of Bannon and Gorka from the White House was the high-water mark of the influence of the so-called “globalists” in the Trump administration, and the nadir of the influence of the America First nationalists.
But the victories of the globalists would prove short-lived.