88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  The response from headquarters was soon in coming. Citing the direct interest and involvement of DCI Tenet, they offered to provide a second drop to Karzai’s forces within seventy-two hours. They would not yet approve introduction of a CIA/SF team, though, until Karzai could demonstrate his ability to seize and maintain a defensible perimeter. Otherwise, the threat of capture would be too high. It was gratifying to have headquarters quoting back to us the criteria we had advocated all along for infiltration of a team, but in this case we felt they were being too literal. This was doubly unfortunate because firm U.S. rules of engagement demanded that any close-air targets be designated by Americans, and attempts thus far to do so with a Predator had failed. Without Americans on the ground with Karzai, U.S. aircraft could not provide him effective protection.

  Tenet, we were told, would be raising the issue of mandatory U.S. “eyes-on” with the Principals’ Committee—the War Cabinet—in hopes of getting a change in policy. As soon as the intrepid Pushtun chieftain could demonstrate he would not be overrun, we were assured, we would get our team. To us, this was cold comfort. We doubted there would be a change in military doctrine, and without Americans on the ground with him to direct air support, we thought it unlikely Karzai’s forces could defend a perimeter under determined Taliban attack.

  Hamid responded enthusiastically to the idea of a second drop. Having all the weapons and ammunition he needed for the moment, he said he now would welcome food, warm sleeping bags, and proper foot gear for his fighters. Once again, his force estimate was very squishy. He had 100 fighters physically with him, but the rest of his force, he said, was split up into two additional groups. Altogether, he thought, his force might number anywhere between 300 and 500 men.

  The next four days were an emotional roller coaster. On November 1, Taliban forces mounted in pickups and open-backed trucks rushed out from both Tarin Kowt and Deh Ra’ud, attacking Hamid and forcing his men to fall back. CENTCOM immediately vectored attack aircraft into the area, but had difficulty identifying targets. At various points, CENTCOM air controllers were speaking directly to Greg, as he attempted to relay targeting information from Hamid via sat phone. Nothing seemed to work very well. Karzai would excitedly relay what he was hearing from his men, trying to pinpoint targets he could not see himself. In frustration, he requested a helicopter, so that his men could pick out targets from above and report them directly.

  Late in the day, Hamid reported that the Taliban had broken contact. The U.S. strikes, he said, had sent a clear message. His forces were taking advantage of the lull to change their position. He promised to send coordinates for a new drop zone as soon as possible; Greg had earlier relayed a request for a one-pallet drop of additional weapons, but nothing could be delivered in the short time available.

  Late that night, as I paced the floor, we received another immediate message from headquarters. Intercepted Taliban communications indicated that Karzai’s forces had been ambushed; could we contact Hamid to determine his status? Greg set about feverishly to do that. About 11:00 PM, unable to tolerate the suspense any longer, I called Greg on the secure phone for an update.

  “I don’t know what’s happening, Chief. Hamid was supposed to have called over an hour ago.” I feared the worst, but wouldn’t say so. We chatted nervously for a while; the tension made me all the more susceptible to Greg’s offbeat humor.

  Suddenly: “It’s Hamid, Chief. I’ll call you right back.” Initially overjoyed that Karzai was still alive, my relief was short-lived. I could vividly imagine the scene as the faltering insurgent pleaded for help from Greg while Taliban fighters closed in on him from all sides. A few interminable minutes later, and Greg was back on the line, repeating Karzai’s halting transmissions, and mimicking their style.

  “There is firing again . . . We must move . . . My batteries are failing . . . You must send me a generator . . . I will call you when we arrive at our new location.” Click.

  On and on it went through the night, through several more such staccato interactions, each raising many more questions than it answered, as the running fight between Hamid’s tribals and the Taliban continued well into the morning of November 2.

  Later that day, Hamid was able at last to send a textual transmission.

  “We beat them like hell,” it began. Hamid and his men had encountered a large Taliban force, including both Arabs and Pakistanis, as they were attempting to change their location the night of November 1. The Taliban immediately tried to surround them. After a lengthy, confused fight, Hamid’s men had beaten them off. His force had again been divided into three: one group near Deh Ra’ud, and a second toward Tarin Kowt; he and his remaining fighters manned a command post, but without radios it was very difficult to coordinate with his other two units.

  Greg sent a response: “Everyone in the U.S. government supports you. All we ask is that you maintain a continuous heartbeat. . . .”

  Later on the 2nd, concerned that Taliban forces remained in the area and could attack again at any time, headquarters proposed that Karzai be supported with a BLU-82 strike. We appreciated the sentiment, but it was a terrible idea. A 15,000-pound “daisy-cutter” would have devastated a wide area. Our enemies would not be the only ones to suffer. After checking with Hamid, Greg immediately requested that they stand down: “Karzai depends on local support,” he pointed out.

  On November 3, unsure that he could maintain his position much longer, Karzai sent Greg a long message. He requested a helicopter exfiltration for himself and twelve of his senior commanders. He needed to confer face-to-face with us, he said. He could not sustain effective communications with us using the current system, and lacked the means to communicate with his own men over any distance. If we could retrieve him, he could quickly reinsert with his commanders and an American support team within seventy-two hours. In the meantime, the rest of his fighters would melt into the countryside, return to their villages, and await his return.

  In the previous forty-eight hours, Hamid Karzai’s tiny and almost hopelessly tenuous insurgency had suddenly entered the national consciousness. On November 2, The Washington Post ran a front-page story: “Pashtun Uprising Reported in Afghanistan,” it read. With the death of Abdul Haq only days before, Hamid was seen as the last great hope for Pashtun opposition to the Taliban. Hamid’s regular phone calls to international media outlets, “from deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan,” had no doubt helped to raise his profile.

  In response to our request, and probably encouraged by Hamid’s sudden prominence, General Franks immediately charged the Joint Special Operations Command to plan and execute his extraction. They agreed that someone who knew and could coordinate with Karzai should be on board. I wanted Greg on that helicopter. “Jimmy Flanagan,” a cheery, highly skilled former Delta operator from CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division who had only just arrived with us, would accompany him. Both flew immediately to Jacobabad, where they linked up with the JSOC shooters and the aircrews aboard a pair of CH-47 “Chinook” helicopters.

  This extraction, I knew, would be a white-knuckle affair. JSOC operators live on precise advance planning, and are used to being masters of their own fate. This time they would be anything but. They would be flying at night into an unsurveyed and poorly marked landing zone that they had had little chance to study. For all they knew, the location to which they were vectoring might have been overrun by the Taliban before they got there. In their usual operational scenarios armed fighters closing on them are enemies, and treated accordingly. The instinct of Hamid’s undisciplined militia fighters, no doubt, would be to rush toward the landing helicopter, carrying their weapons with them; that could well lead to a spontaneous firefight, and disaster for all concerned.

  Greg gave Hamid clear, stern instructions: No one was to approach the helicopter; all weapons were to be kept out of sight. Greg alone would dismount from the helo and meet with Karzai on the periphery of the landing zone, where he should have his party—which had si
nce been reduced to seven—organized and ready to leave immediately. Greg would then escort them, unarmed, to the helo.

  Miraculously, it all came off smoothly. After picking up the Afghans, the helicopters touched down briefly at Dalbandin, in southern Baluchistan, and then swung northward to Jacobabad. Karzai was safely in our hands. I couldn’t believe our good fortune. It was well before dawn on the morning of November 4, 2001.

  I wanted to rush down to meet our guests immediately, but was delayed by another task. Secretary Rumsfeld was making his first, whirlwind overseas trip since 9/11. He would fly into Pakistan that afternoon of the 4th, and stop briefly at the embassy before continuing on to a meeting and dinner hosted by President Musharraf, departing Pakistan that same night.

  The trip planners in the Office of the Secretary of Defense indicated that the secretary would have only an hour or so in Islamabad before meeting with Musharraf. He wished to meet with the chief of station, they said. The embassy responded immediately that of course Rumsfeld could meet the COS, who could be included as a participant in a briefing by the “Country Team.” Rumsfeld’s office fired back. No, they said, perhaps we have not made ourselves clear: the secretary has little time, and wishes to meet only with the chief of station.

  This was all very flattering, and the secretary would probably not have cared, but he wasn’t doing me any favors. Word that he would only consent to meet with me, and not even the ambassador, spread quickly among the embassy staff. I made a great show of concern and dismay over this. Ambassador Chamberlin, as it happened, would be out of town in any case, but I pleaded with the deputy chief of mission, Michele Sison, to “save” me from having to meet alone with the fearsome Rumsfeld.

  Any chief of station depends greatly upon the support of others, and is well advised not to forget it. I had wonderful relationships with all the key section chiefs, as well as with Ambassador Chamberlin, whose independence of thought and bureaucratic courage I particularly admired, and I needed to maintain those relationships intact. Chamberlin, in particular, had the ability to make life hard for me, and sometimes exercised it. I could well understand the reasons why. The mission was in drawdown mode, with all dependents and non-essential staff sent away from post. She was under tremendous pressure from the State Department to keep the number of official Americans in-country to an absolute minimum, and was even forced to provide a daily headcount. I, of course, was working at cross-purposes, with new people pouring in almost every day. We clashed over it repeatedly.

  “These people are on the gravy train,” she told me one day.

  “Look,” I retorted. “All these people have jobs, and could easily be doing them safely behind a desk in northern Virginia. They’re not out here for their health. It takes people to support a war effort, and we need them here.” I took her on an unscripted walkabout of our spaces. As we randomly approached people crammed cheek-by-jowl at long tables—many didn’t even have proper desks—I invited them to tell the ambassador precisely what they were doing.

  She stopped me partway through the second room. “Okay. I take your point,” she said. I didn’t need to give her, or anyone else in the mission, an excuse to make things harder for me still. I had to show I was a team player.

  When Secretary Rumsfeld arrived at my door, I was pleased to find him escorted by Michele Sison. Tall, vivacious, strikingly pretty, and—in view of her senior position—surprisingly young, she had cheerily greeted Rumsfeld on his arrival and simply refused to leave his side. The secretary, for his part, seemed very jocular.

  “What do you know that I don’t know?” he demanded of me, as soon as we were settled.

  “Very little, I hope.” We were sharing everything we knew with his department, I said.

  “Tell me about Hamid Karzai.”

  I was careful at the outset to state that while of course some of my people knew him very well, I had not yet met the man.

  “Oh, I have!” Michele said. She proceeded to provide the secretary impressions from her encounters with Karzai on the diplomatic circuit. We carried on in a relaxed fashion, the secretary posing questions and listening intently. After a few minutes, a doughy, bookish-looking fellow opened the door and walked in as if he owned the place. I would later come to know Doug Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, much better, in the context of a very different war.

  I talked about prospects for a broader insurgency in the south, and the difficulties we were encountering in getting Pashtun leaders to get off the fence and to commit themselves. The secretary glared. “And what are you doing about it?” he demanded in mock exasperation.

  “Now you see what we live with,” Feith muttered wanly.

  It didn’t seem that Rumsfeld had any particular agenda for the meeting. I think having heard my ideas about the conduct of the war, he just wanted to take my measure a bit. He would seek out my views again in future.

  What I neglected to explain to him was that Karzai’s exfiltration should be kept secret. It simply never occurred to me that I would have to. I thought it obvious that with Karzai having publicly announced his leadership of a genuine, independent, indigenously based insurgency in the heartland of Afghanistan, the last thing we would want to do was advertise that the U.S. military had been forced to fly in to save him from the Taliban. The secretary and I were operating on very different assumptions. I would soon regret the oversight.

  Late that night, I met with General Ehsan, the new ISI chief, just as he was returning from dinner with Rumsfeld at the presidency. I briefed him on our surreptitious exfiltration of Hamid Karzai, requesting that he keep this information close-hold, and stressing that it would only be a brief period before Karzai would leave Pakistan to return to the fight. No one must know that he’d left. The general agreed, stressing that we needed to make quicker progress against the Taliban, and also offered me exclusive use of his personal aircraft for three days, so that we could ferry necessary supplies and equipment down to Jacobabad.

  It was not until the following morning that I found myself in the abandoned schoolhouse that was now Hamid Karzai’s home. After we had conferred quietly for a while, we joined his tribal colleagues in a circle. Hamid introduced his six commanders, extolling each in turn for his loyalty and bravery in confronting the Taliban. I asked a number of questions about their plans and the steps they would take upon their return, with Hamid patiently translating both questions and answers. We spoke of our common interest in driving foreign terrorists out of Afghanistan, and the terrorists’ Taliban protectors from power. I spoke of the assistance they could expect from America. The discussion was all very warm and bracing, but it hadn’t yet told me what I really wanted to know. Finally, I put to them what was to me the obvious question:

  “What you are setting out to do will be very difficult,” I said. “You are taking great risks for yourselves, your families and your clans.” I paused, looking briefly at each of them in turn. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Muhammad Shahzad,” a heavyset man whose body seemed to radiate energy and strength, had made a particular impression on me. He had piercing light green eyes, and bore himself with considerable dignity. Karzai had earlier told me privately of his loyalty. He had insisted on remaining next to Hamid at all times; at the points of greatest danger in the mountains, he had remained awake while Hamid slept, and had covered his leader with his own blanket to protect him from the wind. To that point, he had not said a word, but now he spoke for everyone. His answer was simple and direct:

  “We’re tired of those bastards from Kandahar telling us what to do in our own area.” That I could understand; it worked for me.

  Hamid, Jeff (the senior reports officer), and I then excused ourselves and stepped out to a separate room. I felt I had died a thousand deaths following Karzai’s progress over the past few weeks through brief, often panic-stricken snippets, related secondhand. Now, at last, I had the opportunity to hear the complete tale, calmly, from the man himself, as Jeff took notes and ask
ed questions.

  As we knew, on October 8, Hamid and three companions had crossed into Afghanistan on Highway 4, the main southern route from Quetta, riding two motorcycles all the way to Kandahar. They spent the night with a trusted friend, from whose home they could see the booming flashes of a U.S. air raid. The following day they drove northward in a taxi until they encountered a Taliban checkpoint at the crossing into Uruzgan Province. The guard, a taciturn young man barely able to support a beard, was suspicious of the large bag in the back of their car, the one with the satellite phone secreted within it, and wished to inspect it. The taxi’s occupants demurred, and two of their number went inside to speak with the officer in charge. Karzai and his remaining companion whispered together in the car. Their quest might end right then and there, they agreed, but they would not be arrested that day. They prepared their weapons. Their two friends emerged from the guardhouse. The senior officer, apparently, had not been interested—either in them or their bag. Leaving the border post behind, they continued onward without a stop until they reached Tarin Kowt, the provincial seat of Uruzgan. Hamid Karzai, the son of Abdul Ahad, grandson of the great Khair Muhammad Khan, and scion of the proud Durrani Popalzai, was finally home among his people.

  The Pashtuns of Afghanistan are divided into two broad tribal confederations, the Durrani and the Gilzai. The former are concentrated in the central and southern regions of the country, the latter in the east. Tarin Kowt itself was comprised of perhaps 60 percent Durrani, with a plurality of those drawn from Hamid’s Popalzai. As soon as he arrived in the area, Hamid traveled to Kotwan village to meet with the highly respected Amin Zadeh. Amin drew together key notables from both Durrani- and Gilzai-affiliated tribes, including representatives of all the local Popalzai. Together they pledged Hamid their support, but stressed to him that they had few weapons, and not enough ammunition even for those. In subsequent days, Hamid met local chieftains in Khanaka, and later in Ghojurak, canvassing tribal groups in virtually all the villages surrounding Tarin Kowt over the following two weeks. In one excursion in the Dera Juy Valley, his borrowed car got stuck in mud; he and his companions walked onward three hours up the valley to meet with seventy tribals.