by Steve Coll
Fahim’s relations with Karzai remained shadowed by the former’s arrest and rough interrogation of the latter less than a decade earlier. Fahim considered Karzai to be a playboy who had benefited from a rich father. In any event, Fahim had troops while Karzai had none. Karzai insisted years later that he and Fahim enjoyed a “very respectful relationship” once they joined government together, but it seemed to some of the Americans who met with him in this period that Karzai trusted very few people.28
In Washington, President Bush asked Zalmay Khalilzad, then the senior director for Afghanistan at the White House’s National Security Council, whether he should take the rumors about an assassination threat from Fahim seriously. Khalilzad had been born and raised in Afghanistan before earning a doctoral degree in political science at the University of Chicago. He had served in previous Republican administrations and had become, after September 11, the most influential adviser on Afghanistan who enjoyed direct access to President Bush. He was a self-invented man, gifted and adaptable, a natural Washington operator—a phone juggler, a network builder, disorganized, charismatic. He was tall, clean-shaven, with a head of receding graying hair. His manner was all smiles and shoulder grabs. He had the sort of Oval Office style George W. Bush enjoyed—jocular but respectful, quick with a story or an insider’s detail about a foreign leader. He also offered something no other White House adviser could. He had deep, personal knowledge of Afghanistan.
“These guys are unpredictable,” Khalilzad told the president. The probability was low that Fahim would bump off Karzai, he judged, but the impact would be high. Bush urged Khalilzad to persuade Hamid Karzai to accept American bodyguards. The public symbolism would not be great, but the loss of face could be endured; a coup d’état eliminating a conciliatory Pashtun leader might trigger a new civil war.
Khalilzad called Karzai from the White House and spoke in the code they used when they assumed the call would be overheard by foreign intelligence services. “I am calling you on behalf of your friend,” Khalilzad said, referring to President Bush. Khalilzad said he recognized the subject was “very sensitive” but he urged Karzai to give “due consideration” to the recommendation. But Karzai hesitated. Fahim questioned how it would look for an Afghan leader to so distrust his own security forces that he would accept Americans in substitute. Yet other Panjshiris, including Yunus Qanooni, the minister of interior, told Karzai that he should accept the offer. He eventually said yes.
Karzai’s greatest asset in Washington was his relationship with George W. Bush. The president talked with Karzai as often as twice a month by secure videoconference, once the infrastructure in Afghanistan was available. Karzai understood the effort Bush was making and appreciated the respect and deference he showed. Their relationship eventually came under strain but never broke down, and for a remarkable number of years after 2001, Bush’s mentorship succeeded and Karzai stretched himself to cooperate with the United States.
To Americans who worked with him in Kabul, Karzai could seem a lost and even lonely figure. According to reports that circulated at the American embassy, the chairman would sometimes slip away from his personal protection detail and travel around the city anonymously. Some versions of the reporting held that Karzai kept a secret car for these journeys. Karzai later denied that there had been any such vehicle. In any case, he was in a searching mood. Interim leader of war-shattered Afghanistan was not a job he had campaigned to hold. It wasn’t clear what his conception of being president really was. Ambassador Robert Finn thought of medieval France: Karzai was “the king, and he was in Paris, and everyone acknowledged that he was the king, but that did not mean that he told everybody what to do.”29
That spring, the actual former king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, returned to Kabul. He had been forced from the throne in a 1973 coup d’état and had gone into exile in Rome. He was eighty-seven years old and frail. He brought a staff with him and moved into private quarters one floor above Karzai’s office at the Arg Palace. The former king enjoyed rooms with twenty-foot ceilings and an outside patio with a view of the grounds. Zahir Shah’s retainers clearly hoped for a royal restoration as Afghans finalized a new constitution. Karzai treated the former king respectfully but also maneuvered for power. The palace atmosphere overall was one of intrigue and hidden danger, but also hope and purpose.
Karzai’s office became “like a late-night TV program,” as Finn put it. “Guest number one came in and sat on the couch and got his fifteen or twenty minutes. And then he moved over to the couch, and guest number two came in. And this went on all day long. By the end of the day there would be ten or fifteen people in the room, and I would say, ‘Who the hell is running this country?’”
Part of Karzai’s instinct, Finn recognized, was to “keep your enemies where you can see them.” The difficulty was that “he wouldn’t make decisions.” One talking circle led to the next.30
Many Afghan leaders before Karzai had died violently. The city was full of northern gunmen and it would take only one warlord with a bankroll to put out a hit contract. “We were trying to help him learn to be president,” Sedney said. “The C.I.A. was worried about just trying to keep him alive.”31
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Donald Rumsfeld flew into Afghanistan that spring. He was not a popular figure at the Ariana Hotel, the embassy, or in the military barracks at Bagram. At one meeting, the secretary of defense pronounced, “The war is over in Afghanistan.”
Rich Blee contradicted him. “No, sir, it’s not.” Rumsfeld responded profanely. The gap between how Rumsfeld saw Afghanistan and how career spies, diplomats, and military officers on the ground saw it was growing wider by the month. Rumsfeld told Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, the highest American military commander in the country, to “do two things—pursue terrorists to capture or kill and build an Afghan National Army.” Yet Central Command had given McNeill no written campaign plan, and Rumsfeld provided no specifics about what size or shape of an army he wanted in Afghanistan.32
Rumsfeld believed that N.A.T.O. security forces in Bosnia and Kosovo had fostered dependency by the host country. “At the time, 13,000 troops seemed like the right amount,” Bush recalled. “We had routed the Taliban with far fewer, and it seemed that the enemy was on the run. . . . We were all wary of repeating the experience of the Soviets and the British, who ended up looking like occupiers.”33
Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal landed at Bagram in May as the chief of staff of Joint Task Force 180, the Central Command force devised to succeed Hagenbeck’s command. (This was an American command distinct from N.A.T.O.’s security effort, then primarily focused on Kabul.) McChrystal’s main job was to set up a headquarters unit at Bagram. Yet he wasn’t sure whether the force’s mission was going to be nation building or continuing the pursuit of remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. A senior Army officer in Washington told him, “Don’t build Bondstells,” referring to the N.A.T.O. base in Bosnia that Rumsfeld saw as a symbol of peacekeeping mission creep. The officer warned McChrystal against “anything here that looks permanent. . . . We are not staying long.” As McChrystal took the lay of the land, “I felt like we were high-school students who had wandered into a Mafia-owned bar.”34
His mission included training the Afghan National Army, but “we just weren’t scoped when we got there, mentally or physically, to even contemplate that seriously. We were a very small headquarters that was pulling together disparate forces and there were very few.” The Bonn Agreement had contemplated building an Afghan National Army of 70,000 soldiers, but the Pentagon was in no hurry to resource that program and Rumsfeld seemed to be wavering about whether a force of that size would ever be necessary. Hamid Karzai and Fahim Khan wanted something on the order of 250,000 soldiers, wildly beyond what the Americans had in mind (at least for now).35
In June 2002, McChrystal’s superior, McNeill, attended a Central Command conference in Germany. When he came back he announced, “That me
eting was all about invading Iraq.” They were stunned. The planning for the next war created fresh incentives for officers and intelligence analysts in Afghanistan to downplay signs of trouble in that theater—if you wanted promotion and frontline battlefield assignments, you went on to the next war.36
That month, Taliban or Al Qaeda guerrillas attacked and blew up a C-130 transport plane while it was parked on the ground at an airstrip near Gardez, killing three American soldiers aboard, according to a senior military officer then at Bagram, who reviewed intelligence about the attack. “That really got the attention of a lot of people,” the officer said, “because it was like, ‘Hey, we didn’t go in there to lose a lot of people.’” Yet the Pentagon put out a false story that the plane had crashed during takeoff and that there had been no enemy fire. Rumsfeld insisted that the Afghan war was won; his public affairs bureaucracy accommodated him.37
SEVEN
Taliban for Karzai
Gul Agha Sherzai, the C.I.A.’s man in Kandahar, or one of them, grew up around dog fighting. His father bred squat, fierce winners, organized tournaments, and oversaw gambling. In Sherzai’s deft repertoire of public personas—tribal balancer, cash dispenser, business monopolist, reliable American client, land-grabber—the dog fighter was never far from summons. When agitated, he punched people. To demonstrate his prowess to his militia while fighting his way back into Kandahar, with Special Forces and C.I.A. officers alongside, he once jumped out of his car and shot dead several Arab fighters. He later suggested that he and Mullah Mohammad Omar should settle things with a knife fight, to see which “motherfucker” cried out first.1
Sherzai held court at the governor’s headquarters in downtown Kandahar, an arched compound surrounded by dusty flowering gardens. Some days he appeared in the robes and turban befitting a Barakzai tribal leader. Other days he wore American-issued camouflage and Special Forces insignia. He and his brother, who ran security operations for him, were fans of the Die Hard movies, Steven Seagal, and Bollywood gangster musicals. A visitor recalled Gul Agha decamping once from his sport utility vehicle in a pin-striped suit, black shirt, and white tie. After a spate of rocket attacks on Kandahar Airfield, Sherzai’s men captured a suspected insurgent, cut his throat, skinned him, and hung the corpse from a bridge on the main road to the city. They affixed a cardboard sign to the body: “DON’T FIRE ROCKETS AT THE CAMP.”2
There were about four thousand American and allied soldiers at Kandahar Airfield. Their mission was not peacekeeping, but terrorist hunting. They needed reliable local security forces to protect their base and patrols. They had few proven allies in the Taliban heartland. The Sherzais filled the gap, for a fee. N.A.T.O. troops maintained an inner ring of security around the air base. The governor’s militias maintained an outer perimeter under contract.
Some C.I.A. officers who worked with Sherzai found him to be a lovable rogue, an anachronism, perhaps, but a dependable and necessary one in post-Taliban Kandahar. State Department assessments were less generous. One described Sherzai as “a poor listener who always tries to dominate the conversation” and a “weak administrator” whose method of governance relied heavily on payoffs to tribal elders, journalists, and political office seekers. His lifestyle certainly challenged American sensibilities. He married at least four wives, who gave him ten sons and seven daughters. One of his wives was a former airline stewardess he had first seen as a twelve-year-old girl in Pakistan, and who he claimed had proposed to him “because she had heard so many good things” about him. Sherzai also followed the local practice of dressing up preadolescent boys as girls and apparently thought nothing of turning up before Western diplomats with such companions.3
The Taliban had taken power in Kandahar by challenging predatory corruption. Yet American policy in 2002 rested on the restoration of Sherzai’s compromised rule in the Taliban’s birthplace. The United States had transformed Afghanistan by overthrowing its government in a whirlwind but it had no political plan and few locally credible anti-Taliban allies to choose among, at least in Pashtun areas. Sherzai quickly seized upon the opportunity to enrich his family and rebuild tribal patronage. He took control of customs revenue at Spin Boldak, at the Pakistani border, a spigot of cash. He ran monopolies in water supplies, stone quarries, gasoline distribution, and taxi services. He opened a gravel and cement plant to service his American contracts. By one estimate, his take was about $1.5 million a month. Of the province’s sixty heads of civil departments, Sherzai appointed fellow Barakzai tribe members to fifty-two, although he did allow other tribes some positions in the police and district administration. None of his lieutenants had the benefit of higher education.4
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Haji Bashir Noorzai, an opium trafficker and former C.I.A. agent then about forty years old, was among the opportunists who met regularly with Governor Sherzai in 2002. Noorzai had come into contact with the C.I.A. a decade earlier, during the Afghan civil war, when the agency had run a clandestine program to buy back some of the more than two thousand heat-seeking, portable Stinger antiaircraft missiles the United States had distributed to mujaheddin guerrillas battling the Soviet occupation. After the Soviet withdrawal, the agency feared that terrorists might acquire Stingers to attack civilian airliners. Through I.S.I. officers and unilateral agents, C.I.A. officers working out of Islamabad Station paid about $80,000 for every missile returned for destruction.
Noorzai heard about the program through a friend in Pakistan and volunteered to locate and buy back Stingers in his home region of Kandahar. He met a C.I.A. officer at the start of each mission. The officer tore a ten-dollar bill in half, gave one half to Noorzai, and told him that if an American met him with the other half, that would authenticate their contact. Ultimately, Noorzai brokered the sale of about half a dozen Stingers to the C.I.A. and cleared a total of $50,000 in commissions.5
His family included leaders of the Noorzai tribe, who were large in number and controlled lands rich with opium crops, but did not enjoy great political influence. Taliban rule benefited the Noorzais. Bashir grew up in Maiwand, where Mullah Mohammad Omar had settled after the Soviet war. Bashir Noorzai provided cash and arms to the Taliban when they took power in Kandahar after 1994. In 2000, his father died and Bashir became “the Chief of the Noorzai,” as he called himself. After September 11, he waited out the American invasion in Quetta. When Gul Agha Sherzai seized Kandahar, Noorzai sent word to him that he wanted to renew his help to the C.I.A. The governor invited him to Kandahar.6
He did not receive the welcome he expected. American military officers detained Noorzai for six days at Kandahar Airfield and interrogated him. They asked him about his relationship with the Taliban, which Noorzai admitted had been friendly. He told the various Americans who questioned him—military officers, C.I.A. officers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents—that America was already falling into the trap of allowing local Afghan allies around Kandahar to put down enemies by labeling them Taliban when they really weren’t. “Many people take advantage of American friendship to harm their rivals,” Noorzai explained.7
Noorzai eventually convinced them that he could once again help collect Stingers and other heavy weapons. The Americans released him. He purchased batches of old weapons the Taliban had left behind—Blowpipe missiles and caches of rocket-propelled grenades. He turned trucks full of arms in to the Americans at Kandahar Airfield.
By Noorzai’s account, however, Gul Agha Sherzai’s men hijacked the C.I.A.’s Stinger repurchase program and turned it into a racketeering venture. Noorzai said he identified five or six Stingers held by old commanders and paid for them, planning to sell them for a profit to the C.I.A. (The agency was now paying as much as $125,000 per returned missile.) But when Noorzai told Sherzai’s aides about his deals, he said, the governor’s men “beat up some of my people,” stole Noorzai’s money, and also stole the missiles so they could sell them back to the C.I.A. themselves. “He is just a crow,” Noorzai said of Gul Agha,
“but you have made him a hero.”8
Noorzai said he traveled to the United Arab Emirates with Sherzai and Khalid Pashtun that spring, to help them obtain payments from U.A.E. sheikhs in exchange for allowing the Arabs to access Kandahar’s desert hunting grounds, where they used falcons to hunt bustards, a migratory bird. The Taliban had run such a hunting program, and Sherzai had the idea that he could obtain fresh rental payments. Emirati go-betweens handed over a briefcase with two hundred thousand dirhams in cash and arranged for another payment of one million dirhams, or about $320,000 in total. “Everything is the money business in Afghanistan,” as one of Noorzai’s aides explained. “Politics is for money, fighting is for money, government [is] for money.”9
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Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had ruled out amnesty for surrendering Taliban in late 2001. Yet by the spring of 2002 the context for his policy had changed. Al Qaeda had abandoned Afghanistan’s cities. The Taliban had dissolved and disappeared. The country had quieted, apart from the eastern mountains. Karzai had started to lead a constitutional process outlined by the Bonn Agreement, to determine the form of national government. He remained open to negotiation with the Taliban, just as he had been in December.
At Kabul Station, Rich Blee shared Karzai’s opinion that some Taliban might be corrigible. Taliban leaders held abhorrent ideas but at least they were not corrupt, Blee told colleagues. It would be valuable to win peaceful defectors to bolster Kabul’s shaky new government. Besides, any student of military history knew that it was wise after victory in war to create reconciliation and pacification programs for the defeated enemy. The victor might hang a few enemy leaders and generals, but it could be dangerous to hold every official and military officer on the other side accountable—too much punishment was a prescription for future rebellion.
