The Daily - Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018

Episode Date: January 30, 2018

The U.S. government announced this month that it would withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan. In the weeks since, Afghanistan has experienced one of the most violent and deadly periods in its 16-year war. How are the two connected? Guest: Mujib Mashal, a New York Times correspondent in Afghanistan, who describes the sense of terror in Kabul. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Earlier this month, the U.S. government announced it would withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan. In the time since, Afghanistan has experienced one of the most violent and deadly periods in its 16-year war. How the two are connected. It's Tuesday, January 30th. Mujib, tell us about this past week of violence in Afghanistan.

Well, the last attack was this morning. Mujib Mashal covers Afghanistan for The Times. It was snowing this morning, so it was a cold morning and about five o'clock in the dark of the night, about five attackers got into this military university at the heart of Kabul. Breaking overnight, nearly a dozen killed in a terror attack on an Afghan military base. Just the latest assault in a surge of violence in Kabul. The Afghan capital woke to the crack of gunfire early Monday, the latest in a wave of deadly attacks after a weekend of grief.

And they fought for about five hours, and they killed 11 soldiers and wounded another 16. A ladder was used by one of the attackers to eye on the wall. By 10 o'clock, you know, the attack was over, but it shook much of the city just because it was coming off the back of a couple weeks of repeated attacks. The assault comes after a Saturday bombing in Kabul killed more than 100 people. It's just another day in Kabul with another security and intelligence failure.

Families are burying their dead. There have been three attacks in the space of a week. So the deadliest of the attacks of the past two weeks was on Saturday, where the Taliban packed an ambulance with explosives, and they drove it right to the center of the city. You're saying an ambulance. Why an ambulance? Because the city is pretty militarized, and there are checkpoints at every corner.

There are bomb-sniffing dogs, so it was a good disguise for them. Especially on the street where they detonated it, there's a hospital. There's a major hospital. And in subsequent interviews, security guards have said, well, we looked at the ambulance at the first checkpoint, we thought it's an ambulance, you know, it's probably carrying a wounded or an ill person to the hospital. They pass the first checkpoint. At the second checkpoint, they detonate the explosives and had about at least 103 people killed and more than 200 wounded. That whole area is damaged.

So that was the biggest of the attacks. But about a week before that attack, there was a long siege over one of the main hotels in Kabul. The situation unfolding in Afghanistan tonight after four gunmen attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. This is the largest hotel in the capital. There's this hilltop hotel, very historical, scenic place. Gunmen entered and killed about 22 people, most of them pilots and crew belonging to this one airline, the biggest Afghan airline. That's where they put up all their

foreign staff. They're mostly Ukrainians. They're pilots from Venezuela. They would stay there because they thought that was one of the few safe places that remained in the city. The attack happened so easily that it just boggled a lot of people's minds. About three guys arrive in a van full of explosives. They park the van, they just walk right in. Three other guys have stayed at the hotel, already infiltrated, possibly stayed for days. And they start shooting from the inside. And then these poor pilots and crew members and dozens of guests, they're just caught there. Some of them, you know, jump from the balconies and sort of use their bedsheets as makeshift rope.

bedsheets as makeshift rope. There's one guy, this Greek pilot, who cut his own mattress and sort of try to hide in there and leave the windows of his room open to act out that he had fled the room, you know? Because this was a 15-hour siege. People were trying everything. So it's just been two weeks of very, very intense back-to-back violence to a point where the death of the first attack had not been counted for. People are still searching for family members when the second attack happened. Some bodies are at the morgue that still haven't been identified just because that's how badly damaged they were. It's just been that kind of intensity back-to-back that hasn't given the residents of the city any breathing space. Who has claimed responsibility for these three attacks or do we hold responsible for them?

The first two attacks were claimed by the Taliban. The third one was claimed by ISIS. But Afghan officials were saying nobody should be fooled by that, that this is all one concentrated Taliban violence. Mujib, you're describing a series of attacks that sound deliberately designed to terrorize and terrify people in Kabul. Is that how it feels now? Are people just terrified? Yes, yes. I think everybody I've spoken to is terrified. After mourning the dead, their sorrow has turned to anger. They're striking

where they can create the most fear, and they've done that. And many residents say they no longer trust the government to keep them safe. And every time an attack like that happens, a good part of the city just shuts down because it just turns into a full military zone. The city already is a very militarized city. Every roundabout you go to, you see security forces. And the main part, especially a diplomatic area where the government offices are, where the businesses are, that area chokes with traffic all day because every roundabout, their security force searches vehicles and they've narrowed the streets to slow down the traffic so they could search. And the fact that the government, despite turning the city into a military zone,

cannot prevent these kind of high profileprofile attacks in heavily guarded areas is what kind of takes a toll on the citizens. And it's a reminder every day how vulnerable, you know, everything in the city is. We want justice for our people. We want senior security officials to resign. As an Afghan citizen, I cannot expect explosions and suicide attacks every day. When we go to work, we have no hope to come home alive. How much longer do we have to put up with this? It's Taliban's way of saying they can strike at will at the heart of the city, close to government institutions, and the government really can't do anything about it, except

feel even more heat from its own people for not being able to stop the attacks. Can you give us a sense of what it's really like to be a civilian in Kabul right now? Help us feel what it's like to be there, what it looks like, what it sounds like. Is there any joy at all in life in Kabul despite all this? I think there is joy, but there's also a lot of guilt. Guilt? Yes, that people move on very quickly. An attack may pause them during lunch and they may tone down the volume of the music playing at the cafe as the bomb goes off.

And as the answer calls family members, loved ones, friends to say they're fine, they go back to their lunch. I'm talking in third person right now, but I should talk about, this is my experience on Saturday. On Saturday when the big ambulance bombing happened, I was at lunch with a friend. And during the lunch, we did not hear the explosion, but everybody around us started getting calls.

And that is a sign when you know something has happened in the city. And everybody started talking to each other at the cafe about where was the bombing and trying to narrow it down so we could call friends in that area rather than calling frantically around the city. So the music at the cafe was turned down for a few minutes and the food stopped for a little while. But once the calls were made

and once people found out that it wasn't their loved ones, it was a eerie sort of normalcy. And yet, halfway through returning to the meal, my friend and I looked at each other and we were like, this is pretty strange that every other day people die like that. You try to go back to a sense of normalcy, but yet you know it is not normal. You know this is not normal.

So it's that. When I say guilt, it's that sense of guilt. Guilt that even when the scale of these and the frequency are so big that you've kind of become inured to it a little? Yes, yes. And guilt also that it's so in your face, the violence and the loss and the people suffering, and yet you still try to draw a moment of normalcy

when you know how widespread the suffering is. Were these three attacks considered a major escalation of the violence, however? However, I mean, even for people in Kabul who sound numb, who can go back to lunch when the music is put back high and the food service is resumed, even for everyone like that, was the past week particularly gruesome and terrifying? Absolutely. Absolutely. In the past, I think maybe last year or two years ago, it would be, say, one dramatic attack a month or one dramatic attack every two months or so, right? But now, it just feels like not only the attacks are closer together, but they've just gotten way deadlier in terms of casualties and in terms of the size of the bomb and in terms of the locations also, where people would think they would have confidence and security, but how easily they can strike those areas. Well, so tell us more about that. As someone who's been reporting on this situation in Afghanistan for years, what's actually going on here? So a lot of the escalation right now, the violence, is in a way related to a decision President Trump took in December.

He inherited a war that had gone on for 16 years. Two presidents before him had put their fingers on the root cause of the war, but they had struggled to do something with it. And that root cause was Pakistan. It's very important for the people in Pakistan and Afghanistan to understand that America respects religion. I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan. Pakistan shares a long border with Afghanistan. Pakistan gives the leaders of this insurgency in Afghanistan a safe haven.

Their leaders can just sit there. They're away from the American airstrikes. They're away from the Afghan forces. They can just plan and, you know, continue and execute attacks because Pakistan uses this insurgency to gain political influence in Afghanistan. We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars. At the same time, they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting. For close to two decades, it has invested in this proxy force to try to gain political influence in Afghanistan. To create the government it wants in this neighboring country. Exactly. But that will have to change and that will change

immediately. So President Trump in December said, I'm going to go after Pakistan. I'm going to pressure Pakistan. President Trump has put Pakistan on notice. He cut about a billion dollars worth of security aid from Pakistan and he told Pakistan to stop harboring terrorists. Today, we can confirm that we are suspending security assistance, security assistance only, to Pakistan at this time. Until the Pakistani government takes decisive action against groups, including the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network, we consider them to be destabilizing the region and also targeting U.S. personnel, the United States will suspend that kind of security assistance to Pakistan. When he did that, everybody who has followed and observed Afghanistan, including Afghan

officials, were saying there's going to be an escalation. Pakistan will not just submit to U.S. pressure so easily. We should expect increased violence across Afghanistan, particularly in urban centers, because that is just easier. It takes a harder toll. And one attack, one guy coming in with a suicide vest in a city will capture more headlines and will show the Afghan government in Kabul as much weaker. So that is the escalation we're seeing right now. So the Taliban with these recent attacks are trying to weaken the Afghan government as much as possible in a way that benefits Pakistan's position in the region and

ultimately could therefore benefit the Taliban's because the two are nurturing each other. benefit, the Taliban's because the two are nurturing each other. Pretty much, pretty much. That is a big picture goal. But in the immediate, it almost just seems reactionary also, just to show to the Americans and to Trump that we are capable of this kind of reach deep inside a city where a US-backed government has been there for 17 years, and yet it cannot protect itself. Did the United States anticipate that the action it took against Pakistan might trigger this kind of escalation? And if it did, does it assume that that is the cost of a longer-term defeat of the Taliban and stopping Pakistan from harboring it? A lot of people, including American officials,

expected this escalation. And a lot of them knew that there would have to be patience for this kind of bloodshed for a brief period at least before we could get anywhere towards a resolution to the war. They expected this kind of a reaction from the Taliban. Is there a world in which this escalation shows that the U.S. strategy, which seems to be a long-term strategy for defeating the Taliban and making Pakistan stop harboring them, is there a case to be made that these absolutely horrible terror attacks

are signs that the U.S. strategy is in some way working, as hard as that is to conceive, given that so many people are dying? I think so, because the escalation was expected. It's just that question of how much of this escalation can a weak Afghan government absorb and how much American attention there is to make sure it follows through and gets this to the next step of keeping the pressure on Pakistan. Those are very, very big ifs. And that is what is making your question kind of difficult. The signs are that it is playing out like that.

Pressure on Pakistan, escalation. But what is at question right now is that next step. And that next step, because of the death toll, makes that next step difficult. And by extension, makes that bigger sort of U.S. strategy difficult. President Trump is expected to address the situation in Afghanistan tonight in his State of the Union address. What do people in Kabul and in Afghanistan want to hear from the U.S. president right now? Is there anything that they could hear from him

that would make them feel secure in this moment, and that there's hope for this city and this country? I think an acknowledgement of the kind of brutality that has happened over the past couple of weeks, and an acknowledgement that that is seen within that focused lens of I exerted pressure on Pakistan. I expected a backlash, an escalation. And the Afghans, everyday average Afghans who may not understand the strategy and this grand chess game are paying the price. I acknowledge it. chess game, are paying the price. I acknowledge it. But we are going to stay on it to make sure that 130 people killed in two weeks is not just another number in the long

casualty toll of this war that didn't get us anywhere closer to a resolution. Thank you, Majib. Thank you, Majib. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, abruptly stepped down following months of accusations from President Trump and his allies that McCabe had led a politically motivated investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. not by President Trump, but by the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray. And in a news conference on Monday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders reinforced that version of events. Cecilia, can you say definitively now that the president did not play a role in Andrew McCain stepping down?

Yes, I didn't say the president wasn't part of this decision-making process. And we would refer you to the FBI, where Christopher Wray serves as the director, which, as I said last week, and I'll repeat again today, the president has full confidence in him and has put the decisions at the FBI in his hands. about an internal Justice Department investigation into actions by McCabe and other senior officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, when the FBI was investigating both Hillary Clinton's email use and the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. Trump began criticizing McCabe after reports in October 2016 that McCabe's wife, who had run as a Democrat for the Virginia legislature, had received campaign donations from a close ally of Clinton's. And we need to restore the credibility to the American people. And to me, if there's nothing,

no national security being breached, I think the American people should have access to this information. Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have voted to release a controversial memo accusing the FBI of misusing its authority in the Russia investigation when it obtained a secret surveillance order on a former Trump campaign advisor in 2016. In voting to release the memo, which contains classified information, House Republicans disregarded warnings from the Justice Department that making it public would be, quote, extraordinarily reckless. And they have infuriated Democratic members of the committee, like Adam Schiff, who called it a partisan effort to undercut the FBI's investigation.

Sadly, we can fully expect that the president of the United States will not put the national interest over his own personal interest. But it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee, because today this committee voted to put the president's personal interest, perhaps their own political interest, above the national interest. the president's personal interest, perhaps their own political interest above the national interest. President Trump now has five days to decide whether the memo should become public. Despite the objections from his own Justice Department,

he has repeatedly indicated that he wants it released. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.