88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  By early 2002, it was obvious to me that the Pakistanis had no interest in pursuing these people. And no wonder: already one could see that the new government in Kabul would be dominated by the former Northern Alliance, and that it was forging close ties with India. Pakistan’s past relationship with the Taliban had always been wary and mistrustful, and its active aid to the forces which attacked and overthrew the clerical regime had surely done little to improve it. Nonetheless, the Taliban was the only Afghan entity capable of serving as a counterweight to the despised government in Kabul, and Pakistan was not about to gratuitously foreclose future dealings with it. I tried to make that clear to every visiting American official who would listen.

  I refused to allow Pakistani hedging regarding the Taliban to become an issue between us. We were focused as a laser beam on al-Qa’ida. Countries will not act in ways which they believe detrimental to their interests. Knowing that I would get no traction on the Taliban, I wasn’t about to let a moot issue complicate or undermine the success we were enjoying against al-Qa’ida, whose members were being snatched up on an almost nightly basis with the ISI’s help. I believed the Taliban were spent. To the extent I was concerned over their capacity to make a political comeback, I felt that the best means of foreclosing that possibility lay not in Pakistan but in Afghanistan. The Afghans had been given a chance at a new beginning. If they succeeded in governing themselves, there would be no need of, or political space for, a Taliban.

  It would be hard to overstate how surprised and encouraged many of us were, in the wake of the Taliban defeat, at how Afghans were behaving. The Afghan national mood reflected a strong desire to avoid repeating the abuses that had brought the country low. Where one might have expected the sweeping Northern Alliance victories in the north and their conquest of Kabul to precipitate an orgy of vengeance on the minority Pashtun communities now under their sway, such outrages were relatively few. It felt as though the country were embarking on an “era of good feelings,” that the past was in the past, and that everything was possible.

  But if Afghans were ready for a new national beginning, the United States proved unready and unwilling to do what was necessary to encourage it. As early as January 2002, I could see the relevant elements of the vast U.S. government bureaucracy, which would have to combine and coordinate efforts in new ways if we were to achieve our goals in Afghanistan, reverting to old instincts. People naturally gravitate toward the prescribed and the habitual, to stay in their comfort zones. Bureaucrats never welcome interference from outside their own organizations.

  Shortly after my return to Islamabad from Kandahar in January 2002, Andrew Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), stopped in en route to Kabul. I desperately wanted to speak to him about how CIA’s relationships with key leaders around the country could serve his interests. Somehow, his traveling staff and my local AID contacts couldn’t get me on his schedule. I’m sure they felt they didn’t need advice from me as to how they should do their jobs.

  A few weeks later, I met with a couple of senior Drug Enforcement Agency managers from Washington. They paid a call on me before going to Afghanistan to survey what DEA ought to be doing there. I pointed out that the Taliban had had more success in wiping out narcotics production than we, or any future Afghan government, could ever hope for. I said they should work with the State Department to reinforce and extend the Taliban’s success with value-added crop-substitution programs. I could see their eyes glaze: their job was to pursue narcotraffickers.

  Even within my own organization, I could already see my colleagues reverting to normal practice. In Kandahar, I had advised a colleague to stay as close as possible to Gul Agha and his people. A small Special Forces contingent had set up shop in the palace to help with security. “Stay with them,” I said. “Gul Agha is a decent sort, but he needs guidance. The best way to meet our counterterrorism goals is to ensure that Gul Agha retains political support.” My advice was ignored. CIA officers typically do not want to be in the business of political mentorship: they want to collect intelligence and chase terrorists. This was as understandable as it was regrettable; it was the natural order of things, even if it meant we would be thoroughly unequal to the needs of the hour.

  When I returned to Washington in June 2002, it wasn’t clear at first what I would be doing. Tenet wanted me around on the seventh floor, and so Jim Pavitt created an associate deputy director position for me as a placeholder while they figured out what to do with me. I wrote a long memo for George laying out the role I thought the agency ought to be playing in Afghanistan. CIA had relationships with many of the major political players around the country. We should take the lead in leveraging those relationships. We could bring together teams comprised of Special Forces, the State Department, the Agency for International Development, and others, who would lead the regional engagement of their respective agencies in the physical and political reconstruction of Afghanistan. In my suggested scheme, CIA and the Special Forces would work with the regional warlords hosting us to raise and train militias, which would be responsible, among other things, for protection of the American teams. The name hadn’t yet been coined, but the interagency units I was describing were a more robust version of what would later be called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which unfortunately included neither the Special Forces nor CIA.

  There would have been many pitfalls in my suggested approach, had it been adopted. If we were not careful, American support could be misused. Militias, if they were not again to become the scourge they had been in the past, would have to be tied, even loosely, to some national authority. Regional warlords would have to be subject to local accountability, through representative shuras or otherwise. But political power in Afghanistan has always been highly decentralized. If we hoped to realize our goals there, it would have to be through Afghans and on Afghan terms, and not by trying to make the country something other than what it is. Provincial Reconstruction Teams, when they were eventually set up, generally failed because of their isolation and estrangement. They pointedly did not include an organic Afghan component, and lacked local political support. Operating alone, they were not reinforced by the greater U.S. military presence.

  The memo returned with a note from Tenet. “This is excellent,” it said. “But what do I do with it?”

  I had thought the director would forward it to Dr. Rice for consideration by the National Security Council, which might then adopt a plan to be implemented by the various agencies of government. Tenet’s comment reflected a tacit recognition that a detailed operational plan was unlikely to be successfully imposed from Washington. Concepts half-understood at the cabinet or subcabinet level were unlikely to be coherently communicated downward through the separate bureaucracies. The hope of success was based on those in the field coming together to agree on a sustainable way forward. No one should have understood that better than me. But if the true path lay in making Afghan warlords the best warlords they could be, the international mission in Afghanistan would fail to realize it.

  Taliban commanders and fighters did not flee immediately en masse to Pakistan following the fall of Kandahar. Although much of the senior leadership left, most cadres—many of them local mullahs—returned to their villages, particularly in the south. In many cases, they faced harassment and abuse from the dominant tribals whom the Taliban had previously neutered. The extent of such harassment may never be precisely known, but there was enough—accompanied by oft-repeated stories concerning the alleged abuse of respected Taliban figures—to have convinced many in the Taliban by 2005 that there was no place for them in the new Afghanistan. A number of them joined their seniors in Pakistan. As men who were literate and knowledgeable of religion, though, they retained respect and influence in the rural areas, and were ready to come back when the opportunity presented. Some less prominent tribes, previously favored by the Taliban but now shut out of power and unable to share in the business opportunities generated
by reconstruction spending, were drawn by the mullahs into insurgency. There was no general template. Each Pashtun district had its own dynamic, and its own story. But by spring of 2005, as I strolled the palace grounds in Kabul, the Taliban was well on the way to reconstituting itself in many areas, though we were only just becoming aware of the threat.

  Within weeks of my return to Washington, a new job began to take shape. In August 2002, Tenet emerged from a beach vacation to meet with Jim Pavitt and me. “Start studying up on Iraq,” he said.

  For the next two-plus years, through war preparations, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and the first year and a half of counterinsurgency warfare, I served as CIA’s Washington-based Iraq Mission manager. Although I lacked the rank, John McLaughlin persuaded the National Security Council to allow me to represent CIA on the Deputies’ Committee. I traveled widely throughout Mesopotamia. In over two years of thrice-weekly meetings in the White House Situation Room, I had a front-row seat on some of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions in our history. It was a deeply disillusioning experience.

  My disillusion was all the greater in that I genuinely believed in the mission to topple Saddam. It never mattered whether he had chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons on the shelf, ready to deliver in March 2003. What mattered was that his regime had the documented capacity to build them, thoroughly catalogued by UN inspectors, and surely would do so again in future, once the UN sanctions regime was ended. Saddam had had every opportunity to make a clean breast of all his programs and to fully account for all his weapons and precursors, but in over ten years of cat-and-mouse with UN inspection regimes, he had failed to do so. We couldn’t know all we needed to know about the Republic of Fear, but what were we to think? I would have thought it criminally irresponsible if the United States had been willing to stand aside while a regime that had launched two regional wars and murdered many thousands of its own citizens, in a position to control a majority of the world’s traded oil, were allowed to rebuild its WMD programs at its leisure. The world could tolerate an Iraq equipped with WMD, or an Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein and his sons, but not both. If the United Nations would no longer forcefully uphold its own resolutions, America should be prepared to do so.

  There was never any question that the U.S. military would rapidly defeat Saddam’s army. But the signs that we lacked the collective wisdom to deal with the aftermath were manifest from the start. Where Iraq was concerned, the national security apparatus was completely dysfunctional, its rival elements so far apart that they could not have an honest discussion of the issues. The meetings I attended at the pinnacle of the foreign policy bureaucracy were notable for what wasn’t said, rather than what was: mendacity and indirection were the orders of the day. A rough coalition of the NSC, the State Department, and CIA were able to prevent Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and the vice president from naming an Iraqi government-in-exile and then arbitrarily installing it after the invasion. They wouldn’t say so, but I and others were convinced that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary Doug Feith, and their subordinates in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as the neoconservative stalwarts in the Office of the Vice President, intended to put Ahmed Chalabi, a brilliant but duplicitous longtime Iraqi émigré oppositionist with a Svengali-like influence over them, in charge of that government. We were just as convinced that such a government would never be accepted by Iraqis.

  On the other hand, Defense and the vice president quashed the idea of identifying clean, respected figures at the local and regional levels and bringing them together in a sort of constituent assembly to form an interim Iraqi government after the invasion. The United States would be able to influence the selection of such leaders, but could not—and should not—control it. In one critical meeting on the subject, Vice President Cheney was very explicit: Given the choice between political legitimacy and control, he said, we should opt for control. The upshot was that as the U.S. invasion began on March 19, 2003, the U.S. government was internally at loggerheads, unable to agree on a plan for Iraq’s political reconstruction.

  As soon as the shooting stopped, Zal Khalilzad, still at the National Security Council, was sent to Iraq by Condoleezza Rice to break the impasse. In what some of us hoped would be the first of several such meetings around the country to identify local leaders with legitimate support, Zal and retired General Jay Garner, designated to be head of the Iraq reconstruction effort, met with local notables from southern Iraq at Nasiriya on April 16. Secretary Rumsfeld intervened before a second such meeting could be held and Zal was ordered home. On May 11, in a move that took me and most of those supposedly in the know completely by surprise, President Bush named Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a former State Department official who had long since left government and had no Middle East experience, to head what would soon be called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). He would be absolute dictator of Iraq, empowered to rule by decree. He would report directly to Secretary Rumsfeld. Defense and the vice president’s office had won. Now the political reconstruction of Iraq would proceed according to their wishes.

  The immediate focus was on the Iraqi Ba’ath Party and the army. Bremer, under Pentagon influence, banned the former ruling party and instituted a “de-Ba’athification” program, designed to purge its members from senior jobs in the public sector. His decree may have seemed fairly moderate on paper, but with the vengeance-minded Ahmed Chalabi, still the darling of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cheney, overseeing its implementation, it went far deeper than originally intended. Hundreds of schoolteachers, for example, forced earlier to join the Ba’ath for reasons of career advancement, were thrown out of work.

  Rather than calling elements of the regular Iraqi Army back to their barracks and employing them in reconstruction projects, as the departed Jay Garner had planned to do, Bremer formally dissolved it. The army would be rebuilt from scratch, from the bottom up. No senior officers would be retained. The Sunni minority, which had dominated both institutions, got the message: There would be no place for them in the new Iraq. By fall 2003, I was organizing a series of formal CIA briefings, first for Condoleezza Rice and the NSC, then for Vice President Cheney, and finally for the president, to explain that a genuine insurgency was under way in the Sunni-dominated center and west of the country, and that U.S. policy was largely to blame. Religious extremists from all over the Muslim world were flocking to Iraq to join the next jihad. Civil war loomed just over the horizon.

  Our briefing for the president, called on short notice for November 11—Veterans Day—was more dramatic than I anticipated. Cheney, Rice, secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld, and the rest of the senior foreign policy team from the White House, State, and Defense packed the Situation Room to hear what Tenet, McLaughlin, three of our senior analysts, and I had to say. After the analysts provided a description of the situation on the ground, I launched into a broader summation of the reasons for the insurgency, with much implied criticism of current policy. No sooner had I finished than the president, looking grim, swung his gaze across the table toward a surprise participant just in from Baghdad. “What do you say, Bremer?”

  The presidential envoy seemed resigned and depressed. He had searched in vain, he said, for effective Sunni leaders who could appeal to their community. The Iraqi army had in effect dissolved itself and could not be recalled. And as much as the Sunnis might wish a rollback of de-Ba’athification, powerful leaders in the Shi’a community would not permit it. In short, there was nothing to be done but to continue on the basis of current policy.

  Robert Blackwill, the former ambassador to India during my Pakistan days and now the NSC’s point man for Iraq, asked me to accompany him on a fact-finding trip over the 2003 Thanksgiving holiday. After several days spent with the Coalition Provisional Authority and deployed U.S. Army elements in the field, we agreed that the CPA was beyond redemption. The only hope was for CIA and the military to somehow stem the insurgency on their own. Blackwill so reported to the Whi
te House. President Bush would not countermand the policies pushed by Rumsfeld and Cheney, but he did decide to accelerate the handover of power to an interim Iraqi government the following spring.

  In the meantime, as Iraq descended further into violence, CIA reported forthrightly on the worsening situation, in sharp counterpoint to the hopeful reports being conveyed by the military. Day after day, to my great admiration, George Tenet entered the Oval Office to bring the president the truth, long past the point when his message was no longer appreciated. On one occasion he took our Baghdad station chief into the oval to brief the president directly on a particularly stark field appraisal he had prepared.

  In senior policy councils, we went through the motions of debating whether the de-Ba’athification process should be revised. In a paper solicited by Blackwill, I argued as persuasively as I could for a rollback. But the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Doug Feith carried the message from the only parties who would have a vote: a change in policy regarding the Ba’ath Party, he said, would “undermine the whole moral justification for the war.”

  Meanwhile, the effort to create a “New Iraqi Army” to replace the one we had disbanded was a disaster. Responsible Iraqi military leaders with whom CIA was in touch pleaded for creation of a unifying national institution of which Iraqis could again be proud. There were plenty of clean, capable, and respected officers, both Sunni and Shiite, they said, who could organize proper army divisions and re-create a national command structure under civilian control, along with a national academy to train the next generation of officers along democratic lines. Iraqis, they said, should be taking the lead in fighting an insurgency rapidly falling under the sway of foreign terrorists. Instead, the U.S. Army was training disaggregated, battalion-size militias, with no senior command and no organic support, utterly dependent on their American masters, to serve as cannon fodder for the occupation.