Former US national security adviser John Bolton’s bombshell book, “The Room Where It Happened,” has revealed what President Donald Trump has said about Afghanistan in meetings with his administration’s officials.
Trump opposed a continuing US military presence in Afghanistan for two related reasons: first, he had campaigned to “end the endless wars” in faraway places; and second, the sustained mishandling of economic and security assistance, inflaming his instinct against so much frivolous spending in federal programs, according to the excerpt of the book.
The book reveals how Trump was frustrated about 2017 strategy on Afghanistan.
In a meeting on November 8, 2018, Trump said “We’re being beaten, and they know they’re beating us.” Then he was off, raging against the statutorily mandated Afghanistan Inspector General, whose reports repeatedly documented wasted tax dollars but also provided amazingly accurate information about the war that any other government would have kept private, according to the book.
“I think he’s right,” said Trump, “but I think it’s a disgrace he can make such things public.” Mentioning Khalilzad, Trump said, “I hear he’s a con man, although you need a con man for this.”
“My strategy [meaning what ‘his’ generals had talked him into in 2017] was wrong, and not at all where I wanted to be. We’ve lost everything. It was a total failure. It’s a waste. It’s a shame. All the casualties. I hate talking about it,” Bolton recalled Trump as saying.
Trump said, “Let Russia take care of them. We’re seven thousand miles away but we’re still the target, they’ll come to our shores, that’s what they all say,” said Trump, scoffing. “It’s a horror show. At some point, we’ve got to get out.”
US intelligence chief Dan Coats offered that Afghanistan was a border-security issue for America, but Trump wasn’t listening.
“We’ll never get out. This was done by a stupid person named George Bush,” he said. “Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars, and we just can’t do it. Another six months, that’s what they said before, and we’re still getting our asses kicked.”
Then he launched into a favorite story, about how US helicoptered schoolteachers every day to their school because it was too dangerous for them to go on their own: “Costs a fortune. The IG was right,” he said, veering off into a report about the construction of “a billion-dollar Holiday Inn” and saying, “This is incompetence on our part. They hate us and they shoot us in the back, blew the back of the guy’s head off, arms and legs and things [referring to a recent “green-on-blue” attack where a Utah National Guardsman was killed] India builds a library and advertises it all over.”
Bolton says he had been silent throughout because the whole meeting was a mistake.
He continues: Inevitably, Trump asked, “John, what do you think?” I said, “It sounds like my option is in the rearview mirror,” explaining again why we should counter terrorists in their home base and why Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program made it imperative to preclude a Taliban haven in Afghanistan that might accelerate Pakistan’s falling to terrorists. Dunford said if we withdrew, he feared a terrorist attack on the US in the near future. Trump was off again—“Fifty billion dollars a year”—until he ran down and said to no one in particular, “You have until Valentine’s Day.”
In another meeting, Trump asked questions, especially about one provision for an exchange of prisoners and hostages between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which in numerical terms looked a lot more favorable to the Taliban than to us, Bolton said.
He said Trump didn’t like that at all. Then Trump began riffing about Afghan President Ghani and his elaborate house in Dubai, which we knew from actual research Ghani didn’t own. But no matter, because Pompeo pointed out the reality that Ghani was now President and controlled the government’s armed forces. Completely predictably, Trump asked, “Who pays them?” Esper, new to this movie script, promptly responded, “We do,” thereby launching Trump into the riff about how Mattis always said, “These soldiers are fighting bravely for their country,” until Trump asked who paid for them, and found out the total cost (including equipment and other supplies) was about $6.5 billion annually. “They are the most highly paid soldiers in the world,” Trump concluded. Then he was off on “green-on-blue” attacks, where Afghan government soldiers attacked US forces: “We teach them how to shoot, and then they take the weapons and say, ‘Oh, thank you, sir,’ and then kill our guys.”
Bolton writes:
Then we were off to the Afghan elections and a reprise on why Trump didn’t like this or that senior Afghan official. If only Trump could keep it straight that incumbent President Ghani was not former President Karzai, we could have spared ourselves a lot of trouble.
As the discussion proceeded, Trump said at one point, “Making a bad deal is worse than just getting out. I’d rather not make a deal.” I thought this comment provided a glimmer of hope. But before we got too far, Trump shifted again to complaining about leaks, including that CNN had earlier reported this very meeting. “These people should be executed, they are scumbags,” he said, but then observed it was “not a bad thing that the news [was] out” that we were talking about Afghanistan. This led to one of Trump’s favorite legal gambits, namely, that the Justice Department arrest the reporters, force them to serve time in jail, and then demand they disclose their sources. Only then would the leaks stop. Trump told Cipollone to call Barr about it, which Cipollone said he would do. Trump went on: “I like my message. If they come at us, we’re going to destroy their whole nation. Not with nuclear weapons though. They hate us too. Taliban wants their land. We went in to take their land, and they’ve got crooks” in the highest levels of government.
As if he had already decided to approve the Pompeo-Khalilzad deal, Trump said, “Let’s make a big deal about it, like it’s a wonderful deal. If they do anything bad [which I understood to mean, if Taliban broke the agreement], we’re going to blow their fucking country into a million pieces. [I did not take this to be a well-thought-out military strategy, but simply typical Trump analysis.] And I don’t blame the military because you weren’t given the tools.”
Bolton also says that neither the incumbent, President Ghani, nor Afghanistan’s Chief Executive, Abdullah Abdullah, received an absolute majority in 2019 election, necessitating a runoff.
