Kushner sat at the opposite end of the table from McMaster.
“I understand this is very ambitious,” the president’s son-in-law said. He stood. “I understand the concerns. But I think we have a real opportunity here. We have to recognize it. I understand we have to be careful. We need to work this diligently, as if it’s going to happen. And if it looks like we can’t get there, we’ll have plenty of time to shift gears. But this is an opportunity that is there for the seizing.”
No one said no. Harvey knew they really couldn’t, and he continued to plan as if it were going to happen. He set some thresholds, deciding that they would have to have over $100 billion in military contracts agreed on beforehand.
Execution fell to Harvey. MBS sent a team of 30 to Washington and Harvey arranged multiple conference rooms in the Eisenhower Office Building. Working groups of Americans and Saudis were set up on terrorism, terrorism financing, violent extremism and information campaigns. The Pentagon held meetings on contracts and security partnerships.
Harvey did not want to ask too much of the Saudis, who he knew did not have as deep pocketbooks as generally thought. Oil prices had dropped, cutting into Saudi revenue.
McMaster was still not enthusiastic. Because Kushner wants it, he told Harvey, we need to keep working it. But there’s not a lot of support for it. We’ll go through the motions, and then we’ll kill it at some point.
Kushner said that if the United States was going to stay engaged in the region, they needed to help the Saudis and Israelis succeed. The president was not going to continue paying the bills for U.S. defense in the Middle East when the primary beneficiaries were the countries in the region, according to Kushner.
His worry was increased Iranian influence and subversive operations in the region, especially Hezbollah, which threatened Israel.
Get the Saudis to buy more, Kushner said. If they bought weapons systems, it would help the U.S. economy and job creation. They would buy large stockpiles of munitions, 10-year maintenance and support contracts.
The Saudi team came back to Washington for a second visit. For at least four days straight they all had meetings that went to 1 a.m.
Kushner held daily interagency meetings of the key U.S. players in his office where a dozen people crowded in.
At times the Saudis were not delivering enough on contracts or arms purchases.
“I’ll make a phone call,” Kushner said to Harvey. He phoned MBS directly and the Saudis increased their arms purchases.
When it looked like they were close, Kushner invited MBS to the United States and brought him to the White House where he had lunch March 14 in the State Dining Room with Trump. Attending were Pence, Priebus, Bannon, McMaster and Kushner. This violated protocol, unsettling officials at State and the CIA. Lunch at the White House with the president for a middle-rank deputy crown prince was just not supposed to be done.
Tillerson and Mattis continued to express their doubts. This is too hard, too much work to do, too many questions about the contracts.
Trump finally gave the go-ahead and the trip to both Saudi Arabia and Israel was announced on Thursday, May 4.
Trump went to Saudi Arabia from May 20 to 21 and was lavishly welcomed. He announced $110 billion in Saudi-funded defense purchases and a grab bag of several hundred billion in other contracts—certainly an exaggerated number.
Harvey believed the summit had reset the relationships in a dramatic way, a home run—sending a strategic message to Iran, the principal adversary. The Saudis, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and Israel were united. The Obama approach of straddling was over.
The next month Saudi king Salman at age 81 appointed MBS, age 31, the new crown prince and next in line to lead the Kingdom perhaps for decades to come.
CHAPTER
15
Trump was one of the most outspoken foes of the 16-year-old Afghanistan War, now the longest in American history. To the extent Trump had a bedrock principle, it was opposition, even ridicule, of the war. Beginning in 2011, four years before his formal entry into the presidential race, he launched a drumbeat of Twitter attacks.
In March 2012, he tweeted, “Afghanistan is a total disaster. We don’t know what we are doing. They are, in addition to everything else, robbing us blind.”
In 2013, the tweets picked up. In January, it was, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” In March, “We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.” In April, “Our gov’t is so pathetic that some of the billions being wasted in Afghanistan are ending up with terrorists.” And in November, “Do not allow our very stupid leaders to sign a deal that keeps us in Afghanistan through 2024-with all costs by U.S.A. MAKE AMERICA GREAT!”
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.
* * *
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.