Now, on the screen above us, I could see George Tenet leaning over to speak into Secretary Rumsfeld’s ear, while gesturing in my direction. The participants on the other side were arrayed in tiers, in some sort of amphitheatre. In addition to Tenet and “Hank,” the newly appointed head of CTC/SO, the headquarters support unit, I could make out Rumsfeld and, if I squinted, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. Air Force general Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also present, but I didn’t know it. I had no clue at the time what he looked like; in fact, it was his first day on the job. No one apparently felt the need to make introductions.
George invited me to walk the secretary through the war plan approved by the president and discussed with General Franks of CENTCOM a week before. I began by laying out the general concept of what we were trying to do, of employing military means as part of a broader political effort to remove the terrorist safehaven in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance would necessarily be a part of the new political construct we hoped would follow, but we should be careful at the outset, I said, in providing them with bombing support. Too much progress too quickly in the north would cause the Pashtuns to re-coalesce around Mullah Omar. It was critical for the long term, I stressed, that we have Pashtun involvement in the effort to move Omar aside and change Afghan policy toward al-Qa’ida.
That support, I noted, was slow in coming. Most of the Pashtun tribal leaders and others with whom we were in contact were firmly on the fence, waiting to see if the Americans were serious, and wanting to know who was likely to prevail in a military confrontation before committing themselves. If U.S. airstrikes in the south were sequenced correctly, beginning with targets directly associated with Mullah Omar and al-Qa’ida, and executed with devastating force, it might change the psychology in the subordinate ranks of the Taliban leadership sufficiently to induce them to make a deal. Failing that, our early attacks could embolden independent tribal elements with whom we could treat much more easily, and perhaps induce them to seize the available opportunity to rise up against the Taliban.
Rumsfeld had sat through this exposition unmoved. I paused to get some sort of reaction, or to see if he had any questions. He was apparently unused to having briefers stop without being invited to do so.
“Well,” he blurted with some irritation, “do you have anything else to say?” His hostility took me a bit by surprise. It wasn’t until considerably later that I would see for myself, firsthand, just how terrified even senior Pentagon generals were of him.
“Well, sir,” I replied tartly. “I’ve just laid out the conceptual outline of what we’re trying to do. I could go on to walk you through each phase in chronological order, if that’s what you’d like.” I paused again. The secretary was apparently used to a bit more deference. He said nothing, evidently unwilling to give me the satisfaction of a response. I simply went on to describe the phases I’d proposed in my cable.
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, interjected with a question. Was I proposing that we should withhold offensive military support from the Northern Alliance indefinitely? That, too, surprised me. In the plan, I had made an analogy between the current situation of the Northern Alliance and the position the Israelis found themselves in during the Gulf War of 1991. Although themselves the target of Iraqi missile attack, the Americans had impressed upon the Israelis that the most effective contribution they could make to the war effort was to stay out of it, lest their involvement break up the Arab coalition the United States had painstakingly cobbled together to confront Baghdad. Similarly, I said, we should try to keep the UIFSA commanders in the north from moving forward aggressively at the outset of the conflict, lest a U.S.-facilitated offensive from the north cause previously restive Pashtuns to fall in line solidly, once again, behind the Taliban. Knowing that this advice would run sharply against the grain within CTC, and perhaps elsewhere in the U.S. government as well, I had perhaps overstressed it in order to make the point. But I thought I had made it clear that we would know rather quickly whether our political strategy in the south was going to work or not. If not, indefinitely withholding military support from those in the north both capable of striking the Taliban and eager for our help, even if we had been spurned by potential allies in the south, would be more than stupid. At the end of the day, we would have to go with the allies we could get. Was his question a trap? It almost seemed that Wolfowitz was trying to set me up as a straw man, so that Defense could press an alternative approach. I could only guess at what was happening in the inter- and intra-agency shark tank back there.
“Not at all,” I said. “As we go through the different phases of the plan, we will try to motivate first the Taliban, and then others in the south, to join the international coalition against al-Qa’ida. But if they fail to do so, and quickly, we will have to throw in with the Northern Alliance and take our chances.”
Wolfowitz wouldn’t let it go. “Oh?” he said, his voice trailing off. “That wasn’t the way I read it.”
George jumped in. “We’ll go through the phases quickly. If we don’t get traction on one phase, we move to the next. We expect this to play out in a matter of days.” George was always quick on the uptake. You could speak to him in shorthand, and he always understood exactly where you were going.
There was another point I wanted to stress. During the critical period after our air attacks began, Afghans would continue to behave like Afghans. They would operate on their own timetable and in their own way, not ours; and if we hoped to influence them, we would have to calibrate our timetable to suit. If senior elements in the Taliban were tempted to push Omar aside and to change policy on al-Qa’ida, they would have to meet and consult with one another; it would take time, and they couldn’t meet in large groups if the leadership were under active air attack. As and when we had intelligence to indicate such a political dynamic was under way, we might want to pause our air operations selectively to give the process time to play out.
At that point, the screen went blank. We’d lost the satellite link. My senior communicator tried to reestablish it, to no avail. As no one called back, I could only assume they’d heard enough from me. But according to Bob Woodward’s later account of the event, Secretary Rumsfeld had taken exception to my suggestion of a pause in our bombing operations. It had struck an old nerve with him, suggesting the unilateral bombing pauses staged to encourage negotiations with the North during the Vietnam War, which in the minds of many had made us appear like weak supplicants to Hanoi. There would be no bombing pauses, he said. The two contexts could not have seemed more different to me. I might have tried to explain, but of course I would never know of Rumsfeld’s concerns. We are all products and, if we are not careful, victims of our experience. The secretary was famously experienced.
It was hard for me to tell whether this little exposition had gone well or not. The interpersonal dynamics viewed through the keyhole afforded by this teleconference suggested a lot of tension back there, but in the crush of events, no one, understandably, was briefing me on what was going on. I was generally left to guess what effect my input was having in the interdepartmental wrangle taking place as Washington prepared to go to war in Afghanistan.
Apart from Secretary Rumsfeld’s curmudgeonly behavior, there had been another discordant note during the evening. At one point, Hank, the new head of CTC/SO, was explaining to the secretary about some of the Northern Alliance commanders, and mentioned that Isma’il Khan of Herat was a Tajik. Without thinking, I contradicted him, pointing out that although aligned with UIFSA and from an area with a substantial Tajik population, Isma’il Khan was himself a Pashtun. It was a blatantly stupid thing to do, publicly contradicting a colleague on a seemingly minor point in front of the most senior officials of the Defense Department. Extreme fatigue is my sole, inadequate defense. And my victim’s reaction only underscored for me the idiocy of what I’d done.
“Oh,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl. “I hadn’t realized that.” It would have been
bad enough if I’d been right; but I was wrong. God only knows where I had gotten the notion that Isma’il Khan was a Pashtun, but like so many jihad-era commanders, he had faded into insignificance and obscurity during the Taliban years, and was only now beginning to come back into the political conversation. It may seem like a relatively small thing, and for someone else it might have been. I will simply never know to what extent, if any, this little faux pas would contribute to our subsequent difficulties. But it certainly didn’t help.
My past interactions with Hank had not been unpleasant, at least from my perspective. In fact, one might have thought he owed me a debt of gratitude. I had hosted him, as a mid-ranking CTC manager, during the previous year, and taken him on a tour of the Khyber Pass and some of the wilder spots in the North-West Frontier. Among these was Darra Adam Khel, an infamous village of expert gunsmiths who can produce counterfeit versions of virtually any firearm, from an AK-47 to a high-end Italian shotgun. While there, the ruling malik, or tribal elder, made a gift to both Hank and my son of innocent-looking fountain pens. When the nib of the pen was removed, however, it was revealed to be a firearm, from which a 22-caliber round could be fired at close range—the perfect assassination weapon.
As we attempted to board a return flight from Peshawar, Hank ill-advisedly placed the weapon in his carry-on luggage, perhaps thinking it was adequately disguised. It was immediately spotted by the young Pakistan Army trooper manning the X-ray machine, who demanded that Hank’s backpack be opened for inspection. This threatened to get ugly: a U.S. counterterrorism official caught smuggling an assassination weapon aboard a commercial aircraft overseas. The fact that we were bloodying the Pakistanis over the laxness of their counterterrorism policies was probably not going to help. Seeing that the culprit was an American official, and not wanting to take the burden of the impending unpleasantness entirely upon himself, the jawan (soldier) made a move to summon his superior. This, I knew, could rapidly escalate out of control. Hank had no immunity from prosecution. Praising the young fellow for his perspicacity, I explained the situation, noting that the pen had been a gift from the local tribes, and claiming that its recipient had no idea of its true nature. By all means, I suggested, the offending item was dangerous and should be confiscated, but perhaps it would be best for all of us if we simply left it at that. The young soldier glanced again at Hank’s official passport. After a moment’s hesitation, he agreed, much to my relief. I would have occasion to wonder if I’d acted too hastily.
Chapter 13
* * *
VOX CLAMANTIS
OCTOBER 2, 2001
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE two men could not have been greater. Mullah Osmani sat stolidly, his great bulk supported in an overstuffed chair to my left. In front of me, beaming and impish, sat little Mullah Jalil, perched on the edge of a high bed, his short legs dangling over the side. He was almost giddy with excitement, swinging his black Reeboks to and fro.
The diminutive deputy foreign minister had again been sent by Mullah Omar as an official note-taker for this, my second meeting with Osmani. By this time I was developing a genuine understanding of how Jalil operated. He had thrived in the Taliban system by making himself useful to as many people as possible, always managing to stay in the middle of the action, where he could manipulate the various players to his own ends. A meeting like this was what he lived for. Apart from serving as Mullah Omar’s eyes and ears, it was impossible to know how many overlapping agendas Jalil might be trying to serve on this day. What was clear to me, though, was that for me to have any chance of success in this meeting, Mullah Abdul Jalil Akhund must not be a part of it.
Events were hurtling forward. On September 20, the same day that President Bush delivered his ultimatum to the Taliban in his State of the Union address, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Clergy, numbering 700 scholars, had issued its conclusions. It had partially—but only partially—opened the door to an acceptable settlement by recommending that the Taliban government should seek bin Laden’s voluntary departure from the country. This was as far as they would go, but it provided an opportunity to the Taliban leader, should he choose to seize it. A day later, on the 21st, Mullah Omar promptly slammed the door shut, stating that he would neither turn over bin Laden nor ask him to leave. If there were any ambiguity on that score, that same day Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, held a press conference in Islamabad designed to remove it.
General Mahmud of the ISI, beginning to despair, made one final effort on September 28, leading a group of eight Pakistani Ulema, well-known religious extremists all, to meet with Omar in what Mahmud himself described as an attempt to induce the Taliban to do the minimum necessary “to get the gun to swing away from their heads.” If there was nothing for the moment to be done about bin Laden, Mahmud suggested, perhaps the Taliban leader could agree to release the eight humanitarian workers from Shelter Now International, who had recently been arrested for Christian proselytizing; or perhaps he could hand over some of bin Laden’s lieutenants; or at least he could allow Americans to inspect the al-Qa’ida camps, to demonstrate that their occupants had fled. All suggestions were in vain.
As the alternatives to all-out war against the Taliban were being systematically foreclosed, I could sense that attitudes in Washington were hardening in tandem. Even a few days before, the tone had been quite different, at least at the White House. The president, who had not yet delivered his public ultimatum of the 20th, had reacted to George Tenet’s report of my September 15 meeting—and the implicit possibility of a shift in Taliban policy—with open interest.
“Fascinating,” he had said.
Similarly, when my war plan was approved by the president on September 24, he and the cabinet principals still held out the possibility of a continued role for the Taliban, provided its leaders agreed to break with Omar and meet U.S. demands. All, including Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, agreed that we should not hit the full Taliban leadership at the outset of our military operations, lest we discourage an intra-Taliban split.
Over a week later, though, in the face of Mullah Omar’s recalcitrance, I could feel the political landscape shifting. Flying south from Islamabad on a 1980s-vintage twin-engine aircraft which General Mahmud had put at my disposal, peering through the early morning dust haze at the razor-edged mountain peaks of Baluchistan, the utter remoteness and desolation of the surroundings provided an apt metaphor for my situation. I was entering the wilderness. One could sense that in the past few days, as manifested in a dozen subtle ways, all American efforts were now vectoring inexorably toward war. You could see it in the attitudes on display during the teleconference with Secretary Rumsfeld the night before. It was no longer clear to me that Washington would accept any deal, even if an alternative Taliban leadership were prepared to offer one. Once the mental break is made, and war has been deemed inevitable, events take on their own momentum.
Someone with a greater sense of political self-preservation would have dropped this effort entirely. I had at least had sufficient good sense to get George Tenet’s prior verbal permission for this meeting, conveyed to me by the chief of the Near East and South Asia Division. In the process I had stressed that my main goal was to induce Osmani to break with Mullah Omar. At a minimum, I hoped to sow serious divisions within the Taliban leadership. I could not rule out greater success, however, and had to contemplate the possibility that Mullah Osmani and the rest of the Taliban Shura, the leadership council, would reject Mullah Omar, accept U.S. demands, and find a way to turn bin Laden and his fourteen most senior al-Qa’ida lieutenants over to us in a bid to retain power. That might have been a welcome development ten days before, but I had the sense it might be unwelcome now.
I knew that this mission, no matter how carefully pursued, would carry with it the taint of negotiation, the very idea of which had become anathema, from what I could divine of the current climate in Washington. The president himself had said that there could be no amb
iguity—you were either with us or with the terrorists—and that his demands of the Taliban were not up for negotiation or discussion. As a practical matter, however, even finding the modalities to meet U.S. demands would require discussion, if not negotiation, and a refusal of all discussions would scuttle any chance of non-military success. However remote the chance of a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, I felt, it should not be cast away lightly. I was haunted by the thought of the disasters that had befallen both the British and the Russians in Afghanistan, and I feared that a similar fate could befall us if we attempted to achieve a political objective using exclusively military means.
I was not concerned about exceeding my authority, per se; I essentially had none, and I knew it. I had no specific instructions, no approved talking points, little guidance other than what I might logically draw from the president’s September 20 speech and from the war plan approved a few days later. I had no mandate whatever, beyond the strictly operational one given me by George Tenet. But I saw that lack of guidance as a blessing. At that stage in my career, I had had comparatively little direct exposure to group foreign policy deliberations at the cabinet and subcabinet level, but I had seen enough to have little faith in them, at least on this topic and under the current circumstances. In the prevailing climate, I feared, a request for guidance would have elicited a series of narrow, sterile, and pugnacious ultimatums, which would inevitably elicit a similarly knee-jerk response from the Taliban.
No, I thought: Better to go without talking points. If I could come up with some formula to meet Washington’s demands in a way palatable to the Taliban, I could at least present Washington with a clear proposal to which they could respond as they chose. I would have done all I could. Nor was I concerned about reaching a political agreement I was not authorized to reach. I intended to make clear that I had no authority to agree to anything—only a willingness to try to find solutions, which competent authorities in Washington and Kandahar could then accept or reject.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Page 13
