“And for God’s sake, get some sleep,” he concluded.
“What a good idea,” I said.
OCTOBER 4, 2001
“Ref[erenced] cable received a mixed reception at Headquarters,” the response began. That was rather more positive than I had been led to expect. It went on to state that if the Taliban leadership responded positively to my overtures, headquarters would be prepared to put their proposal on the table for policy consideration. A decision, it cautioned, might be days in coming. The tone of the message made it clear that headquarters did not relish the potential opportunity to make such a proposal, and that no one in the policy world would welcome having to decide how to respond in such ambiguous circumstances.
More than thirteen years later, having incurred nearly 15,000 casualties and having spent hundreds of billions of dollars, with the United States heading for the exit after a textbook exercise in imperial overreach, it is a little hard to sympathize with those concerns.
Later that morning, I pulled Dave, my deputy, aside. “There’s no way my career will survive this war,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re just overreacting.”
“Oh, this latest dustup might not do it,” I said. “But I’m not going to change the approach I’m taking, and there’s no way I’ll survive when this is over. It will come down on my head; no one else’s. But just remember you heard it here first.” It was actually a liberating feeling, to know that you were finished. If I’d had any inclination to pull my punches before, I had no such inclination now.
Later that day, I briefed Wendy Chamberlin on what I was up to, and made the same point.
“Hah,” she snorted. “The people at your headquarters are just jealous. I’ve been jealous of you myself. Just ignore them.” I could have hugged her.
OCTOBER 8, 2001
I looked up to see Tom leaning breathlessly through the doorway. “He’s on the line!” he said. I didn’t have to ask who.
Following our meeting in Quetta on the 2nd, Mullah Osmani had called me on October 6. As translated by Tom, he told me he’d met with Mullah Omar, who had a message to convey. According to Omar, the emotions of the Afghans were running very high. “That again,” I thought. Nonetheless, Omar would make some announcements soon. Of course, he could not make the announcement we had demanded of him right away, as he would have to calm the Afghan people first, due to the American threats . . .
“Mullah Sa’eb,” I began. “There is no time for this. Omar will not carry out the demands; Afghanistan will be destroyed. It’s up to you to seize power, as we discussed.”
There was a long pause.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. Would he consult first with potential supporters? “No,” he replied. He would consider what to do on his own. After some back-and-forth, he agreed to call me by noon the following day—October 7.
That was the day, I knew, when the first American strikes would be launched. Mullah Omar’s compound was at the top of the target list. The day passed without the promised call; late that night, Afghan time, the first aircraft and cruise missiles struck their targets in and around Kandahar and Kabul. Our tribal networks had been working overtime to provide precise geocoordinates for the bombs.
Even before Tom’s announcement of the Southern Zone commander’s 10:00 AM call on the 8th, we had already received initial reports from our best source in Kandahar. Omar’s compound had been struck by several cruise missiles. Guards and several people in the one-eyed leader’s household, including his uncle, had been killed, but Omar himself was narrowly missed. He had left the compound just thirty minutes before.
Not long into the conversation, I pointed out that I had warned this would happen. Osmani began shouting and Tom, without a glance at me, began shouting back. “You see? It’s just like we told you! You will not even see them!” This was getting completely out of hand. I grabbed Tom’s arm, causing him to look up, startled, as though I’d shaken him awake.
“Calm down,” I said evenly. Tom returned to translating. I asked Osmani if he’d given more thought to my advice.
“I can’t speak now,” he said; “I’m very busy.” He hung up. I knew precisely what occupied him. We had just received another report indicating that the Taliban Shura had concluded that the Americans would invade Afghanistan by sending an army westward to attack Kandahar along the main road from Quetta. Osmani, as the Southern Zone commander, had been charged with constructing defensive positions east of the city.
Later that evening, I received yet another call, this time from Jalil. “Everyone is in an uproar,” he said. It was obvious to Jalil that the initial attacks from an unseen enemy had left senior Taliban officials “quite afraid,” as he put it, but no one would admit it. And although most of the senior Taliban leadership had been quietly hoping that Omar would take the decision of the Ulema as an excuse to expel bin Laden, they were not admitting that now, either. At this point, in the face of foreign attack, he said, the Taliban leadership could only back down through the intercession of some third party, like the Organization of the Islamic Conference. In any case, the leadership had scattered to separate locations; no one wanted to meet as a group for fear of attracting an airstrike. They could communicate by “wireless,” of course, but to actually reach a consensus within the Shura on a new course of action they would have to meet together to confer face-to-face, and at length: “You know how we are.”
I did indeed. I wrote up the conversation as a formal intelligence report, making clear that the source, whom I could not identify by name, was both uncontrolled and hostile, and that his comments were meant as much to influence as to inform. Nonetheless, much of what he had to say rang true to me. In a separate comment in the report, I noted that while the source’s remarks were clearly self-serving and that he hoped to see a halt to the airstrikes, the scenario he described, of Taliban officials being culturally incapable of making group decisions unless able to meet face-to-face, contained a large measure of truth.
But none of that mattered. The time for diplomacy was over. Now the logic of war would have to run its course. The political structure of Afghanistan, such as it was, was about to be smashed. The ultimate success of our venture would depend upon creating a new one, and neither I nor anyone else had the slightest idea what it would look like.
Chapter 16
* * *
SON OF KINGS
OCTOBER 9, 2001
THERE WAS ANOTHER OBSERVER of the initial American airstrikes in and around Kandahar, a surreptitious one. Hamid Karzai, having arrived in Kandahar Province by motorcycle with two companions just the day before, was keeping a low profile. His discovery by the Taliban would have meant a swift and violent death.
Months before, in the spring of 2001, as we were laying the foundations for what we hoped would be a tribal uprising, a small number of my officers had been charged with meeting multiple Pashtun tribal leaders known to oppose the Taliban. We wanted to assess their ability and their willingness to actively undermine the mullahs in Kandahar, in the event we received a presidential order to try. Particularly as these were Afghans, we’d paid little attention to their claims—which invariably exaggerated their influence and the numbers of loyal fighters they could put in the field—and had focused instead on what they could demonstrate on the ground. Though we lacked the authorities necessary to take military action against the Taliban, at that stage we didn’t need them. If a contact claimed large numbers of followers in various locations willing to do his bidding, we wanted to see that demonstrated through verifiable intelligence gathering and dissemination of propaganda, before we ever had to consider whether to turn these people loose to generate armed mayhem.
Hamid Karzai had been but one of these tribal leaders, and by no means the most promising at the time. Educated and urbane, fluent in many languages, Karzai was a prominent member of the so-called “Rome Group,” which had formed around Muhammad Zahir Shah, the former Afghan king, driven into exile in 197
3. Hamid was a well-known proponent of religious tolerance and multiethnic unity among Afghans. As such, he played well in the diplomatic salons of both Europe and South Asia. There also was no denying his family and tribal pedigree: grandson of a respected Afghan politician and son of a notable tribal leader, he was now the preeminent elder of the Popalzai, a prominent tribe of the Durrani Pashtun tribal confederation. Durranis had been kings of Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century.
Still, I had my doubts about him. He had been a Pakistan-based fund-raiser and administrator during the anti-Soviet jihad, with few if any credentials on the battlefield. Whatever his political attractions and abilities, he certainly didn’t seem like a warrior. What did most distinguish him was his burning desire to drive the Taliban from power. The Taliban had killed his father, gunning him down on a street in Quetta on July 14, 1999, just after my arrival in Pakistan. A month later a massive truck bomb exploded just outside the outer wall of Mullah Omar’s compound in Kandahar, killing several members of his household. There was never any evidence connecting Karzai to that attack, but the Taliban were convinced he was behind it. They had even tried to have him extradited from Pakistan shortly before 9/11, and had plotted to murder him in the event they were refused. “By their enemies,” it says in Christian scripture, “ye shall know them.”
Once in direct contact with him, we quickly came to realize that beneath the Pashtun’s smooth, regal manner lurked a considerable amount of anger and resentment—and not just toward the Taliban. Hamid deeply resented the fact that the United States had abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, and had apparently been content to see it fall under the sway of Taliban brutality. “Where have you been all this time?” he demanded. Make no mistake: this was not a man who would ever be a “controlled” source of the CIA. But to achieve his political goals in Afghanistan, he would need American help; and we would need his, or that of others like him, if we were to achieve ours.
Serendipity and luck play far larger roles in our lives than many of us are prepared to admit. Having established preliminary contact with a large number of Afghan commanders, it was necessary to spread out responsibility for vetting them among a larger number of officers. Given his isolation from the main body of the station, I was keen to have “Greg,” one of my dispersed “base chiefs,” the head of a small unit subordinate to me as station chief, thoroughly integrated into this effort. My assignment of Greg as Hamid Karzai’s contact was arbitrary. I’m sure I had good reasons for making this particular decision at the time: I just can’t remember what they were. In any case, fate would reveal it to have been an inspired choice, and no less so, I would contend, for having been inadvertent.
On the surface, they made a very odd pair. As smooth and polished as Hamid was, Greg was blunt and profane. A tough, wiry paramilitary specialist with an outrageous Fu Manchu and an even more outrageously ironic sense of humor, he did his best to hide an incisive intelligence beneath multiple layers of self-deprecation. Also hidden beneath that flinty exterior, though, was a rather thin skin, and a sensitive soul.
Paramilitary specialists in the Clandestine Service are a wary and misunderstood breed. Chosen for their military knowledge and abilities, they live within an organization in which people are generally valued for an entirely different set of traits. Most receive a measure of espionage training, but for them it is almost always an underdeveloped, secondary skill. They consider themselves warriors, but are not allowed to be real soldiers. Normally called upon to provide training and guidance to irregular, indigenous forces, or to serve as a liaison between U.S. Special Forces and CIA spies, they have a foot in both camps, but are generally not fully accepted in either.
Greg was among the relative few in his tribe who excelled in both intelligence and paramilitary operations; but the same could not be said for all those paramilitary specialists who clambered to join his team after I’d approved his nomination as base chief. He took strong exception when I tartly pointed out that I was looking for intelligence officers and not gunslingers to join him, and so I went out of my way when he arrived in the field to cultivate him. It was time well and amusingly spent. Greg and I developed a bond traipsing about the gun shops and bazaars of old Peshawar, and hoisting drinks late into the night at the fabled Khyber Club. Socializing with our spouses, we found wry camaraderie as the husbands of sharp-tongued, independent women who were distinctly underwhelmed by the supposed brilliance of their husbands. I found in Greg an avid student of South Asian history, and a gifted linguist. Within months of his arrival at post, he was bantering comfortably in Pashtu with the guards outside his compound. But perhaps even more than his intelligence and restless curiosity, I learned to value his humor. You simply could not spend any time with the man without frequently finding yourself doubled over in hilarity.
Greg had needed all of his skills, and humor as well, in dealing with Karzai. In the late summer of 2001, Hamid was showing considerable promise, but just as often was hopelessly mercurial. His plans seemed to change on a daily basis.
In August, a network of his followers set about surreptitiously delivering “night letters” in and around Kandahar. The night letter is a sort of Afghan institution: notes are anonymously slipped under doors or tossed over compound walls in the dark of night. Used for propaganda or intimidation, its effects are insidious. It conveys the impression to those in power that their enemies are everywhere, moving with impunity right under their noses. Hamid’s people managed to deliver some 800 of them during the month, denouncing the Arab presence in Afghanistan.
By late August, days before 9/11, Hamid was already contemplating his return, perhaps to Helmand or Kandahar provinces, the primary seats of Taliban power, so that he could direct his people more closely. Greg counseled him against doing so without a sensible plan, but even after 9/11, when Greg began pressing Karzai to return inside as quickly as possible, the elements of a plan were excruciatingly slow in coming together.
When on September 26 the ten-man CIA “Jawbreaker” team, led by my old friend Gary Schroen, arrived to establish a liaison with the Northern Alliance in the far northern Panjshir Valley, it was a welcome development, but it ratcheted up the pressure on us considerably. Gary was making a start at reinforcing the capabilities of the Taliban’s fierce ethnic rivals in the north; that meant all the more that we needed to get something going in the south, although that would be a far greater challenge. Beset though they might have been, the Northern Alliance had large, established, relatively conventional armies equipped with tanks and heavy weapons; they still controlled substantial amounts of territory in the north. Gary and his team faced considerable hardships and dangers, certainly, but nonetheless were able to operate in relative security behind friendly lines. In the south, it would be completely different. Any teams we contemplated inserting there would be behind enemy lines, operating as guerrillas in an insurgency mode.
Having had responsibility for the past two years for all of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the task in the south naturally fell to me. CTC, though a headquarters support organization, had jealously retained control of our contacts with the Northern Alliance in past years, and now insisted that Jawbreaker, and any other teams in the north, would report directly to it. This was an anomaly: normally, one would have expected our contacts with the Northern Alliance to have been maintained by an overseas CIA outpost—perhaps in Central Asia. But there was no such outpost there on a par, in terms of influence or bureaucratic heft, with Islamabad. The normally desk-bound headquarters case officers in CTC were able to assert primacy in the north in a way they never could in the south. Thus, the CTC-vs-Islamabad, Northern Alliance-vs-southern strategy dynamic, which had arisen in the spring of 2001 through differences of opinion as to how best to exert pressure on the Taliban, was now being further reinforced.
Before 9/11, we had hoped for a Presidential Finding that would permit us to encourage, fund, and support a Pashtun insurgency against the Taliban; the finding never m
aterialized. Now, within days of the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, we had all the authorities we could possibly want or even imagine; and an administration that previously would not be railroaded into fomenting armed action on the part of anti-Taliban Afghans was pressing us breathlessly to do just that, as quickly as possible.
Night after night, in the days and weeks after 9/11, my officers had been meeting with tribal leaders, former Pashtun warlords from the jihad era, and representatives of some currently serving Taliban commanders. Each morning they briefed me on the myriad excuses they had received for inaction. Even after the U.S. air campaign started on October 7, the bottom line was that most of these self-regarding warriors were not about to declare themselves against the Taliban, and take the risk of attempting to rally their respective tribes, until they had a better idea of how this fight would turn out. In a land where internecine warfare was endemic, you learned to pick your fights carefully, and generally entered only the ones you were relatively assured of winning.
The Taliban commander of a base which housed a training camp for al-Qa’ida fighters actually had the temerity to send word via a courier that he had defected “secretly,” and was “with us in his heart.” We sent back word that until he did better than that, he would be considered an enemy subject to attack. Another encounter, between a Dari-speaking officer and a very well known but now aging senior commander who had distinguished himself against the Soviets, particularly sticks in my mind. The officer was young, slender, soft-spoken, almost effeminate in manner. After an hour or so of polite conversation, during which he heard and diplomatically rejected a long list of excuses, the officer finally lost his temper. Rising to his feet, he stood over the grizzled old warrior.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Page 16
