Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  The deputies committee at the National Security Council approved the plan on June 18. The principals met two days later, with President Bush presiding. As Khalilzad clicked through his slides, Bush stopped him.

  “Zal, I want you to turn Karzai into a great politician,” he said. The entreaty was typical of how Bush thought about Karzai. During their video calls, he tried to build up his counterpart by treating him as a fellow professional pol. “You have your politics, I have mine,” Bush would say when they struggled over divisive problems like Pakistan or civilian casualties.3

  The president signed off on a final memorandum a few days later. The “Accelerating Success” PowerPoint deck became an action plan with tasks parceled out to cabinet departments. That August, Condoleezza Rice approved the formation of an interagency body, the Afghan Inter-Agency Operations Group, to follow through. An Army colonel, Tony Harriman, arrived from the Pentagon to run the effort at the N.S.C., from offices at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

  Harriman discovered that the new White House plan for Afghanistan was better understood as a plan to write plans: “What’s our plan to reform the judiciary? What’s our plan to deal with people who had been captured on the field of battle, our reconciliation plan?” How would they build up the Army and reform the Ministry of Defense and professionalize the Afghan spy service under Engineer Arif? The Operations Group reviewed that autumn whether plans were complete or not complete. The problem was, as Harriman put it, “They were all ‘not done.’”4

  In early October, Major General David Barno, a West Point graduate, landed at Bagram Airfield to assume command of international conventional forces in Afghanistan, which then numbered about twelve thousand. Barno was appalled at the lack of organization and planning he inherited. He was allowed by the Pentagon to travel with half a dozen staff but had no headquarters team befitting such a large and dispersed force. Pentagon planners were so overwhelmed by the Iraq invasion and initial occupation that they seemed to manage Afghanistan from pieces of scrap paper. In his fifteen years of senior command, Barno had never seen a poorer transition from one general to the next. He found it “completely ad hoc” and discovered “there was not a campaign plan,” indeed, “not a plan, period.”5

  Khalilzad had his PowerPoint slides and a signed presidential memorandum, but he was not one to be controlled by paperwork. He had secured what he needed from Washington: a new Bush-endorsed policy that promised bigger budgets and access to American troops to reinforce Hamid Karzai’s authority. As a special envoy, Khalilzad had already established himself in Afghanistan as an improviser and local string puller. He would now become the most unconventional of ambassadors, less a diplomat than a kind of Afghan-American warlord, advertising benign intentions, wearing a smile and a suit.

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  On November 27, 2003, Thanksgiving Day, a convoy of American armed guards and diplomats packed into sport utility vehicles roared through Kabul toward the airport. One S.U.V. struck a pedestrian, a woman fully covered in a burqa. She fell; it wasn’t clear how badly she might have been injured. The vehicles rolled on. The U.S. embassy’s security protocols for Afghanistan forbade drivers from stopping for an accident, at least in some circumstances. There were about five thousand international peacekeepers in Kabul, yet the city remained insecure. If Americans attended to accidents, crowds might gather and grow excited, security planners feared. Security constraints shaped the lives of American diplomats and aid workers in Kabul. They endured long days inside heavily guarded buildings, forbidden from making spontaneous trips to markets or restaurants, their confinement relieved only by occasional outings in armed convoys, journeys that could be wondrous and terrifying in the space of a few hours. For Kay McGowan, a young embassy staffer in the convoy to the airport that Thanksgiving Day, who witnessed the collision with the anonymous Afghan woman, it was a heart-stopping way to begin what was to be a memorable day of V.I.P. duty.6

  The convoy was headed to receive Hillary Clinton, a champion of women’s rights in Afghanistan, who was completing her first year in office as a United States senator. Clinton deplaned that morning with Jack Reed, a West Point graduate who served with her on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The pair was making a lightning tour of Afghanistan and Iraq—Clinton’s first battlefield tour as a senator. They had chosen to spend Thanksgiving with troops from the Tenth Mountain Division, which was based at Fort Drum, New York. Already it was apparent that Clinton might run for president eventually. She had just published a best-selling memoir, Living History, and the crowds that turned out for her book tour signaled her rise as a celebrity. Bush faced reelection in just a year. The Iraq war was deteriorating by the month. Democratic leaders saw an opening to argue that Bush had neglected Afghanistan and Al Qaeda and had failed to plan adequately for the invasion of Iraq. It was the first draft of a Democratic electoral strategy that would commit the party’s candidates to the cause of Afghan security and development during the next two presidential cycles.

  Between turkey helpings and photos with soldiers, Clinton affirmed that she favored sending more Western soldiers to Afghanistan, to prevent the Taliban’s revival. She referred to American interests in the country much as the Bush administration did. Afghanistan was a frontline state in the war on terrorism. The Taliban were hardened terrorists. “The U.S. is resolved to stand as a strong partner and to ensure that the terrorists, whoever they are, wherever they come from, will be dealt with,” she told reporters. “The message should be: The Taliban terrorists are fighting a losing battle.”7

  Zalmay Khalilzad flew into Kabul the same day aboard a U.S. military C-17 transport jet, to take up his post at the U.S. embassy. He sat strapped in the cargo hold beside a demining tractor and thirty thousand pounds of ammunition. At Bagram, he hustled onto a helicopter and landed outside the embassy. Khalilzad talked with Clinton and Reed and then accompanied them to the Arg. They talked with Karzai about Pakistan and the Taliban’s resilience. Clinton would become an ally of Khalilzad’s across the aisle as he sought budget increases for Afghan aid.

  Khalilzad moved into a metal rambler on the embassy grounds, a kind of imitation house made of three trailers fitted together in an H shape. His corrugated home was not far from where he had attended high school. Generators and prefabricated buildings had eased some of the primitive conditions embassy staff had known early in 2002, but the embassy complex remained lightly resourced, reflecting White House policy and Office of Management and Budget priorities.

  Not least to avoid spending long hours in his trailers, Khalilzad ingratiated himself at the Arg Palace and quickly became Hamid Karzai’s chief wazir in residence. They had known each other since the anti-Soviet war, when Khalilzad visited Peshawar during the Reagan and Bush administrations and Karzai served as a political adviser. The pair spoke in a rapid-fire patois of Dari, Pashto, and English, sometimes dropping words from all three languages into a single sentence. That ensured they could maintain a two-way conversation that usually only a few other Afghans in the room could comprehend.

  Khalilzad visited Karzai two or three times every day. He had dinner with him often. He helped Karzai prepare talking points for meetings with other ambassadors. They seemed to U.S. embassy staffers to get along like brothers, intimate but capable of intense squabbling. In Khalilzad’s opinion, the squabbles “always ended cordially because I would explain what the facts are. We had a lot of information. He had a lot of rumors. . . . And he had enough confidence to say, ‘Well, you are not gaming me.’” There was a sense that winter that the Bush administration had “abandoned us, but we get to do what we want,” as McGowan, Khalilzad’s chief of staff, put it. Khalilzad invented American policy from day to day during the long hours he spent huddling with Karzai, chattering in their patois. “None of us really knew what he was doing because we didn’t have the language,” McGowan said.8

  DynCorp International, a military security contractor headquartered in
Virginia, supplied bodyguards to both Karzai and the U.S. embassy during this period. The two teams assigned to keep Karzai and Khalilzad alive fell into a strange rivalry, arguing about which principal had the higher Al Qaeda or Taliban bounty on his head. Aware of the matter of appearances, Karzai accepted his bodyguard of burly men wearing wraparound sunglasses after “consultation with Afghans from [the] provinces.” At the ceremonial opening of a road project, a DynCorp guard punched out Karzai’s minister of transport because he did not recognize him and feared he might be rushing Karzai. To combat Karzai’s palace fever, Khalilzad and his staff scheduled as many ribbon cuttings out of Kabul as they could, partly because DynCorp would agree that it was safe for Karzai to travel only if the destination was an American-run event.

  Khalilzad attended cabinet meetings as if he were a member of the government, which, in effect, he was. A few days after an Afghan cabinet debate, the ambassador would read top secret C.I.A. cables reporting on what had transpired, based on reports from paid agents inside the Karzai administration. Reading the intelligence cables at his embassy desk, Khalilzad would snort, “That is not what so-and-so said, that is not what happened.”9

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  Soon after Khalilzad arrived, Karzai asked him to help him remove Engineer Arif as chief of the Afghan spy service. From Karzai’s perspective, the main problem involved ethnic politics. To build his political base as the presidential election approached, Karzai needed support from diverse Pashtun tribal leaders. These leaders inevitably included some with histories of accommodation of the Taliban during the 1990s. Karzai encouraged Pashtun leaders to visit him in Kabul to talk about reconciliation and post-Taliban politics. N.D.S. sometimes arrested, interrogated, and even beat up these prospective allies, suspecting them to be enemies of the state.

  Khalilzad sympathized with Karzai’s complaints about the N.D.S. He knew as well that the C.I.A. and the Afghan Ministry of Finance had found evidence of extensive corruption at the service. (According to Arif, accusations of personal corruption against him “are unfair,” but “there were some problems” with “organizational corruption” because of the chaotic situation and the lack of supervision of N.D.S. staff in the provinces.) Arif did not speak English fluently and was not as sophisticated about international politics as some of his Panjshiri colleagues. But Khalilzad would have to go through the C.I.A. if he wanted to make a change. After 2001, Arif built out intelligence liaisons with Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and others. Yet the C.I.A. inevitably became his dominant partner. The agency supplied a stipend to N.D.S. in the budgetary year of 2002–3 of $6.5 million, as well as irregular support, in smaller amounts, for specific operations.10 Yet this was only a fifth of the annual funding Arif sought as he rebuilt N.D.S. in every province. He argued with his C.I.A. advisers. He wanted to build a hospital for N.D.S. employees, for example, because Afghanistan lacked a formal health system of any quality. The C.I.A. pressed him instead to consolidate N.D.S.’s huge workforce.

  Karzai had appointed Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official with a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia, as his minister of finance. Ghani happened as well to be an old acquaintance of Zalmay Khalilzad’s. They had played basketball in Kabul as teenagers and had even been in the same cohort of the American Field Service exchange program, traveling together from Kabul to America. (Ghani stayed with a family in Oregon.) With Khalilzad’s encouragement, Ghani tried to strengthen and normalize the central government by assembling Afghan technocrats around him, and allocating budgets and finance from his ministry, as other countries did. Engineer Arif fell into Ghani’s crosshairs.

  At the end of 2003, the Ministry of Finance withheld salaries for fifteen thousand N.D.S. employees for three consecutive months. The freeze jeopardized Arif’s credibility with his own men. Arif could tap Fahim from time to time for funds from the old Northern Alliance coffers, but it was becoming clear to both the C.I.A. and Karzai that Arif was “using the N.D.S. for the benefit of his own ethnic and personal interests, often working behind the scenes against Karzai and the government,” as the C.I.A.’s Gary Schroen put it.11

  Yet the C.I.A. station chief in Kabul that winter opposed firing Arif. Panjshiri gunmen still protected expatriate C.I.A. officers at the Ariana Hotel. It would not be wise to alienate them by removing their boss. And Arif cooperated well with C.I.A. militia operations at the Omega bases along the Pakistan border. Arif and his men recruited, vetted, and dispatched fighters to serve in the reconnaissance forces.

  The station chief asked George Tenet to telephone Khalilzad at the embassy one evening to wave him off the plan to fire Arif. The ambassador stood firm, but Khalilzad and Karzai soon came up with a compromise they thought the C.I.A. might accept. Karzai would appoint Amrullah Saleh as Arif’s successor as the country’s top spy.

  The clean-shaven, well-dressed Panjshiri occasionally interpreted during meetings at the Arg Palace. He was professional and had strong language skills. Khalilzad invited him to the embassy. Saleh came across as intelligent, a man who had lifted himself up through work and merit. He seemed to be a genuine Afghan nationalist, not a regional chauvinist. He was eager to take full charge of N.D.S.12

  Finally the C.I.A. relented. In February, Karzai summoned Arif and told him that he was promoting him to “senior intelligence adviser.” By offering him an advisory role, the departing chief’s wealth would not be threatened and he would be eligible for other offices. (He later became an Afghan senator.) Arif had lost confidence in Karzai and believed that the interim president’s advisers were spreading false accusations against him. For his part, Amrullah Saleh understood he had the C.I.A.’s backing but he also grasped why Karzai might have endorsed his appointment. He was almost a decade younger than Arif. “They thought, ‘Let us put the youngest and least experienced of them,’” meaning the Panjshiris, in charge, “so that there is internal fighting between them.”13

  Saleh did seek to run N.D.S. on more modern principles. When he took office, he claimed to have identified and fired thirty-eight thousand ghost employees in one week. At his Kabul headquarters, he built up an organization chart very similar to the C.I.A.’s. He separated analysis from operations and produced regular intelligence papers and threat and analysis briefings for President Karzai. Even under Saleh’s reform drive, N.D.S. remained too large, unruly, and penetrated by Iran and Russia to be a fully reliable partner in the most sensitive C.I.A. operations along the Pakistan border.

  Saleh believed that “there were massive flaws in the American approach” to Afghan intelligence and security. The Bush administration starved N.D.S. of the capital it needed to preempt Pakistani interference and the Taliban’s revival, he argued. Fifteen million dollars a year was nowhere near enough for an agency combining the functions of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in a country so sprawling and vulnerable to guerrilla incursions across an open 1,400-mile border with Pakistan. “Why does Afghanistan need a big organization?” his C.I.A. counterparts argued. “Let’s bring it down to a couple of thousand collectors.” The agency’s mission was to locate, kill, or capture Al Qaeda leaders. Saleh’s mission was to stabilize a war-scarred and impoverished unstable country. The C.I.A. “would argue with me over small issues—how many vehicles to buy.”14 It would be several years before they accepted his argument that defeating Al Qaeda and other transnational jihadists in the long run required much larger Afghan security forces. The N.D.S. example illustrated American investment in post-Taliban Afghanistan: deliberate minimalism, followed by tentative engagement, followed by massive investments only when it was very late to make a difference.

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  General David Barno, the commander of conventional forces in Afghanistan, kept an office at the embassy and lived fifty feet from Khalilzad in the compound’s trailer park. Khalilzad and his aides regarded Barno as an effective, politically aware general. In fact, for the first time since the Taliban’s fall, the ambassador, the military’s com
mander, and the C.I.A. station were unified around a political agenda for Afghanistan, however quixotic it might look: to advance Afghan governance; to deliver visible reconstruction projects that would benefit Karzai’s prestige, such as an asphalt ring road around Afghanistan; and to strengthen his government’s control over the budget. At the heart of all these policies was a single bet, implicit in the “Accelerating Success” plan: to place Afghanistan’s leadership in the hands of Hamid Karzai and to help him win election as president for a five-year term.

  American policy under Khalilzad treaded a fine line. The United States would not interfere with or fix the eventual voting results, but it would prepare the ground for Karzai’s candidacy by strengthening his writ in comparison with potential regional rivals. The goal was to “move warlords” into “being political figures,” as Barno put it, so that they would no longer resort to violence but would become “part of the fabric of government.”15

  “What do you want to do, Mr. President?” Khalilzad asked Karzai, referring to the likes of Fahim, Dostum, and Ismail Khan. Those three warlords controlled tens of thousands of armed men between them across a vast swath of Afghanistan’s north and west.

  “They won’t listen to me,” Karzai said. “They will listen to you.”16

  Their first target was Abdul Rashid Dostum. In 2004, street protests and other agitation erupted against a Karzai-appointed governor in Faryab Province. Dostum claimed that he was not in control of the protesters but wanted their concerns addressed. Karzai dispatched an Afghan National Army unit to restore order. The A.N.A. unit had American trainers with it, and Khalilzad warned Dostum that if he attacked it, he would be going to war with the United States.