by David Loyn
RED LINES
In 2009, the Riedel report was influential on the Obama administration’s initial policy that continued the Bush stance of not talking to the Taliban. “Mullah Omar and the Taliban’s hard core that have aligned themselves with al Qaeda are not reconcilable,” wrote Bruce Riedel. “We cannot make a deal that includes them.”11 But Richard Holbrooke, who had been the architect of the Dayton peace deal that ended the Bosnian war, thought otherwise, and during the year, others in the administration began to share his view that there might need to be a political track of negotiations along with the military one. Holbrooke brought Barnett “Barney” Rubin into his office—a veteran of Afghan affairs, and a strong advocate for a peace track, talking to the Taliban. He had been an adviser on the Obama campaign in 2008 until told to resign by Riedel, who told him public advocacy of talking to the Taliban was “poison.”
Riedel’s view that the Taliban leadership were tied to al-Qaeda and irreconcilable defined policy for the first eighteen months of the Obama administration.12 Rubin drafted a proposal for a peace track to be considered during the long discussions on Afghan policy through the fall of 2009. When it came to a crucial White House meeting on October 13, 2009, to decide the way forward, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not mention the proposal.13 She was preparing her run for the presidency and did not want to appear weak on the Taliban. Rubin wrote, “Obama and Clinton each wanted the other to take the political risk of opposing the military option.”14
But the idea of a peace process was gaining traction. In early 2010, shortly after President Obama’s surge announcement of thirty thousand extra troops requested by General McChrystal, Doug Lute met Holbrooke, Rubin, and one or two select intelligence officials to chart a way forward. Lute had become convinced that the counterinsurgency strategy would not work because of the corruption of the Afghan government, the weakness of Afghan armed forces, and Pakistan’s safe haven policy. While he was wary of Holbrooke’s special representative role, which raised inevitable questions of hierarchy between them, the two shared skepticism about counterinsurgency. Early in his career, Holbrooke had written the section on “pacification” in Vietnam in the McNamara review, which became notorious when published in The Washington Post as the Pentagon Papers. Holbrooke told Rubin over dinner one night, “Though the government had changed the names of the programs since Vietnam, one thing had not changed: they still didn’t work.”15
Lute was looking for a plan B, to be deployed if the Taliban were not defeated by military force. He was helped by an intelligence assessment for the fall 2009 review of Afghan policy, which led to the surge. That assessment concluded for the first time that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were not joined at the hip.
Remarkably, it was not until that review that the question was asked. Lute said, “Our intelligence community is based on not making policy recommendations. So you have to be careful about the question you ask them.” Internally, the intelligence assessment had developed since the early days after 9/11 when there was a U.S. disinformation campaign designed to prove close relations between bin Laden and Mullah Omar. The two were said to go fishing together, and Omar had apparently married bin Laden’s daughter. None of it was true. Omar was wary of his troublesome guest. He even went to his ancestral village in Maiwand and took a fourth wife (the maximum allowed) to prevent bin Laden offering his daughter when it was suggested.16 The Taliban leader issued a ruling that any fatwa issued by bin Laden was “null and void.”17 After 9/11, their relationship became more complicated. They were allies against the international coalition and bound by Pashtun hospitality rules. They led distinct organizations, but for nine years, it was enough that the Taliban refused to abandon al-Qaeda, for the U.S. conviction that the two were closely allied never to be questioned.
Failure in the early years to build channels of communication with the Taliban had consequences as the mood changed toward talks. The deaths of seven CIA operatives at Camp Chapman, a remote base close to the Pakistan border, in December 2009, showed the risks. They were killed by a suicide bomber they thought they had turned. And as well as tragedy, there was farce. In 2010, a Baluchi shopkeeper persuaded British MI6 agents that he was the Taliban deputy commander Mullah Akhtar Mansour. He was even flown from Pakistan to Kabul in a NATO plane, but was called out when an Afghan who knew the real Mansour was brought into the process, and the fake Mansour promptly disappeared, but not before pocketing tens of thousands of dollars.
As the wind changed toward a more nuanced approach, Lute expanded his small group exploring peace talks to include the CIA and DOD, setting up an interagency “conflict resolution cell.” Their first task was to lift a Bush-era prohibition on talking to the Taliban, which involved taking around twenty-five Taliban figures off the list of people facing U.S. sanctions. Then there were the red lines, the preconditions the Taliban would have to accept before there were talks—renouncing violence, severing links with al-Qaeda, and agreeing to the constitution. These were the same obstacles routinely imposed by those in power against insurgents ahead of peace talks. They were tantamount to a demand to surrender and were a clear obstacle to progress toward talks. Privately, Lute’s group were now able to explore a talks process, finessing the red lines from preconditions into desirable end states. One of Holbrooke’s senior advisers, Jarrett Blanc, called it a “Jesuitical debate between the difference between setting a precondition and describing your minimum end state.”18
While the U.S. had invested little in cultivating political contacts with the Taliban, some European nations had done far more. Some NATO allies, in particular the UK, Germany, and Norway, were pragmatic, knowing there was no clear victory to be won on the battlefield; all the military could do was shape the space for a negotiated peace. This had led to mistrust in the coalition, adding to the American sense that their allies were not really in the fight.
After his release from Guantánamo, the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Zaeef, lived openly in Kabul and was a potential intermediary as he retained close links with the organization. He came to the UK, where as well as meeting government officials, he went deer stalking in Scotland. It was an unofficial sidebar to the main visit, but the best kind of confidence-building. His eyes lit up when he was handed a rifle, and he shot two deer. He returned to Kabul carrying a bolt of Stewart tartan.19 Norway, a traditional peacemaking nation, without any of the baggage of the U.S. or former European imperial powers, came closest to the Taliban. Their intermediary, Alf Arne Ramslien, claimed he even met Mullah Omar among a group of Taliban leaders in a secret location he believes was near Karachi in southern Pakistan.20
On one occasion, the Norwegian negotiators hosted emissaries from both the Afghan government and the Taliban in the same Oslo hotel, but the Taliban side pulled out ahead of the planned meeting. Norway’s initiatives did not bear fruit at the time, although “success often starts with crazy ideas and comes in unexpected bursts” in peace negotiations, Ramslien told The New York Times. “And failure can happen regardless of your best efforts.”21
Ramslien and his colleagues showed considerable courage, in particular going to the frontier region of Pakistan, where Western hostages were being held, and where The Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl was murdered in 2002 while meeting Taliban contacts. The Norwegian embassy in Islamabad received a crudely worded threat, sent by Taliban members who did not approve of the process. “We will attack with chemical weapons and destroy all Norwegians.”22
Norway encountered another block of granite in the middle of the road toward peace talks—Pakistan. The Islamabad government continued to ride two horses, holding on to the need to use the Taliban to have influence in Afghanistan, while supporting America’s war. When Norway and the UN began to put out feelers to bring a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Baradar, to Kabul for talks with the government, Pakistan arrested him.
In Afghanistan, General McChrystal was on-message as the policy shifted, building consensus for neg
otiations among the troops in his command in 2010. “We were visiting the Special Forces HQ in Bagram, so he’s among the guys he knows best,” said his senior civilian adviser, Matt Sherman. “And his whole thing was like going, ‘Hey guys, you and I have been killing these guys for years. And if I am open to talking with them, then so should you. We all have killed them and they’ve killed us. And if I can do this, you can do this.’”
But just as the Obama administration was feeling its way toward peace talks, McChrystal was replaced by the American commander most convinced of the possibility of military force to prevail. General Petraeus’s Anaconda strategy was not about squeezing the Taliban to the negotiating table. It was about squeezing them, period. “You have to kill, capture or turn the bad guys.”23 While Petraeus talked about “reintegration and reconciliation,” this was bottom up, not an attempt to engage with the whole movement. What if the Taliban would not be turned or fractured? There was no space in his policy for Lute’s plan B.
In August 2010, a month after taking command in Kabul, Petraeus told Holbrooke that it was too early to negotiate. “He wants to do it only when the time is right, which he says will be next year,” Holbrooke recorded in his diary. “Frankly, I just don’t believe him.”24 Holbrooke was not against the need to put significant military pressure on the Taliban as long as the clear aim was to persuade them they needed to talk. He derided “well-intentioned but misguided members of the European and American left,” who opposed an increase in troop numbers. “The chances of success of any reintegration or reconciliation policy will be significantly increased by battlefield success.”25 But he wanted a clear negotiation route laid out. In December 2010, Holbrooke wrote a memo titled “How Does This Thing End?” characterizing Petraeus as believing it would show “weakness” to engage with the leadership of the Taliban. “David does not foresee, and so far opposes, any real discussion with the leadership of the Taliban.”26
A HAMBURGER IN HARRY’S
If it came to talks, Holbrooke always presumed he would be the lead negotiator. Since his first work in villages in Vietnam in 1963, he saw diplomacy as best built from the ground. He showed courage going into Sarajevo under fire before constructing the Dayton peace deal that ended the Bosnian conflict in 1995, and in 1999, he sat with guerrillas while engaging in negotiations in Kosovo, crossing a Serbian front line to do so.27 But he had made too many enemies in the administration. Clinton knew she could never persuade the White House to make him the lead on as delicate a subject as talking to the Taliban. There had been attempts to oust him from his job in early 2010, and Obama had left him behind in Washington when he went to see Karzai in Afghanistan.28 Holbrooke was not the person to do a deal involving an Afghan president who could hardly be in the same room as him after Holbrooke’s heavy-handed moves against him in the 2009 election.
Lining up the variable geometry of peace talks remained elusive. The Afghan government would talk only inside Afghanistan, in particular to reduce the influence of Pakistan. The Taliban as an organization would not talk to the Afghan government, which they saw as illegitimate, a “puppet” of the “invaders.” And they would talk to the “invaders” only to secure the release of prisoners and discuss the withdrawal of foreign troops, a consistent approach they held in peace talks over the next ten years.29
When the Taliban re-formed in 2003—united now with the Haqqani network—they had a political council, military council, and administrative council. They appointed shadow governors and military commanders for every province in the country, with a clear hierarchy under Mullah Omar.30 A coherent movement, with a political plan, they were now seeking international recognition and a political office to enable them to operate outside the region.
Karzai had held informal talks with a number of current Taliban commanders by phone, and occasionally in person. As America began to explore the contours of a peace process in 2010, he called a peace Loya Jirga in Kabul, preparing his own nation for dialogue, calling the Taliban “brothers,” and setting up a High Peace Council. The jirga faced a rocket attack—and a furious Karzai forced the resignations of two able ministers in the security sector in response. The High Peace Council was not as positive a step as it sounds. The first head, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was hardly a neutral bystander. He was the leader of the Jamiat-e Islami, the Tajik northern force who were the Taliban’s main military opponent.
While on the beach in the South of France, Rubin was called by an old Saudi contact, who requested to meet in Dubai. When they met, he said the mainstream Taliban, the so-called Quetta Shura, under the leadership of Mullah Omar, wanted talks. They had appointed an intermediary, Tayyib Agha, in his thirties, one of Omar’s closest advisers when in government and related to him by marriage. He spoke good English and was in the group who attempted to surrender Kandahar peacefully to Karzai in November 2001. When Pakistan heard about the initiative, they closed it down, persuading Saudi Arabia not to allow Agha to visit.31
Agha had also reached out to Germany through an Afghan exile living in Europe, who contacted the BND, German intelligence, in late 2009. After a face-to-face meeting with Agha in Doha in the spring of 2010, Germany brought in America. Before they agreed to meet, Lute’s team wanted proof that Agha spoke for the leadership, and Rubin suggested some tests. First, the U.S. asked for proof of life of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier kidnapped when he walked off his base in June 2009. That was significant, as it would show that Agha had a link with the Haqqani network, allied to the Taliban. The second test was a statement of support for “our brothers in Somalia,” to be inserted into the annual Eid statement by the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, in September 2010. Agha passed both tests.
In November 2010, Holbrooke’s deputy, Frank Ruggiero, went to Munich, where a safe house in a nondescript Munich suburb was prepared for the first face-to-face talks. A German executive jet was waiting on the tarmac at Doha to bring Agha when there was a last-minute hitch. The German AfPak envoy, Michael Steiner, called Lute to say, “The deal is off.”
“What do you mean, the deal’s off?” Lute replied.
“Agha won’t get on the plane because he’s afraid that when it lands he will be in Cuba.”
He feared he would suffer the fate of so many potential intermediaries in the past and end up in Guantánamo. Lute walked upstairs to the Oval Office, got in to see Obama, who gave his personal assurance for Agha’s safety, putting his own credibility on the line.
Agha, who trimmed his hair and beard, unlike many Taliban, arrived in Western clothes, changing into traditional shalwar kameez for the first sessions of talks over two days.32 Holbrooke’s one instruction was to open the door to a process, make sure there was a second meeting, listen to what he had to say. But Agha felt there was an impatience on the other side to move too fast.33 There was a mismatch of expectations. The Taliban had a limited agenda to secure prisoner releases and open a public political office to give them an address. The U.S. side wanted a swap for Bergdahl and to build a series of confidence-building measures toward a wider peace process. There was also a cultural difference—Afghan meetings can take a long time to get to the point.
Rubin was heading to Kabul the day Ruggiero came back from Munich, so they met for a debrief at Harry’s Tap Room in Dulles International Airport. Holbrooke was so keen to hear what had happened that he made the trip out to the airport and heard the full account while Ruggiero devoured a burger. Eleven days later, just before Christmas 2010, Holbrooke died, collapsing with a ruptured aorta, on the seventh floor at Foggy Bottom, while actually in the secretary of state’s office that he never occupied as his own.
TOUGH CHOICES
Two months after Holbrooke’s death, at a memorial speech in his name at the Asia Society in New York, Clinton made an important readjustment of America’s position on peace talks that Holbrooke had wanted. She accepted in public what Holbrooke and Lute had been using as a working assumption in private. The three red lines—renouncing violence, severing links with al-Qaeda, an
d agreeing to the constitution—were pushed down the track. No longer preconditions, instead they were to be “necessary outcomes.”34 She called the move toward negotiations a “diplomatic surge,” to go with the military and civilian surges.
The new AfPak envoy, Marc Grossman, was more methodical and process-driven than his mercurial predecessor. Gone were Holbrooke’s creative pyrotechnics; in their place a steady series of meetings between Ruggiero and Agha, around seven in all. The U.S. was not negotiating a peace deal. It was a clear policy of the Obama administration that the final settlement needed to be between the Taliban and the government, “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.” What was being constructed was a series of confidence-building measures—lifting of sanctions on Taliban individuals, the release of five Taliban leaders from Guantánamo, and the recognition of a Taliban office in Doha. In return, the Taliban would sever their links with international terrorism, release Bergdahl, and commit to talks with the Afghan government.
The talks faced opposition from hard-liners in the Taliban, as well as the U.S., who would move to block negotiations if they became public. Resentment in the Afghan government at being excluded led to the talks being revealed. On May 25, 2011, Afghan officials leaked the name of Tayyib Agha and the detail of German involvement in the U.S.-led process to the German magazine Der Spiegel. The government in Pakistan were already upset about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden earlier in the month, and Clinton immediately flew to Islamabad to lower the tension and persuade them they had not been cut out.35 The Taliban leadership had kept the talks secret from their fighters but now needed to confirm they were talking to the U.S., justifying it as a way of securing the release of the Guantánamo Five.
