by Steve Coll
As the war raged Karzai saw the front lines but he thought of himself as a political and social analyst. His sense of politics was informed by the example of his father, who promoted the traditional power of Afghanistan’s tribes and the country’s royal family, while also supporting modernization. The Soviet war shattered and scattered the Karzais as it did so many other Afghan families. In a country as poor as Afghanistan, privilege and a touch of rank such as the Karzais enjoyed did not translate into seven-figure Swiss bank accounts. They were better off than many countrymen and yet financially insecure. Some of Hamid’s brothers went abroad. One of them, Qayum, opened an Afghan restaurant in Baltimore. Another, Mahmud, opened fast-food outlets in San Francisco and Boston. Only Hamid and his younger brother, Ahmed Wali, settled in South Asia.
Hamid Karzai argued that Afghanistan should seek to recover from the Soviet war by restoring tribes and the royal family as symbols of national unity—a strategy that would benefit previously elite Durrani Pashtun families such as his own. In 1988, he published an essay in the Central Asian Survey, an academic journal. His modest thesis concerned “the extraordinary resilience and persistence” of “the very deep-rooted traditional beliefs and religious values of the tribes, and indeed of the whole nation.”12
In 1992, when Kabul fell to the C.I.A.-backed mujaheddin, Mojaddedi became president briefly. Karzai became a deputy foreign minister. I.S.I.’s favored Islamist guerrilla leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, had been named prime minister but refused to join the new government. Hekmatyar’s forces shelled Kabul mercilessly from a base to the south of the capital. The I.S.I. would eventually abandon Hekmatyar in favor of the Taliban, but at the time he was the most important client of Directorate S.
Ahmad Shah Massoud was then minister of defense. Fahim Khan and Engineer Arif, his intelligence aides, suspected that Hekmatyar had a secret network of supporters inside Kabul. One day, Arif summoned Karzai for “advice” about individuals who might be working for Hekmatyar, a senior Afghan official involved recalled. The idea was “to share intelligence” with Karzai “and ask him to do something about it” at the foreign ministry, meaning identify and help round up Hekmatyar sympathizers. But Karzai “was nervous,” understandably enough, about being interrogated by Panjshiri musclemen.13
Afterward, Karzai took it upon himself to visit Hekmatyar to try to find a diplomatic solution. When he returned to Kabul, however, Fahim Khan arrested Karzai on suspicion of collaboration with the enemy. The intelligence service abused Karzai in a Kabul cell. Fahim regarded Karzai as a “weak figure” who could be intimidated, as a Western diplomat who worked closely with both men put it.14
After a short period of imprisonment, one of Hekmatyar’s randomly aimed rockets hit the jail and knocked a hole in the wall, allowing Karzai to escape. He fled to Pakistan. There he expressed support for the Taliban. “I believed in the Taliban when they first appeared,” Karzai later conceded. “I gave them fifty thousand dollars to help them out, and then handed them a cache of weapons I had hidden near Kandahar. . . . They were good people initially, but the tragedy was that very soon after they were taken over by the I.S.I.”15
As the years passed, the Taliban’s hostility toward the Karzai family changed his thinking again. Hamid Karzai’s aging father spoke out against the Taliban. One morning in 1999, assassins on motorbikes gunned him down. After that, Hamid opened contacts with Ahmad Shah Massoud, Fahim’s commander. They discussed the possibility of Hamid Karzai’s entering Afghanistan to build up a Pashtun-led resistance to the Taliban.
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Greg Vogle arrived as the C.I.A.’s chief of base in Peshawar in 1999. He worked from the U.S. consulate there. He was a man of medium height who had become well known in the Directorate of Operations for his spartan workouts and his bushy, Fu Manchu mustache. He looked like he might be a guitarist in a Lynyrd Skynyrd or Allman Brothers revival band. He had grown up in the Deep South and joined the Marine Corps reconnaissance force, a branch of the Special Forces. On one early assignment, in 1983, he flew into Beirut after Islamic Jihad bombed a Marine barracks there, killing almost three hundred. Vogle left the Marines after five years to become a C.I.A. officer. For the next twenty years he served mainly in the Special Activities Division, the agency’s paramilitary wing. During a tour in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Vogle would ride for an hour on a stationary bike in the morning. At midday he would move the bike into the peak desert sun and ride for another hour. In the evening he would swim for a third hour using a device that rendered his legs inert so that he pulled through the water with his arms. Later, Vogle deployed to Africa and the Balkans. As he aged his hair grayed and his face sank, adding to his battered biker-rocker mien. “Easy day,” he liked to say in parting.16
Paramilitary specialists in the C.I.A. were “a wary and misunderstood breed,” who often struggled to be fully accepted by their liberal arts–educated colleagues, as Robert Grenier put it. Vogle “was among the few in his tribe who excelled in both intelligence and paramilitary operations.” He was profane and had an imaginative sense of humor. Yet he also had “a rather thin skin, and a sensitive soul.” According to Crumpton, Vogle could hold a blood grudge.17
Grenier made the “arbitrary” decision to assign Vogle to Hamid Karzai. They were not the most likely pair, except that Karzai, too, was a sensitive soul. Grenier insisted that Karzai was in no way a controlled C.I.A. agent, but rather a potential resistance leader in a common cause. After the assassination of Karzai’s father, Vogle helped him to sketch out the plans Karzai was considering to enter Afghanistan and link up with the Northern Alliance. I.S.I. caught wind of the planning and served Karzai with an eviction notice late in the summer of 2001. Then came September 11, which galvanized Karzai. He and Vogle discussed a new possibility: Karzai would move into Afghanistan to stir up a rebellion among tribesmen and allies in the Taliban’s heartland—a more direct and risky version of the guerrilla strategy the pair had outlined earlier.
A few days before the air war started on October 7, Vogle called Karzai.
“I can’t tell you why, but you’ve got to get inside now,” Vogle said. The implication was obvious: The American bombing would start soon. Karzai had to be in position to take territory and rally followers as the Taliban reeled under the coming air assault.
Karzai said he had to check with contacts in Kandahar. The next day, he called Vogle back. “I’m going this afternoon,” he reported.18
Unarmed, in the darkness, joined only by three friends, Karzai crossed by motorcycle into Afghanistan.
His courage made an impression on Vogle. It was one thing for a trained reconnaissance soldier to ride into the dark; it was another for a political science student with no military experience. Vogle and Grenier pressed to create a joint C.I.A.–Special Forces team of the sort that had earlier been inserted into the north, to aid the more experienced Panjshiris and their Uzbek and Hazara allies. Those helicopter-borne teams had landed in areas firmly controlled by the indigenous forces they would assist, however. Karzai had melted into vast Taliban country—he had no base of operations, no bodyguard, and no confirmed military allies inside Afghanistan. The idea was that as soon as Karzai had “rallied a sufficient number of fighters to hold territory and defend a landing zone,” as Grenier described it, Greg Vogle and Pentagon special operators would follow by helicopter. “The truth was we were all making it up as we went along.”19
Karzai initially toured rural Kandahar, hosting delegations and giving speeches, then moved toward Uruzgan’s provincial capital of Tarinkot. He found modest support—perhaps a few dozen armed fighters traveled with him—but also ambivalence. Switching sides was an Afghan way of war, but the Taliban had showed no mercy to those who defected, and it wasn’t yet clear to locals how this war would turn out. Where were the Americans?
Karzai and Vogle stayed in touch by satellite phone and text. Grenier believed that Cofer Black and Hank Crumpton were too slow to su
pport Karzai, and that C.T.C.’s failure to supply him as he traveled was “beyond scandal.” Crumpton was at odds with Grenier over the latter’s caution about working with the Northern Alliance, but felt that he ordered “a lot of reconnaissance” to support Karzai. Between October 30 and November 2, Karzai’s small band fought off a Taliban force sent to kill him. They barely escaped. “Everyone in the U.S. government supports you,” Vogle texted him. “All we ask is that you maintain a continuous heartbeat.”20
The next day, Karzai asked to be rescued—his phone was running out of batteries. Vogle flew on the Special Operations helicopter that extracted him and some followers. Back in Pakistan, they moved Karzai into an old schoolhouse at a Pakistani air base in Jacobabad, in southern Sindh Province. Karzai gave phone interviews to the BBC and other journalists, pretending to be still inside Afghanistan, until Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld inadvertently blurted out that Karzai was actually in Pakistan.
By mid-November the Pentagon and C.I.A. had organized Team Echo, a paramilitary force drawn from the Army’s Fifth Special Forces Group, Delta Force, and the C.I.A. Army captain Jason Amerine, a West Point graduate, would command the team. Greg Vogle would lead its small C.I.A. contingent. Team Echo flew into Uruzgan on the night of November 14.
At that point, besides Karzai, the only other Pashtun resistance leader the C.I.A. was prepared to back with an embedded military team was Gul Agha Sherzai, a strongman from southern Afghanistan’s Barakzai tribe. Karzai and Sherzai were destined to become political rivals whose struggles would shape Afghanistan; it was the C.I.A.’s support that gave birth to this competition. Like Karzai’s Popalzai tribe, the Barakzai had produced generations of Pashtun elites, particularly through the Mohammadzai subtribe. Gul Agha Sherzai was not of the elite, however. His father, Abdul Latif, was a small businessman who had risen during the anti-Soviet war as a commander, “exploiting the absenteeism of the Barakzai aristocracy,” as two scholars of the family’s history put it. In 1989, Abdul Latif’s cook murdered him by poison. His son Gul Agha (“Flower” in Pashto, a name he adopted as a boy) inherited his networks of influence and added Sherzai (“The Lion’s Son”) to his name. He became governor of Kandahar after the Soviet withdrawal, a powerful figure in the coalition of checkpoint-extorting, neighborhood-menacing commanders the Taliban expelled from power. He went into exile. Sherzai relied on political influence and a “ragtag band of tribal militiamen with no organization and few heavy weapons.” Through his networks, Sherzai had been gathering intelligence on the Taliban and Al Qaeda for the C.I.A. for more than a year before September 11. He lived in Quetta, enriched himself through business and espionage, and bided his time. The significance of his position that autumn was that, like the Panjshiris, Gul Agha Sherzai was already a vetted Counterterrorist Center partner with a track record of cooperation with the C.I.A. against the Taliban.21
Sherzai entered Afghanistan from Quetta, to Kandahar’s south, a few days after Karzai landed by helicopter. Team Foxtrot, another Pentagon-commanded Special Forces–C.I.A. collaboration, joined Sherzai. To prepare, Sherzai’s lieutenants met I.S.I. officers in Quetta to receive Pakistani weapons. The service had reluctantly come to play both sides in the American war against the Taliban, but few officers had changed their convictions. The I.S.I. officer handing over the guns told Sherzai’s men “that they were making a serious mistake in trying to overthrow the Taliban, one which they should regret, and one which they should seriously reconsider.”
In Grenier’s judgment, the threat Karzai and Sherzai “posed to the Taliban was primarily political, not military.” The Taliban had taken power five years earlier by persuading entire sections of the Pashtun population to join them, without firing a shot. Now the process might work in reverse. The problem was, as Grenier put it, “Our own understanding of this broad sociopolitical shift was hazy at best.”22
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The decisive battle of Hamid Karzai’s improbable campaign took place less than two weeks after he returned to Afghanistan in the company of Vogle. A convoy of about fifty armed and highly irregular Taliban vehicles rolled up a highway from Kandahar to attack Karzai outside Tarinkot. It “looked like a snake slithering out of the pass,” in the journalist Eric Blehm’s description. “There seemed to be no end; it just kept coming, its numbers obscured by the dust storm it created as it advanced across the flat desert floor.” Karzai’s smaller militia carried “everything from AK-47s to bolt-action rifles that likely predated World War II.” But F-18 fighter-bombers obliterated the Taliban trucks before their occupants could dismount, scattering dozens of charred bodies on the plain. The remaining trucks turned and fled.23
The victory brought yet more local leaders to Karzai’s makeshift quarters, where Greg Vogle, who had taught himself some Pashto, was a constant presence—part bodyguard, part political adviser, and part reporting officer into C.I.A. channels. The political stakes he managed rose by the day. The Northern Alliance held Kabul. Kandahar lay open to Karzai and Sherzai. An interim post-Taliban government was now an urgent requirement, and the Bush administration appointed the diplomat James Dobbins to negotiate one, in partnership with the Algerian-born diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi. The United Nations scheduled a formal conference in Bonn, Germany. En route, Ehsan ul-Haq, the I.S.I. chief, and Abdullah Abdullah, the longtime political adviser to Massoud, each volunteered to Dobbins the name of Hamid Karzai as someone who might be an acceptable interim leader of Afghanistan. “We thought, ‘If he’s a Pashtun from Kandahar, and he’s a C.I.A. guy, okay,’” explained one senior Northern Alliance leader. It was unlikely that there would be many other aspects of Afghan politics on which the I.S.I., the C.I.A., and the Northern Alliance would agree. Hamid Karzai’s destiny was sealed.24
As he moved toward Kandahar, Karzai met tribal leaders hoping to pledge themselves to him early. On December 5, he had just sat down for another parley when an explosion shook the room, throwing him to the floor. Vogle leaped on top of Karzai’s body to protect him, followed by a scrum of Afghan guards.25 They feared a Taliban attack was under way.
It was friendly fire. An Air Force controller had inadvertently directed a two-thousand-pound bomb near Karzai’s position. Three Americans and fifty Afghans died.
Karzai was shaken but not seriously hurt. During the next hour, a BBC reporter called his satellite phone from Kabul to inform him that he had been named chairman of the new Afghan interim government. That same day, a Taliban delegation arrived with a letter of surrender, as Karzai later characterized the document.
Karzai asked Mullah Naqibullah, the militarily powerful commander of an armed force in Kandahar, to speak with surviving Taliban leaders who had gathered in Shah Wali Kot, a redoubt of canyons and ridges to Kandahar’s northeast. Mullah Mohammad Omar received him. Other senior Taliban leaders and advisers were also present. Karzai was inclined to accept Omar’s terms of surrender.
The next day, at a Pentagon press conference, however, Donald Rumsfeld announced that any negotiated end to the war against the Taliban was “unacceptable to the United States.” It remained American policy toward the Taliban “to bring justice to them or them to justice.” This policy was soon felt in Kandahar. Some of the senior Taliban who offered to back Karzai’s new regime were arrested and later sent to Guantánamo.
After tense negotiations, the C.I.A. helped to broker a deal in which Gul Agha Sherzai was restored as governor of Kandahar, Naqibullah yielded political power but maintained his armed force, and Hamid Karzai took over national leadership from Kabul. Mullah Mohammad Omar hid out for a few days, wrapped in a shawl, then climbed on a motorcycle and escaped into Pakistan.26
Hardly anyone in Washington or at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center reflected on the Taliban’s political fate or how the movement’s exclusion from the country’s new politics might later create a backlash. “Sadly, in terms of our policy, I don’t think we thought much about them at all,” Crumpton recalled, referri
ng to the Taliban’s surviving leadership. “We killed a lot of them, many thousands of them, including some of the key leaders. They were whipped.” Unfortunately, “what we failed to do is to understand that we had to replace the Taliban with something better.” As he worked with Karzai and the Northern Alliance to allocate cabinet seats in the new Afghan regime, James Dobbins believed the Taliban “had been so discredited by their performance in government and by the speed at which they had been displaced that they were not going to be a significant factor in Afghan politics. That turned out to be completely wrong.”27
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In early October, Osama Bin Laden issued his first statement since September 11. “There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots,” he said. “Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south.”28 He kept a low profile in the weeks that followed, receiving a few visitors but moving frequently. When Kabul fell, Al Qaeda’s remnant army of Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, Africans, and other volunteers evacuated to the east, toward Jalalabad and then southeast into the White Mountains near the Pakistan border. Bin Laden had constructed underground bunkers there during the anti-Soviet war, at the complex known as Tora Bora.
On November 21, Central Command’s Tommy Franks, who was planning air operations against Tora Bora, took a call from Donald Rumsfeld, who ordered him to start working on plans for an invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld told him to have something ready within a week.29 That dissonance set the tone for the following three weeks. The objective of Operation Enduring Freedom was not to seize Kabul; it was to destroy Al Qaeda. Yet Rumsfeld was ordering the campaign’s commander to plan for a different war before he had completed the one at hand. Military history is rife with examples of generals and presidents who squander strategic advantage by failing to press a battlefield triumph to its conclusion. Here was the same story again, involving not only complacency but also inexplicable strategic judgment, fractured decision making, and confusion.
