88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  General Ehsan, I feared, would not be so candid. At this point, I was already focused not on the present crisis, but on the next. Now that the United States was finally engaged, and had put both Pakistanis and Indians on notice, I thought there was a fair chance that the deputy secretary could gain Pakistani agreement to cut off infiltration of Kashmiri militants across the Line of Control, and that this would be enough to satisfy New Delhi—at least for the nonce. But I didn’t believe for an instant that the Pakistanis would make the cutoff permanent, and feared that once the Indians realized this, as they would, they would not be dissuaded from attacking in response to the next, inevitable terrorist outrage.

  On January 2, President Musharraf had delivered a much-anticipated address to the nation dealing with religiously inspired militancy in their midst. Extremism, he stated forthrightly, was destroying Pakistan from within, and had to be opposed. We had hoped, in the process, that he would clearly and permanently forswear support to those engaged in violence in Kashmir, many of whom, we knew, were Pakistani nationals. Sitting at home that evening, I had listened carefully to the coded language he employed—and came away disappointed. The following morning, Ambassador Chamberlin and Chat Blakeman, the political counselor, were exultant, but I was depressed. Yes, the president had forsworn any Pakistani support to terrorism, but how could he do otherwise? It was all a matter of definition, I knew, and unless Musharraf placed his words in the context of a change in policy on Kashmir, those words would be meaningless. On the issue of Kashmir, Musharraf had been implacable; absent any other means of exerting pressure on New Delhi, I felt certain, sooner or later support to militants would inevitably continue.

  That Saturday, June 1, I sat alone with Ehsan for well over an hour. I approached the topic carefully. I reviewed the past history of U.S.-Pakistan relations, noting the layered, institutionalized duplicity which had always characterized them. I pointed out that it is the habit, and indeed the duty, of diplomats, and spies for that matter, to lie to one another. That was how they protected their national interests. He smiled in wry recognition. I fully expected more such ritual duplicity, I said, when Mr. Armitage came to town. But at a certain point, duplicity would no longer serve either of our interests.

  “Please don’t misunderstand me,” I continued. “I fully support my country’s policy. I believe Pakistan should immediately and permanently end its support to armed militancy in Kashmir and cease militant infiltration across the Line of Control. That is what we will want to hear when Mr. Armitage arrives. But if that is not what you actually intend—if other things must happen before you will actually make the cutoff permanent—then saying otherwise will not serve your long-term interests, or ours. If there is in fact more that must happen to achieve a permanent cutoff, then you must tell us.” Ehsan looked at me thoughtfully. I had gone as far as I could go, and probably further than I should.

  On June 6, Rich Armitage arrived in Islamabad and held high-profile meetings with Abdul Sattar, the foreign minister, with Foreign Secretary Inam ul-Haq, and with the chief secretary for Kashmir. He sat for two hours with President Musharraf, and came away with at least vague assurances. He had one other scheduled meeting before departing for New Delhi.

  The three of us sat on a long, low couch, with the late-afternoon sun pouring over our shoulders through the plate-glass window directly behind us. Lieutenant General Ehsan sat between Armitage and me, slim and dapper as always. He had abandoned his uniform in favor of a well-cut dark suit. He bore the uncomfortable look of a smooth and clever man who has suddenly found himself cornered. Normally, a discussion like this would have taken place in General Ehsan’s offices but, given the sensitivity of the situation, all had thought it best to keep the meeting as low-key as possible. We were meeting in the residence of the American ambassador.

  As we sat together, General Ehsan repeated the assurances newly provided by General Musharraf; Ehsan would be the one charged with carrying them out. A beat passed in awkward silence, as I waited to hear a “but . . .” It was not forthcoming. At last, I put the question to him directly: “Will you need some reciprocity from the Indian side to make these assurances permanent?” The general looked at Armitage furtively for a moment, and then managed a tentative, equivocal “Yes.”

  But the opportunity, such as it was, had passed. Ehsan did not press the point. Deputy Secretary Armitage had what he needed. The following day, June 7, he presented the Pakistani assurances, such as they were, to the Indians as a firm commitment to cut off militant infiltration into Indian-held Kashmir. The Indians were guardedly mollified. Soon they would see a drop in infiltation across the Line of Control. It would take several months more before the two armies would end their mobilization and pull back completely from the frontier, but the point of greatest danger had passed.

  I had hoped, perhaps naively, that Armitage’s shuttle diplomacy would lead to concerted U.S. engagement to deal with the underlying dispute over Kashmir. I thought this close brush with open warfare between two nuclear-armed powers would convince us that the status quo was unacceptable. I had stressed to Rich that difficult as that might be, a resolution of Kashmir was necessary if we were to achieve our regional objectives, including in Afghanistan.

  But the deputy secretary didn’t need guidance from me, and my concerns did not change the objective circumstances. Despite a UN Security Council resolution dating from 1948 demanding a plebiscite in the disputed territory, India had always refused any outside involvement in Kashmir, considering it an internal matter. And the United States was not about to put its potential strategic relationship with India at risk in deference to a negotiation that would probably never get off the ground.

  And yet, as we would shortly see again, the key to our objectives in Afghanistan, to say nothing of our other regional interests, depended on a genuine peace between India and Pakistan, a peace they were manifestly incapable of achieving on their own; and that peace, if we were to have it, would rest in turn, then as now, on a resolution of Kashmir.

  Part Five

  * * *

  POSTSCRIPT: ONCE AND FUTURE WARS

  Chapter 44

  * * *

  PREMONITIONS

  MAY 2005

  IT WAS ONE OF those perfect days which lingers in the memory. Standing on the grounds of the Arg Palace in Kabul, I could take it all in at a glance: the bright emerald green of the carefully manicured lawns framing the understated, traditional elegance of the palace, and the tall, stately pines that drew the eye upward toward the Afghan flag, which snapped smartly in the wind before the backdrop of a cloudless, crystalline azure sky.

  It had been nearly three years since I had left South-Central Asia. Now I was returning on a week’s visit to the region that had once been my home. My courtesy call on Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, which had taken place minutes before, had seemed surreal. We chatted amiably, but there was little reference to the struggles and adventures of the past. Surrounded now by the trappings of position, if not power, I had the impression that the humble, parlous circumstances of Hamid’s rise were perhaps an embarrassment best not spoken of. From the many current, pressing problems which I had been prepared to discuss, the president had seemed to me strangely detached. His mind that day was working on a grander scale. If one hadn’t known better, one might have thought it was within his power to unite all Pashtuns under the Afghan flag, to obliterate the hated, British-imposed Durand Line, and to fix the border with Pakistan at the Indus River.

  As I strolled about outside, the air of unreality persisted. I marveled at the improbability of it all. In the fall of 2001, when Karzai was being chased from hill to hill by the pursuing Taliban, it would have been impossible to imagine a day such as this. Now our courageous if somewhat impractical friend was the duly elected president of his country. It was like a dream. How could things have turned out so well? I should have remembered the age-old admonition about things that seem too good to be true . . .

  I had fai
led to understand the nature and the limits of our victory over the Taliban in December 2001. Having been so concerned at the outset that we would reprise the experience of the British and the Soviets, I was seduced by the deceptive ease with which the Taliban had been driven off in a period of only eighty-eight days since the attacks of 9/11. Rather than fighting on in a twilight guerrilla struggle, the Taliban had simply disappeared as Afghan-American forces closed in on their final redoubt in Kandahar. I concluded, prematurely, that my grave misgivings had been misplaced.

  There was so much we all failed to realize. First, for all that I had preached that ours must be a political more than a military victory over the Taliban, I had not quite grasped the underlying politics of the Taliban’s collapse. Very few Pashtun leaders had actively risen up against the Taliban, and yet it had become clear—to the Taliban, if not fully to us—that they had thoroughly worn out their welcome among the Pashtuns who comprised their natural base of support. As defeat piled upon defeat for the Taliban, and as it became apparent that Hamid Karzai and Gul Agha Shirzai would converge on Kandahar, the insurgent leaders were tacitly accepted, if not enthusiastically welcomed, by a population transparently happy to see the Taliban depart. They were simply tired: tired of the Taliban’s fundamentalist repression, tired of relentless taxation, tired of seeing their young men press-ganged into military service, tired of incessant war. It strikes me now that it was the realization of their own political weakness, more than American bombs, which convinced the Taliban that their time in power had passed. American bombers, for all their effectiveness, could not have secured the two dissident Pashtun chieftains from an angry and hostile populace. Similarly, we did not realize how evanescent, or how reversible, this tacit popular support could be.

  History, viewed in hindsight, takes on the trappings of inevitability. The victory of the anti-Taliban opposition in the south was anything but. Much was written at the time, and much has been written since, some of it by former colleagues, about how, in combining rude indigenous forces with small numbers of SF troops and CIA operatives, and supporting them with precisely targeted airpower, we had somehow set a brilliant new template for how future wars would be fought. That will depend very much on the war. The tactics we employed in 2001 were simply an adaptation to the unique circumstances in which we found ourselves. They fit our political need to keep Afghans in the fore and to keep the American footprint small, while taking full advantage of our technological superiority. The approach we took was a function of political necessity as much as military prowess. There was hardly any genius at work in defeating a primitive army, employing primitive tactics, with uncontested airpower and precision-guided munitions. An old nineteenth-century London music hall chorus celebrating the success of British colonial armies against benighted tribesmen summed it up nicely:

  For whatever happens we have got

  The Maxim gun, and they have not.

  And yet . . . and yet, it had still been a close-run thing. Even with the full benefit of U.S. air forces on their side, Karzai and his band had come within minutes of annihilation at Tarin Kowt on November 17, 2001. Throughout the southern campaign, the Taliban’s repeated tactical stupidity—rushing headlong, again and again, in truck-mounted attacks over open ground in the face of American airpower—was as much a factor in their defeat as was the sophistication of the weapons they faced. The Taliban have since shown themselves to be a “learning enemy.” We were merely fortunate at the beginning that they were a slowly learning enemy.

  Had Karzai been lost, the political tenor of the war in the south would have been radically changed. If the U.S. Marines, who fortunately stayed isolated in the trackless southern Registan Desert and out of the fight, had instead been the ones to drive the Taliban and al-Qa’ida out of Kandahar, the Taliban would have seen their defeat in very different terms. They would not have accepted the legitimacy of the new Interim Administration, and Afghanistan would most likely not have had the window of opportunity which it did, in fact, enjoy for some years to create a stable, peaceful political environment.

  Although I did not realize it yet, that opportunity had ended by the time of my presidential courtesy call in the spring of 2005. Its demise was the result of many factors, but to understand what happened, one has to go back to the rise of the Taliban as a political force in 1994. It began as a movement of clerics in the Kandahar area with rather modest goals: to stamp out the rampant crimes and abuses of the many petty, feuding warlords besetting their region and, in the process, to bring some measure of unity and stability. Adherence to sharia, Islamic law, would be their weapon and their guide. But as so often happens, success caused the Taliban to expand upon their core aspirations. Shortly after Kabul fell to them in 1996, and with most of the opposition having been consolidated under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Masood, some sort of power-sharing agreement could almost certainly have been reached to bring peace to the country. But by now the Taliban leadership, carried away with power, could only conceive of national unity under its direct control.

  The multiple, crushing defeats of 2001, in combination with the loss of grassroots political support in the south, brought the Taliban back down to earth. Theirs was a religious movement, never a political party. In their many confused interactions with Hamid Karzai as he made his way south from Uruzgan, they were not so much seeking a political settlement as assurances of personal safety for themselves. During his negotiations, Karzai tried to wend his way through a political minefield, attempting to reassure the Taliban leadership so as to secure their de facto surrender, without alienating his foreign patrons. In the process, he made promises he could not keep, which would ultimately undermine his credibility.

  With the prominent exception of Mullah Omar himself, many in the Taliban leadership were quite willing to accept Karzai as head of the interim government established and blessed at the UN Conference in Bonn. As the self-styled “Commander of the Faithful,” Omar was not about to bow down before any secular authority, but he did not object if others chose to. He merely advised them not to trust Karzai, and fled—most likely to Pakistan, where he probably remains to this day. There were never, to my knowledge, any clear discussions, let alone any agreement, between Karzai and any American authority concerning the status or potential reintegration of senior Taliban members into Afghan political life. To the Americans, and particularly to the Department of Defense, which acted as an independent authority in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s defeat, most if not all senior members of the Taliban were necessarily connected to al-Qa’ida, and their detention therefore an imperative of the “War on Terror.” Still other Taliban commanders were wanted under UN war crimes’ auspices for the massacres previously visited on the Shiite Hazara minority during the civil war.

  Given the ambiguity of their circumstances immediately after the surrender and evacuation of Kandahar, senior Taliban were no doubt paying close attention to the actions of the victors. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founding member of the Taliban and the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, was arrested by the ISI and turned over to the U.S. military immediately after the Taliban government’s collapse in December 2001. He would soon find himself in Guantánamo, and remain there until 2005. In my contacts with him since his release, Zaeef has claimed that he had firm assurances from Karzai that he would not be touched following the Taliban’s surrender. Regardless of what he might actually have been told, Zaeef, who despite having withdrawn from the struggle against the Americans and the Afghan government remains a respected figure among the Taliban, still denounces Karzai’s role in his treatment. He does so while splitting his time between Kabul and Doha, Qatar. His attitudes may be representative of others in the Taliban leadership: either he was actively deceived, he says, or else Karzai had no real authority, and thus was a puppet of the Americans.

  Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the former foreign minister, approached people associated with Gul Agha Shirzai in Quetta in early February 2002, seeking their intercession with the Ame
ricans. He was escorted by Gul Agha’s men to Afghanistan, and turned over to the U.S. military at the Kandahar Airport, where he was detained. Although by that time I no longer had any direct role to play in Afghanistan, I believed Muttawakil’s imprisonment to be a gross mistake. It seemed clear that there would have to be some process of reconciliation with the rank-and-file of the Taliban, and that to be credible, reconciliation would have to extend to members of the leadership who were neither under indictment for crimes nor had any continuing relations with al-Qa’ida. Surely, I thought, Muttawakil, who was no terrorist and who had little real authority within the Taliban, should not be seen as a threat. I feared that others, who might otherwise be willing to reconcile with the government, would draw lessons from his arrest. It took several years and strong lobbying to get Secretary Rumsfeld, whose personal authorization was required, to agree to his release. By then, the harm had been done.

  From the collapse of the Taliban government in December 2001 until my departure from Pakistan in June 2002, I neither sought nor received any sort of policy guidance regarding senior Taliban figures, many of whom were thought to have fled to Pakistan. On the Pakistani side of the border, we were focused on one thing: finding and capturing as many fleeing al-Qa’ida members as possible, preferably to include Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their senior lieutenants. Virtually all of our intelligence collection was geared in that direction. We would see the occasional report to indicate that members of the Taliban Shura were pitching up in Quetta or Karachi, and we sought ISI help in investigating these leads. Somehow, though, the effectiveness which characterized the ISI’s pursuit of al-Qa’ida did not apply where the Taliban was concerned.