The Afghan leaders were corrupt and making money off of the United States, he insisted. The poppy fields, largely in Taliban territory, are out of control.
“The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you,” the president told his generals and advisers. “They could do a much better job. I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”
It was a 25-minute dressing-down of the generals and senior officials.
“Look, you can’t think of Afghanistan in isolation,” Tillerson said. “You’ve got to think about it in a regional context. We’ve never before taken this sort of multilateral approach to Afghanistan and the region.”
“But how many more deaths?” Trump asked. “How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?” His antiwar argument, practically ripped from a Bob Dylan song lyric, reflected the desires of his political base whose families were overrepresented in the military forces.
“The quickest way out is to lose,” Mattis said.
Trump pivoted. Prime Minister Modi of India is a friend of mine, he said. I like him very much. He told me the U.S. has gotten nothing out of Afghanistan. Nothing. Afghanistan has massive mineral wealth. We don’t take it like others—like China. The U.S. needed to get some of Afghanistan’s valuable minerals in exchange for any support. “I’m not making a deal on anything until we get minerals.” And the U.S. “must stop payments to Pakistan until they cooperate.”
Mattis described their strategic framework and goals for nuclear nonproliferation. We need a bridge strategy until we’re able to empower the Afghans, he said.
“Why can’t we pay mercenaries to do the work for us?” Trump asked.
“We need to know if the commander in chief is fully with us or not,” Mattis said. “We can’t fight a half-assed war anymore.” In order for the military to succeed, Mattis needed Trump to be all-in on the strategy.
“I’m tired of hearing that we have to do this or that to protect our homeland or to ensure our national security,” Trump said.
The official full written NSC record of the meeting said simply that Trump “endorsed” the use of a “mix of tools” to pressure Pakistan to abandon its covert support of the Taliban. Contrary to his words, the document stated the U.S. would continue to engage Pakistan where there were mutual interests, and civil assistance to Pakistan would continue, while military assistance would be conditioned on better behavior. Rhetorically and operationally it would be a new, get tough strategy.
Later in the day those who had been in the meeting huddled in Priebus’s office to discuss Afghanistan and South Asia strategy. McMaster worked to frame things in a way that showed he had heard the president’s views and was trying to execute on the general orientation of them in as responsible a manner as possible. He tried to be upbeat. But it was clear that he, Mattis and Tillerson were close to their wits’ ends.
That evening, Priebus hosted a dinner strategy meeting. Bannon seemed to be driving the agenda. Priebus, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a young, hard-line policy adviser and speechwriter who had previously been Jeff Sessions’s communications director, complained about the NSC process. McMaster didn’t seem to want to implement the president’s viewpoints, but was trying to convince Trump of his own. Bannon wanted to replace McMaster with Kellogg, the NSC chief of staff, whose worldview aligned more closely with the president’s and his own.
* * *
Graham told Trump that Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, would allow him to have as many counterterrorism troops as he could want, plus CIA bases wherever he wanted. It was the best listening post and platform to attack international terrorism in the world. “They would take 100,000 troops,” Graham said, exaggerating. “You should jump for joy that you have a counterterrorism partner in Afghanistan which will prevent the next 9/11.”
“That’s not nation building,” Trump said.
“We’re not going over there to try to sell Jeffersonian democracy,” Graham agreed. His worry was the increasing, endless tension between Pakistan and India. “Pakistan is spending a lot of money to build more nuclear weapons. It’s getting really out of control.”
Graham had recently visited Afghanistan and left depressed. “We don’t have a game plan in Afghanistan on the diplomatic side.” There was no special representative, the role that had been filled by Richard Holbrooke in the first part of the Obama administration. “We don’t even have an ambassador.” For all he could tell, there was only one person at the State Department on the South Asia desk.
“We’re going to fail on the political,” he said. A peace settlement with the Taliban was the only way out. “The Pakistanis are going to double deal until they see the Taliban losing.”
Trump had a solution. Did Graham want to be the ambassador to Pakistan?
“No, I don’t want to be ambassador to Pakistan,” Graham said.
They left it at that.
At the White House, Trump began repeating a line he had heard at a meeting: “The way we’re going to win is to run an insurgency against the insurgency of the Taliban.”
Trump loved the idea of a renegade operation, a campaign that the establishment was sure no one could win. The president said, “These guys in the 1980s against the Russians on horses.” Perfect.
Bannon added fuel to the renegade fire by criticizing the weak Afghan Army. “We spent a trillion dollars to take the world’s best fighters,” Bannon said, “and turn them into the world’s worst army.”
Trump loved that also. Bannon had pushed about as far as he thought he could. They were trying to make policy on a string of one-sentence clichés.
Graham had one more warning for Trump.
“Pull them all out, because 8,600 [troops] ain’t going to work, and accept the consequences,” he warned Trump, referring to the number currently in Afghanistan. “And here are the consequences: It becomes Iraq on steroids. There are more international terrorists in Afghanistan than there ever were in Iraq. The deterioration will be quick and the projection of terrorism coming from Afghanistan will exponentially grow. And the next 9/11 is coming from where the first 9/11 was. And you own it. The question is, are you going to go down the Obama road, which is to end the war and put us all at risk, or are you going to go down the road of stabilizing Afghanistan?”
CHAPTER
16
You’ve got to be kidding me,” Priebus had told Secretary of State Tillerson in a phone call in early March. The controversial Iran deal negotiated by Obama had to be reviewed every 90 days. They now had two days to renew or reject, Tillerson said. In February, Trump had called it “One of the worst deals I’ve ever seen.” As a candidate in 2016, he had said, “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”
Tillerson wanted to renew as a matter of both practicality and principle. Central was the fact Iran was in compliance with the deal as Obama had negotiated it. He came up with some language for renewal.
“The president’s not going to go for it,” Priebus said. “You need to come up with a better statement. Mild, matter-of-fact won’t cut it. We need language that’s going to actually make the case for President Trump’s position. He’s not going to like it. Secondly, if he reads this, he’s going to really blow up.”
When Priebus briefed Trump on Tillerson’s proposal, the president retorted, “You aren’t going to jam this down my throat!”
Priebus ran shuttle diplomacy between the president and the secretary of state.
“They’re not in violation,” Tillerson said. The intelligence community and the allies who were signatories to the deal agreed that Iran was not in violation.