Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  After the operation was over, Gen. Nicholson told reporters that the US had killed sixteen hundred Islamic State fighters, leaving only a thousand in Afghanistan’s east in November 2017. But the number of active Islamic State members would increase over the years, regardless of what the United States did, suggesting that the military lacked a clear picture of the situation, or that Islamic State recruitment rates outpaced its losses. Just a couple of months later, Gen. Nicholson said that the US military had cut the group’s numbers in half, and there were now an estimated fifteen hundred Islamic State fighters left in early 2018—a much higher number than reported the previous year.

  From the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, there was silence.

  Footnote

  1 This figure comes from Brown University’s Costs of War Project for the period 2001–2019.

  CHAPTER 25

  You Don’t Believe in Winning?

  GENERAL MCMASTER

  WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP took office in early 2017, responsibility at the State Department for the Afghan peace process had passed to Laurel Miller, who had become the acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. She hoped to continue the push for peace negotiations under the new administration, as the president was vocally opposed to foreign engagements and might be open to bolder steps to accelerate progress.

  Miller drafted a proposal for the new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to read as soon as he took his place on the seventh floor. It outlined the main points that had emerged over almost a year of secret talks with the Taliban and offered a framework for moving forward. She waited several months but received no reply. Secretary Tillerson’s team lacked key staff and was unprepared to hit the ground running. Worried about missing the opportunity to make an impact on policy, Miller enlisted the undersecretary for political affairs, Tom Shannon, to get a response. The third-ranking officer at the State Department, Shannon oversaw the implementation of regional and bilateral policy.

  Soon he came back with a reply: Secretary Tillerson had signed off on the proposal. No questions asked. Miller was taken aback. She thought the news that the United States had been talking to the Taliban for almost a year would come as a surprise, perhaps even a shock. After all, the United States had been fighting the Taliban without pause for over fifteen years. But apparently the secretary thought that continuing with negotiations was a no-brainer. The message, according to Shannon, was something like: “If you’ve been doing this for some time, and think it might eventually lead somewhere, have at it.” The White House signed off on a trip.

  In the first week of April 2017, Miller left for another round of talks with the Taliban in Doha, accompanied by her Pentagon counterpart, Jedidiah Royal, the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia. Unlike Secretary Tillerson, the secretary of defense, Mattis, had taken a personal interest in the effort and had given Royal detailed guidance and feedback before their departure. As always, the talks were held in secrecy and have not been previously reported in the media.

  The US negotiators, pushing hard for a breakthrough, tried to convince the Taliban that this could be a last opportunity to prove that the process was viable. The new administration might close the door to further talks, they warned. The Taliban didn’t buy into the scheme. Their position remained, as always, that official talks needed to begin with the United States before the Kabul government was brought in. The US delegation lacked the authority to put troops on the table or offer any other bargaining chips. The process hit a wall.

  At the National Security Council, Gen. McMaster was planning an interagency trip to Afghanistan and the surrounding region to finalize policy options for President Trump. He wanted to get all departments and agencies on board to ensure a cooperative approach. Too often, strategies failed because one agency or another did not really buy in. But executing his plan wasn’t so easy. The idea of an interagency trip was met with stiff resistance from both the State Department and the Department of Defense.

  Gen. McMaster thought their opposition stemmed from timidity: they were reluctant to confront a difficult problem with bold new ideas. Bureaucrats preferred to maintain the status quo. He asked Fernando Lujan, who was filling the vacated role of acting senior director for South Asia after Peter Lavoy’s departure, to work on options for a new South Asia strategy until Lujan’s replacement could start.

  The national security adviser’s focus on Afghanistan caused consternation at the agencies. The Pentagon worried that proposing a new and escalated effort in Afghanistan would invite President Trump’s wrath and potentially backfire. President Trump had repeatedly expressed his disapproval of the Afghan war and his intention to end it, not ramp it up. If Gen. McMaster pushed too hard, President Trump might remember that the war was still going on and pull the plug. The State Department, for its part, worried that Gen. McMaster would bulldoze over the talks, which already faced criticism due to the lack of progress made after a year of secret meetings, and put negotiations on hold indefinitely.

  By the time Gen. McMaster launched the trip in mid-April 2017, his staff had drafted an early version of the South Asia strategy that was working its way through the interagency process. He planned to stop in Afghanistan first, for two nights, and then travel on to Pakistan for a half day and India for one night. He didn’t have his new team in place, and he felt that some of the holdovers from the previous administration were ill-suited to their roles. He was particularly skeptical of the State Department’s Laurel Miller and her focus on reconciliation. To his mind, the Obama appointees just didn’t have the courage to commit to the war and failed to understand the potentially disastrous consequences of letting Afghanistan slide out of control. He thought there was a real risk that the country could become a training ground for terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State if it collapsed.

  He was pleased that the National Security Council’s new South Asia director, Lisa Curtis, was due to join them in Pakistan. Lujan was on the trip, along with Courtney Cooper, who was still the Afghanistan director at the council. Laurel Miller and Jed Royal joined from the State Department and the Pentagon, respectively, having recently returned from their trip to meet the Taliban in Doha. Gen. McMaster summoned them to his office during the flight to Afghanistan to brief him on the progress they’d made so far with the talks.

  Miller had prepared a pitch that summarized the takeaways from the past year and what approaches could be taken to advance the process.

  “Well, I think we’re just wasting our time,” Gen. McMaster said as soon as she was finished.

  He proceeded to outline his vision for US strategy in Afghanistan. It did not involve peace talks anytime soon. The first step, the national security adviser said, was to turn around the trajectory of the conflict. The United States had to stop the Taliban’s advance on the battlefield and force them to agree to concessions in the process. He criticized the Obama administration’s botched troop surge, which had been undercut by the tight eighteen-month deadline to start withdrawing. He had served in Afghanistan in 2011, when the US presence was at its peak of one hundred thousand troops, and believed that pulling out early, just as the surge was showing signs of progress, had sabotaged any chance of victory.

  He told Miller and the other staff members present that US talks with the Taliban would only succeed when the United States returned to a position of strength on the battlefield and was “winning” against the insurgency. At the mention of winning, the Afghanistan director, Cooper, tried not to roll her eyes. She thought back to all the previous generals that had come and gone in Afghanistan, each of them promising to turn a corner. She didn’t think the United States could force the Taliban to make concessions simply by ramping up on the battlefield. Nor was President Trump likely to endorse such a plan.

  Gen. McMaster saw her expression out of the corner of his eye. “What? You don’t believe in winning?” he asked.

  In Afghanistan, the national security advis
er was pleased to find that everyone was enthusiastic about his proposed course of action. The US military had been advocating for additional authorities and troops since the drawdown. The Afghan president, Ghani, along with the rest of the government, was delighted. Senior Afghan officials remembered Gen. McMaster from his tour in Afghanistan and expected him to lift the Obama-era restrictions on US operations that had allowed the Taliban to make gains in the preceding years.

  After returning from the trip, Gen. McMaster felt that everyone understood the importance of getting on board with the process and unifying around a new strategy. The next step was to produce a framing document that would present a cohesive appraisal of US interests in the region and the situation in Afghanistan, and a shared view of US goals. He wanted the South Asia strategy to recognize that the policies for each country in the region had to be interlinked to shape the outcome in Afghanistan.

  That process proved simple enough, to his surprise. Everyone was ready to put more pressure on Pakistan for sheltering the Taliban, a complaint that Gen. Nicholson had repeatedly testified about in Congress. The trouble began when the time came to refine options for President Trump and decide how to present them. Usually, agencies gave the president options to choose from, with scenarios for each. Gen. McMaster wanted to offer four options, including withdrawal, which the president clearly favored. He encountered resistance from others who countered that President Trump might just pull out if given the choice.

  In a sign of how security was ailing in Afghanistan, a huge truck bomb exploded at the gates of the German embassy in the center of Kabul at rush hour on May 31, 2017. The blast left a nearly fifteen-foot crater in the ground, killed over 150 people (the vast majority Afghan civilians), and wounded hundreds of others. No one claimed responsibility. The Taliban rarely took credit for bombings that had a high toll on the civilian population, and Islamic State, which sometimes took credit for attacks hours after they had occurred, didn’t emerge either.

  The bombing signaled that the Western-backed government was unable to secure even the most heavily fortified part of the capital city, and foreign embassies further scaled down or suspended their operations. US embassy officials and other Western diplomats were severely restricted in their movements. Even before the attack, the US embassy had relied on a contractor to shuttle staff between the embassy and the Kabul airport by helicopter because the mile-long trip by road was considered too dangerous. The flights cost thousands of dollars each way. Things only got worse after the bombing.

  The South Asia strategy was supposed to be finalized before Afghanistan came up at a meeting of NATO defense ministers at the end of June, but disaccord at the National Security Council delayed the process. By that stage, reconciliation had effectively dropped off the agenda. Miller’s contract at the State Department was set to expire, and there were no plans to keep the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan running. On Miller’s last day, Alice Wells, who was set to take over the role of acting assistant secretary for South Asia, was asked to take on its responsibilities instead.

  When the National Security Council finalized its proposal for President Trump in July, it outlined three options. The first was an increase of up to seven thousand troops and certain adjustments to the US military’s authorities; the second was a full withdrawal, which would guarantee chaos and US humiliation; the third was turning the war over to contractors, who would be guided by US Special Forces and the CIA.

  There are different accounts of how the process went down. The best is to be found in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, which is mostly based on a version of events provided by Steve Bannon, then the chief strategist at the White House. It describes how President Trump lost his temper as soon as the plan was presented, angrily railing against the mess he’d inherited in Afghanistan and threatening to fire almost every general in the chain of command. Again and again, President Trump returned to the same point: we’re stuck, we’re losing the war, and nobody has a plan to do better than that. “The generals were punting and waffling and desperately trying to save face,” Wolff writes. “Talking pure gobbledygook in the situation room.”

  President Trump compared the interagency process to an episode that had taken place at the 21 Club, one of his favorite New York restaurants. It had closed for a year, during which it had hired an expensive team of consultants to analyze how to make the business more profitable. The advice was to get a bigger kitchen. “Exactly what any waiter would have said!” President Trump shouted, according to Wolff’s account.

  After a couple more attempts, Gen. McMaster finally succeeded in convincing President Trump, who was also under pressure from lawmakers and the media to make a decision, to sign off on the plan to moderately increase troops. The South Asia strategy, which framed Afghanistan as integral to stability in a volatile and strategic neighborhood, was presented to the public in August 2017. It involved increasing pressure on the Taliban and taking a tougher approach with Pakistan. It lifted restrictions on US action against the Taliban and fully relaunched the US war in Afghanistan with a potentially open-ended commitment.

  “The Taliban was not a declared enemy force. It was crazy!” Gen. McMaster said later, in an interview in his office at Stanford University. He said the plan he pushed through marked the first time the United States had had a “sound strategy” in Afghanistan since the beginning. It aimed to be tough on Pakistan by cutting off aid and treating the country as an antagonist for hosting the Taliban and terrorist groups, rather than as an ally.

  Following the announcement of the South Asia strategy, a slow-burning bureaucratic battle ensued between Gen. McMaster and government agencies. In our interview, he launched into a denunciation of the Taliban’s attacks on Afghan-government and US forces, and complained that getting agencies to implement the strategy had been difficult. The Pentagon slow-walked the directive to increase pressure on Pakistan, he said, and took too long to send more troops to Afghanistan. In the end, he had to write a memo to Secretary of Defense Mattis, urging him to press ahead with the order to ramp up operations.

  “I mean, it was extraordinary. There was a lot of friction on that,” Gen. McMaster said. “I wrote a memo that said, hey, the president said the Taliban’s a declared enemy force. What don’t you guys understand about this?”

  He also had difficulty controlling the State Department. Despite being advised not to talk to the Taliban, to allow the full force of increased pressure on the group to sink in, they “fell all over themselves” to talk to the Taliban, in his words. Alice Wells traveled to meet with Taliban officials in Doha soon after inheriting the responsibility of the special representative’s office, to continue the relationship where it had left off.

  Gen. McMaster thought it would never be possible to reach a meaningful settlement with the Taliban without an unending commitment to stay, as outlined in the South Asia strategy. “Thinking that’s going to get us anywhere in a negotiation with these people—who have a vision for Afghanistan that is, I think, a modern-day form of barbarism—I mean it was crazy. If it had been up to me, I would have closed the Taliban political office. I think it was a total waste of time,” he said.

  President Trump supported the idea of naming a new envoy for Afghan peace ahead of the South Asia strategy announcement, but it failed to gain traction during the interagency process for various reasons. Opponents did not want peace to become a distraction, feared losing influence over policy, or were skeptical that talks with the Taliban would lead anywhere, citing the State Department’s failure to make progress over a year of meetings.

  The new authorities meanwhile led to a massive surge in US operations and airstrikes. The United States dropped 4,361 munitions in Afghanistan in 2017, more than triple the total deployed a year earlier. The escalation helped keep the Taliban out of major cities, but it failed to stop the erosion of government control in rural areas. In Kabul, Western diplomats remained largely confined to heavily fortified compounds.
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  For the Special Forces who were heading to Afghanistan in 2018, the outlook was very different than in earlier years. Fewer restrictions on airstrikes and on partnered operations gave them much greater freedom to operate. Air support was limited by the availability of assets, rather than by policy, and strikes could be authorized at a lower level than in the past. All these changes increased the military’s flexibility to support troops on the ground. Despite this, the military continued to run into crises when the Taliban renewed efforts to capture a provincial capital, this time turning its focus to western Farah and southeastern Ghazni.

  Although President Trump signed off on the South Asia strategy, he did not keep Gen. McMaster around for much longer. He fired the general in 2018, in part over his handling of Afghanistan. Unlike other cabinet-level officials, he was at least spared the humiliation of receiving the news via Twitter. The new national security adviser, John Bolton, favored a continued US presence to fight terrorism but was less preoccupied with the quagmire in Afghanistan and did not believe the war could be won.

  President Trump also began a hunt for a new commander to replace Gen. Nicholson, complaining that he wasn’t winning the war even after receiving the requested additional authorities and troops. Senior military officials tried to reason that it wasn’t possible to turn around the war with still-limited resources in a short period of time, but Gen. Nicholson’s public comments about victory being around the corner only added fuel to the fire.

  CHAPTER 26

  Green Berets Unleashed

  JOSH

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOSH THIEL, the commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, was tapped to lead the mission soon after the new South Asia strategy was announced. Based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, he had nine months to prepare for the deployment, which was scheduled for early March 2018. Josh was athletic with short dark hair and a chiseled jaw. He kept a small axe in his bunker-like office, and he sometimes used it as a prop while talking to emphasize a point.