President Trump has a well-known mistrust of the advice he gets from his military brass.
The president has stated on many occasions that while he respects their service and dedication, he believes his business acumen gives him an edge when it comes to seeing the big picture, especially when it comes to ending “endless wars.”
It turns out Trump’s misgivings are well-founded, as amply demonstrated by this month’s release of the so-called Afghanistan Papers, a trove of more than 2,000 memos and notes from interviews of national security insiders that amount to a secret history of the war in Afghanistan.
The internal government documents were obtained legally by the Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act, although not without two federal lawsuits and a three-year legal battle.
Like the Pentagon Papers almost a half-century ago, the memos tell a familiar tale of military and civilian defense officials issuing overly optimistic public pronouncements proclaiming steady progress toward victory while privately harboring grave doubts about the prospects for success.
In the case of Vietnam, it was the “Five O’clock Follies,” a daily military briefing for reporters in Saigon that falsely used inflated enemy body counts to show the United States was winning. Also, there was the famous assertion by Gen. William Westmoreland that there was “light at the end of the tunnel,” suggesting the U.S. was on its way to winning the war.
In the case of Afghanistan, a steady stream of American commanders has insisted victory is at hand, either providing misleading metrics or more often deluding themselves that the strategy was working.
“The new Afghan National Army Special Operations Corps … has never lost a battle against the Taliban and they never will,” boasted U.S. Afghanistan commander Gen. John Nicholson in a November 2017 Pentagon briefing. “Looking ahead to 2018, as President Ghani said, he believes we have turned the corner, and I agree.”
As America’s longest war enters its 19th year, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion, more than 2,400 U.S. troops have died, another 20,000 wounded, and according to the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, “Control of Afghanistan’s districts, population, and territory has become more contested over the last two years, resulting in a stalemated battlefield environment.”
The Afghanistan Papers show that members of the Bush and Obama administrations not only misled the American public about the years of stalemates, they also misled the president.
According to one interview with someone identified only as a National Security Council official, the Obama White House and Pentagon pressured the military to come up with talking points to demonstrate the U.S. troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working.
“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory, and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the official told government interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”
Is it any wonder Trump doesn’t trust his commanders?
When he took office in 2017, he ordered a full review of Afghanistan policy intending to end U.S. involvement. But after months of lobbying from national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he agreed to go against his gut.
“My original instinct was to pull out,” Trump said in an Aug. 21, 2017, speech announcing his new strategy, “and, historically, I like following my instincts.”
By essentially saying Afghanistan was a lost cause, Trump was up against a persuasive emotional argument that by quitting now, thousands of lives of American troops would have been sacrificed in vain.
It the same sunk cost fallacy that kept the U.S. in Vietnam long past the point where it was clear the war was not winnable.
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” is how young John Kerry put it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost. Who will say this was in vain?” is how retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute put it in a document from 2015.
“Trump was right from day one that Afghanistan is not fixable,” says Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute. “Trump is the first president to say out loud what everybody should have learned by now: the longer we stay, the more lives and money we waste.”
The current Afghanistan commander Gen. Scott Miller, who took over last year and narrowly avoided assassination during a Taliban attack on a local governor’s compound in southern Kandahar, has kept a low profile.
At Miller’s 2018 confirmation hearing, he was questioned by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, now a Democratic presidential candidate.
“Gen. Miller, we’ve supposedly turned the corner so many times that it seems now we’re going in circles,” Warren said. “So, let me just ask you, do you envision turning another corner during your tenure as commander?”
Miller knew to be careful in his answer.
“I can’t guarantee you a timeline or an end date … or offer necessarily a turning point,” he said, “unless there’s something to come back and report back that something has changed.”
As of this writing, Miller has yet to brief reporters or the American public on progress in the war.
The Pentagon has learned one lesson from its years of wishful thinking and overly rosy predictions of imminent victory: It no longer issues such upbeat statements at Pentagon briefings.
In fact, the U.S. military no longer conducts any operational briefings from Afghanistan at all.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
