Fear: Trump in the White House

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.”