by Matt Farwell
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IT HAD BEEN eight years since the Taliban were routed from Kabul and Kandahar and bin Laden vanished into the mountains and cave complexes of Tora Bora. The CIA needed a win and thought they had one with a Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi. Balawi was just what the CIA had been missing: a mole with intimate access to core al-Qaeda leadership. Since early 2009, his handlers in Amman had been passing along his covert reports to their CIA counterparts, and, with each new dispatch from the FATA, Balawi’s stature grew, from merely a promising asset to a mole with historic potential. In August, he sent a short video clip of himself alongside Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a thirty-seven-year-old al-Qaeda commander, explosives expert, and the man bin Laden had tasked with managing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Most compellingly, Balawai also had access to Ayman al-Zawahiri, on whom the last tips were at least two years old.
The Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or Mukhabarat, was upfront with the Americans about Balawi’s checkered background. He had been recruited by a young GID officer, a cousin to King Abdullah II, who discovered Balawi through his online alter ego as a prolific jihadi named Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. After the Mukhabarat hauled him in for interrogations, Balawi flipped allegiances and agreed to help the Mukhabarat track down terrorists. Still, there were doubts about his reliability. He needed to be vetted by the CIA directly. In mid-December 2009, Langley issued orders to Jennifer Matthews, the senior officer in Khost Base, and one of the agency’s most experienced al-Qaeda experts, to find out if Balawi was what he seemed.
Matthews and her team decided to bring him across the border from the FATA into Afghanistan and drive him the ten miles to Camp Chapman, the CIA annex on FOB Salerno, one of the largest U.S. bases east of Kabul and, as brigade headquarters for Colonel Howard’s Task Force Yukon, the command center during the midsummer DUSTWUN. After two weeks of negotiations, the meeting was set for December 30. The White House was briefed. Matthews told her team that if they wanted Balawi to trust them, they needed to show him trust as well. They ordered the driver not to search him. They even baked him a cake, which awaited him in the debrief room. Most of the agency’s staff at Chapman, fourteen people in all, gathered for the meeting. The red Subaru station wagon arrived after 4:00 p.m. The driver passed through three security checkpoints without stopping for a search and parked in front of the annex’s central compound. Balawi stepped out of the car with his hand in his pocket, said the Shahada, and detonated. Six people were killed instantly. A mortally wounded Matthews was loaded onto a medevac helicopter and died in the air.
Six months into his Kabul mission, Major General Mike Flynn saw a war in tailspin. Rather than gifts, Christmas had brought a slick propaganda video of Bergdahl as a POW, a deadly CIA disaster, and, in early January, a posthumous martyr’s video from the suicide bomber al-Balawi, broadcast across the globe by Al Jazeera and on YouTube. The wise men in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department did not comment. In early February a secret report arrived at Bolling Air Force Base, the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters in southwest Washington, D.C. It said that Haqqani had carried out the attack at Chapman after it was initiated, directed, and funded by Pakistani intelligence. ISI spies had met twice with Haqqani commanders in the month before the attack, once to hand over the operation’s seed money and once with operation orders. It didn’t cost much. Two hundred thousand dollars went a long way in the FATA, covering overhead and bribes for an Afghan Border Police commander in Khost. When a heavily redacted portion of the U.S. intelligence report surfaced in Western and Indian media, Islamabad denied everything.
Of Chapman’s many tragedies, its preventability was the most demoralizing, and Pakistani complicity the most infuriating. The hard truth was that the enemy had outmaneuvered the Americans both on the battlefield and in the ISI-CIA shadow war. Throughout 2008, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admiral Michael Mullen had devoted himself to building trust with Pakistan’s generals and spymasters. Lieutenant General Asad Durrani, the ISI director general at the time, gave Mullen the same old promises, vowing to take incremental steps to rein in bad actors in the FATA, while, in the same meeting, denying that the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s government in exile, had sanctuary in Quetta, or even existed at all. Mullen knew it was a brazen lie. The shura not only existed, but U.S. and British intelligence had high confidence that Pakistani intelligence was represented within the Taliban’s leadership council. The power dynamic between them, however, was difficult to pin down.
Three days before Bergdahl’s video was released, General Flynn’s staff updated their “State of the Insurgency” PowerPoint briefing in Kabul, noting the enemy’s growing capabilities: The average size of IEDs on the Afghan battlefield had increased dramatically. These cheap armor-defeating bombs had become the weapon of choice for the Taliban, the new iteration of the Stinger missiles the CIA had provided to the mujahideen to defeat the Soviets. Slide twelve concluded, “The Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely.”
It had been nearly thirty years since Washington spent billions teaching the mujahideen how to fight and win against a larger, richer, and more technologically advanced “Evil Empire,” as President Reagan had labeled the USSR. The Islamic guerrillas had incorporated and passed down the lessons and tactics to a new generation. Meanwhile, America’s future generals had turned their attention to another battlefield: politics. David Petraeus’s 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation examined how the media’s representation of the Vietnam War had been the real impediment to victory. A decade later, H. R. McMaster’s 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty, studied the machinations within Washington and Robert McNamara’s Pentagon that had led the country down the path of catastrophe in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War continued its blind escalation, he wrote, “without a vision of how military action might actually achieve the goals of the war.”
Like Petraeus, McMaster, and his commander Stanley McChrystal, Flynn knew that COIN was the product of political logic as much as, if not more than, military strategy. In practice, it could even undermine the mission. Yet here he was, delivering yet another slideshow, touting COIN as a panacea six months after he and McChrystal had already seen its futility in southeastern Afghanistan and went gunning instead for the more immediate results of special operations night raids. COIN was the public face of the new way to victory in Afghanistan, but it didn’t match reality on the ground, or the intent of the command structure in Kabul. COIN was every bit the mirage that Bowe Bergdahl had suspected.
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IN THE CIA’S SIXTY-TWO-YEAR existence, only one attack had been worse than Chapman: On April 18, 1983, a Hezbollah truck detonated in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut with what the FBI later described as the largest man-made nonnuclear explosion since World War II. Sixty-three people were killed, including seventeen Americans, seven of whom worked for the CIA. But the Chapman attack was different—if Beirut was an Achilles frontal assault, Chapman was a Ulysses Trojan Horse. The Hezbollah driver had crashed through three armed checkpoints and heavy gunfire; Balawi just walked in for cake. The central lesson from Chapman was also the lesson of the war surrounding it, as obvious as it was maddening: The United States government was dumping trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives into a war against an enemy it had trained and an ally it had financed, and there was no way out.
The attack also opened a new round in the eternal and bitter feuding between the Pentagon and the CIA. Before Langley could write and disseminate its after-action report about the causes and implications of the attack, the Pentagon delivered its own indictment of the agency’s practices. Five days after the blast, Flynn published Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. Rather than submit the paper to a military journal where no one would read it, Flynn sent it to the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D
.C., think tank that was a popular way station for hawkish Democrats between political appointments. Flynn’s coauthor was Matt Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter turned Marine Corps intelligence officer.
“Eight years into the war,” the paper began, “the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.” American spy agencies, despite their multibillion-dollar budgets, were “unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade.” Fixing Intel was more than a diagnosis; it was an attack on the status quo in an intelligence community dominated by civilians. The CIA had tried and failed in Afghanistan, and now it was the uniformed Pentagon’s turn to take over and fix the problem. The paper quoted McChrystal on the heart of the problem: “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, Congress, the president of the United States—are not getting the right information to make decisions.”
The basic intelligence failures were all the more remarkable in light of the immense technological gap between the U.S. and the Taliban. At any given time, American spies could access all cell phone, radio, and electronic transmissions in the country; watch live and recorded video from drones, blimps, airplanes, and satellites covering wide swaths of the rural Afghan countryside; and read constant Blue Force Tracker position pings and situation reports from troops on the ground. Still, the Taliban grew.
Fixing Intel urged the military to approach intelligence in a new way. The paper imagined teams of brainy analysts “empowered to move between field elements, much like journalists,” Flynn and Pottinger wrote. “Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency.” In short, they imagined a military intelligence model that looked less like the mind-numbing COIN lectures and more like Robert Pelton’s Afpax Insider, the very program that McKiernan had contracted after the Battle of Wanat in the summer of 2008, and which Mike Furlong would ultimately bring crashing down with his extracurricular activities.
As much as Flynn claimed to hate the bureaucracy, publishing the paper when and how he did was a savvy bureaucratic move. In a speech a few weeks earlier at West Point, President Obama had vowed not only to deploy an additional thirty-thousand troops to the war, but also to commit another $30 billion to the problem. To Flynn and Furlong, it was a fresh line of credit and an opportunity to seize control of the CIA’s rice bowl in Afghanistan.
Predictably, reactions to Fixing Intel were split according to institutional loyalties. In his memoir, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote that Flynn’s diagnosis and recommendations were entirely astute and sensible. His sole point of dissent was with Flynn’s decision to publish his assessment in public and expose American weaknesses to the enemy in Afghanistan. At Langley, CIA director Leon Panetta and agency rank and file read it as a ruthless attack from the military on the CIA when they were at their most vulnerable. “Flynn was a guy who thought he could make anybody walk on water,” a CIA officer reflected, but ultimately he was “a neophyte in the intelligence game. Flynn never got the big strategic picture.” In the end, his paper’s greatest accomplishment seemed to have been aggravating the existing divisions within the national security apparatus.
Neither CIA nor DoD had a way to solve the war’s fundamental problem: the fact that the Taliban knew the terrain better than their enemies and would never give up fighting as long as the American invaders occupied their land. The U.S. Army worked against the land, bombing it from the sky and shielding its fighters in fourteen-ton armor-plated trucks. American soldiers were both protected and weighed down by their “battle rattle”—sixty pounds or more of body armor and gear, while the Taliban fought in flip-flops and loose-fitting cloth shalwars, using the terrain as their armor. The Taliban saw American soldiers as soft, predictable targets, unable to function for long stretches of time without supplies from their support bases. Taliban commanders didn’t try to compete with American firepower or technology; they didn’t need to. They would wait and plan, attacking, melting away, and regrouping to attack again when the time was right. They struck at the weakest joints in the lumbering American war machine. After an airstrike, they looked out for unexploded bombs among the NATO ordnance, collected them as gifts from above, and used the material to build their own homemade bombs. Unlike the American-propped Karzai government, the Taliban had no need to enforce nationwide rule. In a country the size of Texas, where hundreds of tribes and subtribes spoke more than two dozen languages and decades of war had divided them further, national unity had always been a lofty aspiration.
In nineteen pages of text, Flynn and Pottinger used the words “fail” and “failure” sixteen times. Noting that “revenge-prone Pashtun communities” are unlikely to work with the same people they view as indiscriminate killers, the paper concluded that “merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them.” It was as true for the U.S. as it had been for the USSR, which despite killing several hundred thousand Afghans, “faced a larger insurgency near the end of the war than they did at the beginning.”
Even in the national security state that he was trying to shake up, Flynn’s alarm was not unique. Matthew Hoh, the former Marine Corps officer featured in the Taliban’s Christmas Day video, had resigned from his State Department post in Zabul Province in September 2009 with similar concerns of inevitable failure. In his resignation letter, Hoh wrote that “the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.” The Karzai regime was seen as corrupt because it was corrupt. Hoh doubted not only the way the U.S. was conducting its war, but also its greater purpose.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had similar questions after her own deputy warned her that the Pentagon lacked a clear goal and had put Washington on the path to quagmire. Speaking via video teleconference with Admiral Mullen weeks after Hoh’s letter went public, Clinton relayed a recent report from the State Department’s senior representative in RC South, Frank Ruggiero, who could not safely venture into Kandahar from a nearby U.S. base. This sorry state of affairs, Clinton noted, persisted even after troop levels in the area grew tenfold. Clinton asked Mullen to explain: Why, after the troops that were requested to secure RC South were provided, wasn’t the situation under control? Because, Mullen answered, McChrystal didn’t have enough troops. The answer was as obvious as it was insane, and it followed a basic rule of bureaucratic logic: Failure was the evidence that more effort, more manpower, and more funding was needed. For Mullen and McChrystal, the problem was that fewer and fewer U.S. officials were buying the argument.
That winter, Flynn traveled to Pakistan to meet with his Pakistani counterparts. If Fixing Intel was seen in Washington as a breach of intelligence service etiquette, his efforts to salvage the mission in-theater were even less polite. The most urgent topic, as it had been before he and McChrystal arrived and would remain after they were gone, was Pakistan’s inability or unwillingness to control the terror groups operating with impunity on Pakistani soil. Being lied to by Pakistan was no longer a glitch; it had become the central feature of the relationship, a dysfunctional codependency that twisted further as the war escalated. How could Flynn, the career intelligence officer who had built his reputation by bending the rules, continue to go along with this Pakistani charade? Flynn was known for his temper and his apparent attention deficit disorder. In a meeting with the ISI, this was a dangerous combination. Perhaps Flynn didn’t intend to tip his hand and reveal highly classified information to the Pakistanis, but in this winter meeting he did. While the exact information he revealed remains classified, his breach was serious enough that, in a rare event, a lower-ranking Naval Intelligence officer present reported Flynn for a security violation. A CENTCOM investigation concluded that Flynn had revealed government secrets to Pakistan, but it w
as inadvertent and did not threaten national security.
The Washington Post cited a separate incident in 2009 in which Flynn had disclosed sensitive information to Pakistan about “secret U.S. intelligence capabilities being used to monitor the Haqqani network.” It was more than a breach of protocol; it was a heedless attack on rivals within his own government. A CIA officer in the meeting was so aghast at the disclosure, he promptly reported it to headquarters in Langley, which relayed the officer’s concerns to officials in the Defense Department. The investigation put Flynn’s future job prospects in limbo for a year before CENTCOM commander General James Mattis cleared him of the charges.
After Michael Hastings published “The Runaway General” in the June 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal was fired for his loose lips and insubordinate attitude toward the Obama White House, and he retired. Mike Flynn remained in the Army. In September 2011 he was promoted to lieutenant general and appointed assistant director of national intelligence for partner engagement at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This man, chronically frustrated by intelligence bureaucracy and with a documented history of revealing classified information to foreign governments, was now in charge of a branch of U.S. intelligence devoted to partnering with spies from allied nations. In the lawless regions of one of these ostensible allies, Bowe Bergdahl remained in chains.
