by Bob Woodward
Trump got right to his point. “What do we get by maintaining a massive military presence in the Korean Peninsula?” he asked, returning to his obsession with the money and the troops.
“And even more than that,” he went on, “what do we get from protecting Taiwan, say?” He had always seen this as a worldwide problem: the United States paying for the defense of others in Asia, the Middle East and NATO. Why are we even friends with South Korea? he wanted to know. What do we get out of this? He had been fuming for a year. The answers were insufficient.
Mattis and General Dunford once more explained that the benefit was immense. We get a stable democracy in a part of the world where we really need it, Mattis said. South Korea was one of the strongest bastions—free elections and a vibrant capitalism.
South Korea had a population of 50 million people, the 27th-largest country in the world but with an economy that was the 11th-largest and a GDP of $1.5 trillion, the same as Russia’s.
Trump had been informed about the edge the Special Access Program intelligence operations gave the United States in detecting a North Korean missile launch—seven seconds versus 15 minutes from Alaska. There was also an offensive cyber attack capability. It had mixed results sabotaging North Korean missiles before or after launch.
Mattis showed signs that he was tired of the disparaging of the military and intelligence capability. And of Trump’s unwillingness to comprehend their significance.
“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Mattis said. He was calm but stark. It was a breathtaking statement, a challenge to the president, suggesting he was risking nuclear war. Time stopped for more than one in attendance.
One person present said Mattis’s message was clear: Stop fucking around with this. We’re doing this because we’ve got to prevent World War III. This isn’t some business gamble where if you happen to go bankrupt or whatever, it’s not a big deal.
It seemed Mattis and others were at the end of their rope with the president. How are you possibly questioning these things that are obvious and so fundamental? It was as if Mattis were saying, God, stop it!
Mattis was not finished. “We have the ability to defend the homeland with forward deployment” of the 28,500 troops. He was reluctant to mention the Special Access Programs in such a large meeting.
Mattis explained, without the intelligence capability and the troops, the risk of war would vastly increase. The means of defending South Korea and Japan would be decreased. If there was a war without these assets, “The only option left is the nuclear option. We can’t achieve the same deterrent effect” in any other way. “And we can’t do it as cost effectively.” The arrangement with South Korea was one of the great national security bargains of all time. Mattis tried to speak the president’s language of cost/benefit analysis.
“But we’re losing so much money in trade with South Korea, China and others,” Trump countered. “I’d rather be spending money on our own country.” The United States was subsidizing others with the trade imbalances.
“Other countries,” Trump went on, “who’ve agreed to do security things for us only do it because they’re taking so much of our money.” They were almost stealing from us.
“Forward-positioned troops provide the least costly means of achieving our security objectives, and withdrawal would lead our allies to lose all confidence in us,” Mattis replied.
Chairman Dunford jumped in, seconding all these points with some passion.
“We’re spending massive amounts for very rich countries who aren’t burden sharing,” Trump said, hammering his point.
Then, out of the blue, he raised what Kelly had told him about the McMaster and Tillerson feud over who would negotiate with the Saudis to get the $4 billion for operations in Syria and elsewhere.
He said he had heard McMaster had urged Tillerson to back off. He laid into his national security adviser. “Why would you do that?” he asked McMaster. “The Saudis are confused. This is $4 billion. Rex is going to do this. H.R., stay out of it. I have no idea why you possibly would’ve thought that it was wise for you to take it away from Rex, but steer clear. Rex is going to do this. He’s going to handle it.”
McMaster took the dressing-down in stride. He had been insulted in front of the National Security Council he was supposed to lead and coordinate.
McMaster, a chain-of-command general, replied, “Yes, sir.”
Tillerson, on the other hand, turned back to the main issue: the value of forward deployment. “It’s the best model. The global system. Joining together in trade and geopolitics leads to good security outcomes.”
Dunford again supported his argument. “Our forward-deployed cost in South Korea is roughly $2 billion. South Korea reimburses us for over $800 million of that. We don’t seek reimbursement for the cost of our troops” such as their pay. The chairman also said that other countries were paying the U.S. an annual subsidy for activities we would engage in anyway for our own protection. “We’re getting $4 billion a year subsidy in our efforts to protect the homeland,” Dunford said.
“I think we could be so rich,” Trump said, “if we weren’t stupid. We’re being played [as] suckers, especially NATO.” Collective defense was a sucker play.
Citing a number often used by Bannon for the financial sacrifice and cost of all the wars, military presence and foreign aid in the Middle East, the president summed up, “We have [spent] $7 trillion in the Middle East. We can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.”
The president left. Among the principals there was exasperation with these questions. Why are we having to do this constantly? When is he going to learn? They couldn’t believe they were having these conversations and had to justify their reasoning. Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like—and had the understanding of—“a fifth or sixth grader.”
When I first learned of the details of this NSC meeting, I went back to a transcript of what President Obama had told me in 2010 about what he worried about the most.
“A potential game-changer,” Obama said, “would be a nuclear weapon . . . blowing up a major American city. . . . And so when I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one area where you can’t afford any mistakes. And right away, coming in, we said, how are we going to start ramping up and putting that at the center of a lot of our national security discussion? Make sure that that occurrence, even if remote, never happens.”
* * *
The pressure campaign on North Korea was effectively put on hold while the 2018 Winter Olympics were held in South Korea from February 9 to 25.
General Dunford learned that the Air Force had planned some research and design tests of its nuclear-capable ballistic missiles from California into the Pacific Ocean, scheduled right before and after the Olympics.
They were the kind of tests that the United States was pressuring North Korea to stop. They were provocative. He stepped in and the Air Force held off on the tests.
Early in 2018, the CIA concluded that North Korea did not have the capability to accurately deliver a missile into the United States mainland with a nuclear weapon on top. According to the intelligence and the information on the testing of North Korean rockets, they did not have the reentry of missiles perfected. But they were marching toward that goal. The CIA, for the moment, seemed to convince Trump that the North was not yet there.
CHAPTER
38
Afghanistan continued to frustrate Trump. Months earlier, in late September, he had hosted a reception at the United Nations annual meeting in New York. Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev and his wife posed for a picture with the Trumps. The Azerbaijan leader passed word that the Chinese were mining substantial amounts of copper from Afghanistan.
Trump was furious. Here was the United States paying billions for the war, and China was stealing copper!
Afghan president Ghani had dangled
the possibility that the United States would have exclusive access to vast mineral wealth, untouched in the Afghanistan mountain ranges. His argument: There’s so much money to be made. Don’t walk away. Rare earth minerals, including lithium, a main ingredient in the latest batteries. Some exaggerated estimates held that all minerals in Afghanistan might be worth as much as several trillion dollars.
Trump wanted the minerals. “They have offered us their minerals!” he said at one meeting. “Offered us everything. Why aren’t we there taking them? You guys are sitting on your ass. The Chinese are raiding the place.”
“Sir,” said Gary Cohn, “it’s not like we just walk in there and take the minerals. They have no legal system, no land rights.” It would cost billions of dollars to build the mining infrastructure, he added.
“We need to get a company in there,” Trump said. “Put it out for bid.” This was a giant opportunity, capitalism, building and development at its best. “Why aren’t we in there taking it?”
“Who’s we?” Cohn asked.
“We should just be in there taking it,” Trump said, as if there were a national mining company to move into Afghanistan.
At a subsequent meeting in the Oval Office, Trump asked, “Why hasn’t this been done?”
“We’re running it through the NSC process,” McMaster said.
“I don’t need it done through a fucking process!” Trump yelled. “I need you guys to go in there and get this stuff. It’s free! Who wants to do this?” It was a free-for-all. Who wanted this bonanza?
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross volunteered. “I’ll take care of it, sir. I’ll do it,” he said as if it were a Commerce Department issue.
Trump approved.
Kelly didn’t say much but took McMaster, Ross and Cohn to his office.
McMaster was ripshit at Kelly for not intervening. “You just chopped my legs out from me. You knew I was running a process.” He was going by the textbook as usual, was working with the State and Defense Departments and any other departments or agencies with an interest. “You hung me out to dry in front of the president!”
There was little that appealed to Trump more than the idea of getting money from others to pay for national security commitments made by previous U.S. administrations—NATO, Afghanistan, Iraq. The only other appealing prospect was making a good deal, and he thought this was one.
The State Department assessed the mineral rights. Analysts concluded this would be a great propaganda boon to worldwide extremists: The United States is coming to rape your land and steal your wealth from the ground. They sought legal opinions in hopes of slowing it down.
On February 7, 2018, McMaster convened a small group of principals in the Situation Room to hear Commerce Secretary Ross’s report. He had talked with the acting minister of mining in Afghanistan that morning. “The Chinese are not getting anything out. They have these big concessions, as they do worldwide, and they sit on them. They’re in it for the long term. They don’t need to make immediate money off it.”
So there was nothing to worry about. Afghanistan did not have the infrastructure or transportation, the regulatory or environmental controls, he said. No private company would make an investment.
“It’s fake news,” Ross said, to mild laughter.
McMaster added that most of these minerals would be impossible to reach because a lot of them were in Taliban-controlled areas. It was a war zone, and a military perimeter defense would have to be established before mining. At best, he said, it would take 10 years if everything went right.
Ross said he would follow up to explain this to the president.
* * *
Kelly seemed to be just trying to keep the ship from sinking. At a senior staff meeting in early 2018, he announced with pride, “I now know that I will not be the shortest-serving chief of staff. I’ve now surpassed Reince.” Priebus had served 189 days, the shortest tenure of any White House chief of staff in history.
* * *
Early in 2018, 60 Minutes broadcast a piece on the Afghanistan War, noting that Kabul was so violent that the U.S. commander could not be safely driven to his headquarters through the city. General Nicholson flew the two miles by helicopter. He made it clear he had adopted Trump’s victory-driven approach. “This is a policy that can deliver a win,” Nicholson said.
Nicholson’s intelligence and operational maps showed that the U.S.-led coalition controlled about 50 percent of the country. Within knowledgeable Pentagon and State Department circles it was known that Nicholson had claimed, “I’ll get to 80 percent in two years.”
He was determined to enhance the coalition’s and Afghan Army’s capability to claw back what would amount to 75,000 square miles. It was unattainable, even preposterous, to many who had served in Afghanistan.
A secondary goal of Nicholson’s was that after four years, the Taliban would realize they could not win and would come to the negotiating table. This was the same Taliban that had been fighting for 16 years.
* * *
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.”
Returning to his normal voice, Trump said, “That guy’s just full of shit. I met this guy. McMaster doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Trump had met the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, at the White House in March 2017.
“These military guys, they don’t get business. They know how to be soldiers and they know how to fight. They don’t understand how much it’s costing.”
