88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  “Everyone wants in on this!” It sounded like an easy victory in the making. We had no idea just how close the southern campaign was, even then, to catastrophe.

  By the end of the day, of the approximately eighty Taliban vehicles involved in the attack, some forty-five had been destroyed, with the rest finally breaking off and fleeing in disorder. Many scores of Taliban were killed—most buried too quickly by local villagers to get any sort of accurate post-battle count. It was another huge setback for the Taliban, following on the heels of the fall of Kabul and the other disasters that had recently befallen them in the north, but this time in a Pashtun area close to Kandahar, which they had dominated almost since their founding and which was home to some of their most senior leaders.

  Still, it had been a very close thing: even with the enormous weight of uncontested American airpower on their side, Karzai and his adherents in Tarin Kowt had nearly been overrun. Tactical stupidity—rushing forward headlong in vehicles over open ground in spite of sustained air attack—had been at least as much a factor in the Taliban defeat as had U.S. air superiority. Had Karzai perished, as well he might, it would have left the Taliban free to concentrate their reserves on Gul Agha, and would doubtless have convinced the southern Pashtuns of the futility of resistance to the Taliban. It would certainly have changed the whole complexion of the struggle in the south, and might have forced us to “Americanize” the war and abandon altogether our strategy of assisting the Pashtuns in their own liberation.

  As it was, Pashtun elders in Uruzgan who had been chafing under the Taliban but who had been unwilling to declare themselves without indications of imminent Taliban defeat were now coming forward in growing numbers to declare fealty to Karzai, their native son. They sought his patronage and promised fighters to his cause.

  By any objective measure, neither Karzai nor Gul Agha, at this or any other stage, posed much of a military threat to the Taliban, per se. In those days I thought of them primarily as mobile lightning rods, able to attract attacks by Taliban forces who had no tactical answer for the problem of air-delivered smartbombs. With the relative immunity afforded them by American airpower, the threat they posed to the Taliban was primarily political, not military. It is worth remembering that many of the major victories won by the Taliban during their northward march in the first years of their existence were not won through force of arms. Instead, whole populations, tired of the depredations of feral local warlords, had risen up to embrace the pious rectitude which the Taliban represented, driving off their oppressors in the process and sending their sons to join its army. Now, the process was working in reverse. Our own understanding of this broad sociopolitical shift was hazy at best. The Taliban were far more capable of understanding what was happening to them.

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

  NOVEMBER 17, 2001

  HEY, CHIEF.” THE COPS (Chief of Operations) was leaning through my doorway. “Jalil’s on the line. He sounds pretty excited.”

  I hadn’t been sure if I’d ever hear from Mullah Jalil again. But given that he was calling me, I was not at all surprised that he was upset. I crossed the hall and took a moment to collect my thoughts before picking up the sat phone receiver.

  “Haji Mullah, how are you?” I said breezily.

  “They tried to kill me!” he wailed. “They bombed my house!”

  I feigned shock and surprise. “What? Haji Mullah, this is terrible! This was not supposed to happen! Are you all right?” The bombs had fallen the night before, destroying the Foreign Office Guesthouse where Jalil made his residence, at a time when he would normally have been present. He had left home just two hours before the attack; when he returned in the early morning, he found the place in ruins.

  The start of hostilities on October 7 had done nothing to discourage Mullah Jalil from continuing to speak with me. On the contrary, it gave him all the more reason to stay in touch, and to try to manipulate me or to seek my assistance in pursuit of his many schemes. If there were a common denominator in the little cleric’s constant machinations, it was that he hoped to find a way to end the war. To the extent that could be done on terms maximally favorable to the Taliban, so much the better; but he clearly wanted to find a solution to the conflict before it wrecked the movement. Within that overall framework, though, there was no telling how many different conspiracies he might be pursuing at any given time, or how far he might go in his pursuit of each. For my part, I was looking for instances where our tactical interests might overlap, or where gambits he was pursuing to his own ends might be twisted or exploited in ways the mullah did not intend.

  To say that Jalil was highly conspiratorial was not to say that he was particularly schooled in deception; his motives were generally easy to trace. You could never trust what he said, of course, but there were many instances when it was to his advantage to tell the truth, and in any case it was always useful to measure what he was saying against what we knew from other, more reliable sources. My contact with him also provided me a means to pass useful messages to the Taliban leadership.

  In one of our conversations near the outset of the war, Haji Mullah suggested to me what he hoped I would see as a useful operational ploy. If I were to send a doctor in my employ to Kandahar, he suggested, say from another Muslim country, senior Taliban leaders would bring their families to him for treatment, thus providing the physician—and therefore me—with a wonderful means of eliciting information. Jalil would gladly facilitate the process, and help install the doctor. There were times when his manipulations were so childishly transparent they were almost endearing.

  On October 18, Jalil suggested something more interesting. He hoped to arrange meetings between me and “some Taliban leaders and commanders.” Some of the Taliban leadership would be aware of what he was doing, he said elliptically, and some would not; Mullah Omar, he said, would be in the latter category. As a test, and partly out of concern for some sort of ambush, I asked whether he would object to having these meetings set up with ISI assistance. He warily replied that that would very much depend on who in the ISI was involved. He readily agreed to my suggestion of Brigadier Suhail, the nattily attired Taliban expert and my good friend, but volunteered that under no circumstances should “Major Hadad,” a radical supporter of the Taliban in the mold of Colonel Imam, be made aware of what was happening. In seeking General Jafar’s agreement to employ Suhail in the effort, I underscored my concerns about Hadad and others of his ilk. Jafar fully understood: Imam, he said, had been sent back into retirement for just that reason.

  The meeting took place in Karachi on October 24. The experienced officer I sent in my stead met with Abdul Qadir, the Taliban military attaché in Pakistan, who was acting as a personal emissary for Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder, with Mullah Omar, of the Taliban, and now the Taliban’s deputy chief of Army Staff. Baradar was a respected commander from the jihad era and, like Hamid Karzai, a Durrani Popalzai from Deh Ra’ud, in Uruzgan. Speaking through his emissary, Baradar promised to give us “five [senior] Arabs,” presumably including bin Laden, but said there could be no change in overall Taliban policy concerning al-Qa’ida. That was unacceptable, of course, but an interesting beginning. We passed the emissary a satellite phone for Baradar’s use, with an invitation to contact me directly.

  On November 8, Jalil passed on a more interesting message still. Baradar, he said, wanted to join the opposition with 700 or 800 fighters from his home area of Deh Ra’ud. But first, the commander wanted to know two things: Would we support him? And second, were there any other Afghans who would fight? These were not unreasonable questions. If he were to break militarily with the Taliban with only a small force, Baradar would need our assistance to survive more than a few days, and unless other Pashtuns were willing to oppose the Taliban, he would be condemned to ultimate failure. Neither Abdul Haq nor Karzai had received effective assistance from us up to that stage; the former was dead, and the latter had ba
rely escaped Afghanistan with his life a few days before. It was not at all clear whether any other Pashtuns would take similar risks.

  But still, this didn’t smell right. It sounded as though Baradar—or perhaps Jalil—hoped to lure Americans into an ambush, or to sniff out whether there were other Pashtuns who were preparing to take up arms against the Taliban. And even if Baradar were sincere, why would Jalil help him? Jalil had never given any indication that he would turn against Omar, or otherwise help us to eliminate other senior Taliban whose recalcitrance was standing in the way of a settlement. I responded that we would be willing to provide assistance to Baradar, or anyone else who took up arms against the Taliban for that matter, but that we would only do so if Baradar publicly broke with the organization and inflicted casualties on their forces. And as for others, Jalil should know that there were many Pashtuns who opposed the Taliban. The wily cleric indicated that he understood; he would convey our message to the deputy chief of staff. Days later, there was still no response from the senior Taliban commander. Jalil told me on November 10 and 11 that he had discussed the situation with both Baradar and Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, the minister of civil aviation. Neither, he said, could decide what to do.

  It was around this time that Dave approached me. With all of us working eighteen-hour days, none of us could afford to expend unnecessary effort. Why was I wasting my time with Jalil? I took some umbrage at that, but it was a reasonable question, and it caused me to reflect. Sure, the chances of our getting anything really useful from this contact were undoubtedly remote. But in my estimation, the potential long odds opportunity to sow dissension among the Taliban leadership, unique as it was, made it worth the investment in time. And in all honesty, there was something else, too: I was drawn to this sort of contact like a moth to a flame. In the Clandestine Service, closing with the enemy—talking to terrorists, if you like—is what we do. I’m not sure I could have passed up the chance to spar with Mullah Jalil, even if, on some level, I’d wanted to.

  And there was yet another reason to maintain contact with Jalil, one more devious. In mid-October, Jalil asked if I could ensure that his ministry’s guesthouse located on the eastern outskirts of Kandahar along the Kandahar-Kabul highway would not be bombed. With that assurance, he would be able to stay there, and use the location as a safe place to meet with his Taliban colleagues, and thus develop information that would benefit us both. I readily agreed, and informed headquarters that this location should be carefully watched via aerial reconnaissance. If, as I suspected, Jalil eventually took advantage of this “no-fire” zone to host a significant meeting, it might provide us with an excellent opportunity to kill multiple members of the Taliban leadership at a stroke.

  On November 16, with the Taliban in the throes of near panic over the recent fall of Kabul, Jalil reported that some of the senior leaders were discussing the possibility of surrender. That evening, we received a highly reliable report from a vetted source that Omar and other members of the Shura were meeting at the Foreign Office Guesthouse. This was what we’d been waiting for. The report had come to us late, though—well after the scheduled start of the meeting. We reported it immediately, in hopes there would still be time to strike. The presence or absence of vehicles in the area would tell us whether the opportunity were still live. Hours passed, with no indication of a reaction from the military. Once again, a rare chance had been missed.

  I was awakened in my bedroom about two o’clock in the morning by a call from an old friend. “Dan,” an experienced ops officer, was now the senior military targeting officer for CTC. It seemed that half the agency was being drawn into CTC one way or another.

  “The Air Force wants to bomb the Foreign Office Guesthouse.” Referring to Jalil by his code name, he inquired whether we considered him an asset. An “asset,” in CIA parlance, is a recruited source, someone to whom we owe loyalty and protection. Mullah Jalil was certainly not that.

  “Why do they want to bomb it now?” I asked. “It’s too late. The meeting’s over. [Jalil] is no asset, and I have no problem bombing his location, provided there’s a target there. But killing [Jalil] by himself makes no sense: he’s not a commander, he doesn’t control any guns, and he’s no threat to us. Since now the Taliban has used the place successfully for a high-level meeting, they’re likely to use it again. We should wait, and bomb it then.”

  After we rang off, I had the suspicion that Dan had only heard a small part of what I’d said. He’d called with a simple question from the Air Force—“Was this a no-strike location?”—and I had given him his answer: “No.” I had a sinking feeling I’d just signed the mullah’s death warrant. I shook my head at the stupidity of it all.

  As the next morning’s phone call made clear, I had in fact done almost exactly what I’d feared. After Jalil calmed down a bit, we spoke about the situation, and whether the collapse of their position in the north might induce the Taliban leadership to explore terms of surrender. As we prepared to ring off, I again expressed concern about his plight, and the loss of his house.

  “Where will you go?” I asked. The words were hardly out of my mouth when I realized my mistake: at this point, I was the last person in the world to whom he would reveal his whereabouts, ever. There was a long pause, followed by a dry, mirthless laugh. He hung up without another word. Dave must have noticed something odd about my expression as I walked through the outer office. He looked up at me quizzically from behind his desk.

  “I’m becoming a very bad man,” I said.

  Mullah Jalil called me again on November 18. The leaders in Kandahar were discussing whether they should explore possible peace terms, and were seeking to establish channels to Karzai through Haji Bashir Noorzai, the drug lord, and Mullah Naqib, yet another jihad-era commander who was the master of Arghandab, just north of Kandahar. They didn’t feel they could reach any decisions, though, until they could consult with some of the senior Taliban commanders fleeing from the north. Even if the commanders couldn’t reach Kandahar, he said, Omar might be able to consult with some of them via radio if they could get as far south as Zabol Province. Apparently becoming impatient with his colleagues’ reflexive indirection, Jalil himself was trying to get in touch with Karzai, he said. Two days later, he would succeed.

  Chapter 29

  * * *

  REDEMPTION AND VINDICATION

  NOVEMBER 19, 2001

  THE HELICOPTER SWOOPED IN low, dipping quickly between the high ridges on either side of the valley. No sooner had it landed than Gul Agha broke for it at a dead run. His speed was surprising for such a big man. His family members and senior commanders, who had been standing with him as they tracked the helo’s progress, trailed after him as best they could in the darkness. Suddenly, he pitched forward, face-first, and fell heavily to the ground, as though poleaxed. The others coming up from behind stopped well short of him, appalled, and busied themselves in embarassed silence, studying the ground or the sky as their chieftain gathered himself, grunting, and slapped the dust from his clothes. As soon as he was upright and reoriented, Gul Agha resumed his sprint, this time not stopping until he had wrapped Mark in a smothering embrace.

  The reasons for Gul Agha’s enthusiasm were not entirely sentimental. Three days before, on November 16, one of his reconnoitering patrols came across the Taliban “lost convoy” we had been tracking the night of the 14th, now dug in a short distance from the western entry to the Shin Naray Valley. Quick requests for an airstrike made from Islamabad were denied, for the familiar reason: no U.S. eyes-on to verify the target. With a Special Forces ODA present, including a forward air controller, the Taliban vehicles might have been attacked from the sky in a matter of minutes. Instead, they remained at large, liable to strike at any moment. From what we knew, it appeared Gul Agha had done all we could expect, but had received little support in return. We were tempting fate; we needed to get a team in with him as soon as possible.

  “Duane,” a paramilitary specialist sent forward by CT
C, had joined the station a few days before. He’d been told by CTC/SO that once an initial team had deployed with Karzai, he would lead the next one dispatched in the south. That wasn’t going to happen: Dave pulled him into his office for a private chat. Mark was a veteran station officer, Duane was told, and a highly competent one; he had deep knowledge of Afghanistan and of Afghan politics; and most important, he had established an excellent relationship with Gul Agha. Mark would be the one to lead the team.

  “I don’t trust this guy,” Dave muttered to me after he and Duane emerged.

  “Duane will be fine,” I said. “He can’t help what he was told. He doesn’t care who’s in charge; he just wants to get into the fight.” I was right. Duane did an excellent job for us, and never caused a bit of trouble.

  We sent out an immediate cable, proposing that Mark and Duane link up with ODA 583, which had been designated by Fifth Group to join Gul Agha and was assembling at Jacobabad. Two other specially trained enlisted men from the military’s “Gray Fox” program were also available at Jacobabad to add to the team. I had worked with operators like them before. In addition to their military skills and specialized intelligence training, and their access to military communications, they had the benefit of being formally under our control, and so could be assigned as we saw fit, without Pentagon permission.

  The following day brought good news. Several truckloads of Pak Army weapons arranged by General Jafar and turned over to Gul Agha’s men at Quetta rolled into Shin Naray; these were augmented later the same day by several more weapons bundles, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.