Fear: Trump in the White House

Graham was aware of the internal warfare in the White House. General Kellogg, NSC chief of staff, was siding with Bannon, arguing to get out. That meant Kellogg was at war with McMaster, his own boss.

Graham saw the stories Bannon or someone else was leaking to the press, calling this “McMaster’s War.” He called Trump at once.

“This is Trump’s war, my friend,” Graham told the president. “Nobody in history is going to remember McMaster or Bannon. They’re going to remember you.”

In Bannon’s eyes, the old order would do what it always did—stay the course or retreat in disgrace. He wanted to find a way to mitigate the downside risk, providing cover for Trump.

In a May 31 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial defense contractor Blackwater, declared “Afghanistan is an expensive disaster for America.” He proposed the creation of a “viceroy” to lead all military efforts in Afghanistan and the replacement of all but a small special operations command of the U.S. military with “cheaper private solutions,” contractors who would make multiyear commitments to train the Afghan security forces. “The U.S. should adjust course from the past 15-plus years of nation building and focus on pounding the Taliban and other terrorists so hard that they plead for negotiation. Until they feel real pressure and know the U.S. has staying power, they will win.”

This did not get very far because it meant private contractors like Prince, a brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, would make lots of money.

Bannon asked CIA Director Mike Pompeo if he could find a middle solution. Pompeo agreed to go to Afghanistan in the first week of August.

For years the CIA had run a 3,000-man top secret covert army in Afghanistan. The CTPT, short for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were Afghans paid, trained and controlled by the CIA. They were the best Afghan fighters, the cream of the crop. They killed or captured Taliban insurgents and often went into tribal areas to eliminate them. They conducted dangerous and highly controversial cross-border operations into neighboring Pakistan. Could this CIA paramilitary force be expanded, making a troop increase unnecessary? Could the CIA paramilitary force and several thousand Army Special Forces do the job so the big regular ground force of the U.S. Army could get out?

Mattis called Senator Graham. A proposal was forthcoming, he explained. The military would coordinate with the CIA. “The CIA has got some high-value targets that they want to hit.” There were four operations: “Two on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

When McMaster tried to sell a slimmed-down version of concepts like “frames” or the R4s, Trump was cruelly dismissive. He had one question: “What the fuck are we doing there?” But he had an idea for Secretary Mattis and Bannon. “I want to get some enlisted guys, some real fighters, over here who are not officers.” He wanted their on-the-ground views of Afghanistan.

Mattis rolled his eyes.

Bannon, always looking to history to serve his purposes, was reminded of President Lincoln’s almost mystical devotion to hearing from soldiers as commander in chief.

On July 18, Trump had lunch at the White House with three soldiers and an airman who had served in Afghanistan. Trump, Pence and McMaster sat on one side of the wide, gleaming table in the Roosevelt Room; on the other side sat the four young men in their dress uniforms, looking uncomfortable as cameras documented their visit.

The president said, “I want to find out why we’ve been there 17 years, how it’s going and what we should do in terms of additional ideas. We have plenty of ideas from a lot of people but I want to hear it from people on the ground.”

Afterward, Trump summed up their views for Bannon: “Unanimous. We’ve got to figure out how to get the fuck out of there. Totally corrupt. The people are not worth fighting for . . . NATO does nothing. They’re a hindrance. Don’t let anybody tell you how great they are. It’s all bullshit.”

The National Security Council gathered in the Situation Room at 10:00 the next morning, July 19, to brief Trump on the Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy.

McMaster spent the initial part of the meeting identifying objectives and framing issues for discussion. Trump looked bored and seemed disengaged. After about five minutes, he interrupted. “I’ve been hearing about this nonsense about Afghanistan for 17 years with no success,” he said before McMaster had finished laying out the issues. We’ve got a bunch of inconsistent, short-term strategies. We can’t continue with the same old strategy.

He brought up his meeting with the troops the previous day. The best information I’ve gotten was from a couple of those line soldiers, not the generals, he said. “I don’t care about you guys,” he told Mattis, Dunford and McMaster.

We’re losing big in Afghanistan. It’s a disaster. Our allies aren’t helping. Ghost soldiers—those paid but not serving—are ripping us off.