American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Amoore knew to be skeptical of such tales. Kabul was rife with “shoppers”—sources selling fake stories to mislead Western journalists and intelligence officers, but this one seemed to check out. Amoore compared battle footage with news reports to verify that Nadeem was who he said he was. Next, he ran it by his intelligence sources at the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS), who confirmed the basics of Nadeem’s story. There was no way to safely verify it, they told Amoore; the Taliban had already killed two of their own for talking about Bergdahl. The American prisoner had become one of the region’s most guarded secrets, and Amoore was the only reporter with the story. The Sunday Times headline on August 22, 2010, set the tone for years to come:

  CAPTURED U.S. SOLDIER HAS JOINED OUR CAUSE, SAY TALIBAN.

  It would be years before Amoore realized that he had been conned. The Taliban used disinformation for a variety of reasons. In this case, the fake news was likely meant to goad the Americans into the prisoner exchange or ransom that the Taliban demanded. As a means to spread rumors and set a narrative that would sow political discord in the United States, it would prove incredibly effective; as a method to kick-start negotiations, it was premature.

  Twenty months into the Obama administration, Washington still had no coherent diplomatic policy toward the Taliban. The president had spent hundreds of hours managing exhaustive White House policy reviews that assessed every available leverage point, from digging more village wells to incentivizing farmers to replace their opium poppies with cotton or wheat. But in all of the analysis, peace talks were never seriously considered. The no-negotiations Bush-era legacy had left little insight into Taliban leadership, no strategy about whom to communicate with, and no method to even begin.

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  NEARLY A DECADE of war had taught both the Taliban and the Americans that claims from the enemy could not be trusted. When the mullahs Fazl and Noori surrendered in Mazar-i-Sharif in November 2001, it had seemed briefly possible that some Taliban officials would be permitted to join Karzai’s government. Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s deputy intelligence minister, also turned himself over as a willing cooperator after he was told that he would be granted amnesty. Weeks later, all three were captured by U.S. forces and flown to a makeshift prison aboard the USS Peleliu, the amphibious assault ship that had carried the first Marines to the region before it began receiving detainees in the Arabian Sea.

  From their prison ship, the men were hooded and restrained, blindfolded with goggles stuffed with cotton balls, sedated with rectal suppositories, strapped into the cargo bay of U.S. transport planes, and flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In early 2002, they were joined by Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, a founding member of the Taliban who, as the governor of Herat Province, had earned a reputation as a moderate among senior Taliban officials. None had been charged with any crimes, but as they shuffled in shackles into the tropical heat and wire fencing of the open-air U.S. detention camp, the lesson was clear: The Americans could not be trusted. The Taliban leadership in Pakistan had been looking for ways to get the men back ever since.

  Caught between the ISI and the threat of American imprisonment (or Hellfire missiles), Taliban leaders began telegraphing their desires to the two ISAF nations that showed the greatest diplomatic capacity for peacemaking: Norway and Germany. For three and a half years, between 2007 and 2010, Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Støre, managed the opening moves in a delicate and at times dangerous diplomatic chess game. Whenever he came close to bringing Taliban and Afghan envoys together, the meetings were blocked by Taliban hard-liners or the ISI—it was often hard to tell the difference. The Norwegian government hadn’t told the Bush administration about the Taliban’s outreach efforts, and as much as Obama’s first year brought hope for diplomacy, his Afghanistan surge had also revealed the depths of American factionalism.

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had authorized Richard Holbrooke, her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), to begin quietly searching for a brokered peace even as the Pentagon and CIA remained confident that they could kill and capture their way to victory. Uncertain which way the winds of U.S. policy were blowing, Støre waited until December 2009 before he told Clinton about his secret Taliban diplomacy. Even then, and to the evident chagrin of Clinton’s deputies, he refused to share his Taliban contacts’ names, fearful that they would be snatched by U.S. agents and stashed in Guantanamo alongside Fazl, Noori, Wasiq, and Khairkhwa.

  The only party to the war more obstructive to diplomacy than the Americans, and more capable of undermining it, was the ISI. By the spring of 2010, with both the Taliban and Karzai working with the Norwegians to set up peace talks, the ISI was working just as hard to obstruct them. Later that summer, Norwegian diplomats in Islamabad received typewritten death threats, and yet another meeting they had scheduled between the Taliban and Karzai’s representatives was derailed at the last minute by shadowy forces. In both cases, it seemed that ISI elements were responsible, and the Norwegians soon accepted that the gears of power driving the conflict were beyond their control. Peace in Afghanistan rested on a catch-22: Without talks, the war would never end, and as long as the war continued, there could be no talks.

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  RICHARD HOLBROOKE WAS DETERMINED to close out his diplomatic career with an achievement no one else could claim. But from his first days on the job, when he was faced with the déjà vu rescue of David Rohde from a more unreachable captivity than what had trapped him in Bosnia, Holbrooke knew that peace in Afghanistan was a distant dream. He also knew that he needed an expert from outside the Beltway, and before Obama was sworn into office, Holbrooke called Barnett “Barney” Rubin, a New York University professor who he believed could light a path through the Taliban’s murky power structure.

  Rubin was a senior fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation, sometimes working out of the program’s Abu Dhabi campus, and had been writing about Afghanistan for nearly thirty years. He could read and write in Arabic; speak Urdu, Hindi, and a bit of Dari; and had access to a broad network of contacts across the Muslim world, especially in Kabul. (Karzai’s own spokesman had previously worked for him at NYU.) From his efforts with the UN Development Programme, Rubin had met former Taliban leaders from Omar’s inner circle, and when Holbrooke contacted him, he had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan as a guest of a policy think tank working on reconciliation. There, he had met with former ISI directors general and former ISI officers who had worked with the mujahideen, the Taliban, and other militant proxies. Few Americans could match Rubin’s insights into the region’s obscure social and tribal hierarchies, and Holbrooke told him to begin at the beginning: Find out who speaks for Mullah Omar.

  Holbrooke and Clinton saw an opportunity to recreate the aggressive peace-through-strength diplomacy that had worked in their favor in Bosnia. Obama’s surge would pin down the Taliban militarily, weaken its negotiating position, and force it to accept American terms up front. Or at least that was the idea. As Rubin began quietly working his contacts in the Middle East, Holbrooke navigated his own channels in Washington. Difficult as it might be to get the Taliban to the table, he knew that convincing the White House, Pentagon, and Congress would be just as hard.

  Rubin has a dry wit and wears a white beard and a shock of white hair over wire-frame glasses. His overall effect is more hip rabbi than technocratic wonk. But iconoclasm was precisely why Holbrooke had brought him on—to shake up a war-planning bureaucracy seized by perpetual spasms of internal gridlock. Rubin was dismayed, for instance, that the Obama White House had retained what he saw as an outdated and misguided Bush-era counternarcotics policy of poppy eradication. The U.S. government should focus its powers on heroin traffickers, he thought, not on poor uneducated farmers.

  “The peasants that grow the flowers are not our enemy,” he said. “In fact, we’re trying to win them
over, and destroying their livelihood is not a good way to do that.”

  Living in New York and reporting only to Holbrooke, Rubin conducted his initial outreach more or less in secret. As he explained it to his new boss in a December 2008 memo, some of Rubin’s best contacts included people who “might be easier and more effective to utilize from a base partly outside the government.”

  In April 2009, Holbrooke formalized Rubin’s role, hiring him on as a special government employee of the SRAP office at the State Department. He obtained a Top Secret/Special Compartmented Information security clearance and later that month flew to Kabul to meet with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and an early associate of Mullah Omar. Zaeef’s life told its own story of the war. Following 9/11, he had hosted press conferences as the public face of the Taliban taunting the U.S. government. In December 2001, two weeks after he applied for formal asylum in Pakistan, the ISI detained him in Islamabad; five months later he was shipped off to join his comrades in Guantanamo Bay. Though he was a high-ranking Taliban official deemed to have ties to al-Qaeda, and while his time as a detainee in Cuba was marked by belligerent noncompliance, the Bush administration released Zaeef on September 11, 2005. Back in Kabul, he reconciled with Karzai’s government, wrote a memoir, and gained a reputation as the kind of moderate Taliban who could bridge the diplomatic divide.

  Zaeef told Rubin that the Taliban wanted to negotiate. They believed that the Norwegians and Germans had been sincere in their peacemaking desires. The problem was the United States, which broke its promises to those who had cooperated and seemed intent on fighting the war forever. Nevertheless, Zaeef said, if and when the Americans were ready to talk, the Taliban was as well—assuming that a few essential conditions were met up front.

  First, ISAF troops needed to leave Afghanistan. Second, the Taliban needed assurances that their envoys would not be arrested when they traveled to talks. Third, the Taliban wanted to run a brick-and-mortar diplomatic office—in Saudi Arabia. Finally, the U.S. needed to release six Taliban detainees from Guantanamo; these men would help run the Saudi office.

  The Saudi royal family had been pursuing this mediation role for years, with intelligence chief Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz leading the effort. The royals saw geopolitical opportunities in peacemaking. Beyond the international prestige, the kingdom could strengthen its bonds with Washington while also weakening Iranian influence in Afghanistan. For Prince Muqrin, however, the main challenge was figuring out what exactly the Americans wanted. Muqrin complained that he was receiving totally conflicting requests from the State Department, which wanted help finding Taliban officials to speak with, and his CIA contacts, who demanded that he detain more of the Taliban officials on its blacklist.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Muqrin pleaded to Rubin. “Talk to them or arrest them?”

  About two months after his meeting with Zaeef in Kabul, Rubin was back in Holbrooke’s office on the first floor of the State Department when he first heard about the captured American soldier. His time with Zaeef had led Rubin to believe that peace and reconciliation talks were inevitable. With Bergdahl in Taliban captivity, a prisoner exchange now looked equally unavoidable.

  “I knew before I started that the Taliban, if we ever met them, would ask for the release of those five guys from Guantanamo,” Rubin said. Originally, the request was for six, but in 2011, following the death of Mullah Awal Gul, it dropped to five.

  Rubin was on vacation in the south of France later that summer when he received a call from a Saudi national and former mujahideen who asked him to fly to Dubai to meet in person. When Rubin arrived, the old soldier said he had a message of peace. Mullah Omar wanted to talk to the Americans, and the Saudis could connect them to the one man with the authority to speak for him: Tayeb Agha.

  Rubin knew the name. He had met Agha before; in 1998, the young man had served as an interpreter for an interview Rubin conducted with a Taliban official in Kandahar. He knew that Agha was close to Mullah Omar, had been traveling to the Arab Gulf States on fund-raising trips for the Taliban, and, ergo, was about to be sanctioned by the U.S. government. Rubin told Holbrooke the good news, followed by the bad: Agha was their most promising lead yet, but the Treasury Department was going to ban him from traveling to countries that would work with the U.S. to detain him.

  Before the issue could be addressed, Rubin learned that the Saudis had backed out as mediator. There had been a feud between the Taliban and the Saudi royal family; a disagreement had grown into an argument that blew up into a fight, and by the time Rubin heard about it, the Saudis were spreading rumors that Tayeb Agha was an Iranian double agent. But the falling-out proved only a minor setback for the Taliban. The Saudis weren’t the only courtiers in their ambit, and Agha moved on to a more reliable mediator: the German Federal Intelligence Service. In January 2010, Bernd Mützelburg, Germany’s special envoy to Afghanistan, invited Holbrooke and Rubin to a meeting in Abu Dhabi to share the news.

  It was the breakthrough that Holbrooke had been waiting for. The question he couldn’t yet answer was how his own government would respond. If the Norwegian efforts had revealed the schism between moderate and hard-line Taliban, Obama’s surge had divided the U.S. government in similar ways. With record numbers of young American soldiers and spies fighting and dying, diplomacy was anathema to the Pentagon, CIA, and their oversight committees in Congress. Talks would mean accepting the unacceptable reality that the Taliban would never be defeated.

  At the White House, Obama had retained Lieutenant General Douglas Lute as his unofficial “war czar.” First appointed by President Bush in 2007 to manage the unmanageable, Lute was seen as a low-key and pragmatic problem solver. Under Obama, Lute formed the Conflict Resolution Cell (CRC), a classified group of senior advisers recruited from the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, and NSC; it was an interagency group that by design represented the full range of policy options and internal conflicts. The Pentagon wanted to keep fighting; the CIA was having a banner year with its drones; and despite Holbrooke’s assurances from the Germans, no one from Langley or DoD had seen any proof that the Taliban was genuinely interested in peace.

  Sitting among the military brass, Rubin was out of his academic element, but certain in his belief. “The Taliban want to talk,” he told them, and there was no harm in listening.

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  “WE’RE GONNA NEED YOU full time,” Holbrooke barked to Rubin over the phone later that summer. All of a sudden, the White House was ready; Tayeb Agha was ready; and for Rubin, the part-time gig as Washington’s foremost secret diplomat wasn’t going to fly any longer. He and Holbrooke were on the verge of opening the highest-level wartime peace talks since Vietnam, but almost no one in the U.S. government knew about it. Hillary Clinton had given Holbrooke a long leash, and Lute had granted Holbrooke’s request not to share the update from Germany with the Pentagon or CIA. Since Rubin reported only to Holbrooke at the time and enjoyed relative isolation as a special government employee, his was an unencumbered role that drove some bureaucrats mad.

  “Once or twice people got wind of my activities and accused me of violating policy,” Rubin said. “I asked them to write down what I had done and what policies I had supposedly violated. They had nothing.”

  In late October 2010, with approval from Clinton, Gates, and President Obama, Holbrooke put the plan in motion. He assigned Frank Ruggiero, the State Department deputy who had been trapped on his Kandahar base a year earlier, as the lead negotiator. He would be joined by two military men on loan from the Pentagon: NSC deputy and DIA analyst Jeff Hayes, and Army colonel Chris Kolenda, one of Gates’s most trusted aides. The German intelligence service (the Bundesnachrichtendienst) would handle the logistics, hosting the first meeting on November 28 in a safe house outside Munich.

  After years of diplomatic jockeying, the Germans had become the only party trusted by all sides. A
fghans had a kinship with the Germans dating back nearly a hundred years based on their shared histories of going to war with the British and the Russians (and now the Americans)—somewhat awkward facts for U.S. national security meetings. But the Afghans saw the Germans, as NDS chief Saleh told Rubin in a meeting with Karzai, as “a different species” of white Europeans. Scientific accuracy aside, the sentiments were sufficiently widespread to give Karzai and the Taliban some common ground.

  Secrecy in Munich was a top concern. At the White House, Obama agreed that Agha could travel without being arrested by U.S. authorities. Despite that direct presidential approval, Lute decided not to share the plans with his Conflict Resolution Cell. Though the group’s very existence was compartmented and highly classified, Lute believed—just as Holbrooke, Støre, and Mützelburg had before him—that some elements of the U.S. government could not be trusted.

  Three days after Thanksgiving 2010, Ruggiero, Hayes, and Kolenda arrived at a safe house in a sleepy Munich suburb that had been locked down with a security perimeter ahead of the talks. Agha flew in on a German jet in Western clothes, his hair and beard trimmed in the Western style. Though he was one of Mullah Omar’s closest aides, Agha was also something of a Taliban rarity: a literate, sophisticated English speaker equally comfortable lingering over a gourmet meal in a luxury Gulf State hotel as he was holding an AK-47 and drinking chai in a mud-walled qalat in Quetta.

  Before Ruggiero left for Munich, Clinton had laid out her negotiation guidelines, which weren’t much different from the demands that President Bush had made in the fall of 2001. If there was to be peace, the United States had three nonnegotiable terms: First, the Taliban would need to stop fighting; second, break off their lingering relations with al-Qaeda; and third, agree to accept and abide by the Afghan constitution. Outside of those redlines, Clinton said she was open to “creative diplomacy.” Above all, Holbrooke told Ruggiero before he left, “the most important objective of the first meeting is to have a second meeting.”