Obama’s dilemma on troop surge now vexes Trump
Dispute over how to proceed in Afghanistan pits pair of generals against political aides
WASHINGTON — A new president confronts an old war, one that bedeviled his predecessor. He is caught between seasoned military commanders, who tell him that the road to victory is to pour in more American troops, and skeptical political advisers, who argue that a major deployment is a futile exercise that will leave him politically vulnerable. Barack Obama in 2009. But also Donald Trump in 2017. As Trump faces his most consequential decision yet as commander in chief — whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, where a truck bombing on Wednesday offered a brutal reminder that the 16-year-old war is far from over — his administration is divided along familiar fault lines.
The dispute pits two generals who had formative experiences in Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster — against
political aides, led by the chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who fear that sending in more troops would be a slippery slope toward nation-building.
“They are going to be faced with the same questions we were,” said David Axelrod, a former senior Obama adviser, who worried, during the 2009 debate, that the generals were boxing his boss in. “How and when does this end? Or is it an open-ended commitment of American lives and resources? What will the investment produce in the long run?”
The White House shelved the deliberations over Afghanistan three weeks ago, after an initial Pentagon proposal to deploy up to 5,000 additional U.S. troops ran into fierce resistance from Bannon, an ardent nationalist, and other political advisers. In the West Wing, some aides have taken to calling Afghanistan “McMaster’s war.”
Undeterred, McMaster plans to bring the debate back to the front burner this coming week, a senior administration official said. But as he does so, the Pentagon appears to be moving toward a smaller recommendation, in which U.S. allies would supply half the new troops. Historically, the United States has supplied about two-thirds of the soldiers in Afghanistan.
That proposal depends on nailing down commitments from NATO and other allies — a task that former officials said had gotten harder after Trump’s stormy visit to Europe, where he chided allies for not paying their fair share of the alliance’s upkeep and declined to reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense.
“Trump has made it harder, not easier, to follow the U.S. lead,” said Douglas E. Lute, a former ambassador to NATO who advised both Obama and President George W. Bush on Afghanistan. “Questioning U.S. leadership makes it more difficult for the allies to send troops into harm’s way.”
While the parallels between the Trump and Obama administrations are striking, there are important differences.
Trump has shown his generals more deference than did Obama. In 2009, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, had a significant voice in the debate, though she formed an alliance with the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, and the regional commander at the time, Gen. David H. Petraeus.
Now, current and former generals all but monopolize the debate. The White House has also delegated military decisions like the recent order by the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., to drop the most powerful conventional weapon in the U.S. arsenal on Islamic State fighters in a tunnel complex there.
The troop numbers under consideration are far more modest. In 2009, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top commander in Afghanistan, recommended 40,000 to Obama.
And Trump did not run for office promising to turn around the war in Afghanistan, as Obama did. In fact, Trump said next to nothing about the Afghan war during the 2016 campaign. His views on the subject are best gauged through his posts on Twitter in 2012 and 2013, when the war was a much bigger news story than it is today.
“It is time to get out of Afghanistan,” Trump wrote on Feb. 27, 2012. “We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.”
“Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back?” he wrote on Aug. 21, 2012. “Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!”
“I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan,” Trump said on Jan. 14, 2013. “We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money — rebuild the U.S.!”
But Trump is discovering, as Obama did, that extricating the United States is harder than it appears.
McMaster and other advisers warn that without reinforcements for the Afghan army, the security situation in Afghanistan will get even more precarious than it is now, potentially creating more sanctuaries for al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
Currently, the international security force assisting the Afghan army has about 13,000 troops, of which about 8,400 are U.S. soldiers. Under an initial plan, which Nicholson recommended to Congress in February, the United States would send 3,000 to 5,000 additional troops, including hundreds of Special Operations forces.
Such a deployment would allow American advisers to train and assist a more Afghan forces, and it would place U.S. troops closer to the front lines at lower levels in the chain of command.
For both McMaster and Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, Afghanistan was a profound experience — but in different ways. Mattis commanded a brigade in the early days of fighting after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He earned a reputation as a swaggering warrior who would turn up in a foxhole with his troops.
McMaster headed an anti-corruption task force that worked mostly out of the capital, Kabul, after Obama’s troop surge. He quarreled with Afghan officials and warlords in an often-futile effort to make sure billions of dollars in U.S. aid went to the right places.
“Running an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan makes being Donald Trump’s national security adviser look easy,” said John A. Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an expert in counterinsurgency strategy.
Both Mattis and McMaster are steeped in counterinsurgency doctrine — the strategy that helped lead Obama to order a deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009.
But Nagl said both had reason to be more cautious this time: Mattis had scars from the heavy losses borne by the Marines there, while McMaster’s exposure to rampant corruption would rob him of any illusions that a few thousand new troops could turn around Afghanistan.
“He understands how arduous, how grinding, how interminable this is going to be,” Nagl said. “But what is the alternative?”
That question is echoing again in the hallways of the West Wing — and the people asking it have Trump’s ear.
Bannon, who was a powerful force behind Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate accord, has recovered some of his influence in the wake of that debate. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-inlaw and adviser, remains a crucial voice, despite his troubles over reported links to Russia. Though he has not taken a position on troops, his aides say he views his role as making sure the president gets genuine options.
Other officials may weigh in, too. John F. Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security and another retired general, holds weight with Trump. His son was killed in combat in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson may be exerting behind-the-scenes influence already. The debate over Afghanistan abruptly slowed down after officials at the State Department expressed concern that McMaster was “jamming through” a troop decision.
Still, Trump’s heavy reliance on military commanders risks a repeat of what some critics viewed as a weakness of the Obama administration’s troop debate, even with Hillary Clinton’s participation: its overemphasis on a military solution.
“This whole decision is being seen too narrowly, through a military prism,” said Daniel F. Feldman, who served as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama. “It has to be seen in a more integrated way. It requires a more aggressive diplomatic component.”