88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  The terrorism “Czar,” for his part, was in a difficult position. The ISI does not have its own weapons stocks; he had arranged the delivery from the Pak Army Supply Corps, and now they wanted to be reimbursed, to the tune of a substantial sum. Jafar had gone out of his way to help me, and now he was on the hook. In response to his inquiries, the supply people had said that while the weapons provided may not have been new, they were perfectly serviceable and had come from standard Pak Army stocks. Without hard evidence to the contrary, there wasn’t much he could say, and I could tell he still half-suspected that he was being framed by Gul Agha’s people. It’s possible that we had fallen victim to some surreptitious Pak Army conspiracy to undermine the anti-Taliban war effort, but I think it far more likely that some enterprising Pakistani supply officer had seen the opportunity to dispose of a lot of old weaponry cluttering his warehouse and get generously reimbursed for it.

  The problem was entirely my fault. I could and should have had the weapons inspected on delivery, and did not; I was moving too fast, and operating on too many assumptions. It was a foolish mistake, perhaps decreasing the effectiveness of Gul Agha’s force, and at the same time gratuitously handing CTC another stick with which to beat me.

  Not satisfied with that degree of trouble, I went on to invite more. No sooner had the first weapons convoy made it to Shin Naray than I began to worry about resupply, particularly of ammunition. When Gul Agha and Foxtrot decided to move south to Highway 4, it occurred to me that this might give us an alternative means of resupply in the event the aerial route proved inadequate, which I fully expected. If Gul Agha were able to secure the road running east to the border from Takht-e Pol, perhaps we could resupply him by road from Quetta.

  Again, I had no alternative but to turn to the Pak Army. Pakistan was awash in guns, but we lacked the time or resources to canvass the countryside to make purchases of a half-dozen automatic rifles at a time, to say nothing about quality control. This time I specified to Jafar that the weapons should be brand-new, and in their original packing crates. Jafar himself joined Captain Greg and Jim M., my senior paramilitary officer, to thoroughly inspect everything on delivery. It was pristine. Jafar had the weapons and ammunition loaded on three outsize “jinga” trucks, and prepositioned them, at my request, in Quetta.

  Of course, I had no authorization for any of this, and I knew I’d never get it until the need was manifest, by which time it might be too late. I figured that if we turned out not to need these supplies, I could always return the shipment to Jafar, and would only have to worry about the cost of fuel and drivers. Even then, I was clearly out on a limb, but I thought about how I’d feel if Foxtrot were sitting on Highway 4, under attack from the west, unable to get adequate resupply from the air, and I were unable to do anything about it. The decision was an easy one.

  With Shirzai’s forces about to take Takht-e Pol, I requested authorization to reimburse the Paks for the first shipment, and permission to go ahead with purchase and road delivery of the second. I was told that under no circumstances was I to proceed with the second purchase; Gul Agha would be resupplied from the air. And as for the first delivery, I was treated to a prim lecture on prevailing prices for reconditioned weapons in the gray arms market. I was reminded that the Pak weapons—as we had duly reported—were “substandard,” and told that I should negotiate a lower price. I was also pointedly told that while I may have based my decision to make the first purchase on verbal approvals from the DCI and DDO at the November 13 video conference, I should not have taken this as formal authorization, which can only come in cable traffic. They were outdoing themselves. It was a response worthy of Captain Queeg.

  It wasn’t until weeks later that Mark related to me the story of the house-bombing at Takht-e Pol. The father of the injured girl had wept openly and unashamedly after rushing to the scene. Although Afghan tradition called for compensation for his loss, he refused it. He hated the Taliban, he said. If the sacrifice of his wife was the price to be paid for liberation, he would accept it. The Special Forces medic stitched up his daughter and treated her as best he could.

  I don’t know exactly why I was so seized by the thought of this girl. Perhaps it was Mark’s vivid description that distinguished the scene in my mind. There has been so much carnage, before and since. In the many years of America’s engagement in Afghanistan, how many civilian casualties have there been? But to me, this was singular. These were my officers; this was our battle. This girl, somehow, was ours. When I asked weeks later, Mark thought Gul Agha’s people would be able to locate the girl’s family. I spoke to a senior colleague in the Near East Division about setting up a fund to help her. But those initial sentiments were soon obscured and then overwhelmed in an unending welter of eighteen-hour days. There was still a war to be fought.

  So many years later, there are times, alone in the dark of night, when I still think about that girl. I wonder what became of her, and how the scars we inflicted might have affected her prospects for marriage. I never saw her myself, never even knew her name. After a long career, after involvement, direct and indirect, in so many wars, named and unnamed, I have so few regrets. But if there were one thing I could do over, it would be this: I wish I had done something to help that girl.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  SERENDIPITY TO INEVITABILITY

  NOVEMBER 22, 2001

  AN ODD FEELING SWEPT over me as my turn came to speak. It was one of those all-too-rare moments of clarity, when a million jumbled, contradictory sentiments suddenly fuse into a single, crystalline, articulable thought. I spoke of the horrors of 9/11, of events whose meaning and emotional impact many of us had hardly begun to absorb, pressed as we had been into immediate, incessant action. We would never have wished such horror and sadness to be visited on our country, I said, nor would we have wished for the present war. And yet, we should give thanks. For if these events had to come, thank God they came on our watch, since unlike nearly everyone else, it was in our capacity to do something about them. I raised a glass: “Let us give thanks,” I said, “for the opportunity to serve.”

  It was Thanksgiving Day in Islamabad, and Wendy Chamberlin had generously thrown open her doors to the entire community, swollen as it was with visiting military personnel, itinerant CIA operators and analysts, and any number of outsiders from an alphabet soup of government agencies, to say nothing of what remained of our original, close-knit group. The sole price of admission: public words of thanks. It was a touching event, with many remembrances of those who had been uprooted from their homes and could not be with us. And yet, as it turned out, I spoke for many for whom our present efforts were a welcome outlet for unspoken grief, anger, and a sense of violation.

  The following day, Greg called. During his extended stay in Tarin Kowt, he had had time to make regular secure sat phone contact with us in Islamabad to consult and provide updates. During that period I frequently would enter the station in the morning to find Dave in his office, talking and laughing uproariously on the phone. There could only be one explanation.

  “You’re talking to that damned Greg again, aren’t you?” I’d call out, intending to be heard at the other end of the line, before picking it up myself.

  On this post-Thanksgiving afternoon, I passed on holiday greetings, and asked how their day had been. He didn’t have to tell me, actually. I had a clear mental image of what it was like: meager, monotonous, badly prepared food; scarce clean water; Spartan accommodations in cold mud huts where thick dust constantly hung in the air.

  “Oh, Chief,” he began, with apparently earnest enthusiasm. “You wouldn’t believe it. Best Thanksgiving ever! They’ve got the biggest turkeys here you ever saw; ate so much we couldn’t move. Just stuffed ourselves. Then, after we laid around awhile, we rolled on down to the ball field to watch Tarin Kowt take on Deh Ra’ud High. . . .” Before long, he had me laughing helplessly.

  There were limits, though, to the extent to which good humor could compensat
e for the deprivations of the field. To those living in such conditions, the few small physical comforts that remain to them can take on immense importance. For one of the Special Forces communicators there with Team Echo, it was his morning cup of coffee. Each day, he would prepare it with infinite care, employing precise amounts of sugar and powdered creamer, scarce commodities that he carefully husbanded. On one such morning, just after completing his ritual preparations, his radio went off unexpectedly. Before running off to answer it, he solemnly balanced his cup on a rock, where it unfortunately fell under the gaze of Tom, the CIA Dari translator, whose light-fingered proclivities have been noted earlier.

  According to contemporaneous accounts, it took three strapping Special Forces operators to pull the communicator off poor Tom. There might have been serious legal repercussions had they failed. But there was no question of Tom’s staying: for his own safety, Greg placed him on the next available helicopter.

  The shock of their defeat at Tarin Kowt had brought a welter of tentative probes from various prominent Taliban figures. On November 18, Karzai was contacted by an intermediary for Taliban minister of defense Obeidullah. Two days later, Mullah Jalil called him, as he had indicated to me he would, and was told by Hamid that if he surrendered, he would be treated well. As Jalil explained to me, the Taliban leadership was still frozen in indecision, waiting for commanders Dadullah-Lang and Muhammad Fazl to return from Kunduz. The Taliban commanders were trying to negotiate free passage for their men with General Dostum in return for the surrender of their weapons and foreign fighters. On the 23rd, the Taliban leadership was still waiting, and feared the negotiations with Dostum had broken down.

  According to Jalil, the Taliban were continuing their talks, both with the drug-running Haji Bashir Noorzai—whom they had put out of business a year before, but who appeared to have somehow convinced them he could play an intermediary role—and with Karzai. Omar, he said, was constantly moving his location; he demurred when I asked precisely where. The cleric claimed that he was trying to persuade the others in the leadership to accept a face-saving way out; he hoped that they might do so if Karzai and Gul Agha would employ trusted mullahs to broker the negotiations. It was becoming obvious to me, though, that Brigadier Suhail’s assessment of intra-Taliban dynamics was absolutely correct. The Taliban were incapable of making a group decision without Mullah Omar’s involvement and support; and despite all the maneuvering around him, the Taliban chief still showed no sign of backing down.

  On the 25th, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, the justice minister, offered to surrender to Hamid, and was given a slightly different message. The fate of senior Taliban officials would be determined by international bodies, he was told, but they could count on Karzai’s protection in the meantime. The offer, Karzai said, would be good for forty-eight hours only. It was perhaps not an accident that Hamid had spoken just minutes before on a sat phone call set up by Greg with Ambassador James Dobbins, who was to be the senior U.S. representative to the Bonn Conference, arranged under UN auspices to determine the future of Afghanistan—and set to begin in two days’ time.

  As the political environment in the south rapidly shifted, Karzai was clearly making things up as he went along, as we all were. His instincts were generous, and he appeared inclined toward reconciliation, but he remained highly suspicious of the Taliban. He feared that Obeidullah might be trying to use negotiations with him as a stalling tactic in hopes that he could eventually consolidate the Taliban forces then besieged in Konduz, whose amnesty was being negotiated, into his planned defense of the south. But as these various bargaining initiatives gained momentum, Hamid expressed particular faith in Mullah Naqib of Arghandab, just north of Kandahar City. Naqib was clearly tolerated by the Taliban, who had allowed him to retain authority in his own area, but Karzai did not consider him aligned with them. He insisted to Greg that Naqib should be involved in any surrender negotiations with the Taliban.

  In Islamabad, we had a less sanguine view of the former jihad-era commander and former Kandahar governor. We disseminated a warning, drawing on information from multiple sources, suggesting that Naqib was acting as a front for Taliban interests. They had not ceded any real power to him, we pointed out, and the twin facts that he was willing to play the intermediary and that he had the apparent trust of the Taliban leadership did nothing to ease our concerns. Naqib’s warning to Karzai that the Taliban could not turn over their capital to him because the Arabs wouldn’t allow it sounded like a lame excuse to our ears, and an effort to buy time. In fact, subsequent events would demonstrate that we were judging Naqib too harshly, but our attitude was a prudent reaction to the multiple intrigues around us.

  Although clearly willing to treat with the Taliban to a degree which left us uncomfortable in Islamabad, to say nothing of Washington (to the extent Washington had any real inkling as to what was going on), Karzai was not about to risk international, and particularly American support by appearing in any way tolerant of al-Qa’ida or terrorism. Throughout this period there was no one close to him, the redoubtable Greg notwithstanding, to whom he could turn for a definitive readout on American policy, as indeed no clear policy existed. To the extent he could intuit U.S. attitudes, they were reflexively hostile toward anyone associated with the Taliban. All political momentum was behind the upcoming Bonn Conference, scheduled to start on November 27, and the Taliban would play no role in it. Hamid’s political room for maneuver in dealing with the clerical regime was thus extremely limited. He found himself in a position where he could provide politically expedient assurances to Taliban leaders, but with absolutely no guarantee in his own mind that he could make good on them. This would cost him—and Afghanistan—dearly in the future.

  In the meantime, there were more mundane issues at hand. In the aftermath of Tarin Kowt, Greg estimated there were perhaps 500 Taliban survivors who might still be in the area. Concerned lest they come under renewed attack, the Americans organized the limited number of Karzai’s fighters who could be fed and supported by such a small burg to man dug-in defensive positions to the east and south of the town. As of November 20, Greg was still describing Echo’s position as “tenuous.” They would need more weapons for the 700 or so fighters they believed they could currently call upon from villages in the area—given the fluid movement and uncertain loyalties of tribal fighters who came and went, one could never be sure—and estimated they would need between 1,000 and 1,500 fighters before they would feel confident in moving south toward Kandahar. Greg reckoned that it would take another ten days to marshal the required forces. One hundred forty AK-47s, along with thirty heavier weapons, dropped from the sky on the 25th, but more would be needed—or so they hoped.

  Also in the immediate aftermath of Tarin Kowt, the ODA was informed of plans to add a fifteen-man SF battalion headquarters to their tiny eleven-man unit. This was an unprecedented departure from normal Special Forces doctrine, and certainly not welcomed by the ODA. It appeared the ultimate impetus for it came from Secretary Rumsfeld, who had been questioning for some time the prudence of leaving Special Forces units, which were being called upon to deal with cunning warlords in the field, under the command of mere captains. Greg strongly advised against this change in CIA channels, indicating that a substantial increase in American personnel was neither logistically nor politically wise, given Karzai’s need to present a small but effective U.S. presence to his local constituency. Anything which suggested that the Afghans were an appendage to an American invasion force would entirely change the local psychology. Greg’s objections, when conveyed to the military via headquarters, apparently carried some weight: the fifteen-man contingent was reduced to three, led by one Lieutenant Colonel Fox, an SF battalion commander. He took over the role of “senior military advisor” to Karzai on the 26th. Greg, of course, would continue to handle intelligence and politics.

  November 28 brought another round of telephonic political discussions between Hamid and the Taliban. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban
ambassador to Pakistan, known to be very close to Mullah Omar, called first. Would amnesty for his one-eyed leader be a possibility? Karzai replied that it might be, but that before any such action could be considered, Omar must first publicly break with the Arabs and turn over all foreign terrorists to the international community. This was strikingly close to the deal I had suggested to Mullah Osmani before the start of the war. Zaeef listened closely, and promised to convey the message to Omar.

  In fact, the next call was from Osmani. The burly commander requested a cease-fire with both Karzai and Gul Agha, as well as a halt to the bombing of Kandahar. If the Northern Alliance would turn Kabul over to Karzai, he said, the Taliban would be willing to turn Kandahar over to him. This was an interesting gambit, particularly in light of our long-standing fears concerning the Pashtun reaction to the Northern Alliance’s seizure of the national capital. Karzai again indicated that he would consider amnesty for senior Taliban—though this time, showing his characteristic volubility, he declined to include Mullah Omar in the offer—provided they publicly broke with bin Laden’s Arabs. Once again, Osmani stated that he would convey the offer to his leader.

  I had long marveled at the seemingly mystical hold which Mullah Omar seemed to exert over his followers, and which I had seen myself in the case of Osmani. From our intelligence, I knew it and could describe it; but until recently I had never really understood it. Once again, it was Brigadier Suhail who enlightened me. Omar, he said, was a very singular Afghan. He had a strategic vision which those around him simply lacked. Through his piety and the sheer force of his will, he was able to command their respect. But far more than that, he was a master of psychological manipulation, at least in the context of Pashtun culture: he was able to sow a healthy measure of rivalry and distrust among his senior acolytes, while forging strong bonds of loyalty with each. He was the hub of the wheel. Key governors, military commanders, ministers, and members of the Shura all maintained their connection to the organization primarily through him, while frequently distrusting those around them. Here we were seeing it play out again. Key members of the Taliban leadership would reach out singly to Karzai, almost never acting in concert; they seemed incapable of reaching a group decision without reference to Omar.