88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  It did not take any particular genius to suggest ways in which this plan might go badly wrong. I simply could not believe that sensible people would actually propose such a scheme. Dave and I left our guests in no doubt as to what we thought of the plan, and made clear we could not support it in its current form. We suggested some tangible steps they could take to begin to vet the identities and capabilities of their contacts. They accepted the advice quite meekly.

  I followed up with an immediate message to headquarters, urging them to approach the German government at whatever level they thought appropriate to make clear that we opposed what they were proposing to do, and that we would hold them responsible for any harm that might come to Americans if they were to take action on this basis. It was the last we ever heard of it.

  With all the progress we were making, and all our good fortune to date, I was beginning to allow myself some measure of optimism. But late October brought devastating news: after weeks of effort and planning, and on the verge of mounting a rescue mission, we learned from our source Isfandiar that all eight detainees had been moved to another prison. A few days later he was able to clarify that they were in fact being shuttled back and forth between the Intelligence Directorate facility and the new prison, frequently but not always spending the night at the new location, and then returning during the day to the Intelligence Directorate. All our planning was predicated on a nighttime raid, and we could not be sure in advance where the detainees would be on any given night. Beyond its location, we knew next to nothing about the new prison. We were practically back at square one, starting over. It was a crushing disappointment.

  Shakespeare’s King Lear contains a lament at man’s impotence in the face of unknown forces that control his fate: “As flies to wanton boys,” he says, “are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” The detainees themselves, being devout fundamentalist Christians, doubtless had a much more benign notion of the forces controlling their fate than did I. But whatever one’s notions of the Deity, fate held many more surprises in store for the detainees, and for us.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  THE AMBUSH

  OCTOBER 27, 2001

  I COULD SEE THAT this would be no easy meeting. “General Jafar Amin,” counterterrorism “Czar” of the ISI, sat glowering on a couch at the far end of the long, narrow salon, a grim-faced “Brigadier Adnan” by his side.

  The story, by now, was well known. A few days before, on October 23, Abdul Haq, a famous mujahideen commander from the anti-soviet jihad of the 1980s, had left Peshawar and crossed into Afghanistan in an attempt to organize a tribal rebellion against the Taliban. According to press reports, he had entered with fewer than twenty followers, hoping to garner support among his fellow Ahmedzai tribesmen in the Azra district of Logar Province. There he had a mixed reception, and had continued onward with few, if any, additional fighters. On the night of the 25th, his small band was trapped in the narrow Alikhel Gorge in his native Nangahar Province, hemmed in by Taliban units both in front and behind. Deprived of an escape route as Taliban reinforcements poured in, he called for help via sat phone to his nephew in Peshawar. The nephew, in turn, contacted James Ritchie, one of a pair of wealthy, eccentric American brothers from whom Abdul Haq had reportedly been receiving financial support, and who was standing by in Peshawar to monitor the Afghan dissident’s progress. Ritchie then contacted his associate, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, the former national security advisor to Ronald Reagan, who suffered disgrace over his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. McFarlane rang up CTC’s Global Response Center, the GRC, to pass on word of Abdul Haq’s plight and his location. CTC diverted a missile-armed Predator drone to go to his assistance. Later that night, the drone operators located Haq, whose group by this time was locked in a vicious and hopeless firefight with the Taliban. Having only one missile, the Predator operators employed it to blow up a Taliban pickup truck. It wasn’t nearly enough; there was nothing to do from there but watch helplessly as Abdul Haq was captured. By midday on October 26 he was dead, strung up in public by the Taliban.

  That evening, the international press was awash in stories variously sourced to Haq’s embittered Pakistan-based relatives and associates, to McFarlane himself, and to the Taliban. As underscored by virtually everyone, it looked like a colossal American failure to support an uprising by a genuine anti-Taliban Pashtun leader; as such, it could not have come at a worse time, precisely as we were trying to induce other Pashtuns to take similar risks, and to assure them of American support if they did so. It may not have mattered, but in fact, the appearances were quite deceiving.

  I had had little contact with General Jafar before 9/11. We had met often enough, though, for me to get an inkling that there might be some surprises lurking behind the dour, bluff exterior of this short, square-jawed, heavyset man with the deep, rumbling voice.

  For one thing, there were the occasional flashes of sardonic humor. But my first memorable impression of Jafar came in a pub in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the CIA’s early 2000 “charm offensive” aimed at General Mahmud. Our mixed CIA-ISI delegation stopped for lunch, just after General Mahmud’s “staff ride” of the Civil War battlefield. As would befit representatives of an Islamic Republic, each of the Pakistanis ordered juice or tea as the waiter made his rounds. One would not have expected otherwise, particularly under the intimidating gaze of General Mahmud. When the waiter came to General Jafar, though, he didn’t hesitate. There was more than a hint of defiance in his voice as he ordered a beer. It may seem a small thing, and I suppose it was. But I could see then that this was a proud and confident man, independent-minded and contrarian, who was not about to kowtow to anyone.

  On September 16, 2001, a clear, sunny Sunday, Ambassador Chamberlin and I had had our first post-9/11 meeting with General Mahmud, who had returned to Pakistan from the United States the day before as the sole passenger on a CIA aircraft, one of the first to enter American skies after the disaster. At that meeting, Mahmud proudly presented General Jafar as the ISI’s newly anointed counterterrorism “Czar,” promising that he would have full authority to do everything necessary to demonstrate Pakistan’s firm solidarity with the United States in the just declared “War on Terror.” As Mahmud waxed enthusiastically, Jafar inclined his head toward me. “Czar?” he said, sotto voce. “More like a Rasputin.”

  I’m sure that Mahmud had his own reasons for selecting General Jafar for what would now be ISI’s most important task. But there was another factor at work, of which Mahmud was probably quite unaware: for Jafar, this fight was personal. I had met with him several times at ISI Headquarters during the days following 9/11, during the interim when the ban on international flights made Mahmud’s quick return impossible. He told me about a brother-in-law, to whom he was quite close, who lived in Manhattan. Jafar and his wife were trying to reach her brother by phone, to no avail. After two days, fearing the worst, Jafar was distraught and angry. Even after the brother-in-law and his family later proved to be fine, the general fairly seethed as he spoke of the ordeal, and of who had been responsible for it. His banked fury rivaled that of any American I’d met. No one who sat with him in those days, as I had, could doubt where he would stand in the coming struggle.

  It may simply have been our good fortune that this former tank commander occupying this largely thankless job in ISI was a tough, hard-driving taskmaster who had no patience with religious extremism, and who could be counted upon to demonstrate the unambiguous seriousness of purpose on terrorism which Mahmud himself could never muster. But if it seemed obvious to me, and to others in CIA who had dealt with Mahmud, that his heart would never be in the counterterrorism fight, we apparently were not the only ones to have reached that conclusion. On October 8, President Musharraf announced a series of promotions, elevating General Muhammad Aziz Khan—a key Corps commander and one of those, along with General Mahmud, thought to be most sympathetic to religious fundamentalism—to the largely ceremonial four-star
post of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Though they both wore three stars at that point, Aziz Khan had less seniority than Mahmud; in the Pakistani military system, that meant that Mahmud must retire. In one clever stroke, Musharraf had kicked one problematic senior officer upstairs and out of the chain of command, and in the process removed another from a post where he otherwise stood to do considerable harm.

  The Pakistani president never confided his thinking to me, nor to Ambassador Chamberlin so far as I know, but he must have known he would never get more than grudging compliance from the headstrong Mahmud in carrying out a policy designed to confront the religious extremism which officers of Mahmud’s persuasion had long done so much to promote as an instrument of state power. In appointing Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq in Mahmud’s place, he could at least be assured that his policies would be carried forward vigorously. For us, thankfully, it also meant that Jafar would now be unchained. All this stood behind the anger on such vivid display now.

  “If you were going to send this man across the border, why the hell didn’t you tell us? We could have helped you.” Now we had an unmitigated and embarrassing disaster on our hands, he said, and it had all been avoidable.

  The fact was that my station’s involvement in Abdul Haq’s ill-fated mission had been marginal, to say the least, and even that was against our will. As my officers had assessed the relative capabilities of the various anti-Taliban Pashtun commanders, Abdul Haq had always failed to measure up. Yes, he had been a respected muj warrior against the Soviets and the Afghan Communists, one who had inflicted heavy losses on his enemies, and been seriously wounded in the process. He had also established a reputation within the Rome Group around Muhammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, as a broad-minded and idealistic statesman of sorts, a Pashtun like Hamid Karzai who was willing to reach across ethnic and sectarian lines to make common cause with the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazaras, and others. As such, again like Hamid Karzai, he played very well to foreign audiences, and was a regular fixture in international salons. David Katz, the longtime U.S. consul general in Peshawar and a respected Afghan hand, held the former commander in high esteem. By all accounts, he was charming and charismatic, even if the unflattering sobriquet “Hollywood Haq,” with which CIA had tagged him years before and which had stuck to him since, suggested a preoccupation with image over substance.

  As chief of station, I had kept an advisedly low social profile during the previous two years, and thus was not directly exposed to Haq’s siren song. In the meantime, what my officers turned up on him was not encouraging. We knew that broad appeals to nationalist sentiment would only prove useful if they could motivate those inside Afghanistan to take an armed stand against the Taliban. The Taliban may have claimed a mandate from God, but at the end of the day they ruled through the barrel of a gun, and only resort to arms would unseat them. We were looking for commanders who could generate that type of support within Afghanistan, and from all accounts, Abdul Haq was not among them. The fact that he was suggesting to others that he had CIA support likewise made us extremely wary: someone confident of his ability to command guns inside Afghanistan would not have felt the need to misrepresent himself.

  None of this is to suggest that we had any animus toward the former Ahmedzai warrior. We just didn’t see any military capability there, whatever Haq’s political appeal. We felt it would be irresponsible to sponsor or to encourage him, and said so in formal communications with headquarters.

  We were therefore surprised to see a cable in late September instructing Greg, my up-country base chief and Hamid Karzai’s contact, to meet with Abdul Haq and offer him support. Bud McFarlane, who apparently maintained one or two high-level contacts at CIA Headquarters, appears to have been the prime driver behind this idea, but precisely who he spoke to and how the order was then generated within CTC remains obscure. No one seemed to want to claim ownership of the idea after the fact.

  Greg arranged through David Katz to meet with Abdul Haq, as ordered. Told that the former commander planned to enter Afghanistan imminently and failing to persuade him to wait until he had clearer indications of armed support, Greg did manage to coax him into accepting a satellite phone so that we could at least remain in touch and report on his progress. Haq promised to send a runner to the consulate the following morning to pick it up. The runner never materialized. Haq entered Afghanistan the same day.

  It was obvious that Jafar was completely unpersuaded by my story. I was asking him to believe that CIA had had no role in encouraging Abdul Haq to cross the border; that we had had no established means to communicate with him; that we had only been made aware of his ambush by the Taliban through an improbable series of last-minute phone calls for which a now obscure and largely discredited former government official was the critical linchpin; and that nonetheless a CIA-controlled drone had just happened to be loitering on-station at the critical moment and in the right place to come to his assistance when attacked. I could hardly blame Jafar. In his place, I wouldn’t have believed me, either—not for a second. It all just happened to be true.

  The meeting ended uncomfortably: me sticking firmly to my story, and Jafar just as firmly unconvinced. I’m sure, though, that when we parted that morning, Jafar felt he’d underscored for me a valuable lesson. Indeed he had. I could see that he was at least as concerned over the fallout from the Abdul Haq disaster as I; and that whatever ambiguities might exist in the Pakistani attitude toward the Taliban, I could count on Jafar’s support if and whenever I needed it.

  Apparently feeling they hadn’t done enough, CTC/SO sent us a cable later on October 27, demanding to know who had provided McFarlane with the phone number of the Global Response Center. In addition to being an outrageous accusation, there was more than a little irony in this, as McFarlane reportedly had been in direct touch with headquarters before Haq’s entry into Afghanistan, and it was they who had demanded that the station offer him support. Dave and I were still shaking our heads over this one as Greg, believing he was the primary suspect, fired off a blistering message denying any involvement in the debacle other than what our supportive headquarters colleagues had mandated. If we had needed any confirmation, this was it: Langley was definitely in unfriendly hands.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  DRESS REHEARSAL

  OCTOBER 29, 2001

  ALL THE WHILE HE listened, General Franks kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. His gaze conveyed what I considered to be the proper mix of keen interest and wary skepticism. I had developed the clear sense during our first videoconference in September that the general from Midland, Texas, was an extremely canny fellow; his interactions now with our two Afghan guests were greatly reinforcing that impression.

  The general was leaning forward in an overstuffed chair. Spread out on the low coffee table before him were stacks of photographs and a now familiar campaign map festooned with carefully drawn arrows, all converging on Kandahar. Now, however, the arrows emerged from a long, narrow valley on the Pak-Afghan border whose name had only recently entered our lexicon: Shin Naray.

  Sunlight streamed into the room from a huge picture window. One could see dense thickets of olea, acacia, and tecomella extending gently upward for several kilometers, to a point where the Margalla Hills rose almost vertically from the streambeds below, eventually disappearing, ridge upon ridge, into the bluish haze of the northern Pakistani sky. I had always thought the view from the U.S. ambassador’s office was the most spectacular in Islamabad. The scene inspired a sense of infinite possibility, which is precisely what Engineer Pashtun was now trying to convey.

  General Franks had sent word before this, his first post-9/11 visit to Pakistan, that he wished CIA to introduce him to some Afghan tribal leaders. Already concerned by CTC’s clear lack of enthusiasm for Shirzai, I seized on this as a potential opportunity to develop General Franks’s independent support for him. I had given Mark, Shirzai’s contact, strict guidance as to how
I wanted these two Barakzai to look and act: Franks wanted to meet with Afghan tribals, and by God I wanted him to know he was getting the genuine article. Engineer Pashtun, I knew, was given to Western dress, and I could see from my own first meeting with him that years in exile had caused Shirzai to adopt the outward appearance of a Pakistani feudal lord, rather than that of the Kandahari tribal leader he was. “Turbans,” I had said. “Make damned sure they’re wearing turbans.”

  Also before the meeting with Franks, Mark and his Special Forces partner had impressed upon our friends that if they expected to have U.S. air support, they were going to have to undertake their assault on Kandahar in stages. Their willingness and ability to take the war to the Taliban capital was going to have to be demonstrated before American support would come, and so Engineer Pashtun adapted his plan accordingly. As he laid it out for Franks, Shirzai and a small band of armed, truck-mounted followers would cross the border and enter the Shin Naray Valley at its far eastern end. They would immediately move a small blocking force to the narrow western entrance to control access to the valley from the Afghan side. The valley could then serve as a secure rallying point for Shirzai’s tribal followers from the Afghan side of the border, easily defended from high ridges to the north and south—provided the fighters materialized, I thought, and provided they did not kill the ex-governor when they did. Once he controlled this territory, we could provide Shirzai with a drop of weapons and ammunition for those who would join; and once he had successfully engaged hostile Taliban forces, we could provide him, in principle, with a CIA–Special Forces team. If Langley should prove unwilling, my hope was that pressure from General Franks would force the issue. This was where the general’s patronage might prove useful later on, although I was not prepared to say so just yet.