88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  In the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the situation became particularly bad. By late autumn of 1994, the city was divided among rival warlords who ruled their fiefdoms with impunity. On the main highway passing through the area, drug-smoking criminal gangs set up roadblocks to extort travelers, sometimes seizing women from buses and raping them. A group of some thirty local clerics, all veterans of the jihad, and their students, or talibs, acting at the direction of an obscure former mujahed named Mullah Mohammed Omar whom they had sought out to lead them, openly declared themselves and ordered the criminal gangs to disperse. When they refused, Omar’s men attacked one of the most notorious of the criminal checkposts, where a pair of women from Herat recently had been raped, tortured, and killed, and drove them off. This caught both the attention and the imagination of the citizens of Kandahar, tired as they were of lawlessness and victimization, and a surprising dynamic quickly took hold. Local merchants provided the talibs—who called themselves the Taliban—with money, vehicles, and weapons.

  The Taliban had begun as one of many small, independent militias fighting against the Soviet occupiers around Kandahar during the jihad of the 1980s. What distinguished them from other groups was their overtly religious rather than tribal orientation. Their members were drawn from a generation of young refugees from the Soviet war, many of them orphans, who had grown up in camps inside neighboring Pakistan and been educated in madrassas, or Quranic schools. When they and others of their background returned permanently to Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, their estrangement from traditional Afghan life had left them with tenuous ties to tribe or place. Though many had fought against the Soviets or in the subsequent anarchy, they were of a younger generation than the discredited warlords. Following the mini-uprising against Kandahar’s criminal highwaymen, they flocked in large numbers to Omar’s movement. The Taliban quickly became a local political force to be reckoned with, and several of the principal warlords in the area joined, rather than fight them, setting a precedent for the future.

  From its initial modest successes around Kandahar in 1994, the Taliban movement spread rapidly northward like a cleansing flame. The misogynistic, strictly fundamentalist brand of Islam absorbed by its members in the madrassas of Pakistan was intolerant and unforgiving, but it was seen by many Afghans, beset by crime, lawlessness, and anarchy, as precisely what the country needed. The Taliban may have been primitive, but they were righteous. Their string of military successes over the next two years was based not so much on their military prowess as on the political embrace of the Afghan Pashtun population, which in many places rose up against their warlord oppressors as the Taliban approached. Large areas came over to the movement without a fight. By the end of September 1996, Kabul had fallen to them.

  But the Taliban’s attraction for Afghanistan’s Pashtun population did not extend to the other major ethnic groups, largely concentrated in the north of the country—the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, and the Hazaras. The Hazaras, religious Shiites, came in for especially brutal treatment at the hands of the Sunni Muslim Taliban. The ethnic minorities of the north banded together against the Taliban under the auspices of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (UIFSA)—popularly known as the Northern Alliance. By the time of my arrival, the Northern Alliance was locked in a bitter civil war with the Taliban and was being slowly pushed back into the far northern and northeastern reaches of the country.

  It is often alleged that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, created the Taliban. That is certainly untrue. But Islamabad was quick to embrace the student movement, and to provide it with support primarily through the ISI, seeing in it a means of unifying the fractious Afghans under the rule of Sunni Islamists with strong ties to Pakistan. The fact that the Taliban was willing to fight to the end against the Northern Alliance made it all the more worthy of support in Pakistani eyes, especially given the Alliance’s close ties to both Russia and India. Since the dawn of its existence, Pakistan has lived in pertpetual fear of being surrounded by hostile forces in thrall to India; in addition to its natural sympathy for their cause, Pakistan’s support of the Taliban was an obvious means of pursuing its larger geopolitical interests.

  Neither the continuing strife in Afghanistan nor Pakistan’s support to the obscure Taliban movement would have been of much concern to the U.S. government, had it not been for yet another actor in this regional drama: Osama bin Laden. Son of a billionaire Saudi construction magnate, bin Laden had played a marginal role in the anti-Soviet jihad, bankrolling a modest number of Arab fighters who had come to help defend Afghan Muslims against the godless invading Soviets. Radicalized by his experience in the 1980s, bin Laden became more so in 1990 as a result of Saudi Arabia’s willingness to host American troops sent to drive Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the First Gulf War. His vocal opposition to the U.S. troop presence in his native country soon came to the unfavorable attention of the Saudi government, and bin Laden was forced to seek refuge in Sudan, where his efforts to organize violent Islamic extremists into a new organization that he called al-Qa’ida or “the base” first brought him to the attention of CIA and the U.S. intelligence community. In response to persistent American complaints, Sudan eventually prevailed upon bin Laden to go elsewhere; and in 1996, just as the Taliban was consolidating its hold on Kabul, bin Laden and a small number of followers pitched up in Afghanistan.

  The numbers of these followers, most of them Arabs, steadily grew. They were not monolithic. Many came simply to support the Taliban and fight against the Northern Alliance. Eventually, they formed a separate military unit, the Arab 555 Brigade. Others sought terrorist and paramilitary training in the string of camps set up by al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan. Of these, only a relative few were vetted sufficiently to be allowed to swear bayat, an oath of loyalty to bin Laden, and to become formal members of al-Qa’ida. But although it may have been difficult for outsiders to distinguish among them, as a group these international followers of bin Laden were referred to by the Afghans themselves as the “Afghan Arabs.”

  Bin Laden’s “declaration of war” on the United States later that year of 1996 still did not attract much attention in the West, but the events in East Africa of August 1998 changed all that. The truck bombs that were set off nearly simultaneously at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, were quickly traced to al-Qa’ida and bin Laden. Within weeks, the United States launched retaliatory cruise missile strikes against several of bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. These were largely symbolic—the U.S. government couldn’t very well do nothing after the East Africa attack—and they predictably failed to hit their principal target; nonetheless, the Clinton administration was adamant thereafter that something be done about bin Laden. It demanded that Mullah Omar and the Taliban turn him over to American justice; when the Taliban refused, the United States imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions, and convinced the United Nations to do the same.

  American ardor for justice in the case of bin Laden did not extend to taking many risks to see it come to pass. Sending in U.S. commandos to take out bin Laden was out of the question—never seriously considered—and would have been difficult in any case, as we lacked bases in the region from which to stage. More precisely targeted air or cruise missile strikes were a possibility, but dependent upon precise, real-time intelligence sufficient to avoid collateral casualties. That was difficult to come by in those pre–Predator drone days. On the few occasions when such intelligence was available, the administration decided that the risk of harming innocents was too high.

  American reluctance to take risks in pursuit of bin Laden did not make us shy about browbeating the Pakistanis to do so. Pakistan was one of only three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The fact that it was willing to treat with, let alone support, the hosts of our terrorist nemesis added a marked note of anger and outrage to the usual stiff, pious tut-tutting of our official comm
unications with the Pakistani government.

  Under the circumstances, it was obvious that CIA was just going to have to come up with a way of dealing with bin Laden on its own. As I had seen so often in my career, faced with an intractable foreign policy problem and risky, unpalatable choices to deal with it, the default position of the U.S. government was to leave it to CIA to solve—preferably in a neat, tidy, and untraceable way. This, among many other things, would be my task in Islamabad: To arrest, or otherwise to neutralize, a man and an organization that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet had described publicly as the greatest current threat to U.S. national security. I was to do it with little or no help from the rest of my government, in the most obscure, primitive, remote, and war-torn country in the world, and without breaking a federal law that barred CIA from engaging in assassination. And oh, by the way, the sole potential ally to whom I might plausibly turn for effective help in this endeavor had been thoroughly and systematically alienated by my government as well. Apart from all that, my job would be easy. All the same, I couldn’t have been more pleased to take it. In the Clandestine Service, this is what we do. I had spent years preparing for a challenge such as this. For me, these were the best of times.

  It is said that in a typical three-year tour of overseas duty, the best that can be hoped for is two years of effective work: the first six months are spent figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing, and the last six months are spent seeking and then preparing for the next assignment. By December 1999, after I had been at post for six months, I could see that what we had been doing to date with regard to bin Laden and al-Qa’ida was not working, and was unlikely to. I would have to start thinking about the problem in a different way, and come up with a new way to solve it.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  WARNINGS AND FOREBODINGS

  FEBRUARY 2000

  AMBASSADOR BILL MILAM WAS on one of his rants. The complaint was a familiar one—his weight. “You’re so damned abstemious,” he complained. “I wish I could do that. I just can’t stop eating. I ought to have my damned jaws wired shut.” Cantankerousness was one of Milam’s most notable traits, and for me, an endearing one. I couldn’t help but like the man, though he did have a habit of trying to make my life harder than it should be just to show he could. He had his reasons for doing so.

  Some weeks before, Milam had been at Sunday breakfast at a local sporting club with a colleague, an administrative officer who was a notorious gadfly. He looked around the dining room at the large number of unattached males having breakfast alone or in small groups. “Who the hell are all these people?” he grumbled. “I don’t know any of them.” His companion saw his opportunity, and seized it.

  “They’re all Grenier’s people,” he said. He paused for effect. “You know, he runs this place.” The ambassador said nothing for some minutes, seemingly concentrating on his eggs. At length, he stood to leave.

  “I run this place,” he snapped.

  I was in no doubt myself as to who ran the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. As chief of station, I technically answered to the director of Central Intelligence; Milam, as the U.S. “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,” technically reported directly to the president. Our relative places in the federal pecking order were clear, and I was best advised to remember it. I depended on the ambassador’s support, or at least on his forbearance. My push to increase our capabilities in Afghanistan was bringing an ever-growing stream of temporary staffers (“TDYers,” as they were called) to town, and their mysterious activities were no doubt exciting considerable sotto voce commentary among my colleagues. I needed their silent cooperation to keep a low profile on the comings and goings of my people, and it just wouldn’t do to alienate them. That was particularly true of the ambassador. I knew that if some of my station’s activities were to come to the unfavorable attention of the Pakistani authorities, it was to the ambassador that I would have to turn for political support. “Remember,” he told me shortly after my arrival, “if you want me with you at the crash landing, make sure I’m with you at the take-off.” I took that to heart, and went out of my way to bring him as much into the picture as possible about what I was doing. Still, I had rather more independent authority than Milam was comfortable with, and he sometimes went out of his way to demonstrate who was in charge.

  Now, as we hurtled southward through the night in the back of his BMW limousine, ambassadorial flags snapping, toward the nearby army town of Rawalpindi, I felt the need of his support acutely. I was hoping Milam would be able to get for me something I hadn’t been able to get on my own: some level, at least, of consistent Pakistani support against al-Qa’ida.

  A few weeks before, the security authorities in Jordan had uncovered the so-called “Millennium Plot.” Al-Qa’ida-linked operatives had been caught secretly storing a huge quantity of explosives for use in a coordinated series of planned bombings of hotels and other tourist attractions frequented by foreigners along the Jordan River Valley. If there were any doubts regarding al-Qa’ida’s intention to mount another terrorist strike on the scale of the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, this had put such doubts to rest.

  Among those implicated in the Jordan plot were a pair of expatriate Palestinians: One of them, Khalil Deek, a Palestinian-American resident in Peshawar, in Pakistan’s far northwest, had recently been arrested by the Pakistani intelligence service and rendered to Jordan, his country of origin, via a special Jordanian military flight. He had fallen victim to a scenario in which the Pakistanis had both compelling evidence of his complicity in a foreign crime, and such precise information regarding his physical location that they could not have failed to take action without seeming complicit in his activities.

  While this success was gratifying, it had involved a concurrence of events that would be extremely difficult to duplicate on a regular basis. If we were to have any realistic hope of capturing the second, and far more important, of the two Palestinians, we would need active Pakistani support in tracking him down.

  Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubayda, had been on the CIA radar screen for many months. A senior logistician for al-Qa’ida, we knew he had been transiting regularly through Pakistan between Afghanistan and the wider world, facilitating the movement of Arab recruits to and from the training camps located in Taliban-controlled areas. The extent of his importance to al-Qa’ida had just been demonstrated in Jordan. He was the proximate reason why Milam and I were meeting this night with General Musharraf, the chief of Army Staff and, for four months now, Pakistan’s military dictator.

  Entering Army House, the traditional residence of Pakistan’s military chiefs, was like stepping back in time. The architecture, the atmosphere of the place, was redolent of the British Raj. On the surface, the meeting seemed to go well. Musharraf received us cordially and informally. A soft-spoken and unprepossessing man of medium height, he carried himself with a quiet, earnest dignity. Though he may have seized power in a military coup, there was nothing of the bluster or bravado one might have associated with a former commando whose notable military career had been associated rather more with daring than with reflection. Musharraf listened intently to Milam’s presentation. Pronouncing Zubayda’s unfamiliar Arab name with care, the ambassador laid out the case. Here was a very dangerous man, a senior lieutenant of bin Laden’s, who had been implicated by the judicial authorities of Jordan in a major terrorist operation. We knew that he was frequently transiting Pakistan, and we needed Pakistani help to apprehend him before he could strike again. All very straightforward. But the key to the ambassador’s pitch was an implied threat, couched as a simple political reality: for if, God forbid, there were another major al-Qa’ida terrorist operation against the United States in which Abu Zubayda were implicated, and if Pakistan were seen to have been unwilling to bring his activities to an end despite the clear opportunity to do so, the implications for U.S.-Pakistan relations would be severe, if not catastrophic.

/>   Looking at me, Musharraf asked whether information regarding Zubayda had been shared with General Mahmud Ahmed, director-general of the ISI—the infamous organization with which CIA had worked so effectively against the Soviets. I said it had. I pointed out that success against Abu Zubayda would require more of Pakistan than simply to take action based on U.S.-supplied information. We needed active, dynamic cooperation between our two countries, and specifically between our two intelligence services, if we were to generate the real-time, actionable intelligence necessary to find, fix, and apprehend this man. The general replied simply and straightforwardly: He would speak with General Mahmud. The United States could count on Pakistan’s full cooperation against this terrorist threat.

  The meeting ought to have buoyed my confidence, but it did not. I felt Musharraf had been sincere. He would no doubt have taken the action we requested if he had been in a position to do so himself. But he was not. As the four-star chief of Army Staff, he presided as a rough “first among equals” over the Pakistan Army’s nine Corps commanders and the handful of other three-star generals, including General Mahmud of the ISI, who made up Pakistan’s senior military leadership. All had considerable autonomy of action, and none more so than Mahmud, particularly given his history with Musharraf. When Musharraf deposed Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s elected prime minister, the coup had actually been launched on the orders of the formidable Mahmud, whose troops controlled Islamabad at the time. It was Mahmud who had placed Sharif under arrest for trying to dismiss Musharraf. This was a debt of loyalty of which Musharraf had to be thoroughly mindful.