88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  For a few days after 9/11, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had gone silent. The normal flow of secret message traffic had dwindled to a trickle. It was as though the American giant had been staggered. Then, in the days immediately preceding George’s call, the giant had come back to life, and Langley was pummeling me with questions and demands.

  We were facing the imminent prospect of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. I had visions of large numbers of U.S. troops operating in a vast and difficult terrain, trying in vain to find and strike an evanescent enemy, with no defined targets and no clear long-term objectives. This seemed like a prescription for a Soviet-style Afghan disaster.

  Just a few days before, on September 19, one of my officers had gathered our first piece of “smoking gun” evidence of al-Qa’ida’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Our best source on the Afghan Arabs—an agent who had been carefully vetted and whose information had been fully corroborated dozens of times—had attended a meeting of over 100 Arab fighters hosted by bin Laden near Jalalabad, in northeastern Afghanistan. Contradicting his previous public denials of responsibility for 9/11, in this private gathering Shaykh Osama had taken full and triumpant credit for the attacks. He exulted over what he said was an imminent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which would at last draw the Americans into open combat and surely lead to their defeat. I shared the desire to deal with bin Laden once and for all; but I also feared that if we acted carelessly, his prediction could prove accurate.

  As George was talking, my mind was focused on President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech three days before, on September 20. Speaking before the joint houses of Congress, with British prime minister Tony Blair in attendance, the president had laid the cornerstone of a conceptual framework to guide the way forward. The speech had been replete with demands and ultimatums for the Taliban: Turn over Osama bin Laden; close the terrorist training camps and subject them to international inspection; deliver all terrorist fighters associated with bin Laden to competent foreign authorities. Failure to do so, Bush said, would condemn the Taliban to share the terrorists’ fate.

  Hidden in that hard message, however, was a ray of hope and the possibility of redemption. The president was drawing a line in the sands of time. As of 9/11, he was saying, the rules of the game had changed. Henceforth, nations and subnational groups who acted as sponsors of terrorism would be held to account. There was an implicit opportunity for erstwhile terrorist sponsors to reject terrorist tactics and those responsible for them. That opportunity was the message I thought we should extend to elements of the Taliban, and to all Afghans willing to break with the Taliban policies of the past. Reinforced by the international solidarity which had immediately manifested itself after 9/11, that positive message would guide our policy, and provide the justification and the rationale we would need as we took what would most likely be the tough military actions necessary to bring al-Qa’ida to heel and to deny it safehaven.

  “The President has set the policy for us in his speech,” I said. “In effect, he has invited the Taliban to join the international coalition against terrorism.

  “We shouldn’t think about this primarily in military terms. What’s important is for us to focus on our political goals in Afghanistan. We can’t permanently rule the country ourselves. Everything we do should be consistent with the long-term need to create a new political dispensation in Afghanistan, one willing to drive out the Arabs and to keep them out. Any military means we employ should be designed to serve and to reinforce our political objectives.

  “We begin with Mullah Omar. Our initial demands focus on him. If he refuses to change policy, to break with bin Laden, we hit him. That serves notice on the others in the Taliban leadership, who have never much liked bin Laden or the Arabs anyway. We extend the promise and the ultimatum to them, and if they refuse, we have the rationale to hit them too.” George stopped me with questions.

  “Mr. Director,” I said, “this isn’t going to work. I need to write this all down clearly.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s 11:30 PM here, and I’m meeting the helicopter at 6:00 AM tomorrow for Camp David. I need to get some rest. Can you get something to me by 5:00 AM?”

  I told him I could. As I sat at my desk to write, it was as if I were merely transcribing something I could see plainly in my head.

  This was breaking all the rules. No one knew that better. Every CIA officer is taught that we are never to be “policy prescriptive.” CIA’s job is to inform policy, never to make it. I had just spent three years as chief of “the Farm,” the Clandestine Service’s equivalent of West Point for the Army and Parris Island for the Marines, where it was my job to make sure that the next generation of CIA officers knew its proper place in the world. And yet here I was, purposefully violating one of the cardinal rules I had spent a career upholding.

  There wasn’t an approved format for the piece I was writing. I framed it as an “Aardwolf,” CIA’s code name for a chief of station field appraisal. Such appraisals, analytic pieces from senior CIA representatives abroad, are relatively rare, prepared only in response to watershed events. They get a lot of attention from high levels in the executive branch. I knew the senior reports officers at CIA Headquarters, who normally reviewed all incoming intelligence reports for conformity to format and adherence to the rules, would not be pleased when they saw a field appraisal specifically intended to prescribe policy. Their ranks traditionally dominated by women, the senior reports cadres were sometimes waggishly referred to, sotto voce, as “the Sisterhood.” To me they were the Vestals, the guardians of the flame.

  But they wouldn’t get a vote. They would see this chief of station field appraisal, but only after the fact: it was going directly to Tenet, outside normal channels, for his own use with the cabinet principals.

  I banged out the piece, eight pages, in three hours. By the time I was finished, all my senior guys were in the office, and I circulated the draft to them, made modifications based on their comments, and sent it on to the director’s security staff with instructions to hand it to him as soon as he awakened.

  It would be days before I learned of its fate. George had reviewed it at five in the morning and had immediately sent copies to the full War Cabinet, who used it as the point of departure for their discussions, held without the president present, that Sunday morning. The principals presented their conclusions to the president in the White House Situation Room the following day and, after more discussion, the eight-page document was approved by President Bush as the conceptual template for the war effort. Tenet was directed to put me in touch with General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command (CENTCOM), and the senior combatant commander charged with leading the Afghan campaign, to make sure his war plan conformed.

  Later that week, at a meeting with a UK official in Islamabad, he told me that my report had been briefed to the British Cabinet. “You’ve got the silver pen!” he said.

  I regard that cable as the best three hours of work I ever did in a twenty-seven-year career. The mere fact that a CIA field officer was asked to write it, to say nothing of the fact that it was adopted as policy, is extraordinary. Despite its flaws, it anticipated many of the problems with which the United States and its allies are struggling now in Afghanistan, over a decade on, and it suggested remedies—some followed, some not; some effective, some not. Adopted at an early point when opinions were still malleable, it established many of the key assumptions that governed the conduct of the early campaign in Afghanistan—sometimes, admittedly, to an extent more literal than was helpful. But those assumptions reflected the eternal verities of Afghanistan, as America has subsequently learned to its cost.

  Thirteen years have passed since 9/11. The improbably quick victory won by small numbers of CIA and Special Forces operatives allied with anti-Taliban dissidents in what we might call the First American-Afghan War has nearly faded from memory. Our “victory” proved short-lived. After a pause of perhaps three years, the
United States again found itself at war with the Taliban in what we might call the Second American-Afghan War. Only this time, the comparatively modest objectives of the first war had been replaced with an over-ambitious set of millennial nation-building goals which Americans could not achieve and Afghans could not sustain.

  Many of the principles of my cable, which guided the American effort in the first war, had long been abandoned by the start of the second. The original plan postulated that while the United States should support the Northern Alliance—the collection of Afghan minorities who traditionally opposed the Taliban and were locked in a civil war with it—we should strictly avoid the perception that we were entering a civil war on their side. To do so would cause the restive and more numerous Pashtuns, from whom the Taliban was drawn, to coalesce firmly against us. Instead, any effort against the Taliban must include dissident Pashtun elements, beginning if possible within the Taliban itself. I asserted firm rules of conduct: America must keep its military footprint in Afghanistan small; it should eschew permanent bases; the U.S. effort should always be in support of Afghans, rather than the other way around; most important, the American quest to deny Afghan sanctuary to international terrorists should conform to the political culture of the country, rather than fall into the trap of trying to change it.

  The second war is coming to an end. There will be no victory in this war, illusory or otherwise. Having concluded, correctly, that the prospects for success in the terms it had originally defined are too remote, and the associated costs far too high, the Obama administration has decided to withdraw substantially from Afghanistan.

  This recalibration of the U.S. posture in South-Central Asia would be welcome if it were conducted in support of a viable and sustainable long-term American engagement in the region. Instead, the planned post-2014 American military posture in Afghanistan is merely a cover for what the U.S. government actually intends: the abandonment of Afghanistan.

  If America’s problems in South-Central Asia were confined to Afghanistan itself, the situation would not be so dire. But the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its aftermath have unleashed forces within neighboring Pakistan that have further radicalized that country and undermined the political and social underpinnings of a nuclear-armed state of some 180 million people. America’s obsession with Afghanistan has put our country’s far more important interests in Pakistan in serious jeopardy. Now, having caused more harm than good by trying to do too much, we are set to compound our errors by doing too little.

  The challenges that confront us today are remarkably similar to those we faced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Afghanistan is again reverting to civil war, and the religiously inspired radicalism that provided an incubator for the 9/11 terrorists is, if anything, stronger in both Afghanistan and Pakistan than when we were attacked. As it has done before, America is trying to wash its hands of South-Central Asia. As before, that may not be so easy, and we may not be able to live with the consequences of our abandonment.

  For those who will be charged with future U.S. policy in the region, greater acquaintance with the history surrounding America’s first direct military involvement in Afghanistan, and the reasoning that led to our initial successes there, might well usefully inform their—and our—judgments as we prepare for the possibility of yet another phase of our Afghan adventure. It is my hope that a grasp of the practical lessons learned by this writer and his colleagues in the First American-Afghan War, and an understanding of how our distraction from those lessons led to the failure of the Second, will yet prove to be of use as and when America and its allies are forced to embark upon a Third.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  THE SUBVERSIVE

  A PLUMP, MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN perched on the edge of a battleship gray metal desk. Her expression conveyed intelligence, confidence, humor, empathy—and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Call it an unusual form of detachment: Here was someone who could evaluate you clinically, but do so with such charm that you weren’t put off. She seemed both intrigued and faintly amused by me.

  With a three-by-five file card in hand, I had literally wandered in off the street into this unprepossessing, unmarked government office in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the bridge from Washington, D.C. I had no clear idea what I was there for. A series of appointments had been made for me, and this was simply the next one on the list, neatly typed by my congressman’s legislative assistant. Joe Early, Democrat from the Third Massachusetts District, was my wife’s second cousin. My brothers-in-law were precinct captains; my father-in-law had worked in Early’s last election. In a transaction recognizable to those familiar with old-fashioned Massachusetts ward politics, the congressman had done a favor for the loyal extended family of a rather clueless, long-haired twenty-three-year-old.

  Long-haired and clueless though I was, “Dotty,” the CIA recruiter, seemed to have all the time in the world for me. She asked questions about my background. I really couldn’t fathom why; there was little remarkable about it. The dutiful eldest son in a Catholic family of seven children, I had grown up in a comfortable house in a comfortable suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. My childhood had been simple and relatively happy. The nuns who taught me in the local parochial school may have been self-congratulatory in their virtue, but they offered a marvelous education. My summers were spent playing baseball, running through the woods, swimming with friends in our pool, and voraciously reading the biographies of American explorers and military heroes. Unsurprisingly, my instincts growing up were both conservative and deeply patriotic.

  In something of a departure for my family, but perhaps reflective of American upward mobility, at least as it’s sometimes expressed in the Northeast, I was sent away at fifteen to Williston Academy, an old-line brick-and-ivy New England boarding prep school, the sort of place where, in those days, the teachers were still called “masters,” and the boys dressed in jacket and tie for dinner. Although the student body was liberally salted with the names of ethnic Catholics like me, and even a few Jews, the history and tone of the place, symbolized by the Episcopal chapel whose spire dominated the campus, was pure New England WASP. It was an environment that suited me. The sense of social privilege and corresponding obligation that subtly but thoroughly permeated the culture of the school felt comfortable.

  Even Williston was not immune to the social and political ferment of the late sixties and early seventies, but the radical student activism of that anti–Vietnam War period left me cold. The university protesters of my generation, for all their proclaimed idealism, struck me as anything but altruistic: it seemed obvious to me that they didn’t really care a fig about the Vietnamese; they simply didn’t want to be shot at. The supposed vanguard of my generation appeared to me to be transparently self-serving, self-indulgent, and largely ignorant of the American institutions they denigrated.

  Ever since my boyhood brushes with John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, and General Douglas MacArthur, I had dreamed of attending one of the military service academies. During my “Upper-Middler” (Junior) year at Williston, I got a pair of nominations to Annapolis, and went with my father for a guided tour of the campus during Plebe Summer. The evident discomfort of the Plebes notwithstanding, I was intrigued by the culture of the place, and by what I perceived as the necessity to simultaneously embrace and resist its heavy authoritarianism. That, too, suited me. I was ready to go ahead with my application.

  Neither the antimilitary spirit of the times not the attitudes of my classmates could dissuade me, but my father could, and did. Ours was a highly independent family, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times my dad tried directly to influence me on anything. But this was one of those times. “Just remember,” he said. “If you join the Navy, you won’t spend your career doing what you think is best for you; you’ll do what someone else thinks is best for the Navy.” That gave me pause; I opted, instead, for a civilian education. But as I look back, I can see a young man ins
tinctively primed for a life of public service, even if he was largely unconscious of the reasons for it, and had no idea where his proclivities might lead.

  In those days, and particularly among the prep school set, it was expected that if you did well, you would naturally go to one of the “good” schools. For me, reflecting typical New England parochialism, that meant the Ivy League. When I arrived at Dartmouth, though, something changed. I had worked so hard to get there, but now, to my surprise, it felt like I had merely traded a small prep school for a bigger one. Going to college was supposed to be moving on; this felt like treading water. I rebelled, at least after a fashion. Rather than focusing on my studies, in my first year I set about addressing what I felt were the real gaps in my education. I spent much more time than was prudent hitchhiking around New England to see friends. I learned to drink, was introduced to recreational drugs, and began seriously dating girls. My grades slipped badly. My parents were shocked.

  The summer after that first year, my dad pulled me aside for one of our rare little chats. A successful contractor, he framed the problem in straightforward business terms: “When I agreed to pay for your college education, I saw it as an investment,” he said. “Right now, this isn’t looking like a good one.” My grades improved thereafter, but I remained naive, idealistic, and wildly impractical. I had no idea what sort of career I might want, and while I understood the need for money, its pursuit held no interest. College, it seemed to me, was a time to discover fundamental truths: I became a philosophy major.

  The Philosophy Department at Dartmouth did not prove a good fit. With few exceptions, my college professors were a disappointment to me. I had expected to find earnest seekers of truth. What I generally found instead were smart, glib fellows who knew a great deal about what other people thought. Hanover, New Hampshire, is a beautiful place, and I enjoyed the company of an eclectic group of characters in the ramshackle, countercultural fraternity I joined. But they and the few compatible professors I found were a limited antidote to the college experience itself. For reasons that said more about me than them, many of those around me seemed self-satisfied, conventional, and oddly anti-intellectual. Eager to get out of school, I managed to complete my studies in three years, which left me with the suddenly acute problem of what to do next.