88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  Finally, the Taliban representatives had assured Hamid that the Arabs were in the process of leaving. Hamid had responded that the bombing of the city would continue as long as the Arabs remained.

  I thanked Hamid and congratulated him again. I then lost no time in informing both Mark and Greg what had been agreed regarding Shirzai. It was up to them to facilitate things from there.

  As light dawned on the morning of December 7, the streets of Kandahar were in chaos. Mark sat on a hill just beyond the eastern outskirts of the city, monitoring developments. He and an Arabic-speaking member of Gul Agha’s family listened on a walkie-talkie captured from an Arab west of Takht-e Pol as leaders of the fleeing Arabs tried to organize their departure. It was almost like listening to a group of tourists preparing for an excursion. They heard someone say, “Be sure you have your passports!” As the convoy emerged from the city, Mark could count fifty vehicles. A single massed airstrike might have wiped them all out, but there was no one close by who could call it in. They watched as several hundred Arab followers of bin Laden drove off, disappearing to the north on the Kabul-Kandahar highway.

  Meanwhile, Gul Agha led a large force in an attack on the airport, only to find that the Arabs and the Taliban had left. The way into Kandahar was open. Grabbing a portion of his force and piling them into a handful of vehicles, he dashed into the city, with Mark and part of the ODA in tow. Finding no opposition, they went straight to the Governor’s Palace, and immediately occupied it. This was not quite in accordance with Karzai’s carefully laid out plan. While Gul Agha was thus engaged, the newly appointed chairman was unsuccessful in his attempts to contact him by sat phone. Hoping to mediate between Gul Agha and Naqib, he planned to formally name Shirzai governor, but only if the latter would accept the Alikozai master of Arghandab as a partner in the liberation of the city. The deal would have to wait.

  Mark’s reports throughout Shirzai’s campaign, for all that they were usually written in haste, often in appalling conditions and while their author was on the verge of exhaustion, frequently had a lyrical, understated, almost haunting quality. Now, having reached his objective, he paused to write a sitrep in which he described the first concrete sign of the city’s liberation. Much has been written since then about kite-flying, and the symbolic place it holds in Afghan culture. The Taliban, who had banned kite-flying as a sinful frivolity since their takeover in 1994, had been gone for only a few hours. But as Mark stood looking out a window of the Governor’s Palace, he could see, high above the darkening rooftops, that the last rays of sunset were illuminating a handful of kites as they swooped and darted in a bright azure sky.

  It had been eighty-eight days since a series of attacks in a strange country many thousands of miles away had somehow unleashed a war for which no Afghans had been prepared. Now, this ancient city, traditional capital of an ancient land, would have the chance of a new beginning.

  DECEMBER 8, 2001

  I suppose it was inevitable. The dispute between the Afghan liberators of Kandahar was spreading to their American mentors. On the morning of December 8, Mark called to complain. He had contacted Greg to work through some remaining points of contention between their respective principals regarding the role of Naqib in securing the city. Some of Karzai’s people had allegedly begun throwing their weight around, generating considerable resentment in Gul Agha’s ranks, and now Mark was concerned that it could lead to violence. Greg, apparently, had been less than sympathetic.

  “Hamid’s just been named leader of the country. I think that makes him just a little bit more important than your guy, don’t you?” he was supposed to have said. I winced. This was no time for Greg to be Greg.

  “Look, Greg,” I said, when I got him on the phone. “Mark doesn’t know you like I do. He doesn’t know how to take you, and he doesn’t know when to ignore what you say.” This was my lead-in to what I expected to be a counseling session, but the ex-Marine immediately burst out laughing.

  “Okay, Chief, I got it. I hear you, five by five.” He was still laughing. “You won’t have any more trouble from me.” We talked over the need to mediate between the two leaders; otherwise, we risked having our Afghan allies at war with each other, and it was entirely too soon for that.

  When I got back to Mark, he explained that for his part, he’d had to get pretty rough with Shirzai. When our voluble friend had threatened, in a fit of anger, to attack Karzai’s men, Mark had left him in no doubt of the consequences:

  “Shirzai, if you attack, you won’t just be attacking Karzai’s men. You’ll be attacking us, because we’re with them. That will make you an enemy, and we will have to treat you accordingly.” That got the big man’s attention. It was something he could understand: “If my friend attacks my brother, I must attack my friend.” There was no more talk of fighting with Karzai.

  Later that day, I sent out a strongly worded message to both teams. Karzai, who was still moving south from Shawali Kowt, would be entering Kandahar for meetings at the Governor’s Palace on December 9. On the margins of those meetings, CIA was to broker a private session between the new chairman and Gul Agha, at which both Echo and Foxtrot teams were to be present, and all outstanding issues were to be worked out. The two could bicker later, I said, but for now, with the situation in Kandahar still so unsettled, nothing must be allowed to interfere with our counterterrorism objectives. To that end, we would need immediate manpower and assistance from both men. Specifically, Echo and Foxtrot were to set up a joint counterterrorism “pursuit team” of the sort advocated by headquarters to round up any Arabs in the area and to follow up on all counterterrorism leads. We would need a dedicated detention and interrogation facility for any al-Qa’ida or senior Taliban officials captured, where they could be held pending a determination as to their disposition. A special security force should be established to control access to all designated sites associated with al-Qa’ida or with the Pakistani-based Ummah Tameer-e Nau, which was suspected of providing assistance to al-Qa’ida in developing weapons of mass destruction. And finally, a joint committee should be formed to oversee the equitable distribution of humanitarian aid in the city and the surrounding area.

  The December 9 meeting went better than we could have hoped. Thanks in part, I’m sure, to American preparation, everyone was on his best behavior. Karzai, Gul Agha, and Mullah Naqib met, with both Gul Agha and Naqib pledging their fealty to their new leader. At Karzai’s direction, it was agreed that during an interim period, Shirzai would take charge of security in the southern part of the city, south of the main highway, and that a senior lieutenant to be named by Naqib, though not Naqib himself, would assume responsibility for the northern part of the city. Once the situation had been stabilized, Shirzai would assume his full duties as provincial governor. It was a masterly stroke by Karzai, and it greatly eased the tensions between the Barakzai and Alikozai chiefs.

  A cloud of suspicion still hung over Naqib because of the effective escape of both the Arabs and the Taliban leadership, which had occurred under the cover of a surrender agreement he had brokered. Realistically, even if Naqib had given the Taliban political cover to negotiate a handover of the city, political cover was about all he had been in a position to provide. No one could have prevented the Taliban’s escape from Kandahar. The American failure to strike the fleeing Arabs, though, was a costly error for which we could blame no one else, and for which we would eventually pay a heavy price.

  If Naqib had played a role in “saving” the Taliban leadership, he was no more complicit than Karzai. I was not entirely comfortable with the chaotic way in which the war had ended, but the Taliban had done us a great favor in abandoning the city. Had they and the Arabs decided to make a last stand in Kandahar, we would not have had sufficient Pashtun forces to root them out. Employing some combination of Northern Alliance and American troops and U.S. airpower to do the job would have wrecked the city, generated heavy casualties, and completely changed the whole political character of the war in the s
outh, probably precluding any chance of an effective peace. As it was, both Afghans and their foreign benefactors would have the opportunity, at least, for a new beginning, a chance to build a unified nation that would no longer serve as a base for international terrorists.

  The question was whether they, Afghans and foreigners, would have the wisdom and the patience to succeed.

  Chapter 35

  * * *

  THE ESCAPE

  MID-DECEMBER 2001

  THE OFFICE DRAPES HAD been drawn, shielding us from prying eyes in the apartment block several hundred yards away. Once again, I sat on the threadbare couch, feet propped up on the blond wood coffee table, rubbing my eyes to ward off exhaustion as “Kate,” the senior communicator, fussed with the video connection.

  A strong, broad-shouldered, handsome woman in her mid-thirties, Kate had always been something of an enigma to me. She was highly competent, reliable, and devoted to her job, which she performed in the obscurity of her stoutly vaulted spaces. It is one of the great ironies that communicators occupy one of the lowest social rungs in their organization, and yet theirs is perhaps the most sensitive position. They are the keepers of the secrets. Everything flows through them.

  Kate was perhaps more sensitively aware of her caste, and more affected by it, than most communicators. Among other things, it made her all the more fiercely loyal to those who served under her. She wore her chip quite clearly on her shoulder. Unless it was a professional necessity to enter my office, she would not do so. It soon became apparent that she would not pay the boss a call unless summoned. If I wished to interact less formally, I would have to come to her. I was more than happy to do so. And if such visits were not as frequent as they might have been, Kate was gratified at the mark of professional respect they implied.

  After 9/11, things changed a bit. Where once Kate would have established the video link and returned to her office, after 9/11 she lingered to view the goings-on. The reason soon became apparent: she fixed me one day with an appraising eye during a series of particularly politically charged sessions. “It’s interesting to watch the way you maneuver,” she said. “It’s pretty neat.” I remember it as one of the best compliments I have ever received.

  On this occasion, the screen before me was filled with boxes, most representing the various military entities—in Tampa, Qatar, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan—involved in sharing information and coordinating actions for the Tora Bora campaign, which was now getting under way in earnest. This was the first of a series of virtual conferences with CTC/SO acting as host, and determining CIA participation, which meant that shortly I would be cut out, as CTC was eager to get me out of Afghanistan and restrict me to my Pakistani lane. But for some reason I was included in this one.

  The key CIA field participant in the conference was Gary Berntsen, leader of Team Juliet, successor to the original Jawbreaker team led by Gary Schroen in the Panjshir Valley, and now directing the effort in Tora Bora. I had never met Berntsen, but had heard about him. He was reputed to be a bit of a wild man, which colored my perceptions. It would be fair to say that he made a very energetic presentation, punctuated with descriptions of complicated, synchronized movements of attacking forces, blocking forces, and so on. Apart from the handful of CIA paramilitary officers and SF troopers with him, he had only loosely organized rump Afghan militias at his disposal. It was hard for me to judge the soundness of his plans, as I lacked sufficient knowledge of precisely what was happening on the ground, but I do remember thinking that what he was describing was well beyond the capabilities of any group of Afghan militias I had ever heard of.

  Hank was the senior CIA participant at the headquarters end. He said surprisingly little, and when he did speak, it was in a halting and hesitant manner. The meeting broke up in mild confusion. The whole thing struck me as bizarre, so much so that I contacted Pat Hailey at CENTCOM, who had been sitting in, to ask.

  “What was going on with Hank?” I inquired. “Is he up to this?”

  “Don’t get me started,” he said. His theory was that Hank was upset that CENTCOM had allowed an Australian liaison officer into the proceedings. He had therefore said the minimum necessary and shut the conference down as quickly as he could.

  Throughout the first half of December 2001, the heavy bombing of Tora Bora continued. Following the message traffic from across the border, I was getting a rather sketchy and confusing picture of how the situation was evolving. My hope was to get some degree of advance warning as to when and precisely through which passes the al-Qa’ida fighters might flee the American bombardment. As I read the map, there were five passes that were the most likely avenues of escape, the lowest of which had an elevation around 11,000 feet. I was absolutely forbidden by CTC, however, to provide the Pakistanis with any sort of advance warning, as this might provide them an indication of the key points of U.S. attack, information which might then be shared with al-Qa’ida elements in the mountains. This was the sort of unhelpful paranoia with which I routinely had to deal. Nonetheless, the Paks were fully expected to capture any al-Qa’ida members who eluded our grasp, despite not being given any assistance in doing so.

  I was told by CTC/SO that if any Americans or allied Afghan forces were about to cross the Pakistani border in hot pursuit, I was to have a mechanism in place for informing the Pakistanis so that we and our allies would not be fired upon. I reached Jafar at his office at 1:00 AM one morning to ask him to work out the modalities for channeling such a warning to Pakistani troops in the mountains, in the event a warning was necessary. Conveying a rapid message to Pak troops in the mountains would not be a problem, he said.

  “If any Americans approach the border, please let me know right away,” he added. “But if any Afghans try to cross the border, we will shoot them regardless.” On the subject of Afghans, he was very consistent. This sounded like an argument in the making, but I decided to save it until it was needed.

  By December 15, after two solid weeks of heavy bombardment, the Arabs had been driven well up onto the snow-covered north face of the Safed Koh. Soon the Pakistanis were picking up half-frozen, half-starved Arabs stumbling down the other side. On December 17, I paid a call on a then little known major general, Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, the director-general for military operations of the Pak Army, at the Pak Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. I didn’t know it then, but he would have an illustrious future. He reported that the Pakistanis had detained some forty Arabs in the past two days. Many more would follow in the days to come, some 130 in all.

  This raised the question of what to do with them. I had been left in no doubt as to CTC’s views when I had proposed in writing, back in mid-November, a joint international detention and interrogation center for al-Qa’ida captives on Pakistani soil, the proposal to which Hank referred so unfavorably during our chat of November 18.

  “We will not agree to Pakistani detention of any al-Qa’ida prisoners,” the cable stated. “Appropriate arrangements for their internment are being made with our loyal Afghan allies.”

  CTC got a better idea what those Afghan detention arrangements might look like in late November, when Berntsen sent three of his people back up into the Panjshir Valley to inspect a Northern Alliance prison where a large number of captured Arabs were already being held. They were not prepared for what they found. Large groups of prisoners circulated freely in and out of the camp, while their guards frequently could not be found. The “inspectors” were horrified.

  “You’ll want to look at this,” Dave smiled, as he handed me their report during one of our morning meetings. All I could compare it to was the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when an uninitiated British officer enters a captured Turkish military hospital in Damascus for the first time. Staring in shock at the filth and gore around him, the red-faced man can only shout, “This is outrageous!” again and again at the top of his lungs. The tone of this cable was not dissimilar.

  “There is simply no question of our placing al-Qa’ida prisoners in Northern
Alliance detention,” it concluded. I was curious what CTC would come up with now.

  Faithful to our directives, as the Tora Bora escapees fell into Pakistani hands, we arranged for the Pakistanis to move the captured Arabs, Chechens, Turks, Chinese Uigurs, and others in groups down to Chaklala Airbase in Rawalpindi, where they were loaded onto U.S. Air Force C-17 transports. They were flown first to Bagram Airbase north of Kabul, where the U.S. military was quickly establishing a base of operation, and then immediately onward to Kandahar Airport, which the Marines had occupied after al-Qa’ida and the Taliban had fled. A temporary, open-air prisoner holding facility had been set up. We heard later on television that the Department of Defense had decided to ship the detainees from there to facilities being hastily built in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

  Given the subsequent controversy over “Gitmo,” CIA “black sites,” interrogation policy, and all the rest, which together have caused the United States to bear alone the opprobrium that comes of implementing unilateral solutions to what are really global problems, or where alternatively America has stood accused of “outsourcing torture” by selectively repatriating al-Qa’ida captives to repressive allied regimes, it seems to me that my modest idea of a joint international facility might have had some merit after all. It would have harnessed the talents, and gained the support and moral complicity, of many of the nations that have in fact benefited from U.S. actions, while taking little of the responsibility.

  In early December, I received a cable from the office of John McLaughlin, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, Tenet’s number two. It informed me that McLaughlin had met with Arnaud de Borchgrave, the longtime journalist, who had a lead as to where bin Laden might be hiding, and would be arriving shortly in Islamabad. It asked that I provide him assistance.