Fear: Trump in the White House

NATO is a disaster and a waste, he said. The soldiers had told him that NATO staff were totally dysfunctional.

“Pakistan isn’t helping us. They’re not really a friend,” despite the $1.3 billion a year in aid the U.S. gave them. He said he refused to send any additional aid.

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.