US Should “Still be in Afghanistan,” says Former
National Security Advisor at International Spy Museum
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington: While “missions” in the fictional world of super spies James Bond or Jason Bourne are clandestine adventures, the “mission” of the International Spy Museum is to “educate the public,” according to Chris Costa, executive director of SPY.
In furtherance of this “mission,” Costa, former special assistant to the president and Senior Director for Counterterrorism during the first Donald J. Trump administration, hosted Lt General H. R. McMaster (US Army, Ret), former National Security Advisor in the first Trump White House, for a discussion on the general’s latest book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was a major topic of discussion on February 10, 2025, at the International Spy Museum headquarters.
In August 2017, the general, as national security advisor at that time, was tasked by then-President Trump to find a way to extricate US troops from Afghanistan. “The president just wanted to get out,” he said. But McMaster felt he should provide other options and told the president: “If we get out, it’s going to be a disaster.” The chaotic situation when US troops finally withdrew in August 2021, he said, was “completely predictable.”
McMaster pointed out to the president that the US had 10,000 troops in Afghanistan and “Americans didn’t even notice that…because Afghans were doing the fighting. It would cost about $22 billion a year and that’s sustainable,” he argued.
In preparing options for the president, McMaster and his team had to overcome a bias or erroneous assumptions across department agencies, including the intelligence agencies, and help the president understand Afghanistan with a “clear-eyed view of it in the context of the region,” he said. His method was to take more time to think about the nature of the problem while having clear goals and objectives, and to make any assumptions explicit. In addition, he wanted to have multiple alternatives and to try to insulate the development of choices from partisan political considerations. “What’s best for the American people should drive the development of options,” he stated.
Responding to Costa’s question about the 19th century view of Afghanistan being the “Graveyard of Empires,” McMaster noted that many people thought the US experience in Afghanistan was going to be just like the two ventures of the British there, or the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979, without acknowledging that the situation was fundamentally different in that the US was now alongside an Afghan government and Afghan security forces who were fighting for their own nation.
“This was not a war of some kind of subjugation of the Afghans,” he stressed, acknowledging, however, that the US knew that the Afghan government had problems, including corruption.
But many people just wanted to get out, he continued. “I had a conversation with people in the administration at the time and I said I thought what they wanted to do would be a total disaster.”
This urge to leave Afghanistan is what led to the February 2020 agreement with the Taliban which McMaster called a “surrender document, a self-defeat” … and “completely unnecessary.” In 2021, the Biden administration, he said, wanted to craft a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban. “Does anyone really think the Taliban is going to share power?” he asked. “It really is astounding the degree to which people can engage in this kind of self-delusion.”
The general pointed out the damage that was done to the Afghan people, to America’s reputation, and to the geostrategic landscape, in addition to what’s happened in the region in terms of danger from terrorist organizations and the migration crisis associated with the withdrawal.
There’s also a “direct line you can draw from the collapse in Afghanistan to the reinvasion of Ukraine,” he argued. “I think Putin looked at this and said ‘Hey, the Americans just essentially engaged in self-defeat. They’ve got nothing left.’ And he felt he could do whatever he wanted.”
“I think we should still be in Afghanistan,” McMaster stated, “if you look at it, look at what’s happened to the Afghan people now.”
After exiting Afghanistan, the US built a $19 billion over-the-horizon counterterrorism center in Qatar. And “as we know, over-the-horizon counterterrorism really doesn’t work very well,” he said.
In the question-and-answer session, which closed out the program, a nine-year-old watching virtually mentioned his desire to eventually join one of the US intelligence agencies. Responding to his question on how to prepare for this career, McMaster stated: “Read! Read as broadly as you can. Read as much history as you can.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
