The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  “If you’d have asked me to bet on it five years ago, I don’t know. I’d maybe give you even odds on it or something,” he said. “But it’s coming together.”

  In a news briefing with reporters at Bagram that same day, General Campbell sounded even gloomier. “We just went through a very, very tough fighting season,” he said. “We knew it was going to be a tough year, the Afghans knew it was going to be a tough year.”

  Three days later, on December 21, a suicide bomber carrying explosives on a motorcycle killed six U.S. Air Force security personnel on foot patrol near Bagram. Among the fatalities: Maj. Adrianna Vorderbruggen, 36, an Air Force Academy graduate who had pushed for the 2011 repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell prohibition on openly gay servicemembers. Vorderbruggen was posthumously awarded three combat decorations: the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart and the Air Force Combat Action Medal. She left behind her wife, Heather, a military veteran, and their four-year-old son, Jacob.

  As the war entered its fifteenth year, the United States faced a new combatant in Afghanistan and old fault lines began to shift.

  The Islamic State, the fast-growing terrorist network in Iraq and Syria, expanded into Afghanistan and Pakistan. By early 2016, U.S. military officials estimated the local affiliate of the group had between 1,000 and 3,000 fighters, mostly former members of the Taliban.

  Their emergence widened and complicated the war. In January 2016, the White House approved new rules of engagement authorizing the Pentagon to attack Islamic State in Afghanistan. That led to a surge in U.S. airstrikes against the group, which centered its operations in Nangahar and Kunar provinces in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistani border.

  By that point, the U.S. military acknowledged that its original nemesis in the war—al-Qaeda—had all but disappeared from Afghanistan.

  “By themselves, we don’t think that they pose a real threat, a real significant threat to the government of Afghanistan,” Army Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told Pentagon reporters in May 2016. He offered what he called a SWAG—a military acronym for “scientific, wild-assed guess”—that about 100 to 300 al-Qaeda personnel maintained “some type of presence” in Afghanistan. Five years after the death of bin Laden, his network barely registered in the fight.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. military put the Taliban into a nebulous new category. It was still a hostile force, but not necessarily the enemy. Obama administration officials had concluded that the only way to end the war and to stabilize Afghanistan was for the Afghan government to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. Previous attempts to start a reconciliation process had gone nowhere. U.S. officials wanted to try again and decided to treat the Taliban differently in hopes of persuading its leaders to come to the table.

  As a result, the Pentagon imposed new rules of engagement under which U.S. forces could freely attack the Islamic State and the remnants of al-Qaeda. But they could only fight the Taliban in self-defense or if the Afghan security forces were on the verge of getting wiped out.

  Even U.S. lawmakers were confused by the new approach. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in February 2016, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) pushed General Campbell to explain.

  “Is the Taliban an enemy of this country?” Graham asked.

  “I didn’t hear the question,” Campbell replied.

  “Is the Taliban an enemy of the United States?” Graham repeated.

  Campbell stammered. “The Taliban, as far as helping al-Qaeda, and Haqqani, and other insurgent groups, the Taliban has been responsible for…”

  Graham interrupted and asked multiple times if the U.S. military was permitted to go on the offense and attack Taliban forces or kill its senior leaders.

  “Sir, again, I don’t go into the rules of engagement authorities in open hearing,” Campbell said, ducking the questions. “What I would tell you is that our country has made the decision that we are not at war with the Taliban.”

  But the Taliban was still very much at war with the United States and the Afghan government, and as far as the Taliban’s leaders were concerned, the fight was going well. In 2016, insurgent forces overran Kunduz again, repeatedly bombed Kabul, and seized control of most of Helmand province, the heart of Afghanistan’s lucrative opium-poppy belt.

  In Washington, fears rose that the Afghan government was at risk of a political breakdown. Calling the situation “precarious,” Obama reversed himself again in July 2016. Instead of drawing down to 5,500 troops as planned, he ordered U.S. forces to stay in Afghanistan. By the time he left the White House in January 2017, about 8,400 troops remained.

  The next month, Army Gen. John Nicholson Jr., Campbell’s successor as commanding general, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Asked if the United States was winning or losing, he replied: “I believe we’re in a stalemate.”

  In his testimony, however, Nicholson foreshadowed what was in store under the new president, Donald Trump. “Offensive capability is what will break the stalemate in Afghanistan,” Nicholson said.

  In military jargon, that meant more troops and more weapons.

  I. Like many statistics that U.S. officials touted as evidence of progress, Campbell’s extrapolations were grossly exaggerated. A 2017 SIGAR audit discredited the life-expectancy figures as based on spurious data. Instead of twenty-one years, the World Health Organization estimated a six-year increase in life expectancy for Afghan males and an eight-year increase for Afghan females.

  PART SIX STALEMATE

  2017–2021

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Trump’s Turn

  Nearly eight years had elapsed since the previous commander in chief delivered a prime-time, nationally televised speech in front of the troops to announce his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Now, on August 21, 2017, it was Donald Trump’s turn.

  Just as Obama did at West Point, Trump entered Conmy Hall at Fort Myer, Virginia, under dimmed lights as an Army band played “Hail to the Chief.” He narrowed his eyebrows and pressed his lips into a serious expression as he theatrically ascended the stage, then motioned for the soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines in the audience to stop standing at attention and sit down.

  As Trump read from the teleprompter, some of his lines sounded like a replay of Obama’s West Point address. Like Obama, Trump acknowledged that Americans were “weary of war.” But after conducting yet another “comprehensive review” of the U.S. war strategy, Trump had decided to send more troops and expand military operations—just like his predecessor.

  Trump said the Afghan government needed more time and help to strengthen its own security forces. He parroted Obama by cautioning that “our support is not a blank check” and added, “we are not nation-building again.” He accused Pakistan of sheltering the insurgents and threatened to withhold aid if it didn’t change its policies.

  Americans had heard these promises many times before. But then Trump escalated the rhetoric as only he could. He vowed not just to end the sixteen-year-old war, but to win it—once and for all.

  “We are killing terrorists,” he said. “Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition.”

  Trump’s boastful pledge marked a surprising about-face for him on Afghanistan. Before he won the 2016 presidential election, the real-estate mogul and reality TV star had complained loudly about the war’s expense and demanded that Obama pull out. In keeping with his slogan, “Make America Great Again,” he denounced any foreign-aid programs that resembled nation-building.

  “Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!” he tweeted in 2012.

  “We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!” he tweeted in 2013.

  “A suicide bomber has just killed U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When will our leaders get tough and smart. We are being led to slaughter!” he tweeted in 2015.

  But once
Trump moved into the Oval Office in January 2017, he ran into resistance. Trump’s Cabinet and the Pentagon brass told him it could be cataclysmic to withdraw abruptly. If the Afghan government collapsed or the war spilled over to nuclear-armed Pakistan, he would own the problem. They urged him to carefully review the war strategy first and consider all the ramifications. Then he could act.

  Trump agreed. But unlike other presidents, he had scant respect for the generals running the war and no patience for detailed policy deliberations.

  Above all, Trump hated any hint of weakness or defeat. His defense secretary, James Mattis, had committed the grievous error of suggesting just that in June when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we are not winning in Afghanistan right now.” Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the same mistake six days later when he confessed during an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington that “Afghanistan is not where we want it to be.”

  One month before Trump’s speech at Fort Myer, Mattis invited the president to the Pentagon for a wide-ranging discussion about the importance of NATO and other military alliances. Mattis and the Joint Chiefs wanted to give him a special briefing in “The Tank,” a secure conference room where the leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and National Guard reviewed war plans and debated sensitive issues.

  Mattis and Dunford thought Trump would be impressed by the gravitas of The Tank, located in the Pentagon’s outer ring. Dignified oil portraits of four-star admirals and generals dating to the 1950s adorned the hallway outside the conference room. Maybe the setting would help sway the new president—who, like Obama, had never served in the armed forces—and bring him around to their way of thinking about Afghanistan and other global hotspots.

  Trump agreed to attend the session, but quickly became fed up with the lecture. In particular, he blew his stack when Mattis and Dunford talked about Afghanistan. Trump called it a “loser war.” He trashed the commanding general in Kabul, Army Gen. John Nicholson Jr., saying: “I don’t think he knows how to win.”

  “I want to win,” Trump said, according to an account of the meeting by Washington Post journalists Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

  Trump’s language and demeanor floored Mattis, Dunford and the chiefs. They had invested much of their careers in Afghanistan and worried Trump might try to pull the plug on the war before they could finish the strategy review.

  Before becoming defense secretary, Mattis had served in the Marines for forty-four years. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 as a one-star general and became a four-star combatant commander under Obama. Dunford, a fellow Marine, had commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2013 to 2014.

  Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the White House national security adviser, had spent months working with Mattis and Dunford on the Afghanistan strategy review. McMaster was also personally invested in the war. He had served a twenty-month stint at military headquarters in Kabul during Obama’s troop surge.

  Like Mattis and Dunford, McMaster thought the war had gone off the rails. He disdained Obama for withdrawing too many forces too quickly. McMaster favored sending several thousand soldiers back to Afghanistan—on top of the 8,400 troops still there—and maintaining those force levels indefinitely.

  Even though his plan would cost $45 billion a year, McMaster believed the expense was worth it to prevent Afghanistan from disintegrating. The Afghan security forces were already doing most of the fighting. Only twenty U.S. troops had died in Afghanistan during the previous twelve months—a fraction of the casualty rate during the height of the war.

  But McMaster, Mattis and Dunford needed to tread carefully to get Trump on board. After the president’s explosion in The Tank, McMaster organized another high-level national security meeting on August 18, 2017, at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland, to discuss the results of the Afghanistan strategy review.

  Leading up to the session, McMaster refined his pitch. He warned Trump that if he followed through on his tweets and withdrew all U.S. troops, al-Qaeda might return to Afghanistan and launch another attack on the U.S. homeland. McMaster also told Trump that twenty different terrorist groups were active in the region. In reality, al-Qaeda had shrunk to a shell of its former self and the other groups had limited reach. But no president wanted to risk another 9/11 happening on his watch.

  At Camp David, the generals told Trump that they needed more forces and firepower in Afghanistan to break the stalemate. But they framed their proposed escalation as an antidote to Obama’s handling of the war. They argued that Obama had bungled his troop surge by announcing that it would only last for eighteen months. The Taliban had just laid low and waited him out. Don’t be like Obama and tip your hand to the enemy, they advised the president.

  The criticism of Obama was catnip to Trump, who detested his predecessor. He approved sending several thousand more forces to Afghanistan. He also agreed to keep the troop increase open-ended.

  In his speech three days later at Fort Myer, Trump unveiled the new strategy, yet made clear that he was skeptical of it. “My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts,” he said. “But one way or another, these problems will be solved. I’m a problem-solver. And in the end, we will win.”

  Trump declared he would fight the war differently than Obama in another respect: His administration would become more secretive.

  “We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” he said. Trump kept details of his decision to deploy more troops under wraps, even though anonymous U.S. officials had already leaked that 3,900 additional soldiers would go.

  The president justified the enhanced secrecy as a tactic to keep the enemy guessing. But the policy shift had another purpose: It would leave Americans in the dark. The less visible the war, the less likely people would criticize Trump or his generals if it deteriorated further.

  The Pentagon took advantage. Within three months, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan rose to 14,000—an increase of 5,600 from when Obama left office. Other than the extra troops and added secrecy, however, Trump administration officials struggled to articulate what was different about their new strategy.

  In an appearance before the House Armed Services Committee in October 2017, Mattis labeled the new strategy “R4+S.” He said the acronym stood for “regionalize it, realign it, reinforce it and reconciliation, coupled with sustaining it.” But the description was such a mouthful that Mattis and other U.S. officials rarely repeated it after that.

  What became clear to the generals was that as long as Trump was president, they would have to speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.

  In a press briefing from Kabul on November 20, 2017, a newly confident General Nicholson—the war commander whom Trump had ripped in The Tank—said the Taliban was running out of options. “Our message to the enemy is that you cannot win the war. It’s time to lay down your arms,” he blustered. “If they don’t, they’re going to be confined to irrelevance… or death. And so these are the choices they face.”

  Eight days later, Nicholson held another press briefing. He went out of his way to heap praise on Trump’s strategy, calling it “fundamentally different” and “a game changer.” Though Nicholson had previously described the war as being locked in a stalemate, he insisted he no longer saw it that way. “The president has left no doubt in terms of our will to win,” Nicholson said. “We will be here until the job is done… We are on our way to a win.”

  In the most substantive change in the war strategy, Trump authorized the military to intensify the bombing campaign.

  Obama had imposed restrictions that prevented the U.S. military from conducting airstrikes except to protect U.S. troops, carry out counterterrorism operations or prevent Afghan forces from being overrun. By the end of his term, U.S. warplanes were launchi
ng fewer than one hundred bombs and missiles per month.

  But at the Pentagon’s request, Trump cast off the restraints and renewed the air assault on the Taliban with a fury. In 2017, the U.S. military doubled the number of airstrikes and more than tripled the munitions it dropped from the skies.

  Then the military intensified the airstrikes even more. In 2018, U.S. aircraft released 7,362 bombs and missiles—a third more than any previous year in the war. They kept up the blistering pace in 2019 and in 2020.

  While the fighting had become much less visible to Americans at home, the violence inflicted new levels of mayhem on the ground, killing and wounding record numbers of Afghan civilians. During Trump’s first three years in office, U.S., NATO and Afghan airstrikes killed an estimated 1,134 civilians a year—double the annual average of the previous decade, according to an analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

  Trump hoped the bombings would pressure the Taliban into negotiations. But the brute force tactics also suited the president’s style.

  In April 2017, the Air Force dropped a 21,600-pound bomb—the biggest ever used in the war in Afghanistan—on a network of Islamic State bunkers and tunnels in Nangahar province. The Pentagon’s official name for the thirty-foot-long weapon was the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB. But troops nicknamed it the Mother Of All Bombs.

  U.S. military officials said the MOAB killed scores of Islamic State fighters. News of the giant bomb generated news coverage around the world.

  Trump proudly called the strike “another very, very successful mission” and said it showed he was doing a better job overseeing the war than Obama. “If you look at what has happened over the last eight weeks and compare that, really, to what has happened over the last eight years, you will see there has been a tremendous difference,” he told reporters at the White House.