Fortunately, the concentration of Taliban fighters in Tarin Kowt became sufficiently large to attract the attention of the U.S. Air Force. On October 22, Hamid reported that the previous day’s air bombardment had been very successful. The Taliban headquarters in Tarin Kowt had been destroyed, along with a significant number of vehicles. Hamid had set up what he regarded as a fairly secure base of operations in the mountains just north of town. His previous force of 350, he said, had now increased to between 500 and 1,000. The wide disparity in numbers no doubt reflected the habit of Afghan fighters to wander back and forth from their farms and villages as need and inclination dictated, as well as what we had charitably come to regard as Hamid’s bullish optimism.
Best of all, Hamid had finally set up a drop zone, and promised to have it properly marked with signal fires for a low-altitude nighttime drop, provided he was given forty-eight hours’ notice. He asserted, improbably, that he could bring up to 3,000 tribal fighters into his ranks if he could seize Tarin Kowt, which had been abandoned by the Taliban in favor of scattering its forces into local villages to avoid further air attack. But again, he would need better weapons: his fighters were saddled with antiquated firearms, he said, and lacked anything heavier than assault rifles. They could attack isolated Taliban positions, but could not sustain a major battle. His entreaties were accompanied by an aggressive wish list, including PKM machine guns, RPG-7 rocket launchers, recoilless rifles, and ICOM radios.
With characteristic tough love, and still smarting over Hamid’s exaggerated “conquest” of Tarin Kowt, Greg pointed out that to earn a weapons delivery, he was going to have to show more progress. Reliable, real-time reporting on Taliban positions in support of American airstrikes would be a good start, he said.
In the meantime, we were lobbying as hard as we could from Islamabad to get weapons to the Pashtun leader and his band of fighters. Finally, on October 24, an Air Force C-130 cargo plane made the first CIA weapons drop of the war—to General Dostum of the Northern Alliance.
Over the next few days, Karzai’s tactical position deteriorated rapidly. Taliban movements forced him to change his location on the 26th, but he still was able to maintain the same drop zone, hoping against hope that the promised weapons would fall from the sky. On the 27th, he reported that he would have to move again the following day, and requested that CIA arrange tactical air (tac-air) cover to strike any Taliban units that pursued him. International radio broadcasts were now trumpeting the demise of Abdul Haq, and Hamid was sure the Taliban would redouble their efforts to track him down.
Tac-air was also becoming a sore point with me. As early as October 19, I had sent a message to headquarters proposing that we should have a dedicated air platform, either a missile-armed Predator or a C-130 gunship, constantly on station in the Kandahar area to strike Taliban leadership targets as and when they were revealed to us. The U.S. military was simply not moving nimbly enough to take advantage of opportunities that were being reported to us in near-real time. For example, on October 16, our best human source in Kandahar saw Mullah Omar driving out of town in a low-profile two-car convoy. The source immediately provided us with a full description of the vehicles, the precise time and location of their last sighting, and the direction of their travel. We put the target information out within minutes of our receiving it, only to get no response. The final straw came three days later: the same source provided detailed information on a Taliban convoy transporting Mullah Osmani and Kandahar governor Hassan Rahmani northward from Kandahar toward Tarin Kowt. Again, no military response.
I pointed out to headquarters that this was simply unacceptable. We might never have opportunities like this again, and could not afford to throw them away. If this had been garden-variety rumor from an untested source, it would be one thing. But this was our best source, thoroughly vetted, and someone who knew the Taliban leadership intimately.
Traditionally, the “source descriptions” provided in CIA reports are not very helpful to their readers, designed much more to protect the source’s identity than to give the recipient a clear idea of the report’s reliability. The credibility to be assigned even to a “highly reliable” source might vary greatly, depending upon the topic and how he acquired the information. A source might be reporting with full accuracy what he had heard, but might be unsure of the reliability of the person from whom he’d heard it. We in operations would know that, but our customers would not. An intelligence consumer would often be hard-pressed to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. Suddenly finding ourselves in a situation where our reports could mean the difference between life and death, my station cast off precedent and took the initiative to provide far more sourcing information to our military customers. Jeff, my chief of reports, took the lead and almost overnight fixed a problem I had long regarded as a scandal. I explained all this to CIA’s military targeters in Langley, expressing the hope that by providing the military much more insight into the relative reliability of our reports, they would be able to reason with the Air Force and work out a new system for hitting so-called “fleeting targets.”
I got a quick response. In a tone commonly used when speaking with a rather dim child, the headquarters targeting unit explained that while it might be possible to put dedicated air assets on station to strike “fleeting” Taliban leadership targets, the system in place for target discrimination still would not permit the type of strikes I was seeking. They provided a full description of the military’s decidedly inflexible rules of engagement, as though quoting holy writ. The bottom line was that the military would not act unless there were “U.S. eyes-on” to confirm the targets they were given.
It was hard to imagine how U.S. eyes were going to confirm the presence of Mullah Omar in the backseat of a beat-up Suzuki. In frustration, I threw the problem back on them. It was all very good that they had such a brilliant and exacting system for vetting targets, but if it were going to result in our permitting senior Taliban leaders to travel unmolested despite our having reliably identified their locations, headquarters should take the initiative to fix this with the military, or else CIA should employ a Predator to strike the targets itself.
Trying to put the problem in a little more strategic context, I sent a long message to Washington on October 25, providing my view of the evolution of the war, and the actions that might affect its outcome—with heavy emphasis on the need to make better, targeted use of our uncontested airpower. With a nod to W. B. Yeats, I entitled it “Slouching toward Kandahar: A Window of Opportunity to Crush the Taliban Leadership.” The fact that the Taliban lines opposite UIFSA in the far north were so far holding up against U.S. bombardment did carry a silver lining, I noted. With the vast majority of Taliban forces still tied down far from the Taliban capital, we had a window of opportunity—perhaps a brief one—in the south.
We could see growing indications of Pashtun tribal restiveness around the country. In addition to Abdul Haq and Karzai, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, a warlord from Nangahar, had also returned to his home area and was organizing armed followers. There were other indications of rebellion in Nimruz in the far southwest, in Kunar in the northeast, and among the Alizai tribe in Helmand. Enough tribal elders among the Gilzai Pashtuns in the east—in Khost, Paktia, and Paktika—were speaking openly about throwing out the Taliban that Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Taliban minister of tribal affairs whom we had tried without success to suborn months earlier, had been dispatched to appease them. Several of these elders from the eastern provinces were reaching out for assistance from Gul Agha Shirzai, the former governor of Kandahar. Shirzai himself, we knew, was also preparing to reenter the south from Pakistan—preferably with our support.
Our intelligence was giving us an excellent picture of the reaction in Kandahar to these developments. Mullahs Muhammad Fazl and Abdul Ghani Baradar, both senior commanders on the northern front, had been recalled to help plan the defense of the Taliban homeland. Mullah Osmani, who had overall command there, was beginning to arm the same l
ocal tribes which the Taliban had forcibly disarmed years before—a clear sign of distress, if not panic. Omar, Osmani, Fazl, Baradar, Interior Minister Abdul Razzak, and intelligence chief Hafiz Majid were all moving about Kandahar and southern Uruzgan provinces, constantly changing locations and refusing to meet together for fear of air attack.
This underscored, I said, our need to focus on striking the Taliban in Kandahar decisively before the window closed. But to do that we must focus on two things: making our targeted air attacks in the south more effective against the Taliban leadership; and, even more important, moving quickly to support those few southern tribals willing and able to effectively confront the Taliban, even at the relative expense of Northern Alliance commanders whom we had been disproportionately favoring.
The reassignment of Fazl and Baradar, I said, could presage an attempt by Mullah Omar to shift their troops southward as well. Fazl would later return north, but the larger point remained. “Even if Taliban defenses in the north should be broken, enough of their scattered fighters could make their way south to reconstitute a Taliban army . . . too strong for [our] lightly-armed tribals to match, and much too far away for Northern Alliance forces to reach. A defiant Taliban surrounded by significant numbers of loyal fighters in the remote south, supplemented by the Arabs and by Taliban guerilla fighters in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan (supported there by sympathetic tribals in the [contiguous] Pak tribal areas) would not be a welcome scenario. We recommend that we should strike quickly, using the capabilities at hand, while the southern advantage remains with us.”
The same day, Greg chimed in from his base to underscore the point. “We understand competing requirements, and applaud the efforts of others,” he said, “but [Karzai] is the only effective opposition force in the South, and [he] needs our support.”
The response from headquarters was contradictory. On the one hand, to my surprise, CTC/SO had high praise for my cable, asserting that it had been “received exceptionally well,” and reaffirming that we saw the situation in the south in the same way. A near-simultaneous message stated incongruously that Washington was interested in dispatching CIA teams to accompany two separate, completely unvetted Pashtun tribal leaders, with whom CIA had had only indirect contact to date, as they infiltrated back into Afghanistan. One, whom we knew to be a notorious fabricator, claimed to be returning to Kunar in the far northeast. Heavily engaged as we were with the Northern Alliance, a foothold there would have been less than useless to us at that stage, even if this fellow were serious—which we strongly doubted. The other candidate was a small-caliber figure whose home area was similarly far removed from the “Pashtun Belt.” We had stressed the need to quickly pursue the Taliban where they lived, and neither of the candidates headquarters had identified would get us close.
On the other hand, CTC/SO strongly asserted that they “might well elect to defer” sending a team to join Gul Agha Shirzai, with whom Islamabad was now in touch, “until he has assembled a large group of fighters and shown an ability to engage the enemy in the field.” That was sensible enough, as far as it went, but headquarters apparently saw no need to hold other candidates to such a standard. We feared that if Langley elected to assign CIA teams prematurely to unvetted and marginal figures, not only might these scarce teams be overrun by the Taliban and lost unnecessarily, but we would quickly become overstretched and incapable of supporting more substantial figures, such as Shirzai, whose base of support was in the Taliban heartland. We had reported a week earlier that we would soon know what he was capable of, and whether it would make sense to invest scarce CIA and Special Forces resources in him. Nonetheless, headquarters remained clearly and, to us at least, inexplicably hostile to this line of thinking.
Meanwhile, Hamid Karzai’s position was growing increasingly tenuous. He reported to Greg on October 28 that Taliban forces were moving into Deh Ra’ud, a significant town west of Tarin Kowt, threatening to arrest tribal leaders deemed loyal to him. The elders there, he said, had held a jirga, or consultation, in his presence to discuss declaring open hostilities against the Taliban. We were encouraged that he was developing such a following, but thought it unlikely they could sustain a fight without significant new weapons. Hamid once again moved his drop zone to what he hoped would be a safer location. This time he pleaded for a weapons delivery on the 29th. We had been at this for sixteen excruciating days. Greg had to inform him the following day that the latest requested drop was being postponed, yet again, to the 30th.
“That is unfortunate,” Karzai responded, as the Taliban had moved back into Tarin Kowt with 1,500 fighters. They were systematically arresting tribal elders suspected of loyalty to him, just as they were doing in Deh Ra’ud. Ominously, he added another item to his long wish list: a small, portable diesel generator and fuel, so that he could recharge his phone batteries while fleeing from the Taliban. Again, Greg weighed in to Washington with a plea not to miss the promised scheduled drop. Otherwise, he said, “Base does not look forward to the next sat-com transmission with Karzai.”
By now, the delay in supplying Karzai was beyond scandal, and approaching the criminal: heated messages were flying back and forth between headquarters and multiple field locations. The senior CIA representative at the “Joint Special Operations Task Force—North (JSOTF-N),” otherwise known as “Task Force Dagger,” located at the same Karshi Khanabad (“K2”) Airbase in Uzbekistan whence the aerial support flights emanated, suddenly weighed in for the first time. “Colonel Pete,” as he was affectionately known, was a tall, gray-haired Army Reserve officer with a bluff, friendly manner and an outsize personality. He had entered the Clandestine Service relatively late in life, but had brought with him considerable knowledge of the military. Usefully, he had also been Greg’s predecessor as my base chief.
Task Force Dagger had originally been set up to provide helicopter-borne “CSAR”—combat search and rescue—for downed U.S. aircrews in Afghanistan, but had quickly transitioned to provide a staging area for aerial delivery and for insertion of “Operational Detachments Alpha,” or “ODA”s, of the Fifth Special Forces Group as well. These were the multiskilled, twelve-man “A-teams” being inserted with CIA to support the indigenous militias of the Northern Alliance.
In his message, Colonel Pete described an aerial delivery logistics train that was essentially broken. Too many items, he said, from too many places were being packaged, shipped, broken down, and then repacked at too many stops along the way to Afghanistan. This was creating the interminable delays that threatened to undo us in the south. Instead, he advised, items should be sent in bulk to a single forward staging area at an airbase utilized by the U.S. military much closer to the theater of operations. There, weapons and supplies could be packaged once in the correct combinations for the various receiving teams, rigged for aerial deployment, and forwarded on to K2 for final delivery.
Revealingly, he noted that Task Force Dagger had only just been informed of a potential requirement for aerial supply of Karzai in the south, and that no provision had been made for deployment of an ODA in his support. Pete pointedly contrasted this with the elaborate plans being formulated to field ODAs with a series of second-tier commanders in the north. Given the critical importance and tenuous status of Karzai in the south, he argued, Task Force Dagger should be slightly delaying a planned drop to Commander Muhammad Atta of the Northern Alliance, and diverting that package to the beleaguered Pashtun in Uruzgan Province. We could do this, he said, and still be able to make the drop to Atta in time to support his combined move with General Dostum toward Mazar-e Sharif.
Apparently sensing through Colonel Pete that CTC/SO’s attitude was putting them at a distinct disadvantage in terms of planning for insertions in the south, Task Force Dagger sent word on October 28 that they were deploying, on their own initiative, a four-man “planning cell” to work with us in Islamabad. The planners were due to arrive on October 31. We were very pleased to receive them. I reported this development to Langley, a
nd noted that it would be even more helpful if we and Fifth Group could plan in concert with headquarters.
While the bureaucratic wars raged, Hamid Karzai continued a more elemental struggle on the ground. On October 30, we received a report from the Predator operators: they had detected activity at Karzai’s reported location, but could not find the pursuing Taliban. The Predator was just not useful as a broad search tool. Looking through the camera lens of a Predator was like looking through a keyhole. In order to follow the Taliban, they would need to have a precise location from which to start.
Later the same day, we finally got the much-anticipated word from Colonel Pete: Two C-130s had made a precision drop of nineteen bundles of up to 1,200 pounds each to Karzai’s location. This was quickly followed by an excited call from Hamid.
“We’ve got it!” he said. “Some has gone astray, my men are gathering it . . . I’m a little busy now . . . I will call you tomorrow.”
That night, Hamid contacted various international media outlets via his sat phone to announce his insurgent campaign against the Taliban. He had been wanting to do so for some time, but had been cautioned by Greg, who counseled him to wait until he had gathered more strength before waving a red flag in front of the mullahs.
Now, having met our own declared threshold, Greg came in with a formal request for an A-team to join Karzai, including specialists to guide tactical close-air support, supplemented with a couple of CIA “Ground Branch” paramilitary officers. It would be necessary to have substantial military presence right from the start, he wrote, as this would be a “UW” (unconventional warfare) campaign, quite unlike those under way in the north. This was his professional recommendation, he said, although deferring “to others more skilled and talented in this arena.” That last bit was vintage Greg.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Page 21
