by Bob Graham
“I wish I’d been able to see him play.”
“You would have been proud. I remember when Dad told the sports editor of the Post about Tony Ramos and several of the other Cuban ballplayers. He said the Washington Senators should pick them up; the only thing they could do would be to improve the weakest team in the American League. But that was a couple of years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, and the Senators were not about to do that in a southern-culture town like this one.”
“That was my grandfather’s dream, to play in the major leagues, and I know he would want me to thank your father.”
Billington paused to pour two glasses of water. After offering one to Tony he sipped and continued, “That was yesterday and today is now. I’d like to ask a question.”
“Yes sir.”
“Mark Block is not an easy grader, and he has given you very high marks. I’m satisfied you have several of the aptitudes we will need for the inquiry, so I’m more interested in motivation. Why do you want to break your INR career path to take this on?”
Tony leaned forward. “I think the president has fundamentally mischaracterized 9/11 as the beginning of a war on terrorism. It is not a war unless we make it one. This is not a war. It is an intelligence and paramilitary operation against a relatively small and enormously outgunned enemy.”
“What do you mean by ‘relatively small’?” the senator asked.
“A week after 9/11, my current boss asked the head of the INR how many terrorists were there in the world?”
“And what did he estimate?”
“He said if you define a terrorist as a person who has been through training camps like al-Qaeda’s in Afghanistan, or Hezbollah’s in Syria or Lebanon, and who belongs to an organization prepared to use those acquired skills, he estimated 100,000. I don’t disparage that figure, but it’s hardly the Viet Cong, or Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf.”
“So, that’s why you want to join our inquiry staff?”
“Yes sir. To understand the nature, objectives, and capabilities of our enemy. And also to understand why we have exaggerated its threat. Those are some of the questions I think your inquiry can answer.”
“Tony, that is a very thoughtful statement of our mission. I want you on the team.”
JULY 15
Washington, D.C.
Bag slung over his left shoulder, Tony waved goodbye to Mark as he walked to his 2005 black Mustang and began the short ride to the State Department gym. While he was growing up in Hialeah, the Mustang had been a symbol of all he yearned for. Black was an affirmation of his ethnic pride. The twenty-minute drive was Tony’s chance to focus on his agenda for the day.
He showered and dressed in a patterned black Zegna suit. He was not one of the fitness-obsessed regulars in the gym, but he spent enough time on the treadmill and free weights to stay in competitive tennis shape. After his special ops training, it almost seemed like spa treatment. As Tony examined the reflection of his six-foot frame in the mirror, adjusting his Ann Hand red American eagle print tie, he took satisfaction that he weighed five pounds less in his mid-thirties than at his Georgetown graduation, and the same as when he left the military.
Heads turned as he stepped into the elevator. He wasn’t called the “Will Smith” of State for nothing.
On Monday, he’d been notified of an 8:45 meeting in the office of his boss, Ambassador William Talbott, assistant secretary of state for Central and South Asia. When he arrived, Tony was surprised to see his next-door-office mate and occasional nemesis, Benjamin Willis Brewster, leaning over Talbott’s desk.
“Mr. Ambassador, the Saudis are dumfounded with the rush to leave Iraq again,” Brewster intoned in his aristocratic New England accent. “Less than eighteen months after we pulled our combat troops out of Iraq, the country was tearing itself apart in a civil war, and the president has sent them back in again. Now there is serious consideration of transferring a division of those soldiers to Afghanistan. In my judgment the kingdom is legitimately concerned with our vacillation, and if we reduce our new troop commitment precipitously, Iraq will implode into even more violent conflict and an eventual Yugoslavian-style partition.”
Shit, thought Tony as he entered the office. The jerk’s given in to two of the longest-running diseases at State: Arabism—an excessive affection for the Muslim world—and going native—allowing that affection to distort your loyalties.
Talbott stood as he saw Tony and pointed to an empty chair.
Brewster glanced condescendingly over his left shoulder at Tony and then continued. “And at a practical level this administration has reached the same conclusion. Its rationale is not what might happen in the future but how to keep Iraq from unraveling while it is still in charge. As long as this administration is in power, Iraq will be the priority, so why waste our credibility at the White House and on the Hill by taking a contrary position?”
Tony could say there were few people he didn’t like or who didn’t like him. Benjamin W. Brewster was a notable exception. A couple of years behind Tony in age and service, he had the same portfolio for Saudi Arabia that Tony held for Afghanistan. Raised amongst old money and hereditary privilege, Brewster had a cultivated aversion to those he considered his inferiors. Tony, a street-smart Miami Cuban, was near the top of his most-disdained list. This was not the first time they had been in open conflict for Talbott’s attention and support.
Talbott turned to Tony. “Mr. Brewster is making the case that Thursday’s testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee should give equal weight to maintaining our position in Iraq as to expanding our troop strength in Afghanistan. Has he convinced you?”
“In a word, no,” Tony responded.
Brewster turned to face him. “Ramos, you’re locked into the notion that the war in Iraq was, and always will be, a mistake. You’ve lost whatever capacity you had to be pragmatic and strategic.”
Tony started to rise from his seat toward Brewster, but a disapproving glance from Talbott sat him back down again. He contented himself to fantasize about punching Brewster in his soft, bulbous stomach.
“Mr. Brewster,” Tony declared, “I know you don’t like to compare today’s war in Iraq with Vietnam in the 1960s and President Johnson’s determination to avoid a military defeat on his watch. But that is just the trap we have slipped into, whether you call it surge or reset or some other macho word. The objective of your Iraq strategy is to save this president that embarrassment, and paying for it with more body bags. How many more Americans do we have to sacrifice to allow the president to declare ‘I didn’t lose a war’?”
“They’re all volunteers,” said Brewster. “They knew what they were signing up for.”
So typical, thought Tony. It’s so easy to fight a war from behind a desk thousands of miles away. He wished for a moment that there was still a draft and that he could be the one to kick Brewster’s fat ass around in boot camp.
Tony simply replied, “And since you brought up Yugoslavia, let me remind you Iraq was also a made-up country, created at the end of World War I, putting people who despised each other under the same flag. The idea that you can take disparate tribes and make them live together only works under a despotic strongman, like Tito or Saddam. And what have we accomplished? Just making Iraq an easy take for Iran instead of maintaining a balance of power in the region.”
“And what is your grand strategy, Mr. Kennan?”
Tony inwardly cringed at Brewster’s reference to the architect of the Cold War containment strategy against the Soviets. It was historical name–dropping, just to impress the boss. Fortunately, Talbott’s unchanging expression betrayed no such effect.
“To cut our losses from your war and get back in the game where it counts.”
They glared at each other until Talbott warned, “Gentlemen, this is a serious policy issue and what we decide here might actually make a difference.”
“Ambassador, it surely will,” Tony responded. “Afghanistan is central. If w
e fail there, Kabul will go to the Taliban, and Pakistan, already shaky as hell, to al-Qaeda. There will be a firestorm in India. The nations with the sixth- and seventh-largest stashes of nuclear weapons will be eyeball to eyeball and no one will back down.”
Brewster interrupted imperiously. “Mr. Ramos, the president and the Congress have agreed—and you know that doesn’t happen often in this partisan city—that Iraq is the priority. What are your credentials to go before the Senate Foreign Relations committee and challenge them?”
“Common sense and a responsibility to use it for the American people. If we had not been distracted into Iraq, al-Qaeda would have long since been dispatched. Instead, it has been strengthened. Next to al-Qaeda, the primary beneficiary of our Iraq misadventures has been Iran. We have converted Iraq from being Iran’s primary regional rival into Iran’s Shia surrogate.”
Tony recalled an incident Senator Billington had described during the early days of the 2002 inquiry. The senator had just returned from Central Command in Tampa. The purpose was a briefing on the state of the Afghanistan war. The briefing was military-crisp and the outcome upbeat. The United States and its foreign and indigenous allies were rolling the Taliban. Billington was reassured until he was asked to join Central Command’s commander in his private office. Behind closed doors he was told the truth.
“Senator, we are no longer engaged in a war in Afghanistan,” the general said.
Clearly surprised, Billington asked the general to explain.
“To prepare for a war in Iraq, military and intelligence personnel are being withdrawn. The predators, which have been a key part of our air superiority, are being relocated. The special ops units which have been working with the Northern Alliance since before the Russians were kicked out are being moved west and replaced with units from Colombia. Those units performed in an exemplary manner in the South American jungles, but there aren’t many jungles or Spanish speakers in Afghanistan. Senator, we could eliminate al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the rest of them here and now, but not if we don’t have the soldiers and equipment to do it.”
Billington said that was the first time he fully realized that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made and that the consequences of that decision were playing out in real time in Afghanistan.
The general continued. “After we finish the job there, my next priority would be Somalia. It has no effective government to control the growing number of terrorist cells. Next would be Yemen. Its president is willing to help in the war on its home-grown terrorists, but he has no capabilities.
“Iraq, that’s another story. Our intelligence there is very unsatisfactory. Some Europeans know more about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction than we do, but we don’t want to listen.”
Tony thought what a different world it would be if we had listened to the general.
Up to a point, Talbott appreciated what he called healthy debate. He had reached that point and passed it. “Sit down,” he commanded, “both of you. Mr. Ramos, I want you to continue working on my testimony as we discussed yesterday. I want to see it no later than three o’clock. Mr. Brewster, I have another assignment for you. Report back here at five.”
Brewster followed Tony through the office door. When they were out of Talbott’s range, Tony turned. “The Saudi portfolio must be pretty fucking dull if all you’ve got to do is suck up to the ambassador. Or is it just part of your overall career path?”
Brewster smiled condescendingly. “You know, Ramos, if I’d been brought up the way you were, I suppose I would be just as jealous and resentful.”
Tony entered his office and slammed the door.
His windowless cubbyhole was on the second floor of the Marshall wing of the Truman Building, the official name of the Department of State headquarters. Tony had also been attracted to the INR by the diversity of challenges its mission offered. He experienced this range of topics—the continuing conflict in Kashmir, the economic surge of Singapore—in his first years of INR service. In May of his second year, after the latest military suppression of Buddhist monks in Myanmar, he was tapped to pull together and analyze all the open-source and clandestine intelligence. He produced an options paper for the secretary of state that she used in a speech to the Asia Society. But Myanmar was beyond the White House’s attention span. After her words there was no action.
Tony’s gray metal desk was covered with eighteen memos from the CIA and National Security Agency, the two agencies INR depended on for most of its raw clandestine intelligence; five cables from Kabul; and a short stack of pink telephone slips, arranged in order of priority.
Before turning to all of these competing demands, Tony retrieved Senator Billington’s recent op-ed from the New York Times website and reread it carefully from the beginning. One line popped out at him:The congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks left several secrets unanswered ...
For everyone else, this seemed to be old news. Yet John Billington was one of the few individuals Tony had met in public life who seemed to be able to take in the big picture—past, present, and future—in one view. He was one of the few who truly understood the Shakespearean quotation carved onto the entablature of the National Archives building on Constitution Avenue: “What’s past is prologue.” And by the end of the op-ed, he had certainly made his case.
The United States should take prompt action to prevent this potential conflict from becoming a reality.
Billington had a reputation for not mincing words, and Tony was impressed that in supposed retirement, he was still so engaged. Resurfacing the suggestions that the Saudis could have been involved with the al-Qaeda attacks was pretty damn provocative. No wonder there’d been a firestorm of protest over the piece. But Saudi Arabia was another analyst’s territory. Tony had his hands full with Afghanistan.
And his interest in Afghanistan was very personal. At graduation he was commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant. With his athletic ability and facility for language, he was a natural for special operations. With basic and advanced training completed, Tony was assigned to a mixed unit of army and intelligence officers preparing to be inserted with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
Since the Taliban had taken control of the country after the forced eviction of the Soviets, this tribe of tribes operating downhill from the Himalayas had emerged as the primary resistance force.
One memory had never left him—as vivid and searing as the day it happened.
On a cold April morning, Tony was on his horse bareback, hidden in the niche of a hill overlooking a grassland valley. On the near side of the opening was a wooden-fenced enclosure that in other times had confined sheep and goats. A scattering of men dressed in the rough pants and parkas of these highlands sat on the top railings. From the south entrance to the enclosure a horse convoy of a dozen men and three fully clothed women entered. They stopped in front of recently cut stakes driven into the muddy ground at the center of the enclosure.
With their robes wrapped around their waists and hands strapped tightly together, the women were pulled from their wooden seats and dragged to the poles.
On the hill, Tony turned to his partner Amal. In colloquial Pashto, he asked, “What in the hell is going on?”
Shifting on his steed, eyes focused on the scene below, Amal responded in kind, “I don’t know but it looks like Sharia law being fulfilled.”
“What are they doing?” Tony asked urgently.
“In past times this would have been within the families. Now, they are also an offense against Allah and society.”
“And what does that mean?”
Amal waited to respond until the women had each been roped against a stake. Four men encircled each of them and unsheathed their swords. They cut loose the women’s cotton chadaris, leaving them exposed to the eyes of the males and the swirls of icy, gusty wind.
“They have violated the rules of cohabitation, found with a nonfamily male in a compromising circumstance,” answered Amal. “The
sanction is humiliation and flogging. It maybe death when their bodies are returned to the family. This is the Taliban way.”
From bags hung over the rumps of each horse, the men uncoiled leather whips. From his shoulder holster, Tony removed an M4 and nudged his horse toward the narrow path leading to the valley. Amal, surprised and confused, haltingly followed.
“Be careful, my friend,” Amal called out, inadvertently alerting the men below that they were not alone. Now using elemental English, he added, “They are doing what they have been told to do.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Tony replied.
He fired the first burst a meter above the captor’s heads, rattling the trees that encircled the flogging field. The dozen returned fire. One shot tore through the neck of Tony’s horse, which collapsed and threw Tony to the rough ground. Using the dead animal as cover, he pulled off another round. Two men keeled over. The remaining ten ran for the woods, with Tony kicking up sods of earth at their heels.
Still mounted, Amal passed Tony and cut the women free. He sliced up his night sack to give them a minimum of warmth and concealment. As Tony closed the distance on foot, Amal shouted out, “Only in our country a month, already a savior.”
Returning his mind to the present, Tony faced his current challenge: the fact that Afghanistan was again slipping back to the Taliban. Our commander on the ground tells us he needs at least 30,000 more troops, and he’s pretty damn sure they’re not going to come from the Belgians. Still, the administration is focused on avoiding a total fiasco in Iraq by sending the troops back, which they hope will save the November elections. Tony was among those who had always considered Iraq an optional war that had trumped the United States’ legitimate strategic interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the reality was that Afghanistan and Iraq were, and always had been, irreconcilable competitors for our attention and resources.
