Fear: Trump in the White House(40)

And in December 2015, Trump tweeted, “A suicide bomber has just killed U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When will our leaders get tough and smart. We are being led to slaughter!”

Like all presidents, Trump was living with the unfinished business of his predecessors. In the 21st-century presidency, nothing illustrated this more clearly than Afghanistan. The war, begun after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Afghanistan had been the sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, was a thicket of high expectations, setbacks, misunderstandings and massive commitments of money, troops and lives.

Under Presidents Bush and Obama, debates and discussions of troop numbers had dominated internal NSC and public discussion and generated expectations of progress or resolution. Media coverage focused on the troop number and timetable story lines. The number of U.S. troops engaged in the war had become a proxy for progress.

During the Obama presidency, troop numbers were a roller coaster, peaking at 100,000 and dropping to 8,400 with heady expectations, later abandoned, that the combat mission against the insurgent Taliban could end. But internally the experts knew it was futile.

White House coordinator Lieutenant General Douglas Lute labeled the war “a house of cards” in a 2010 meeting soon after Obama added another 30,000 troops.

Dr. Peter Lavoy, Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, later in charge of South Asia for the Obama NSC staff, was a soft-spoken authority on South Asia—Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lavoy was largely unknown to the public but critical to the functioning of the defense and intelligence world. He was both academic and practitioner. He believed the obsession with U.S. troop numbers had been the Achilles’ heel of the Obama administration policy in Afghanistan.

“There are literally thousands of sub-tribes in Afghanistan,” Lavoy said. “Each has a grievance. If the Taliban ceased to exist you would still have an insurgency in Afghanistan.” Victory was far-fetched. Winning had not been defined.



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H. R. McMaster saw he would have a major confrontation with President Trump on the Afghanistan War. He knew Afghanistan. From 2010 to 2012 he had served as the deputy to the commander for planning (J5) at the Afghanistan war commander’s headquarters in Kabul.

During the Gulf War in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, just seven years out of West Point as an Army captain, McMaster led nine tanks in a battle that destroyed 28 Iraqi Republican Guard tanks. Captain McMaster suffered no losses and the battle lasted 23 minutes. He was awarded a Silver Star for valor.

In the Iraq War as a colonel he led 5,300 soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, successfully using protect-the-population counterinsurgency tactics to reclaim the city of Tal Afar in 2005. President Bush had publicly cited it as a model operation to give “reason for hope for a free Iraq.”

In McMaster’s 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, he called the Joint Chiefs who oversaw the Vietnam War “five silent men” who had failed to establish the essential personal rapport with civilian leaders so they could speak their minds. Dereliction of Duty was a field manual for avoiding another Vietnam.

The irony was that Trump was now saying that Afghanistan was Vietnam, a quagmire with no clear national security purpose, the latest example of the incoherence of American policy. McMaster’s job was to align the military’s recommendations for Afghanistan with the president’s goals, but this president’s only goal was to get out.

Staff work at the NSC ground on. On March 1 and 10, 2017, Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel Fernando Lujan, the National Security Council staffer for Afghanistan, chaired the first middle-level meetings of the interagency in the Trump administration. It included representatives from the State Department, Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.

Lujan, a holdover from the Obama administration, knew the Afghanistan policy under Obama had been simple in practice: Avoid catastrophe. There was lots of uncertainty, and the possibilities of calamity were immense. He gave the Afghan police, for example, key to long-term stability, a D minus or F.

At the first meeting, a State Department official teed up the discussion with a series of fundamental questions: Why do we think we need a counterterrorist base in Afghanistan to prevent another attack? What’s the justification for it? What do we think the terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan really is? Why do we think thousands of U.S. troops and intelligence specialists are needed to combat that when we have drones and everything else? Our enduring presence, he noted, can cause further instability from not only insurgents but also regional players, such as Pakistan.

The State official said the United States maintained it did not want to establish a permanent presence when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. So how do we square that now, after 16 years?

No, no, no, said the military representative. The U.S. presence was not to be permanent.

This led to the question, When might it all end? Was a political settlement possible? Would a political settlement be the ends or the means? How could a political settlement be possible if the insurgent Taliban did not want the United States to have any kind of a presence in Afghanistan? Could a possible political settlement be a way to sell continued engagement?

If a political settlement became a top priority, that would require compromise. Was President Trump willing to do so?

Was all of this a fig leaf so the United States could continue doing what it wanted to do? Was a democratic or stable government needed in Afghanistan? How invested was the U.S. in a real political settlement?