Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  Credible Taliban leaders continued to reach out to both Karzai and the United States despite the rejections they had received in late 2001. Tayeb Agha, a political and press aide in Mullah Mohammad Omar’s former office in Kandahar, and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a military deputy to Omar, approached Haji Mohammad Ibrahim Akhundzada, a leader in Uruzgan Province who was from Hamid Karzai’s tribe. Although he was a youthful and obscure figure at the time, Tayeb Agha would prove to be a consequential figure in Washington’s coming misadventures in Afghanistan. He was one of the few people who could reliably speak for Mullah Mohammad Omar, who had vanished. He provided a letter purportedly from the Taliban leader. The thrust of the note, according to an American official who later reviewed the matter, was “Look, the Bonn Conference just happened. . . . We want to be part of Afghanistan’s future and I’ll let my Shura decide how to do this.” Karzai wanted to pursue the opening, but the Bush administration refused.

  Bashir Noorzai offered a second opportunity. Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, the last Taliban foreign minister, came from Noorzai’s home district. Mutawakil’s father had been an imam at a local mosque. The deposed foreign minister had gone into hiding in Quetta, Pakistan. Noorzai reached him by telephone and “convinced him” to meet the Americans in Kandahar. Mutawakil traveled to Kandahar Airfield, where he was arrested.10

  The C.I.A. had a base there, in a fenced-off area that also housed clandestine Special Forces, mainly Navy SEALs. Frank Archibald, a six-foot-two-inch former college rugby player and U.S. Marine, who had risen in the C.I.A.’s Special Activities Division, questioned Mutawakil.

  They talked about creating a new political party allied with Karzai. “Let’s bring him on board,” Blee agreed. “Taliban for Karzai” was the general idea the C.I.A. explored—it offered a propaganda line, if nothing else. According to what Archibald later described to colleagues, the C.I.A. officer “was practically living in a tent” with Mutawakil, while working with him on “creating a legitimate Taliban political party to join the system.” Mutawakil suggested that he could recruit other significant former Taliban to join.11

  Archibald worked up a presentation about Taliban defectors and the future of Afghan politics, according to the account he later gave to colleagues. He flew back to Virginia and presented his ideas at C.I.A. headquarters. Vice President Dick Cheney attended. “We’re not doing that,” he declared after he heard the briefing. One American official involved in the discussions put it: “It’s the same crap we saw in Iraq: ‘All Baathists are bad. All Taliban are bad.’ What American naïveté.”

  The message from Washington for Mutawakil was “He’s going to be in a jumpsuit. He’s going to Guantánamo.” Archibald managed to prevent that, at least. The Afghan government imprisoned Mutawakil at Bagram Airfield for about six months, before he was released into house arrest in Kabul.12

  Mutawakil’s imprisonment “affected my prestige and discredited me with Mutawakil’s family and many other people,” Bashir Noorzai complained to the Americans. The Bush administration’s harsh policy “would not encourage former Taliban leaders and militants to moderate their attitude and cooperate with the new government.” For Noorzai, it got worse. He persuaded another Taliban ally, Haji Birqet Khan, to return to Kandahar, but someone passed a “false report” to the Americans that Noorzai and the commander were planning an attack. American helicopters swooped over Khan’s home and opened fire. They killed Khan and also wounded his wife and one of his sons. The son lost the use of his legs. Two of the commander’s “young grandchildren were killed when they jumped into a well in order to try and hide from the bombardment.” The raid caused Khan’s tribe “to go against the Americans,” according to Noorzai.13

  Noorzai gave up on the C.I.A. and fled to Quetta, where he returned to international opium and heroin smuggling. The Drug Enforcement Administration lured him to a meeting in New York several years later and arrested him. He was not the most unimpeachable of witnesses, but the essence of his testimony about Kandahar in 2002 was unarguable. The city had succumbed again to racketeering. Afghan allies passed false reports to the Americans for ulterior purposes. Violent Special Forces raids and intelligence errors alienated Pashtun families and tribes. “We in that stage started our process of killing all sorts of people” in poorly judged Special Forces raids and close air support operations, recalled a senior military officer then based in Afghanistan. A B-52 Stratofortress mistakenly killed dozens of Afghans at a wedding in Uruzgan that June, after reconnaissance officers confused their celebratory gunfire for hostile action. In Kandahar, Gul Agha’s approach to opposing tribal factions in Maiwand was to tell the Americans they were all part of the Taliban, “and we believed him,” the senior officer conceded. “And Maiwand has never been the same way since.”14

  Green Berets among the Army’s Special Forces, trained to influence local populations through engagement and small development projects, traveled patiently and for the most part peaceably, but theirs was not the predominant mission. Terrorist hunting was. “Black” Special Forces focused on identifying and targeting insurgents. An Army Psychological Operations officer accompanied a Special Forces raid on a Zabul village and watched Navy SEALs beat and threaten Pashtun villagers who weren’t sufficiently cooperative, the officer told Army criminal investigators.

  Q: When the three villagers were assaulted, how were they assaulted?

  A: [Redacted] was kicked in the head, chest, back, stomach, punched in the neck and shoulders and head. . . . The second individual was being hit in the face with closed hands and open hands. . . . [Redacted] had taken the villager behind a wall in the village and I could hear the villager screaming as though he were in pain, and then I heard a gunshot. Later I heard [Redacted] say “I should have killed him!”

  Q: What do you think [Redacted] meant by “He should have killed him”?

  A: In my opinion, [Redacted] was getting angry and frustrated and meant exactly what he had said.15

  After 2002, the C.I.A. and Special Forces discovered there weren’t many Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan after all. They had migrated to Pakistan. So the American operators started attacking Taliban “because they are there,” as Arturo Muñoz, a C.I.A. officer who served in the 2001 war, put it. Yet the political consequences of this shift were poorly considered, in his judgment: “If you start shipping people to Guantánamo who many other Pashtuns know are not terrorists—if you start confusing horse thieves with terrorists—then they come to see that your idea of terrorism is impossible to accommodate. By our words and our actions we destroyed the opportunity to take advantage of the Pashtun mechanisms for accommodation and reconciliation.”16

  Cheney and Rumsfeld had imposed the policy they preferred: to signal to former Taliban that they faced war without compromise because of their alliance with Al Qaeda. Yet for the most part, by mid-2002, the Bush administration had stopped thinking seriously about Afghanistan. Archibald’s presentation about “Taliban for Karzai” was a rare instance when the issue of political pacification was even put up for discussion. The Bush administration’s policy was: The Taliban had been defeated, they remained illegitimate, and stragglers should be hunted down, imprisoned, and interrogated about Al Qaeda. The Taliban did constitute a millenarian revolutionary movement with an uncompromising leader, although it was indigenous and had never attacked outside Afghanistan’s borders. The movement’s core leadership might have rejected political engagement in 2002, if that had been attempted. Yet with incentives, influential former Taliban might have come in from exile, just as Mutawakil had done. The Bush administration’s message to the movement’s survivors and their backers in I.S.I. was clear, however: The Taliban could expect no future in Afghan politics unless they fought for it. The Bush administration did not consider that they constituted a large part of Afghan society, legitimized by faith, ethnicity, and their fighting during the anti-Soviet war.

  —

  The first Taliban shabamah, or nig
ht letters—typically handwritten death threats posted in mosques or slipped under doorways—appeared to the east of Kandahar late in 2002, near the Pakistani border. They made reference to the history of Afghan resistance against foreign invaders, great heroes of the past, and Islamic theology. They threatened death to anyone who worked with the United States or the government in Kabul. Taliban runners tacked them on mosque walls or private doorways, or demanded that local notables read them aloud.17

  On September 5, 2002, Hamid Karzai toured Kandahar. An assassin opened fire on his vehicle from ten yards away, just missing him. American bodyguards gunned the shooter down, accidentally killing Afghan soldiers as well. The same day, a car bomb exploded in a downtown Kabul marketplace, killing fifteen shoppers and bystanders.

  Larry Goodson, an American scholar of Afghanistan, interviewed Taliban leaders along the Pakistan border during this period and found that the movement benefited from “a perception that the Americans would leave, that reconstruction would not succeed, and that Afghanistan would return to chaos.” Especially in areas such as the Kandahar heartland, the movement’s leaders sought to exploit “popular dissatisfaction in the south over the gap between the expectations of western assistance and the reality that virtually none had arrived.” Taliban units made up of twenty-five or thirty guerrillas crossed over from Pakistan to lob mortars and fire rockets at Kandahar in the night.18

  As it prepared for war in Iraq, the Bush administration handed control of Afghan policy increasingly to Zalmay Khalilzad, now a roving envoy to Afghanistan. In April 2003, Khalilzad flew into Kabul to meet with Engineer Arif, the Afghan intelligence chief. Arif reported that I.S.I. clients were “working in Kandahar and Jalalabad . . . providing free passage to terror elements to cross into and out of Pakistan in vehicles loaded with arms.” Arif warned the Bush administration that Pakistan was now “promoting instability in Afghanistan.”19

  Evidence that I.S.I. was back in the game was not difficult to find. That summer, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid traveled through Quetta and southern Afghanistan to document the Taliban’s return. He found the family of Mullah Dadullah, the movement’s vicious military leader, living openly in a village outside Quetta; in September, Dadullah staged a “family wedding in lavish style, inviting leading members of the Baluchistan government . . . and military officers.” In Kandahar, Rashid met Ahmed Wali Karzai, who told him, “The Taliban are gathering in the same places where they started. It’s like the rerun of an old movie.”

  The Afghans primarily blamed Pakistan. The sanctuary the Taliban enjoyed in Pakistan as they regrouped empowered them. Afghans wondered, reasonably: How could the United States fail to see that I.S.I. was up to its old tricks? In a land of conspiracy theories, Washington’s apparent acceptance of Pakistan’s policy created confusion and doubt.20

  There was no grand American conspiracy, of course. The truth was more prosaic. In all of 2003, Bush’s National Security Council met to discuss Afghanistan only twice, according to records kept by a former administration official. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, overconfidence about Afghanistan’s postwar stability, and the cabinet’s desire to avoid further commitment to reconstruction explained this complacency. It would have required energy and determination to confront and threaten President Musharraf and I.S.I. By 2003 I.S.I. seemed to be running a low-level, testing version of the same covert program it had run in Afghanistan for more than two continuous decades, probing what the service could get away with while the Bush administration tried to subdue Iraq. And a new generation of Pakistan Army officers was rising under Musharraf, schooling itself in the arts of “yes, but” with the United States. Among them was Ashfaq Kayani, a mumbling, chain-smoking general who, even more than Musharraf, would shape America’s fate in South Asia in the decade to come.21

  EIGHT

  The Enigma

  The Pakistan Army provided a means for poor, striving families to reach the middle class or higher. There were many ways to succeed as an aspiring general officer. Pervez Musharraf overcame inferior discipline through audacity on the battlefield. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was a grinder, a classroom star. Kayani’s father had been a noncommissioned army officer, the equivalent of a sergeant, who raised his boys in a Punjabi village and urged them to follow in his footsteps, but to aim for the top. Ashfaq attended a prestigious military high school before winning entry to the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point, located in the mountain town of Abbottabad. After early tours as a young officer, he earned a ticket toward generalship with a seat at the Command and Staff College in Quetta, the leadership-grooming school where the D.I.A.’s Dave Smith had developed his connections to future commanders.

  In the early 1990s, the United States imposed sanctions on Pakistan over its clandestine nuclear program. I.S.I.’s support for the Taliban deepened Pakistan’s estrangement from the United States. Officer exchanges and training programs between the two countries shriveled. Yet Kayani lived and trained in the United States several times. Dispatched to Fort Leavenworth, he studied strategy. He wrote a thesis analyzing how the Afghan resistance defeated the Soviet occupation and how Pakistan played its hand in that war, managing the rebellion so that it was successful but did not provoke a total war with Moscow.

  As he matured and rose in rank, Kayani positioned himself as an intellectual and a military strategist. After Fort Leavenworth, having reached the rank of brigadier, he studied for a year at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. There he befriended a U.S. Special Forces officer, Barry Shapiro. Stuck for hours in Hawaii’s choking traffic as they shuttled in transport buses, Kayani educated Shapiro about Pakistan’s mission to liberate Kashmir. Shapiro thought he was brilliant. Kayani was married, with a son and a daughter, and he brought his family to Hawaii. His son enrolled in Hawaii’s public schools. Later, back in Islamabad, at the National Defense University, Kayani finished a master’s degree and passed with the highest possible grade.1

  He spoke softly, in an accented mumble, so that it was necessary to strain to follow him even if he was seated just a few feet away. As Kayani aged, the caramel skin on his face darkened and his eyes sank behind coal-hued hoods, which only added to his inscrutability. He worked hard and pursued conventional hobbies. He golfed enthusiastically, striding down the army’s private fairways in Rawalpindi.

  As Kayani rose, his family was positioned to exploit military connections for business ends, just as American military officers did in contracting firms around Washington. His brother Amjad retired as a brigadier and went into Pakistani defense contracting. His brother Babur retired as a major and went into construction. And his brother Kamran also retired as a major and went into real estate.2 The Punjabi sergeant’s sons had made good by the time of Musharraf’s post–September 11 pivot toward the United States. As Kayani won promotion to two-star general, his family was placed to secure a fortune for a generation or more through military-enabled business ventures. The military-industrial complex was one of Pakistan’s binding forces, alongside Islam, national pride, suspicion of India and America, and cricket. One common narrative about Pakistan held that its powerful army competed for power with civilian political families like the Bhuttos and the Sharifs. Certainly there was rivalry between civilians and the military, evidenced in periodic coups and “democratic” restorations. Yet Pakistan’s informal system of shared control of the economy’s commanding heights bound together families like the Kayanis and the Bhuttos as much as it divided them.

  By 2002, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had become one of Musharraf’s most trusted generals. His billet at that time was director-general of military operations. Musharraf showed no signs of wanting to leave office anytime soon and he had arrogated extensive powers to himself. In effect, his key lieutenants were military princes, beholden to the boss. For now, Kayani diligently served his superiors.

  In March 2003, on the eve of America’s invasion of Iraq, Kayani trav
eled to the United States in a delegation led by Pakistan’s vice chief of the army, Yusuf Khan. Dave Smith served as “conducting officer,” part liaison, part tour guide, part intelligence collector. The U.S. Army installed the Pakistani generals in the distinguished visiting officers quarters at Fort Myer, a short walk from Quarters One, the official home of the American army chief, then General Eric Shinseki. One night, Shinseki hosted a dinner where an ensemble from the Army Band played classical music during the meal and a few Pakistani numbers afterward. At the Pentagon, the group met Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, and at the State Department, Richard Armitage. At the C.I.A., they met Director George Tenet.

  The Pakistan officer corps “is completely reliable,” Khan assured his American hosts, “liberal and moderate.” He reported that a cousin of his served as a captain in an army field unit and had confided that alcohol consumption was more prevalent than just a couple of years before. (For some reason, American officials often measured the reliability of Pakistani military officers by their willingness to drink.) Khan outlined his priorities as one of the Pakistan Army’s chief administrators. These included improved physical fitness, a plan to downsize the uniformed force by outsourcing to commercial contractors, and closing the income gap between junior and senior officers. He mentioned that he wanted to eliminate fifty thousand positions for “officer orderlies,” or servants, to replace them with cash subsidies that would allow each Pakistani officer to hire private servants. Certain traditions died hard.3