We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE
PRESIDENT GHANI greeted me in his office. We talked alone for an hour. I had known him since the early days of America’s war in Afghanistan. We had often lamented together opportunities lost in a conflict that had lasted almost two decades.
The contrast between Ghani and Karzai could not have been starker. Ghani loved the United States because the country had given him the opportunity to escape the horrors of war and achieve success as an academic and development expert. Born into a wealthy Pashtun family in 1949, he received a liberal education at Habibia High School in Kabul and went on to attend the American University of Beirut, where he met his future wife, Rula, a Lebanese Christian.1 After teaching at Kabul University, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia University in New York City. He left Afghanistan in 1977, just months before soldiers gunned down President Daoud and his family and just two years before Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to keep a friendly Communist government in power after the assassination of Daoud’s successor, President Nur Muhammad Taraki.2 Taraki, like Daoud, was assassinated in the palace in which Ghani and his wife would live. His family, however, was spared, and the act was less bloody: Taraki was instructed to lie down on a bed, was suffocated by three men with pillows, and then was secretly buried at night. It was during this turbulent period that most of Ghani’s family was imprisoned. Ashraf stayed in the United States and completed his PhD in anthropology.
On September 11, 2001, Ghani was at his desk in Washington when a passenger jet carrying six crew members and fifty-eight passengers, including five Al-Qaeda terrorists, slammed into the Pentagon across the river from his World Bank office. He knew that there would soon be dramatic change in his native country. An exuberant man who, while discussing almost any development-related topic, would exclaim, “I have a paper on that!” Ghani immediately drafted a five-step plan for political, social, and economic transformation in Afghanistan. Two months after 9/11, his work with a smart, soft-spoken British human rights lawyer, Clare Lockhart, influenced the formation of the Afghan government following the Bonn Conference. Ghani joined Karzai’s government to try to put his ideas into practice as finance minister. He warned against empowering warlords who would perpetuate state weakness and the lawlessness that gave rise to the Taliban. But he was unable to convince Karzai, whose writ depended on accommodating those same warlords. Ghani departed Afghanistan in 2006 and cofounded with Lockhart the Institute for State Effectiveness. The pair authored a book entitled Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, in which they describe the essential functions necessary to strengthen states in distress.3 In 2011, the man who literally wrote the book on what needed to be done returned to Afghanistan to help President Karzai and the Coalition transition secure provinces to Afghan government control. Ghani ran for president of Afghanistan in 2014 as someone who could bridge the worlds of a Western development expert and a traditional Ghilzai Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan. He came from a people, the Ahmadzais, known as warrior-poets who relished autonomy and practiced Pashtunwali, the traditional Pashtun code of honor and hospitality.
No one doubted Ghani’s determination but some were concerned that his background in academia and at the World Bank had developed in him a pedantic style as well as impatience with those who could not grasp or embrace his often rapid-fire reform initiatives. Many of these reforms were sound and practical, while others were aspirational and lacked a clear bridge to implementation. Ghani could be mercurial, and his temper occasionally alienated those he needed to implement the reforms, but he brought in a strong team and was making progress. Our conversation focused on what would become the outline of President Trump’s South Asia strategy.
We sat alone in armchairs that turned slightly toward each other in a large room normally filled by international delegations and their Afghan counterparts. Like Ambassador Hugo Llorens, Ghani was concerned about the psychological dimension of the strategy. A joint strategy would have to generate confidence among the American and Afghan people, as well as Coalition members, while communicating determination to our enemies and their supporters. This “inside-out” effort to strengthen Afghanistan against the Taliban should be matched with an “outside-in” sustained diplomatic effort to convince key regional actors to play a positive, or at least a less destructive, role in Afghanistan and across the region. Our conversation was reminiscent of the many others we had had in his Kabul home five years earlier, over delicious dinners of lamb and Afghan pulau (basmati rice infused with a mix of carrots, raisins, and onions).
I was candid with Ghani about the principal constraint to sustaining a long-term approach in Afghanistan and South Asia: the will of the Afghan and American people. I asked for his and his government’s assistance in reaching American audiences to explain what was at stake not only for Afghans, but also for Americans and all humanity. Ghani and I believed that Afghanistan was a modern-day frontier between civilization and barbarism, but few Americans understood South and Central Asia as an ecosystem in which more than twenty U.S.- designated terrorist organizations thrived.4
That ecosystem emerged from ideal conditions such as state weakness, access to young male recruits, the support of Pakistan’s ISI, the ability to hide in loosely governed spaces, rivalries that allowed terrorists to gain sponsorship from particular tribes, access to a lucrative drug trade and other criminal enterprises, and the ability to flow money, weapons, people, and narcotics across porous borders. Geographically, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region’s centrality and relative inaccessibility made it the ideal spot for basing a jihad and from which to project murderous campaigns outward to India, Central Asia, Russia, China, Europe, and the Middle East. Moreover, the region had a strong ideological draw due to a prophesy in the Hadith (a record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) that an Islamic army will emerge from Khorasan under black banners and ultimately conquer Jerusalem. The text encourages Muslims to “join that Army, even if you have to crawl over ice; no power will be able to stop them.”5
Ghani knew that President Trump had been elected largely by people who did not understand what was at stake in that faraway place and who were skeptical about what more Americans were calling “forever” or endless wars. I asked Ghani to help the world understand, without obscuring the daunting challenges that Afghanistan faced, the good that their efforts, alongside those of courageous Afghans who were sacrificing every day, had achieved. Despite the difficulties encountered in that long war, Afghanistan, by 2017, was a transformed society. After the fall of the Taliban, hundreds of thousands of refugees returned to the country. The city of Kabul grew from a population of one million to close to five million.6 Social services expanded with the returning population. In October 2018, over 45 percent of Afghan voters voted in parliamentary elections. In September 2019, voter turnout dropped due to fears of Taliban attacks, but despite threats to murder anyone who went to the polls, two million people, approximately 27 percent of registered voters, voted in the presidential election.7 Although there was far too much fraud in the development effort in Afghanistan, the entire effort was not wasted, as some have claimed. Americans do not know that Afghanistan is a transformed society because they do not know Afghans who have benefited from the extraordinary changes that followed the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. The contrast between Afghanistan in 2001 and Afghanistan today in the areas of education, technology, and women’s rights is stark.
The education of young people expanded rapidly, including women who had been denied education under the Taliban. Prior to 2001, it was estimated that fewer than 1 million children in Afghanistan were enrolled in primary and secondary education. In 2017, UNESCO estimated children’s enrollment at a total of 9.3 million. Higher education has also expanded, with 300,000 students enrolled in private and public universities as of 2019, one third of them women.8
Because of access to technology and information, Afghanistan is no longer isolated from the world. Over 80 percent of Afghans have access to mobile phones and 400 percent more Afghans reported using the internet to access news and information in 2018 than in 2013. Access to technology is helping Afghans counter corruption through social media exposure and the use of mobile payments and banking. Afghanistan has the most open press in the region, a stark contrast to the complete blackout of the Taliban period and the state-controlled and influenced media in other countries, such as Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asian states. By 2019, there were 96 TV channels, 65 radio stations, and 911 print media in Kabul as well as 107 TV channels, 284 radio stations, and 416 print media outlets in other provinces.9
Under Taliban rule, women were denied education and brutally punished for actions such as venturing outside the home unaccompanied by a male relative or talking with men to whom they were not related, even by telephone. The Taliban enforce those oppressive measures in the areas they control; in 2018, women were lashed as punishment under Sharia law and a Taliban court ruling.10 By contrast, the progress achieved for women under the Afghan Constitution is unprecedented in the region. Afghan law requires that 25 percent of parliamentary seats be held by women, and a record high of 417 female candidates ran for parliament in October 2018.
Soon after the visit, Ghani conducted an interview with Time magazine in which he told Americans that “their security depends on us.”11 He went on to assure them that Afghans would continue to shoulder the vast share of the burden, reminding Americans that the number of troops committed in Afghanistan and the cost of the war had been reduced by 90 percent. He also expressed gratitude for Americans’ sacrifices. He stated that the fewer than 50 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan in the past eighteen months was “still too many” and asked Americans to compare those losses to the 2,300 Americans lost between 2001 and 2014. But the American people needed to hear more from their own leaders about what was at stake and what had been achieved. They also deserved a strategy designed to protect them at an acceptable cost.
Ghani was also well aware that sustaining American will required confidence in the reliability and virtue of the United States’ partners in Afghanistan. Accordingly, Ghani was working hard with Ambassador Llorens and General Nicholson on a compact between our countries to establish clear objectives for Afghan institutional reform and metrics to evaluate effectiveness. In contrast to Karzai, Ghani wanted the United States and other donors to impose conditions on assistance. Those conditions were meant to incentivize reforms and counter opposition from mujahideen-era elites who wanted to maintain their patronage networks.12 Ghani told me that his priority was to strengthen the security ministries of defense and interior as well as the intelligence ministry known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Also vital were institutions and functions critical to establishing rule of law.
But Ghani needed the United States to use its influence. American diplomats and military commanders were sometimes reluctant to impose conditionality of assistance because either they underappreciated the severity of the problem or were oversensitive to being seen as neocolonialists in a country that had fought four wars against occupiers: three against the British and one against the Soviets. But influence exerted in coordination with elected Afghan leaders was supportive of Afghan sovereignty. Ghani described how the Afghan minister of defense was working with General Nicholson’s command to lessen the influence of criminalized patronage networks and improved dramatically the quality of leaders in the Afghan National Army.
We spoke about how the United States and others might reinforce Afghan efforts to lessen divisions and foster unity. Afghanistan is a decentralized nation in which local and tribal leaders jealously guard autonomy. Ghani’s dilemma was how to pursue reform without widening divisions that could weaken the state. While Afghans often profess their identity as Afghans rather than members of a particular ethnic group, decades of war and the Taliban’s brand of Pashtun nationalism mixed with religious extremism had bred resentment and fear of Pashtun domination among the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Turkic minorities in the country. The collapse of the Najib government in 1992 ushered in an era of competition among rival Islamist sects. During the resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s, Afghanistan’s mild indigenous forms of Islam, Hanafi Sunnism and Sufism, were overwhelmed by imported extremist Islamist sects. Divisions weakened popular will to resist the Taliban and created opportunities for foreign actors, such as Iran and Pakistan, to support proxies in return for political influence. There were opportunities for the United States and like-minded countries such as the United Kingdom, India, and Scandinavian countries that have long-standing relationships there to reduce those divisions and foster accommodations among Afghanistan’s communities.
Afghanistan is an increasingly urban and connected society. Communities come together physically in its burgeoning cities and electronically on the internet and through social media. The country’s population is young: 63 percent are under twenty-four years old. Afghanistan’s young people are better connected than ever before not only to the world, but also to one another. Ethnic communities converge on the plains north of Kabul and in the city itself, including Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras.13 Their knowledge is no longer confined to their ancestral lands.
One key destabilizing external force in these efforts was Pakistan. Ghani reminded me that, early in his presidency, he took significant political risk in engaging Pakistan and tried to convince the army leadership to pursue their interests in Afghanistan diplomatically rather than support terrorist organizations such as the Taliban and the Haqqani network. It did not work, and it was not the first time the Afghan president was burned.
Back when the Obama administration prioritized cooperation with Pakistan in the fight against Al-Qaeda in South Asia, Pakistan approached a despondent President Karzai. In May 2010, soon after he professed his commitment to his U.S. partners, Pakistan’s army commander, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, sent the head of ISI, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to Kabul to suggest to Karzai a pact that excluded the United States.14 Karzai, after exhorting the United States to confront Pakistan for years, seemed ready to try something different. Kayani’s real motive was to weaken the war effort against the Taliban by driving a wedge between the United States and Afghanistan. The Pakistanis were smooth, and Karzai was vulnerable. In an October 2011 interview with Pakistan’s Geo Television, Karzai stated, “God forbid, if there is ever a war between Pakistan and America, then we will side with Pakistan. If Pakistan is attacked, and if the people of Pakistan need help, Afghanistan will be there with you. Afghanistan is a brother.”15 In the year of Pasha’s conciliatory visit to Kabul, the Taliban committed at least six major attacks with no military objective on Afghan civilians and four hundred other IED and suicide attacks throughout the country that resulted in civilian deaths.16 By 2017, I had come to believe that continuing to expect Pakistan to change its behavior after a perfect record of duplicity across almost two decades was the height of folly.
As I arrived in South Asia, the Haqqani network was preparing one of the deadliest mass murders in Afghanistan’s recent history, an attack that would kill more than 150 people in Kabul on June 6, 2017. At the time, the United States had over six billion dollars in military and economic assistance in the pipeline. It was past time for a different approach to Pakistan.
I talked with other Afghan officials that day, including Hanif Atmar and Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom would oppose Ghani in the October 2019 presidential election. That evening, I met with Amrullah Saleh, who would later join Ghani as his running mate and candidate for vice president in the presidential election and narrowly escape a Taliban assassination attempt. Saleh, who had served for six years as the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security until he and Atmar could no longer abide Karzai’s conspiracy theories, offended many of his American interlocutors with his direct and sometimes strident criticism of the war effort. But I appreciated his candor and his passion for his country. His unwavering opposition to the Taliban and his willingness to highlight flawed assumptions were refreshing. Saleh always made clear what was at stake.
My conversations with Afghan leaders left me with a sense of hope and regret. I hoped that we might finally align efforts not only to fight the enemy, but also to strengthen Afghanistan such that it could withstand the regenerative capacity of the Taliban. I regretted the missed opportunities due to short-term approaches we had taken to long-term problems over many years. Had we done irreparable damage to our will? Were we out of time? If only the United States and other nations had taken a long-term view in Afghanistan from the outset and not tried to turn the war into something alien to war’s very nature, we might not be in this situation. I was determined to get the U.S. president options to achieve sustainable security in Afghanistan and South Asia, but I knew it would not be easy to gain approval for those options and generate the will necessary to implement them.
MY LAST meeting of the day was with students who had been on the campus of American University of Afghanistan on August 24, 2016, when Taliban gunmen blasted through the university’s fortified wall with a truck bomb. The terrorists laid siege to the campus for nearly ten hours. They killed fifteen people, including students, faculty, guards, and crisis responders, in addition to wounding dozens more.17 When the school reopened seven months later, all but one of those students returned immediately. That student, paralyzed from the waist down, returned after medical treatment in Germany. Our conversation reinforced to me the importance of education in the long-term effort to defeat jihadist terrorists. Those intrepid young people were part of a cohort of young Afghans who transcended ethnic identity, rejected Islamist extremism, and were determined to build better lives for themselves and future generations.
Jihadist terrorists depend on ignorance. Decades of war and the brutality of the Taliban denied education to a population that became susceptible to the demagoguery of the Taliban and terrorist groups. These groups brainwash young people and foment hatred to inspire and justify violence against innocents. They prey on those most vulnerable: adolescents and teenage men (and increasingly women) who are disenfranchised or seek affirmation. Many young people are indoctrinated into jihadist terrorist organizations through sexual and other forms of abuse. The trauma they suffer prepares them to be systematically dehumanized, often through participation in beheadings or other egregious acts of violence. Those who claim piety not only commit the most heinous acts of violence, but also run an immense and profitable criminal enterprise that enriches its leaders, who live in comfortable compounds in Pakistan. Their children go to private schools there while they bomb girls’ schools in Afghanistan.
As I met with these courageous students, I wished that more Americans could get to know them and see the halting but real progress their country was making. I also wondered what those who advocated power sharing with the Taliban envisioned the result would look like. Would the Taliban be permitted to bulldoze only every other girls’ school? Would music and art be banned in only parts of the country? Would mass executions occur in the soccer stadium only every other Saturday? The lack of understanding of the enemy and of the Afghan people led to the paradox of excessive sympathy for the Taliban and disregard for (or at least disinterest in) courageous Afghans: soldiers, police, students, journalists, and government officials who were willing to die to defeat our common enemy and secure a better future for their children and ours. I would keep these brave Afghans in mind as I proceeded on to the next leg of my trip: Pakistan.
THE SHORT flight took us into Islamabad airport. It was familiar to me; during 2003 and 2004 I was a backbencher for several visits on the personal staff of Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command. Central Command is the overall military headquarters with responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan and, by then, Iraq and for military operations across the greater Middle East. Our ambassador to Pakistan, David Hale, met us. Hale joined the Foreign Service around the same time I entered the army, in the mid-1980s. We both spent considerable time in the Middle East, he at the U.S. missions to Tunisia, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia and as ambassador to Jordan and Lebanon. Hale was no stranger to tough, frustrating jobs; he was special envoy for Middle East Peace from May 2011 to June 2013. But his work in Islamabad might have been the toughest of all. That is because the policy he was asked to implement was fundamentally flawed, and because many of his interlocutors were the most duplicitous people on earth.
Over the years, Pakistani officials had taken good advantage of incoherent and inconsistent U.S. strategies. On September 12, 2001, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called the head of Pakistan’s ISI, Gen. Ahmed Mahmud to deliver the message that Pakistan “faces a stark choice: either it is with us or it is not.” Mahmud stated that he wanted to “dispel the misconception” of Pakistan’s “being in bed” with terrorist organizations and promised his and President Pervez Musharraf’s full, “unqualified support.”18 It was the beginning of a sustained campaign of deception and subterfuge. Three U.S. administrations fell for it. Pakistani leaders proved particularly adept at using Americans’ vanity and naïveté against them. Hale and I agreed that previous approaches to Pakistan suffered from a bad combination of superficial understanding and overintellectualization of the regional dimension of the jihadist terrorist problem.
Understanding was superficial because Americans often skipped over the base motivations, goals, and strategies of the Taliban and other terrorist organizations as well as the Pakistani ISI. Overintellectualization occurred when key officials in the Obama administration developed a flawed logic that underpinned a self-defeating strategy. That logic was: because Pakistan is more important than Afghanistan (as Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation with more than 212 million people), U.S. policy should prioritize the relationship with Pakistan over the outcome of the war in Afghanistan.19 The consequences of failure in Pakistan would be far greater than a failure in Afghanistan, the logic went. If security in Pakistan collapsed or if Pakistan became completely estranged from the West, the jihadist terrorist problem would increase by orders of magnitude. An isolated and desperate Pakistan might initiate another war with India, a war that could lead to nuclear devastation in one of the world’s most populous regions. The best strategy, therefore, would be to prioritize good relations with Pakistan to prevent the worst possible outcome.
But that approach to Pakistan rested on wishful thinking and the dubious assumption that the Pakistan Army and ISI were willing to reduce their support for the Taliban and the Haqqani network. Pakistani leaders used these groups to coerce the Afghan government and prevent a Pashtun nationalist call to adjust the border. The ISI also wanted control of at least portions of Afghanistan to provide the “strategic depth” necessary, in their minds, to prevent India from encircling Pakistan with an Afghan government friendly to New Delhi.
U.S. prioritization of the relationship with Pakistan even at the expense of stability in Afghanistan overlooked the interconnected nature of security in both places and encouraged the Pakistani military to continue its self-destructive support of terrorist organizations. It was, of course, a terrorist safe haven in Afghanistan, enabled by the Pakistan-supported Taliban government, that led to the mass murder of 2,977 innocents on September 11, 2001.20 Insecurity and violence in Afghanistan blows back into Pakistan, creating the very problem that downgrading the priority of security in Afghanistan was meant to avoid. When the Obama administration removed the Taliban as a designated enemy, Pakistani leaders concluded that their American counterparts were easily duped. How seriously should the Pakistanis take American appeals to do more to fight the Taliban and the Haqqani network in their own country when the United States had already announced its timetable to withdraw and seemed desperate to accommodate at least some of the Taliban’s demands?
PAKISTANI POLICE cleared the route for our motorcade as we made the short drive to the government section of the city. To those unfamiliar with South Asian cities, Islamabad might seem chaotic as cars, motorbikes, and the ornately decorated jingle trucks vie for advantage in its jam-packed boulevards. But Islamabad is orderly compared to other cities in the region. Built in the 1960s, Islamabad enjoyed a name and an ambitious construction plan that reflected Pakistan’s aspiration to be the second Medina, an Islamic state analogous to the city to which the Prophet Muhammad migrated in AD 622. The capital was also meant to express unity in a country that encompassed diverse territories and peoples, including Punjabis, Pashtuns, and Sindhis.
When we arrived at the prime minister’s office, I sat opposite Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The sun shone brightly through the large windows overlooking the garden. He was serving his third nonconsecutive term at the time. Sharif had previously been prime minister from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1997 until the former army chief Pervez Musharraf unseated him in a bloodless coup in 1999. Sharif was a political survivor, but he was under constant pressure from the army and his political opponents. He seemed sympathetic to our main point that the United States could no longer bear the fundamental contradiction in our relationship in which a supposed ally supported our enemies, perpetuated violence, and was therefore at least partially responsible for the deaths of Coalition soldiers and innocent civilians. I told the prime minister that patience was running out and soon we might no longer be able to provide economic and military aid. The United States had recognized that we were essentially funding our enemies through a middleman—U.S. assistance allowed the Pakistan Army to allocate more money to recruiting, training, equipping, and sustaining the Taliban and other terrorist organizations.
As we walked past the manicured lawn and then drove away down the tree-lined drive, the contrast between the trappings of power in the prime minister’s office and the actual powerlessness of that place and those who occupied it was striking. Despite U.S., British, and other nations’ efforts over many years to reinforce the civilian government of Pakistan, army headquarters remained the place of power and authority. The sympathetic hearing from Sharif was inconsequential. He and his finance minister would soon be indicted on corruption charges related to the Panama Papers leaks and removed from office, but members of Sharif’s party attributed the charges to pressure from the military.21 In 2018, the army’s choice for prime minister, Imran Khan, a former world-renowned cricket player and playboy with a visceral dislike for the United States, took office. It was clear that the U.S. approach to Pakistan had to be based on the reality that while most countries have an army, Pakistan’s army has a country. To move from strategic narcissism to strategic empathy, we would have to pay attention to the emotions, ideology, and worldview of the Pakistan Army leaders.
SINCE THE Pakistani state’s inception in 1947, the army defined itself by the threat from its vast neighbor India. Pakistan fought and lost four wars, including its Civil War (also known as the Bangladesh Liberation War), in 1971, during which Pakistan ceded 55 percent of its population and 15 percent of its territory to newly independent Bangladesh. Territorial disputes remained. In the northwestern Indian subcontinent region of Kashmir, Indian and Pakistani troops engage in high-altitude and high-stakes skirmishes. Conflicts have often escalated to even the threat of nuclear weapons use, as happened in the summer of 2002. Kashmir was the Pakistan Army’s early proving ground for using jihadist terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and it remains a flashpoint for conflict between Pakistan and India. India’s contentious move in 2019 to remove the semiautonomous status the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir had enjoyed for the last sixty-five years could stoke indigenous militancy in the region, much like flawed 1987 state elections did there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.22
American flag officers (generals and admirals) have been at times susceptible to the charms of Pakistani officers, who’ve shared the manners and comportment of a Western army. Their landscaped posts would make any U.S. Army command sergeant major envious. Many of their officers were educated at the British Army’s training ground at Sandhurst. Others attended U.S. Army schools at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. They spoke the Queen’s English, played polo, studied the American Civil War, and drank good whiskey. But they grew up in an organization that saw itself as the arbiter of national interest and the protector of Pakistan’s Islamic identity. The army had veto power over foreign and economic policy.23 And Pakistan’s generals would not let go of what they believed was one of their most effective tools: terrorist organizations and militias that allowed them to use violence while denying responsibility.
The Pakistan Army got its start in jihad in 1947 and never stopped. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. support for Islamist groups fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan flowed through Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, the ISI. The ISI-run resistance to Soviet occupation set conditions for the Taliban’s rise and foreclosed on any chance of a moderate political evolution in Afghanistan. ISI involvement in the Afghan drug trade provided covert funding for Pakistan’s use of terrorist proxies and the development of nuclear weapons.
But the ISI’s Frankenstein’s monsters, and the sons of Frankenstein they spawned, groups like Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and ISIS-Khorasan, turned on their masters. Attacks like the massive bombing of the Islamabad Marriott hotel in September 2008 and the Pearl-Continental Hotel in Peshawar in June 2009 are examples of Pakistan’s project to promote terrorism against its neighbors badly backfiring on the Pakistani state.24 These groups also killed Pakistani civilians and, increasingly, attacked religious minorities such as Shia or Sufi Muslims, risking the kind of destructive sectarian conflict that had engulfed the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys. By the 2010s, attacks were no longer limited to Pakistan’s far frontier as terrorists began to operate in Swat and Buner Districts. They even extended their murderous campaign beyond the Pakistan Army and began to target their families.
In a particularly egregious attack in December 2014, seven terrorists armed with suicide vests and guns burst into the Peshawar Army Public School in the northwest of Pakistan. The toll was heart-rending: 141 dead, 132 of them children ranging in age from eight to eighteen. The attack demonstrated the interconnected nature of these groups. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the primary driver of antistate violence in Pakistan since 2007, took responsibility. The fact that the perpetrators included a Chechen, three Arabs, and two Afghans demonstrated the international dimension of the problem and the folly of believing that these groups could easily be contained geographically.25
In response to the attack, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, stated, “All Taliban are bad Taliban. Extremism of any kind—of thought, action, religious, or political extremism—is bad. We have to eliminate them wherever we find them.”26 He also vowed to regulate religious education. If there were to be an incident that convinced the Pakistan Army to stop using terrorist organizations as an arm of its foreign policy and to pursue all terrorist organizations on its soil, that should have been it. It was not. That is why Ambassador Hale and I believed that any strategy in South Asia should begin with the assumption that the Pakistan Army would not change its behavior.
DESPITE OUR deep frustrations with each other, meetings between U.S. and Pakistani officers evinced a sense of mutual respect based on experience in the profession of arms. Hale and I met with Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, chief of army, and Gen. Naveed Mukhtar, director general of ISI. I had spoken with Naveed at his request two weeks earlier; we shared a background in tanks and mechanized warfare. Having learned of his interest in the history of the American Civil War, I had sent him a copy of Williamson Murray’s book, A Savage War. Naveed, having learned of my daughter’s upcoming wedding, sent a beautiful hand-knotted carpet, which, because its expense far exceeded what would be appropriate to accept, went directly to a government warehouse. Naveed developed his interest in the American Civil War during his attendance at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. In his 2011 War College thesis, “Afghanistan—Alternative Futures and their Implications,” he wrote:
Establishing a viable context for Afghan stability and security involves key regional and global stakeholders. Towards that end, the United States needs to employ major diplomatic measures designed to ease regional tensions and prevent external players from derailing the strategy.27
He was right, but he might also have written that the United States should try to solve the problem that Pakistan was creating. Naveed and other Pakistan Army officers often sounded like they were diagnosing the situation in South Asia as dispassionate outside observers even as they drove much of the instability and violence that was the subject of their analysis.
I opened the meeting with condolences for the more than eight thousand soldiers who had lost their lives to terrorist groups since 9/11 and the more than twenty thousand Pakistani civilians whom terrorists had killed across those years.28 Having studied their army’s recent adaptation to the demands of counterinsurgency, I expressed admiration for their soldiers’ courage, especially given that their families were also at risk. I told them that Americans were deeply saddened by the attack on the Peshawar Army Public School. I intended these opening remarks, in part, to expose the confounding contradiction of the Pakistan Army’s asking its soldiers to sacrifice in battle against terrorist groups while a wing of the army nurtured terrorist organizations with connections to those same groups. I told the generals that Ambassador Hale and I wanted first to listen so we might learn from their perspective and apply what we learned to the new administration’s policy toward Pakistan and South Asia.
General Bajwa took full advantage of the opportunity to orient a member of a new U.S. administration to his worldview. Qamar Javed Bajwa, born in Karachi to a Punjabi military family, joined the Pakistan Army in 1978. He received training at the Pakistan Military Academy, National Defense University, Canadian Army Command and Staff College, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His comments seemed crafted to preempt what he expected to hear from me: exhortations to “do more” against the Taliban and the Haqqani network and hopeful expressions that we could, finally, work together to end the violence in Afghanistan. Like his predecessor, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Bajwa wanted me to accept the fundamental contradiction between denials that the Taliban and other terrorist organizations enjoyed safe havens in Pakistan and assurances that the Pakistani Army could do more against these safe havens with sustained U.S. support.
The conversation with Bajwa and Naveed followed a recurring pattern I had witnessed over the years since September 11, 2001. Pakistani military leaders, army commanders and heads of ISI, were brilliant at manipulating earnest American counterparts. As always, the conversation began with a litany of grievances from the Pakistan Army perspective. The first was the U.S. “abandonment” of Pakistan after the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Then there was the temporary suspension of all U.S. military and developmental assistance in 1979 and again in 1990, after the evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program could no longer be denied.29 From there, the conversation shifted to the portrayal of Pakistan as a victim: a victim of the massive influx of refugees as Afghans fled the Soviet occupation, the Afghan Civil War, and the brutality of the Taliban; a victim of sanctions imposed by the United States due to its nuclear program; a victim of what the Pakistani generals portrayed as a “U.S. war on terrorism” in which Pakistan had been a dutiful ally whose sacrifices exceeded those of the United States and all Coalition armies in Afghanistan combined; and finally, always, a victim of Indian aggression in pursuit of recidivist objectives in Kashmir and the encirclement of Pakistan through the establishment of an India-friendly Afghanistan.30
The Pakistan-as-victim gambit then shifted to a narrative of weakness and beleaguerment. Pakistan was strained economically and overcommitted militarily. If only the United States were more patient and provided more assistance, Pakistan would gradually extend security to the regions in which the Taliban and various terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaeda, were based. Ignoring the implicit admission of the existence of safe havens on its territory, offers to do more in the future were interspersed with flat denials of support for the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and key facilitators of their operations such as the Haqqani network. For those Americans who remained skeptical, Pakistani officers would whisper the possibility that rogue or retired ISI officers might, out of habit and long-standing relationships, continue to advise some terrorist groups without the command’s knowledge, even though the ISI is vertically integrated into the army’s chain of command. The clincher was a play to the ego of the visiting U.S. official. That official, Pakistani leaders intimated, would be the one to convince them to do more to pursue Taliban, Haqqani network, and Al-Qaeda leaders. The United States would just need to be patient and share more information and provide more assistance.
The typical reaction from U.S. leaders was to believe that their Pakistani counterparts were sympathetic to U.S. positions but were simply powerless to effect change, especially on the time line Americans expected. Those Americans often flew home and parroted the Pakistan Army’s main talking point: Pakistan needed more time and more money. And so, the United States wrote more checks and provided more weapons and supplies to those who were sustaining and helping orchestrate a war against them and their allies. It was serial gullibility as new U.S. officials rotated into military, intelligence, and diplomatic positions, and Pakistani officials repeated their lines. Hale and I joked that the relationship had become almost farcical, but the joke was on us. A fundamental shift in policy was overdue, one that incentivized Pakistani leaders to change their behavior and, over time, tried to convince them that it was in their interest to end their support for terrorist organizations that had inflicted so much suffering not only in South and Central Asia and across the Middle East, but also around the world from Libya to France to the Philippines. And while the United States and other nations should continue to encourage a strong Pakistani civilian leadership, a realistic policy must acknowledge that the Pakistan Army makes the important decisions and holds the reins of power.
I tried to break out of the typical pattern by not using the talking points Bajwa and Naveed expected. I told the generals that the new administration would pay far more attention to deeds than words and explained that President Trump, as a businessman, would see funding our enemies indirectly through aid to Pakistan as a bad return on investment. To address General Bajwa’s complaint that the United States was always asking Pakistan to do more, underappreciating Pakistani sacrifices and the limits of Pakistan’s control over its far frontier, I assured him that we would stop asking him to do more. We would instead ask him and especially General Naveed to do less—provide less support to organizations that were killing Afghan and U.S. soldiers and murdering Afghan civilians. I hoped to at least convince him of our determination not to repeat mistakes of the past. I observed that U.S. administrations’ relations with Pakistan tended to go through a cycle that began with conversations like the one we were having. U.S. officials’ expectations rose after hearing Pakistani promises of real cooperation. The cycle always ended in abject disappointment. I said that I intended to stay at abject disappointment until there was a demonstrable change in behavior.
Most of that abject disappointment was based on the Pakistan Army’s failure to confront a particularly brutal mujahideen militia that sought control of territory along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the Haqqani network. The Haqqanis provided another compelling example of how the terrorist ecosystem in Pakistan is a danger to that country and the world. The Haqqanis are also an example of the Pakistan Army’s unwillingness to stop using terrorists as an arm of Pakistan’s foreign policy. The Haqqanis, with ISI support, provide a safe space for terrorists. The Haqqani network, led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is also the military commander of the Taliban, connects the ISI, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other local and global terrorists, many of whom are also hostile to the Pakistan Army and state. The network is valuable to all because of its ability to mobilize tribes, raise funds internationally and through organized crime, communicate through multiple media, and develop and maintain a high degree of military expertise. The Haqqanis provide the Taliban with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of brainwashed adolescents and young men, many of them from the more than eighty Haqqani-run madrassas (religious schools) in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Haqqani network’s role as a military incubator for both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban demonstrates how various terrorist and insurgent groups located mainly along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier are interconnected and enjoy protection from each other as well as from the ISI. And it is the interconnectedness of these groups, as well as the dream of Khorasan’s becoming the site of their future caliphate, that makes this frontier such a geographic center of gravity for defeating these organizations.31 The network has orchestrated attacks on U.S. facilities, including the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2011 and the U.S. consulate in Herat in 2013. The Haqqanis are particularly adept at the mass murder of Afghan civilians. I told Bajwa and Naveed that I was not going to reiterate the same pleas of countless commanders and diplomats to go after the Haqqanis. It was time to operate under the assumption that Pakistan would not do so, and we had no option remaining but to impose costs on Pakistan.32 On the way out, I passed General Bajwa a handwritten note with a list of names of U.S. and allied hostages held by the Haqqani network. He asked me if I would like him to do something about them. I replied that I was confident that he could if he wanted to, and emphasized that, from this point on, we would be sensitive to actions rather than words. We said good-bye and pulled away from the pristine grounds of army headquarters.
Hale and I discussed the sad pattern of U.S. policy toward Pakistan since 9/11, a pattern consistent with the definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Many diplomats and senior military officers, despite decades of experience to the contrary, continued to assume that the Pakistan Army would be honest with them and become a true partner in the fight against jihadist terrorists.
As I met with our team to prepare for the final leg in New Delhi, it was increasingly clear that we needed a strategy that kept in mind long-term implications. I thought of U.S. support for Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who in 1977 deposed and later killed the first elected prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Zia’s eleven years in power left a damning legacy on the army and the country, one from which Pakistan has not recovered. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States had unintentionally helped Zia, who believed that he was on “a mission, given by God, to bring Islamic order to Pakistan,” transform Pakistan into a global nexus of jihadist terrorism.33 I also remembered how, after 9/11, U.S. support for Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf, a former commander of the Pakistan Army who had internalized the army’s hatred for India as well as Zia’s affinity for Islamist militants, bolstered Pakistan’s ability to use terrorism not only in Afghanistan, but also against India.
As we boarded the plane bound for New Delhi, it was clear that from the Pakistan Army’s perspective, everything was ultimately about India. A friendly government in Afghanistan would give Pakistan “strategic depth” in case of another war with India. And the ISI’s support for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was dependent on the Pakistan Army’s vast terrorist infrastructure, built to sustain groups that it uses as an arm of its foreign policy toward India. One such group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), was founded in 1987 as a joint venture between the ISI and terrorists later involved in the founding of Al-Qaeda. LET’s leader, Hafiz Saeed, made clear that LET’s mission was to “fight against the evil trio, America, Israel, and India.”34
INDIA WAS a critical partner, not only in combating South Asia terrorism, but also in the competition with the Chinese Communist Party across the Indo-Pacific. India is a country with tremendous challenges and opportunities. Although it was, in the 1980s, a leader in the Non-Aligned Movement (a group of developing states not formally aligned with the Soviet or U.S. power bloc), and thus resists formal alliances, it was obvious that U.S. and Indian interests were converging. India is projected to surpass China as the most populous nation in the world by 2024. Its population is young, savings and investment rates are healthy, and its economy is growing. But the government struggles to provide social services as rapid economic growth combined with the burgeoning population is generating severe interrelated problems in energy, environment, and food and water security. From 1990 to 2020, India halved its poverty rate, but more than 365 million people remain in multidimensional poverty. India’s diversity also presents challenges to governance and to maintaining a cohesive national identity, as it is home to the largest population of Hindus (79.8 percent) and the second-largest population of Muslims (14.2 percent) in the world, as well as Christians and Sikhs.35 India recognizes twenty-two official languages, but approximately one hundred more are spoken, highlighting the country’s tremendous geographic and cultural diversity. But India works. And its leaders generally share U.S. and Western democratic principles, and concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to promote its authoritarian state model. India is a country that the United States and the world needs to succeed. I hoped to learn more about how to expand our cooperation across diplomacy, economic development, security, commerce, and emerging technologies.
India is vulnerable both to Pakistan’s sustained support for terrorists and the existential threat of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The greatest latent danger may be the potential for ethnic or religious conflict. Violent interactions between Hindu nationalists and Islamic terrorists would be disastrous. When Narendra Modi became prime minister, some feared that elements within his Bharatiya Janata Party would stoke the embers of sectarian violence with Muslims. When Modi was chief minister of Gujarat state in 2002, Hindus and Muslims clashed in a series of riots after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire in a predominately Muslim area. In the ensuing orgy of violence, Hindus targeted Muslims for weeks in a mass atrocity that killed up to two thousand Indians, most of them Muslims. Some accused Modi of failing to quell the violence. Although the George W. Bush administration initially banned Modi from coming to the United States, both the Bush and Obama administrations eventually advanced the relationship with Modi and India.36 In February 2020, as President Trump visited India, at least thirty-eight people were killed in the worst sectarian violence in decades, evidence that sectarian tensions persist.
Before my visit, Prime Minister Modi had allayed fears that he would pursue a Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) agenda. But during his second term, those fears seemed justified. In 2019, he scrapped the semiautonomous status of the Muslim-majority territories of Jammu and Kashmir. Then a Supreme Court verdict allowed Hindus to rebuild a temple at the site of the Ayodhya mosque, Babri Masjid, which had been destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992. At the end of the year, massive protests followed the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allows people from neighboring countries of all faiths except Muslims to gain Indian citizenship.
Still, these events had not yet occurred, and as we started our descent into Delhi, Lisa Curtis reviewed with me the recent history of strengthening U.S.-Indian relations. George W. Bush prioritized improved relations with India, removing all remaining sanctions initially imposed on India after a 1998 nuclear test. In 2005, the two countries had signed an agreement to expand defense relations, and in 2008 the United States led an initiative within the Nuclear Suppliers Group to allow India access to civil nuclear cooperation, despite the fact that it remained a nonsignatory to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. A formal defense relationship and a nuclear cooperation initiative followed. The Obama administration expanded cooperation in defense, cybersecurity, and energy security. I looked forward to working with India’s national security advisor, Ajit Doval, and then-Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to maximize the potential in our relationship. I would be meeting Doval and his team for dinner and Jaishankar for breakfast, after which I would drive to the prime minister’s residence to meet with Modi.
It was easy to tell that Doval’s background was in intelligence. With his head tilted slightly to the right, he would speak in a hushed voice even about the most innocuous subjects. Jaishankar, by contrast, was a polished diplomat who delivered succinct analyses and tactful, indirect recommendations for how the United States might be more effective in South Asia and across the Indo-Pacific region. Jaishankar and Doval saw up close how China was developing exclusionary areas of primacy. The China threat was shifting India’s attitude toward greater multinational cooperation. For example, the Japan-India relationship grew stronger as China attempted to intimidate Japan with maritime militias in the Senkaku Islands and to control shipping routes through the Indian Ocean with facilities in Sri Lanka and the Maldives. India’s leaders saw China’s One Belt, One Road initiative as a one-way street that would disadvantage them. Still, India, due to the legacy of leading the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, was reluctant to give the impression of entering a formal alliance.
It was inevitable that our discussions would turn to the clear and present danger from ISI-supported jihadist terrorists. Events from 2008 are seared in the memory of Indians, not only those of the global financial crisis, but even more the devastating terrorist attacks that exposed the regional and global dimensions of the threat from Pakistan. Ten attackers from LET carried out a series of coordinated shooting and bombing attacks from Wednesday, November 26, until Saturday, November 29, 2008, most prominently at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai. At least 164 civilians were killed, including 6 American citizens; more than 300 people were wounded. The sole surviving attacker, a Pakistani citizen, revealed that he and his accomplices were members of LET, came from Pakistan, and were controlled from Pakistan. These painful wounds were reopened when, in 2015, Pakistan released from jail (on bail) the ringleader of the Mumbai attacks, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi. He promptly disappeared, further highlighting Pakistan’s support for terrorists.37
I could tell that Doval and Jaishankar were worried about the United States’ ability to implement a consistent foreign policy in South Asia. At every turn in our conversations, they made the case for the United States to remain engaged in the region. The 2008 financial crisis and President Barack Obama’s desire to disengage from overseas commitments to focus on “nation building here at home,” a goal that resonated with the majority of the American public, left Indian leaders doubtful about whether the United States would still pursue an active foreign policy.38 President Trump’s campaign rhetoric did not allay their concerns. India, a country shaped by its independence from colonialism and historically critical of U.S. interventions abroad, had become most fearful of U.S. disengagement at the moment when both Chinese aggression and jihadist terrorism were growing. Jaishankar and Doval believed that U.S. disengagement would embolden both threats.
India would be critical to the outside-in aspect of the South Asia strategy, and I told them that the United States would support an enhanced leadership role for India in the region and beyond. India was influential in multinational fora such as the Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa association BRICS and would soon join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. Indian leaders could use long-standing relationships with Russian leaders to persuade President Putin to act in his country’s interest and stop supporting Taliban groups, and instead support the Afghan government. And perhaps, together with Russia, India might help convince China to pressure Pakistan to crack down on terrorist organizations. Terrorists already threatened Russia and China directly and could impede China’s ambitious infrastructure projects in Pakistan and across Central Asia. Moreover, India might join the United States to prevail upon Gulf States such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to cut off terrorist financing and make their considerable assistance to Pakistan contingent on its no longer serving as a nexus for jihadist terrorists.39
On the final day of our trip, Lisa Curtis; MaryKay Carlson, the U.S. chargé d’affaires and deputy chief of mission in New Delhi; and I traveled to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the prime minister’s official residence, where we met with Modi. He gave us a warm welcome. It was clear that deepening and expanding that relationship should remain a priority for both nations. He expressed concern over China’s increasingly aggressive efforts to extend its influence at India’s expense and over its growing military presence in the region. He was very supportive of the Trump administration’s embrace of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific policy and suggested that the United States, India, Japan, and like-minded partners emphasize the concept’s inclusiveness and make clear that it is not meant to exclude any nation. At the end of the meeting, the prime minister put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a blessing. I was happy for any help I could get as our team headed back to Washington.
The trip convinced me that we needed to present the president with the withdrawal option and others that were based on the realities of the region and not on the wishful thinking on which previous policies had been based. The long-term objectives were to ensure that jihadist terrorists were unable to attack the United States and its allies; to prevent a potentially cataclysmic conflict between India and Pakistan; and to convince Pakistan to end its self-destructive support for terrorist organizations and undertake the reforms necessary to prevent its internal security from collapsing. The near-term focus should remain on denying terrorist organizations that have a demonstrated global reach access to the resources, freedom of movement, safe havens, and ideological space they need to plan, organize, and conduct attacks.40 We would base those options on a new set of assumptions:
WE WERE at war with no strategy. As I returned to Washington, DC, and the office occupied by Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, during the escalation of the Vietnam War, I felt that it was past time to clarify what we wanted to achieve in Afghanistan and South Asia. It seemed the worst form of cynicism to express sympathy for the soldiers and families of those killed or wounded in action while perpetuating a war without direction. There were obstacles to overcome in South Asia and in Washington. It took longer than I had hoped. From the end of the trip on April 20 to the day President Trump made a decision on a new South Asia strategy at Camp David on August 18, the Taliban and the Haqqani network conducted more than one hundred devastating attacks on Afghan security forces and civilians.44 The day after we returned to Washington, Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers killed more than 140 and wounded more than 160 people at an Afghan army base in the northern Balkh Province. The Haqqani network conducted another devasting attack on May 31, in Kabul, at an intersection near the German embassy. The massive truck bomb killed more than 150 and wounded more than 400. Refusing to be intimidated, President Ghani hosted a planned peace conference in the capital six days later.
A few days after the Camp David meetings, on August 21, the president explained his decision and the strategy to the American people and the world in a speech at Fort Myer, Virginia. On Afghanistan, he acknowledged that the “American people were weary of war without victory” and stated that his “original instinct was to pull out.” He summarized the dangers associated with a premature withdrawal, including the growing strength of terrorist organizations including ISIS and Al-Qaeda as well as the other twenty U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations active in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He noted the presence of nuclear weapons in such a volatile area. He addressed the contradictions in Pakistan policy, stated clearly that Pakistan offers safe haven to terrorist organizations, and outlined an approach that would deny terrorists control of territory, cut off funding, and isolate them from sources of ideological support. The new policy recognized the war as a contest of wills and aimed at the defeat of those organizations that threatened the United States. There would be no more artificial time lines, and the United States would no longer fall over itself trying to talk with the Taliban. President Trump pledged to support the Afghan government and military as they fought the Taliban while making clear Afghan responsibility to “take ownership of their future, to govern their society, and to achieve an everlasting peace.”45 Emphasis would be on aligning the elements of national power to include diplomatic, economic, and military efforts. After sixteen years of war, the United States had articulated a realistic, sustainable strategy. On August 21, 2017, I met with the president and First Lady in the residence and then jumped into the presidential motorcade as we made the short trip across the Potomac. As we passed Arlington National Cemetery and entered the gates of Fort Myer, I thought it was a fitting venue for the president to give a speech that for the first time clearly articulated how the sacrifices of America’s young warriors in Afghanistan would contribute to an outcome in that country and across South Asia worthy of those sacrifices.
AS I had feared, however, the strategy did not last. Those who were deeply skeptical about America’s long war in Afghanistan convinced President Trump to abandon it. Soon after I departed the White House in 2018, those who misunderstood the nature of the war, underappreciated the threat, and were ideologically predisposed toward disengagement from “forever wars” convinced him that a sustained and sustainable military effort in Afghanistan was futile and wasteful.
In July 2019, Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, visited Washington. Khan had strong anti-U.S. credentials and had been the clear choice of the Pakistan Army to be the country’s nominal leader. When President Trump asked publicly for Khan’s help in bringing the war to a conclusion, it seemed as if another American leader had fallen for a Pakistani counterpart’s effort to pose as a partner in counterterrorism. Khan even got a bonus as the president offered to mediate between Pakistan and India on Kashmir. President Trump went so far as to claim that Prime Minister Modi had asked him to mediate. But any observer of South Asia knows that Modi would never have done any such thing, as India had long-opposed outside mediation of the Kashmir dispute, primarily because past initiatives by the United Nations on the issue had proven disadvantageous to India. India is the status quo power when it comes to Kashmir, while Pakistan seeks to weaken India’s grip over the territory. The visit must have gone better than expected for Khan, as Pakistan regained its role of both arsonist and fireman in Afghanistan and South Asia.
Shortly after the Khan visit, President Trump, indulging in a common misconception of the war, said, “I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.”46 His statement betrayed a misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. America and the broad international coalition were not fighting against Afghans in an effort to subjugate popular will; they were fighting with the vast majority of Afghans to prevent the forcible return to power of a small, unpopular minority that had governed Afghanistan through terror and brutality. The Afghan peoples, like peoples across South and Central Asia and the Middle East, were the principal victims of the Taliban and jihadist terrorists. Despite this obvious distinction between the twenty-first-century war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and historical Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation in the twentieth century and in the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century, the narrative associated with Afghanistan as the “Graveyard of Empires” persisted.
Sadly, the president’s statement cheapened not only the sacrifices made by the more than 58,000 Afghan soldiers and police who died defending their country and their families from the Taliban, but also the sacrifices of the more than 2,300 American servicemen and women who lost their lives in the war.47 The loss of will to sustain the effort in Afghanistan led to rationalization of the decision to withdraw and the resurrection of the flaws and contradictions that undercut U.S. policy there almost from the start.
In September 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, as special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. The self-delusion that the Taliban would forswear any connection to Al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist organizations had returned. In January 2019, the same month that Khalilzad told the New York Times that the Taliban would restrain Al-Qaeda, a UN report observed that Al-Qaeda “continues to see Afghanistan as a safe haven for its leadership,” and the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment noted that Al-Qaeda continued to provide support for the Taliban. Another UN report, in June, warned that the Taliban “continues to be the primary partner for all foreign terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan.”48 Meanwhile, as the United States pursued talks, the Taliban intensified its attacks. In July, as Khalilzad sat down with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, a truck bomb in Ghazni city killed 12 and wounded 179 others. At the eleventh hour, the U.S. administration avoided the embarrassment of hosting Taliban terrorists at Camp David to finalize America’s surrender and abandonment of its partners on, almost incomprehensibly, the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The president canceled the planned meeting with a tweet on September 7 after learning of a Taliban car bomb attack that killed one American soldier and eleven others. Trump would go on to demand a Taliban cease-fire and a sharp reduction in violence as a precondition for resuming negotiations. Although there would be no immediate U.S. withdrawal, Trump made his intentions clear, stating that “We’ve been policemen there for a long time. And the government is going to have to take responsibility or do whatever it is they do.”49
Later that month, the first emir of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Asim Umar, was killed in a joint Afghan-U.S. raid on a Taliban compound in Helmand Province. Haji Mahmood, a Taliban military commander, the AQIS chief for Helmand, and Umar’s courier to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, fell next to him. The Department of Defense suppressed a press release that would have announced the death of Umar because of concerns that it “would complicate further negotiations” by exposing once again the interconnected nature of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Self-delusion was back in full force.50
It got worse. Khalilzad resumed negotiations with the Taliban, and after a “one-week reduction in violence” to demonstrate the Taliban’s control over its fighters and terrorists, would sign an agreement that offered the conditional withdrawal of U.S. forces in exchange for a sustained reduction in violence and other promises from the Taliban. These dubious promises include the commitments from the Taliban not to host, cooperate with, train, recruit, or fundraise for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that threaten the U.S. and its allies. The Taliban also agreed to take immediate action against threats that the U.S. deemed as urgent. It is difficult to understand how any American familiar with the nature of the Taliban, its ideology, and its record would believe those promises.
In the run-up to the agreement, the New York Times lent its editorial page to the deputy emir of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and specifically designated (by the FBI) global terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani. The man who leads the Taliban military arm, facilitates Al-Qaeda, and who has the blood of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocents on his hands blamed America for the war that began, in part, because his father helped cement the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The author’s assurances to permit women’s education and employment were tepid. And the failure, in the agreement or in the op-ed, to recognize the Afghan government or the Afghan Constitution indicates that the Taliban has not given up its ambition to regain power through violent means.
What was particularly tragic was that the Trump administration strategy announced in August 2017 was working. The Afghans were taking the brunt of the fighting. Although every U.S. loss is a tragedy, casualties per twelve-month periods fell from a high of 499 in 2010 to fewer than 20 in the twelve months prior to the president’s statement that he intended to withdraw all forces.51 The annual cost of the war fell from a high of $120 billion in 2011 to an estimated annual cost of $45 billion per year in 2018.52 The plan was to reduce that cost by half again as allies pledged to assume more of the financial burden. Afghanistan had not become Denmark, but government reforms, especially in the security ministries, were progressing. Amrullah Saleh, a no-nonsense leader, had taken over as interim minister of the interior. The January 2018 suspension of security assistance to Pakistan meant that Pakistan, at least, could no longer have it both ways, posing as a U.S. ally while supporting our enemies. The Taliban was under significant military pressure and no longer could simply wait out the U.S. withdrawal time line. Afghanistan was not a pretty situation. It was still a violent place, and Afghan, U.S., and coalition soldiers were still taking risks and making sacrifices; however, the United States had set conditions for its entering a future negotiating process from a position of strength, not desperation.
The September 2019 Afghan presidential election was not pretty. The Afghan government conducted the election under duress. The Taliban threatened anyone who voted. In addition to charges and countercharges of fraud, voter turnout was low. After nearly five months, Ghani was declared the winner by a slim margin. But the election happened. The result presented the United States and other nations with an opportunity to support an elected government and the 82 percent of Afghans opposed to the return of the Taliban and to bolster the will of those fighting on a modern-day frontier between barbarism and civilization.53 It seems the Trump Administration chose not to take advantage of that opportunity.
Khalilzad continued to pursue negotiations in 2020, perhaps to get the best deal possible given the American president’s desire to withdraw. But any deal meant primarily to fulfill that desire was bound to rest on the self-delusion that the Taliban would be an effective partner in countering terrorist organizations. Such an agreement would also empower the Taliban and weaken the Afghan government and security forces as the U.S. exited. That is why if the decision is to withdraw all U.S. forces, regardless of what happens afterward, it would have been preferable to do so with no deal.
THE PROBLEM set in South Asia is connected to other security challenges. It is a region in which cooperation with Russia and China is possible, as both countries would suffer the consequences of a growing terrorist threat emanating from the region. Russia, China, and other states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and European nations have an opportunity to pose Pakistani leaders with a clear choice between isolation as a pariah or partnership in an effort to take advantage of the region’s tremendous latent potential and address its grave problems in the areas of energy, climate change, environment, and food and water security. These are problems that affect Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the majority of the subcontinent. Multinational cooperation on South Asia’s problems is also important to convince Iran to play a less destructive role not only in South Asia, but also across the greater Middle East, where a sectarian civil war created a humanitarian catastrophe and a cycle of violence that strengthened jihadist terrorist organizations globally.
Conflicts evolve based on interactions with enemies and on other factors, such as declining public support and the will of leaders. By 2019, it was clear that the person most critical to sustaining the first long-term strategy for Afghanistan and South Asia was not determined to give the strategy he approved an opportunity to succeed. Responding in large measure to a vocal group within his political base, President Donald Trump abandoned the psychological gains that had strengthened the will of America’s partners and diminished the will of the Taliban enemy and their supporters. The mantra to “end the endless wars,” however, expressed a sentiment that was gaining momentum. As one who not only fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and bore witness to the horrors and sacrifices made there, but who also saw my daughter and son-in-law deploy to those same conflicts, I, too, wanted them to end. But I also knew that there was no short-term solution to South Asia’s long-term problems. What we owed our nation and the sons and daughters who fight in our name was a long-term strategy capable of delivering an outcome that would keep our nation safe at an acceptable cost.
Tragically, as American soldiers who were not yet born on September 11, 2001, deployed to Afghanistan, America was still fighting its longest war one year at a time. But the results of striking a deal with the Taliban for the purpose of withdrawing from America’s longest war are likely to be far worse than a sustained commitment under a sound strategy.