MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Afghanistan's Taliban is imposing new restrictions on women. The supreme leader has endorsed vice and virtue laws that ban women's bare faces and the sound of women's voices outside the home. These rules come three years after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan led to the Taliban's return. A new book, "At War With Ourselves," offers one view of how that happened. The author is H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser early in the Trump presidency. McMaster told our co-host Steve Inskeep he feared U.S. strategies in Afghanistan would mirror American missteps in Vietnam.
H R MCMASTER: Well, I think what went wrong in Afghanistan is we took a short-term approach to a long-term problem. What we needed is we needed a sustained, reasoned approach to the war in Afghanistan and our policy in South Asia more broadly.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump was inclined to leave Afghanistan. He had campaigned on addressing problems at home. But McMaster and others argued it was in the U.S. interest to stay.
MCMASTER: America first, if you will, right? And that's how we tried to frame it for President Trump. He made, I think, a really important and courageous decision because it cut against his predilections in August of 2017.
INSKEEP: Trump adopted a new strategy. U.S. forces gained freedom to strike the Taliban more aggressively and avoided a hasty exit.
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DONALD TRUMP: We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.
MCMASTER: It was a really solid strategy, and he gave a very compelling speech in August of 2017. But the president has a certain dissonance about him on foreign policy, and I also write about - well, there are these Iago figures - right? - who are in his ear, constantly trying to advance, really, their agenda.
INSKEEP: Iago figures - this is a Shakespearean reference to a Shakespearean character. Go on. Go on.
MCMASTER: So Iago is the adviser to the protagonist in "Othello," who poisons his ear with disinformation to manipulate Othello into distrusting those around him. And I describe how various individuals in the Trump administration were quite adept at that kind of manipulation.
INSKEEP: Was he especially vulnerable because he didn't have confidence or didn't have principles to stand by?
MCMASTER: Well, he was vulnerable in a number of ways. One of the ways is he wasn't really familiar with governance, you know, and the roles of people around him. And so it was pretty easy if somebody's going to say, hey, this person is disloyal or this person is cutting against your agenda, to manipulate him that way. You know, he really does enjoy affirmation - right? - adulation, even. And the president, and this is no surprise to anybody, you know, really does not want to do anything to alienate what he considers his most loyal political base.
INSKEEP: People around Trump told him he'd look weak if he stayed in Afghanistan. Eventually, the president departed from his own policy and demanded a quick peace deal.
MCMASTER: We negotiate with the Taliban without the Afghans present. Remember, we forced the Afghans to release, you know, 15,000 of some of the most heinous people on Earth, and these prisoner releases and so forth. And so I think that it was really tragic. It was completely avoidable. And then, of course, I criticized the Bide administration for having reversed so many of Trump's other policy decisions, to say, oh, well, we had to adhere to this February 2020 agreement in executing that humiliating and disastrous withdrawal Afghanistan.
INSKEEP: I'm trying to take the highest altitude view of this that I can in asking this next question. Even though it sounds like you feel it was wrong and disastrously executed, was it on some level correct for the United States to get out of Afghanistan because it was this great domestic political irritant, one of many things that was causing discord at home and that was unsustainable in terms of money and troops?
MCMASTER: Steve, it was totally sustainable, and I don't think the American people knew how many troops we had in Afghanistan. And what was tragic about it is by 2018 and into 2019, it was clear that we had a sustainable level of commitment.
INSKEEP: In the final years, only a few thousand U.S. troops were on the ground. Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster's new book offers one perspective on the U.S. withdrawal, though far from the only one. Reporting from inside the country suggests the U.S.-supported government brutalized many of the Afghan civilians whose support they needed, which is why that government failed to stand on its own. Since then, the Taliban have reverted to more and more extreme policies, reversing the effects of 20 years of U.S. occupation. And today, many of the country's most talented people are in exile. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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