The recent shake-up at the Pentagon will help President Trump fulfill his foreign policy agenda, including taking out terrorist enemies and bringing troops home from Afghanistan, according to a senior White House official who spoke with the Washington Examiner about Trump-allied national security officials taking over key positions at the Defense Department.
“There is no new mission directive — nothing has changed,” the White House official with knowledge of the happenings at the Pentagon said this week, dismissing speculation that there was some sort of ulterior agenda at play, instead saying that the goal at the Pentagon was to fulfill Trump’s longtime promises to kill bad guys, free American hostages held overseas, and wind down U.S. combat troop levels around the world, especially in Afghanistan.
“He wants to bring the troops home. He wants to end the wars.”
If successful, Trump’s last few weeks as commander in chief could result in some legacy-building on the foreign policy front, even as he continues to dispute his loss to President-elect Joe Biden.
Last month, Trump tweeted that “we should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!” However, he faced pushback on that from a number of top generals and, reportedly, from now-former Defense Secretary Mark Esper too. Current troops levels in the war-torn nation have been lowered down to roughly 4,500 as the United States pursues a troubled deal with the Taliban more than 19 years after the al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Esper, who had resisted Trump’s desire to use U.S. troops to help quell the violence and rioting that accompanied protests in cities nationwide this summer and had also worked to rename U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals, was fired by Trump this week. But Esper gave an interview to Military Times in which he seemed to admit that he had tried to finesse how he handled Trump’s desires.
“Imagine this: ‘Disregard what the president said. This is still the plan.’ Now, if I were the president, I’d say, ‘Really? Here you go. Here’s a written piece of paper. You’re coming home by December,’” Esper said, adding that directly confronting Trump wasn’t useful. “You’ve got to think through steps two, three, and four. And often folks don’t do that.”
“Why get in a mudslinging match when you’re still working for the commander in chief? That doesn’t get you anywhere,” he said.
When asked about withdrawal from Afghanistan, he replied, “It may be a little bit uncertain for some folks, but I know the chain of command completely knows what we’re doing and where we’re going.”
Jim Jeffrey, the U.S.’s special envoy to Syria whose retirement was announced this week, gave an interview to Defense One where he admitted that “we were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there” and that the true number of U.S. troops there is “a lot more than” the 200 soldiers the president settled on back in 2019.
Christopher Miller, who took Esper’s place as acting secretary of defense, had been leading the National Counterterrorism Center since August, testifying to Congress in September that “al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan has been reduced to a few dozen fighters who are primarily focused on their survival and are probably incapable of conducting attacks outside the country under sustained CT pressure.”
Miller joined the Army in 1983 and became an Army Green Beret, serving with the 5th Special Forces Group in Iraq and Afghanistan. He went on to become the deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations as well as a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council in 2018 and 2019. He said this summer that “counterterrorism pressure against al-Qaeda has diminished its cadre of veteran leaders and ability to strike the West” and that “several of the group’s remaining senior leaders continue to find safe haven in Iran.”
National security adviser Robert O’Brien, who had been Trump’s special envoy for hostage affairs, said in early October that he supports a plan to draw down U.S. troops to 2,500 in Afghanistan by January and then to zero by May.
But U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pushed back on this a few days later, telling NPR: “I think that, you know, Robert O’Brien or anyone else can speculate as they see fit. I’m not going to engage in speculation. I’m going to engage in the rigorous analysis of the situation based on the conditions and the plans that I am aware of and my conversations with the president.”
O’Brien stood by his remarks a few days later during a discussion with the Aspen Institute.
“It’s not my practice to speculate. Other people can interpret that what I say is a speculation or not, but I wasn’t speculating then, I wasn’t speculating today,” O’Brien said. “And so, when I’m speaking, I’m speaking for the president. And I think that’s what the Pentagon is moving out and doing.”
The senior White House official told the Washington Examiner that, beyond troop drawdowns, the Pentagon would likely attempt to take out more high-value terrorist targets and rescue more American hostages, saying, “Defeating al Qaeda, defeating ISIS, and bringing hostages home were what he talked about on the campaign trail, and have always been priorities for him as president.” Miller told Congress this year that “today’s terrorism threat to the U.S. and our allies is less acute but more diffuse — emanating from more groups in more places than it did in 2001.”
Trump has touted a number of high-profile foreign policy successes, including Middle East peace deals and the strike against Iranian spy chief Qassem Soleimani in January, whose Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been responsible for the deaths of over 600 U.S. troops in Iraq. Trump has also pointed to the U.S. military’s successful raid killing Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in October 2019 as well as the near-total destruction of ISIS’s physical caliphate, which had been established after President Barack Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq.
It remains to be seen if the U.S. will be able to take out other big-name terrorists in the next few weeks. Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man and successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, for instance, has remained beyond the grasp of three successive administrations.
Trump also recently highlighted his administration’s record of rescuing at least 55 U.S. hostages and detainees from overseas, and Trump’s team has continued to work to rescue more hostages, including negotiations with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to release kidnapped Marine and journalist Austin Tice.
Other newly installed officials at the Pentagon are also likely to assist Trump with more forcefully implementing his foreign policy agenda in the waning days of his presidency.
Kash Patel, best known as a former adviser to GOP Rep. Devin Nunes when he was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was named as Miller’s chief of staff. While working for Nunes, Patel helped author Nunes’s 2018 memo on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse which, though hotly criticized by Democrats at the time, was largely borne out as quite accurate by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s bombshell report in 2019 and recent declassifications. Before working for Nunes, Patel was a counterterrorism prosecutor for the Justice Department and after he became a senior director for counterterrorism at the NSC.
Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel, was named a senior adviser to Miller. Macgregor said that he would advise the president to move troops out of Afghanistan “as soon as possible” and that talking to the Taliban was “unnecessary” during a 2019 interview with Fox News. Macgregor, who had been unsuccessfully nominated to be ambassador to Germany and previously made controversial comments about Muslims and martial law at the U.S.-Mexico border, spoke about withdrawal from Afghanistan on Fox News earlier this year: “He’s promised to do that a long time ago, and he’s disappointed a lot of us because he hasn’t. He can stand up tomorrow and pull us out.”
And retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, who did combat tours in Afghanistan, was named acting policy chief for the Department of Defense after having been a senior policy adviser to Esper. Tata had drawn the ire of Senate Democrats and some Republicans for tweets that, among other things, called Obama a “terrorist leader” and characterized Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of.” Tata apologized earlier this year. In 2019, Tata wrote a piece on Afghanistan in 2019 with Blackwater founder Erik Prince for Fox News, saying, “History supports presidential authorization for the use of private military contractors during transition operations to help the U.S. and its allies achieve strategic aims. Now is the time to begin the transition, secure our vital interests, and husband our precious resources.”
Ezra Cohen-Watnick was named acting undersecretary for intelligence, having been brought into the NSC in early 2017 by now-former national security adviser Michael Flynn before he was eventually reportedly ousted by Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster. Before that, Cohen-Watnick had worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, including in Afghanistan, and went on to work at the Justice Department on counterintelligence under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018.
And Michael Ellis, another former counsel to Nunes’s intelligence committee, was named the National Security Agency’s new legal counsel this week, after working under NSC legal adviser John Eisenberg during the Ukraine impeachment saga. He was also involved with the prepublication review process of former national security adviser John Bolton’s memoir, and was reportedly one of the two White House officials, along with Cohen-Watnick, who alerted Nunes in early 2017 that the communications of Trump and his associates may have been intercepted during foreign surveillance.
While some Democrats have speculated that something nefarious was afoot, the New York Times reported this week that “there is no evidence so far that these new appointees harbor a secret agenda on Iran or have taken up their posts with an action plan in hand.”
Milley and Miller both delivered remarks at the opening of the U.S. Army Museum at Fort Belvoir on Veteran’s Day.
“We are unique among militaries,” Milley said during his speech. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe, or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution.”
Miller praised Milley’s remarks at the start of his own speech, quipping, “Chairman, thanks for setting the bar very high for the new guy to come in and make a few words. I think all I would say to your statements is: Amen. Well done.”
