Kelly seemed to be just trying to keep the ship from sinking. At a senior staff meeting in early 2018, he announced with pride, “I now know that I will not be the shortest-serving chief of staff. I’ve now surpassed Reince.” Priebus had served 189 days, the shortest tenure of any White House chief of staff in history.
* * *
Early in 2018, 60 Minutes broadcast a piece on the Afghanistan War, noting that Kabul was so violent that the U.S. commander could not be safely driven to his headquarters through the city. General Nicholson flew the two miles by helicopter. He made it clear he had adopted Trump’s victory-driven approach. “This is a policy that can deliver a win,” Nicholson said.
Nicholson’s intelligence and operational maps showed that the U.S.-led coalition controlled about 50 percent of the country. Within knowledgeable Pentagon and State Department circles it was known that Nicholson had claimed, “I’ll get to 80 percent in two years.”
He was determined to enhance the coalition’s and Afghan Army’s capability to claw back what would amount to 75,000 square miles. It was unattainable, even preposterous, to many who had served in Afghanistan.
A secondary goal of Nicholson’s was that after four years, the Taliban would realize they could not win and would come to the negotiating table. This was the same Taliban that had been fighting for 16 years.
* * *
The DNI intelligence expert briefed Trump on Afghanistan in early 2018: No gains by the U.S. in territory. Nothing clawed back. No improvement from last year; actually, some areas were getting worse. Part of the explanation was that the U.S. and Afghans had to guard Kabul as the Taliban mounted attack after attack on the capital. In the last nine days of January, 130 people were killed in four attacks. This left little coalition military capacity to take back territory.
The analysts had more grim conclusions. Pakistan was not playing ball or responding to pressure. Any settlement was premised on Pakistani participation.
The immediate prospect was more insurgency, maybe even civil war if the U.S. pulled out. Jihadists were coming out of Syria and heading to Afghanistan: the new promised land for bomb makers and bomb throwers.
The coalition probably only had until the spring of 2019 to keep the status quo. The political fabric seemed to be coming apart. A perfect storm was coming, and a practical problem like weather might be the tipping point. The mountains had little to no snow, so no water was coming down to the fields. A drought was coming, and with it a crisis of food insecurity. Around the same time, Pakistan was likely to send one to two million refugees over the border into Afghanistan, many of them Afghans who had crossed the border into Pakistan after the Russian invasion of 1979. Some two million had lived in Pakistan for decades, never in their native Afghanistan, but they would be coming.
* * *
Still, General Nicholson kept saying that he would “win” in Afghanistan. Mattis didn’t like it. “The secretary is very unhappy with what he [Nicholson] just said, and we’re trying to rein him in,” one Pentagon official privately confided.
If the language of the commander in chief was about “winning,” it was hard to criticize the ground commander for using it. But the intelligence indicated that it was heading to worse, not better, next year.
In early 2018, one key participant said, “The military seemed to want a South Korea–style permanent presence. If so, Iran, Russia and China will ramp up their antagonism because all of a sudden we now have a permanent presence in their backyard. But the military may have got its way here because getting out would be a huge walk-down. [The president] said we’re going to win. And you can’t define that as a stalemate forever. At some point people are going to recognize you can’t succeed there.”
* * *
Quietly and nervously, some officials at State and the intelligence community began some extremely sensitive scenario planning, a Plan B. “The military does scenario planning all the time. Why not the civilians?”
The analyst described the outcome of this Plan B. “It’s not a withdrawal and a collapse and civil war. It’s not a liberal democracy, deeply centralized. What’s in the middle? Federalist, more realistic, more sustainable? To give potentially the Taliban a role? The sort of wild card is the president’s short attention span and his questioning all these assumptions that people keep throwing out. And smelling and calling bullshit when he sees it.” For example, saying things will work out with Pakistan. “But Pakistan has not changed since 9/11 and they won’t. The only option, then, is to get out.”
In summary, Afghanistan was a new House of Broken Toys. Political instability. Fraying of the Afghan government. Congressional and public criticism in the United States. Few, if any, military gains. Drought. Massive food insecurity. Refugees.
* * *
Trump blamed two people in particular. First he had a special scorn for former president George W. Bush, who had started the Afghanistan War in 2001 and then the Iraq War in 2003. “A terrible president,” he told Porter. “He was a warmonger. He wanted to exert American influence and take democracy all throughout the world and wanted to be the world’s policeman and started all these wars.” It was foolhardy and a mistake. Even though Trump had made the decision to add several thousand troops, he said he was not going to continue the status quo.
The other person Trump blamed was McMaster. He used Iraq as his evidence. “I don’t know how they’ve [the Iraqis] managed to fool McMaster, but he’s not a businessman. They [U.S. generals] don’t understand the cost/benefit analysis. I can’t believe I let him talk me into putting more troops in there.” He believed that McMaster had been co-opted.
In a searing insult to McMaster, Trump did an imitation of his national security adviser. The president puffed up his chest and started noticeably exaggerated breathing. He said in loud staccato, “I know the president of Iraq. He’s a good man, sir! I know he has our best interest at heart.”
Returning to his normal voice, Trump said, “That guy’s just full of shit. I met this guy. McMaster doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Trump had met the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, at the White House in March 2017.
“These military guys, they don’t get business. They know how to be soldiers and they know how to fight. They don’t understand how much it’s costing.”
On Afghanistan, Trump told Porter, “It’s a disaster there. It’s never going to be a functioning democracy. We ought to just exit completely.”
CHAPTER
39
Trump and Senator Graham played golf at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach two weeks before Christmas, December 10, 2017. In a tweet Graham said the golf course was “spectacular,” a comment sure to please Trump. It was nothing compared to the praise Graham lavished on Trump during their round.
“You’re a very good commander in chief,” he told Trump. The president was listening to his military commanders and the changes in the rules of engagement in the Middle East and Afghanistan were paying off.
This was Graham’s pitch to Trump: “You can do something nobody else did. You’re cleaning up the mess that Obama left you. You’re doing a damn good job of cleaning it up. You’re rebuilding the military. You’re taking a wet blanket off the economy. You’re really unshackling the military and the economy. God bless you for undoing the damage done in the last eight years. Where do you want to go? What do you want to be your legacy? Your legacy is not just undoing what he did, but it’s putting your stamp on history.”