I would deliver two more, rather longer speeches that evening, and take questions from two more delegations: one a group of characteristically dour and sullen Pashtuns led by Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the surprisingly young scion of a leading family of Helmand, elevated by Karzai to be governor of that province; and the other an enthusiastic crowd of Hazaras, Shiites of distinctly Asiatic appearance, long abused by the radical Sunni Taliban, who had journeyed from Bamiyan Province looking as if they had just wandered out of the thirteenth century. Unlike the silent Pashtuns, they murmured their approval of my religious incantations in Arabic, and clapped enthusiastically at my promises of American support. Word had obviously spread far and wide that Shirzai had the favor and the ear of the Americans, and thus was the man to see for assistance. It seemed to me that for the time being at least, we would be best served by allowing Shirzai to take political credit for that assistance, building him up as the just and beneficent alternative to Taliban rule in the Southern Zone of the country.
But already simple, fundamental questions were arising regarding governance. Within a few weeks, Gul Agha had slipped comfortably into his old role as provincial governor. He was generating significant revenue by imposing tolls on commercial truck traffic along the Quetta-to-Kandahar highway, one of only two key transportation portals for the entire eastern half of the country. In a nation as poor and primitive as Afghanistan, such transit tolls were the key source of public funds. Gul Agha was greatly motivated to build up political support by using that money for good works, but there were no controls over its disbursement. And what of the rest of the country? Shouldn’t those funds be shared as a national resource with provinces not so favorably situated? What would be the mechanism for dividing those revenues with the center?
Gul Agha’s accession as governor had been an essentially arbitrary move by Karzai; I had played a role in it, but where was the local legitimacy and accountability in that? Sooner rather than later, short-term expediency would have to be replaced. Long-term stability required that Shirzai, as leader of the Barakzai, be willing to share power and benefits with the other tribes in the area—the Popalzai, the Alikozai, and a host of others. My strongly held view was that someone, preferably from CIA, should remain closely engaged with Shirzai to help ensure that this key regional figure pursued policies which would redound to his long-term benefit and ours. That was fine and probably necessary for the time being, but was it sustainable? America was hardly set to be a colonial power for very long. How could appropriate checks and balances be institutionalized in a place in which American notions of democracy were foreign, and where traditional means of tribally based accountability had broken down, perhaps irretrievably? Surely a new Afghan constitution would have some influence over these matters, but who was going to influence that? I was certainly in no position to do so.
While staying at the Governor’s Palace, I saw evidence that perhaps the Taliban surrender had not been so abject as it had appeared. A CIA bomb expert from our Office of Technical Service whom we had fortuitously sent over a couple of weeks previously had made an important discovery. He showed me a thin, partially concealed wire running down the side of the palace, which had been pointed out to the governor’s staff by an old man in the neighborhood. Our expert had traced it up to the top of the building, where he and his colleagues had found some twenty land mines buried in the mud roof, set to fire downward. We could only speculate, but the theory was that the Taliban had planned to detonate the mines during the upcoming Eid al-Adha, the main religious holiday of the year, when the governor traditionally receives large numbers of supporters. Had the Taliban succeeded, our joint Afghan-American experiment in building a post-Taliban order might have begun very differently. I saw this attempted attack as the last-gasp effort of a dead-end movement. In fact, it was a premonition of what was in store if we and our Afghan friends were not prudent.
The speeches I gave to Afghan audiences in Kandahar were full of good intentions, but not being in a position to implement them, they were more like a prayer for constructive American engagement in Afghanistan. My visit to Kandahar gave me some ideas about how we, and particularly CIA, should use our newfound influence; but now, relegated back across the border, my ideas were not being sought, and understandably so. It would be up to the new team to figure things out for themselves. If I had a sinking feeling that a great opportunity was being lost, I could not dwell on it. I had more than enough work of my own in Pakistan.
Several weeks later, I looked up from my desk to see television coverage of the Eid al-Adha celebrations in Kandahar. I could see Gul Agha, smiling and laughing, mobbed by well-wishers, looking like a Chicago ward politician who had just won a landslide victory. In his left hand he held a large stack of bright red Pakistani hundred-rupee notes. With his right he pressed one into the palm of every person who approached him. He was the happiest man I had ever seen.
Chapter 39
* * *
THE POET
EARLY FEBRUARY 2002
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO be a formal gathering, but there they were, joking together off in a corner, their heads inclined, like a couple of sniggering schoolboys. They made an unlikely looking pair. The American, trim and athletic, kept brushing a hank of sandy-blond hair from his pale blue eyes. His Pakistani companion, balding and rotund, was sunk deeply into the white settee. One might have thought they had broken off to confer on some urgent operational matter—if they weren’t so obviously enjoying themselves.
Sitting at the head of the long, ornate reception room at the ISI mess, I tried to keep up my end of the polite conversation among Deputy Director John McLaughlin, Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, and ISI director-general Ehsan. The members of McLaughlin’s traveling CIA delegation and General Ehsan’s senior staff sat across from one another in roughly descending order of seniority, listening politely as their elders conversed. But my attention was drawn to the antics of the two outliers. I couldn’t have been more pleased to see the way they got on. The fact was that my country’s interests relied to a significant degree on the relationship between these two men.
The following day, during a lengthy briefing for McLaughlin in the “bubble,” Dave, my deputy, laid out the fruits of his collaboration with “General Imran Zaman.” These occasional briefings for senior Washington visitors were as useful for us as for the recipients, probably more so. Operating at full throttle, constantly improvising, we seldom had occasion to stop and consider what we were doing, or how.
As Dave explained, with al-Qa’ida fighters filtering across the Afghan border in significant numbers, Imran and he had worked out a “template” for their capture. The process began with data the CIA and the American intelligence community collected from sources—human, technical, and otherwise—around the world. Reports from CIA’s human sources concerning movements of al-Qa’ida fighters and operatives fleeing Afghanistan were funneling in to CIA Headquarters, where they joined streams of intercepted technical data and all manner of other esoteric information. Some came from satellites, some from lonely technical collection stations on mountaintops, some from drones, and some from allied intelligence or security services.
“Targeters,” the headquarters analysts in CTC whose job it was to immerse themselves in this flood of data and try to make sense of it, winnowed and sifted it, using complex algorithms and keyword searches. Information of any significance would be forwarded to other targeters working with us in Islamabad. There, a phone number thought to belong to an al-Qa’ida operative would be matched to a residential address in a teeming Pakistani city; or the name of a Pakistani militant thought to be harboring al-Qa’ida fighters fleeing from Afghanistan would be connected to an obscure business establishment. Slowly, from a daunting mass of almost unintelligible bits of data, physical targets—places that could potentially be raided—would emerge. The addresses would be forwarded by the station to Imran’s operators at the Clubhouse, who parceled out these locations to ISI sector commanders around the
country. They and their operatives would carry out ground investigations. An address that turned out to be a public location might be placed under intermittent surveillance; but an apartment belonging to a known militant would be placed under direct observation; or a rented villa from which unknown young men were constantly coming and going would be flagged for an immediate raid.
Night after night, the operations unfolded according to a script refined and perfected by Dave and Imran. An ISI sector commander would arrange for a large number of local police armed with Kalashnikovs to appear on short notice at a particular spot and an appointed time, usually late at night. The police would be told nothing in advance. Once assembled, they would pile into their beat-up Toyota pickups to be led by ISI to their target address, which they would surround. The door would be forced, and the police, accompanied by a handful of ISI operatives, would rush inside to arrest all the males. Women and children would be sequestered, isolated, and supervised by female police.
Waiting across the street, invariably, were a few of my CIA officers, accompanied by one or two FBI special agents, usually on temporary assignment, sent to reinforce Jenny and Chris in the Legal Attaché Office. Once the building or apartment was secured, its occupants disarmed, and the premises searched for explosives, the Americans would be invited inside. The male detainees would be screened by my officers. Any Pakistanis, often members of radical jihadi groups such as Lashgar-e Taiba, were remanded to Pakistani law enforcement. Their fate was not our business. The foreigners, on the other hand—Yemenis, North Africans, Turks, Chechens, ethnic Uigurs from western China, fighters from all over the Islamic world—were ours. They would be searched, identified where possible, and transported to Pakistani jails pending disposition.
The Americans present would seize any materials found on the premises—passports, documents, cell phones, computers, hard drives, disks, thumb drives, and the like. With FBI agents ensuring that all the materials remained in a proper law enforcement “chain of custody,” everything would be copied or downloaded. The originals, whether documents or equipment, would go to FBI as potential criminal evidence; the copies would be forwarded to CIA Headquarters to join the mass of exploitable data being fed into the process. Night after night, data streams from hard drives deemed of priority value would be shot skyward from our roof to satellites overhead.
Generally, the raids went well: the militants and their hosts would be taken by surprise, usually in their beds, and several foreign fighters would be taken into custody. Generally, but not always. On one occasion, General Imran received a panicky phone call from one of his sector commanders. During that night’s raid, the commander and his men had burst through the heavy wooden door of a substantial house, but rather than a group of foreign militants bivouacked on mattresses, they had discovered the large sleeping family of a highly respected local physician. Imran reacted quickly. The commander was to apologize to the doctor and inform him that he, his wife, and their family would be personal guests of the general that evening. Ice cream was to be brought immediately for the children, and the physician and his wife were to be transported to the best hotel in town, where they would be offered tea and cakes until their door was fixed and everything put right. That incident passed.
Imran and the ISI were taking much of our information on faith, and trusting us not to embarrass them. Usually, it was rewarded. In return, they maintained our moratorium on inconvenient questions as to where our intelligence was coming from.
Imran had an unusual background. His father was a literary figure, revered in Pakistan as a humorist. There were few situations we encountered together so tense that General Imran could not find a vein of humor. He and Dave made a perfect pair, and were soon inseparable.
In short order, they would account for much of the prisoner population of Guantánamo Bay. When time was available, the foreign fighters picked up in our raids would receive preliminary questioning by my officers at the Clubhouse. But as fast as possible, they would be loaded aboard C-17 transports at Chaklala Airbase in Rawalpindi, just south of Islamabad, and flown first, briefly, to Bagram Airbase north of Kabul, and then to the open-air detainee holding facility crudely constructed at Kandahar Airport. There they would be held until transported to Guantánamo. The detention facility had opened on January 11, 2002.
Our detainee airlift program also involved some quick lessons. A prisoner in one of the first groups to be turned over to the Air Force at Chaklala was discovered to be hiding a large knife inside his shalwar, the traditional baggy trousers worn in Afghanistan and South Asia. It had been missed by his Pakistani guards. Thereafter, all prisoners were strip-searched by Air Force security personnel, and given U.S.-issue prison garb. In another early incident, a particularly energetic prisoner was caught attempting to bring down an aircraft in flight, despite his hand restraints and shackles, by gnawing on a high-pressure hydraulic hose. From then on, all prisoners were restrained in the middle of the cargo deck.
Our briefing finally completed, McLaughlin looked at me. “This is quite an operation you’ve got here.” In fact, I was pleased with what we had managed to accomplish. With active hostilities in Afghanistan ended, at least for the time being, and most, if not yet all of al-Qa’ida fled, the main counterterrorism focus was now centered on Pakistan, where we continued to dismantle al-Qa’ida’s infrastructure and arrest a steady stream of its rank-and-file members and close associates. We had made a good start. But the most important thing we had done was to establish an effective tactical working relationship with ISI. Now we would be ready for the far bigger fish yet to swim into the net.
Chapter 40
* * *
THE PUBLIC AND THE PERSONAL
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome
MARCH 17, 2002
WE STOOD, YAWNING, AT the far western end of the shopping square, warily surveying the area. There seemed little to arouse our concern. The faded storefronts were shuttered, their tattered awnings hanging listless in the damp, post-dawn air. A few Pakistanis, mostly older men in stained shalwar khamises, milled about on the raised concrete sidewalks in groups of two or three. At the open, northern end, where the square fronted on the road, a slight, dark-skinned sweeper stood in the gutter, languidly pushing dust to and fro with a large palm frond. Close by, next to the bus stand, were a group of eight or so Westerners, men and women of various ages, clad in hiking gear. Across the street we could see two more, venturing over to join them. My wife Paula and I would soon join as well, but not right away. Only when the low-slung coaster bus approached would we dash over to climb aboard. If the group should become a target, we wanted to limit our exposure.
Such precautions had long since been a way of life in a country where a measure of latent hostility always lurked just below the surface for Westerners, and particularly Americans. Large crowds, especially those gathered for Friday prayers, were to be strictly avoided. And any concentration of Westerners that had been advertised or could be anticipated, such as that at the Sunday morning pickup point for our hiking group, was a potential invitation to tragedy for the unwary.
For the two years before 9/11, on every schoolday morning, I would stand before the heavy, solid metal gate at the front of our house, waiting for the school bus while my son Doug stayed inside. Mr. ‘Abdul Qadir, the guard, knew everyone in the neighborhood. I would scan up and down the block, and quiz him about any loiterers, anyone who seemed out of place. Anybody unknown would be confronted by Qadir, in his green-and-khaki uniform with the outsize brass buckle, a stout stick tucked under his arm, and asked to explain his business.
None of this diminished our enjoy
ment of an exotic and fascinating country. We traveled widely, especially in the mountainous north, hiking in the Kagan Valley and along the rushing torrents of Kafiristan, near Chitral. Doug and I would go on weekend jaunts to experience the sights and smells of the ancient bazaars of Lahore and Peshawar. While I was chained to a desk, Paula joined groups to scale the heights of Nanga Parbat, ninth highest mountain in the world, and to float down the Indus River on pole barges.
When 9/11 struck, Doug had been devastated to leave his school and head off, with his mother, to exile in America. He had also been mystified by the attitudes of some of his Pakistani schoolmates: though closely acquainted with the West, and from families who had opted expressly for an American-style education for their offspring, many displayed satisfaction at seeing Americans as the victims, rather than the agents, of violence. “Now you see what it’s like,” one had said.
With families away and a huge crisis to deal with, I and my colleagues had been consumed in a blur of eighteen-hour days and seven-day workweeks. But with the fall of Kandahar, I encouraged them to carve out a little time, at least, for personal relaxation. Beginning in February, Dave and I began to indulge ourselves in a weekly round of golf, which became a Sunday morning ritual.
Golf in South Asia is something of a communal undertaking. On a reference from a friend, I sought out Sulayman as my caddy. A tall, slender, laconic young man, and an excellent golfer, Sulayman took on additional duties as my instructor/coach and, golf being golf, occasional spiritual advisor as well. He soon recruited the rest of my golfing entourage. This included a bag carrier, two or three ball-spotters, and various other hangers-on of indeterminate role.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Page 35
