Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  Khalilzad proposed a joint intelligence investigation between the United States and Pakistan to document any covert Indian activity in Afghanistan.

  “There are no Taliban here,” Musharraf said blankly.9

  —

  Douglas Porch grew up in the South, served in the U.S. Army Reserves, and then, in the late 1960s, enrolled at Cambridge University, where he earned a doctoral degree in history. He wrote several books about France’s expeditionary wars in Algeria, Indochina, and the Sahara. French officers were the first to identify counterinsurgency as a separate category of warfare. After 1840, to suppress the Algerian leader Abd al-Kadir, who, like Mullah Mohammad Omar, called himself the Commander of the Faithful, French forces under the command of Thomas Robert Bugeaud burned crops, orchards, and villages. They incinerated civilians who hid from them in caves. These horrors provoked opposition at home, and so gradually the military repackaged “counterinsurgency as a civilizing mission,” as Porch put it. This included an assumption of Arab racial inferiority. Phrases like “hearts and minds” first arose in public discourse in the 1890s. The French called the strategy “peaceful penetration.”

  By the 1960s, counterinsurgency had evolved into a more technocratic “modernization theory” in some quarters of the West. Kennedy-era national security intellectuals argued that as the United States fought for free societies in the face of Soviet communism, it had “an obligation to protect emerging states as they evolve to become functional capitalist economies,” in Porch’s summary. That doctrine influenced America’s fateful decision to accept France’s legacy in Vietnam.10

  In early 2004, Porch was teaching military history at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. His students were captains, majors, and lieutenant commanders. Armed pacification campaigns by foreign forces only rarely persuaded locals of the interveners’ good intentions, he believed. (Porch later authored a book titled Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War.) Yet such campaigns did not always fail. In 2004, the Afghan war looked to Porch as if it was going pretty well. Perhaps this would be an exception to military history’s general rule.11

  That winter, he took a phone call from an officer at Joint Special Operations Command. Major General Stanley McChrystal, J.S.O.C.’s commander, now shuttled between two clandestine task force headquarters, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. Every quarter he called his commanding officers to a conference. The J.S.O.C. officer asked Porch if he could talk to the group about Algeria, and specifically The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 film depicting France’s urban war against Algerian revolutionaries seeking independence. The film credibly showed both sides of the conflict. Could Porch lecture on the movie and lead a discussion about what French counterinsurgency history might imply for fighting the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

  “Come to Fort Bragg,” the J.S.O.C. officer added, “but bring things, because the talk probably won’t be in Fort Bragg.” He did not mention an alternative site, but he suggested, “Bring jeans and athletic shoes.”

  Porch was then fifty-nine years old. J.S.O.C. set him up for shots and fitted him with a flak jacket. The next thing he knew he was at Bagram Airfield. J.S.O.C. units lived and worked on Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time. They had breakfast at noon local time and went to bed at about 3:00 a.m., a strange rhythm for a visitor to follow. Bagram remained primitive, covered with detritus from the Soviet war. The Americans lived in tents and plywood shacks.

  McChrystal summoned Porch after midnight. The general lived a famously spartan existence, sharing a hutch with his sergeant major. He explained that for his conference, in addition to screening The Battle of Algiers, he had assigned his commanding officers to read Modern Warfare, a book written in 1964 by Roger Trinquier, a French officer who served in Vietnam and Algeria.12

  McChrystal was trying to provoke his commanders—door kickers, shooters, terrorist hunters by training and vocation—to think more carefully about what kind of wars they had fallen into. He felt his operations “were very tactical.” The standard procedure was “Give me a list of the bad guys and I’m going to go find them.” Now culling alone looked insufficient. Iraq was falling apart and the violence in that theater was much worse than anything his superiors in Washington were willing to acknowledge. In Afghanistan, McChrystal thought the Taliban had started to get their feet under them, and there were “indications that they were moving out.”

  He told Porch, “We don’t know what the hell is going on out there,” beyond the wire of their bases. “It’s quiet.”13

  One problem, McChrystal believed, was that Special Operations units lacked a common understanding of how to fight without making the insurgencies worse. Again and again, he heard, “We have got to take the gloves off.” McChrystal asked, “What are you talking about? What do we mean here?” He wanted his officers to reflect on experiences like those the French had endured in Vietnam and Algeria, where they had already documented “what works and what doesn’t work.”14

  David Barno, McChrystal’s West Point classmate and his counterpart in command of conventional forces, harbored parallel worries. His forces were on sprawling bases and routinely prepared for large two-week operations with names like Operation Mountain Thunder. They “would tromp around in the nether regions,” as Barno put it. “It was effectively sticking your fist in a bucket of water and pulling it back out again.” He had read counterinsurgency literature, too, and wanted to apply its theories and lessons in Afghanistan, even though he commanded nowhere near the number of troops that counterinsurgency doctrine dictated would be necessary to suppress the enemy. Barno focused his effort on small Provincial Reconstruction Teams “centered on the population” and equipped to deliver aid and build local relationships.15

  On a Friday night, about twenty J.S.O.C. commanders and an equal number of senior noncommissioned officers assembled around plywood tables arranged in a hollow square. Porch delivered a lecture about the hard lessons of French expeditionary war and the Algerian war for independence. One of his PowerPoint slides showed an old photo of suspected terrorists kneeling on the ground, tied together at the neck with rope. “A portion of the French army lost its moral compass,” Porch’s headline noted. In the film, he previewed, the French counterinsurgency officer justifies “exceptional measures” in counterterrorism. “In your view, are his the arguments of a soldier?” Porch asked.

  The next night they watched The Battle of Algiers and afterward Porch led a discussion. The film contained repulsive scenes of French forces torturing insurgent suspects, but it showed that brutality could destroy an uprising, even if the long-term goal of control and stability might be futile. As they talked, there were some J.S.O.C. operators who remained focused on the core mission, Al Qaeda: “We’re going to get Bin Laden and hang him up by the balls,” as Porch put it. But others, particularly the younger noncommissioned officers, picked up on the idea that there had to be more to success in this age of saturated media and global human rights consciousness than just capture and kill.16

  Porch stayed on at Bagram for another ten days, waiting for a flight out. He befriended a military lawyer who took him over to the airfield’s detention center, situated in old Soviet aircraft hangars. The interrogators Porch met complained that they had little good intelligence about the Taliban or Al Qaeda and that Tenth Mountain Division units detained Afghans for spurious reasons: “Well, he has new shoes—he must be an insurgent.” To Porch, it all sounded like the French in Algeria and Vietnam: “You just pick up every military-aged male you can find.”

  The detention center was an enormous open space with balconies that ran around the top. On the second level were interrogation rooms. The detained men were held in a big cage at the bottom, exposed. A curtain shielded toilets. Many of the American guards were female. When they escorted prisoners to the interrogation rooms, they shackled, handcuffed, and hooded them. Porch reflected on the humiliation the Afghan prisoners must be ex
periencing.

  Porch asked if he could visit Kabul. His hosts told him, “No, it’s too dangerous.” He flew home and returned to the classroom at the Naval War College. Over the next several years his students included young officers rotating back from Afghanistan and Iraq. Gradually it became obvious that both wars were deteriorating and that American forces struggled to win the loyalty of the populations they policed. An Army major told Porch, “You start out being nice to them, but as soon as we lose a couple of men, the gloves come off.”17

  —

  By the spring of 2004 it was evident that the Iraq war’s casus belli had been grounded in false intelligence reporting about Saddam Hussein’s possession of biological and nuclear weapons. Press leaks from the White House fingered George Tenet’s C.I.A. for this embarrassment. Press leaks from the C.I.A. emphasized that the Bush administration had interfered with prewar intelligence. Bush faced reelection in November. It was obvious who would win this fight. Tenet had by now run the C.I.A. for almost seven years, the second-longest tenure in the agency’s history, after that of Allen Dulles during the 1950s. On June 3, 2004, he resigned.

  His departure inaugurated two years of turmoil on the Seventh Floor. Bush appointed Porter Goss as his successor. He was a former C.I.A. case officer who led the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as a Republican member of Congress. Even as one of the top congressional overseers of the agency, Goss had no idea that Tenet was about to go and was surprised when Bush asked him to take charge of Langley. To succeed Buzzy Krongard as executive director, Goss appointed Kyle “Dusty” Foggo. A year later, Foggo was indicted for his role in corrupt contracting deals carried out while he held office at the C.I.A. Mike Sulick and Steve Kappes, Senior Intelligence Service veterans who then ran the clandestine service, resigned in late 2004 after a fight with another Goss aide. The Goss team had arrived in a heavy-handed state of suspicion, they felt, asking for lists of officers who were acceptable, accusing senior officers of leaking unflattering stories and of being politicized. Sulick told one of Goss’s aides, “You’re not going to treat us the way you treated the Democrats on the Hill, like pukes.” After the two quit on principle, Goss persuaded Jose Rodriguez, the architect of the interrogation black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques, to run clandestine operations. At C.T.C., Goss elevated Michael D’Andrea, a dark-tempered, chain-smoking convert to Shia Islam who had most recently served as chief of station in Cairo. This group portrait of leadership had some of the roughest edges yet.

  Goss hadn’t asked for the job; as he settled in on the Seventh Floor, he concluded that he had inherited a troubled agency. He knew for certain, from his own experience in the House of Representatives, that there was little trust between the C.I.A. and Capitol Hill, primarily because of the Iraq fiasco. Some Republican congressmen suspected Tenet of betraying Bush; Democrats opposed to the Iraq war were at the same time appalled and furious over the role of bad intelligence in the run-up to the invasion. Goss took it on himself to try to restore decent relations and win increases in funding from Congress, particularly to support expansion in the number of case officers and stations overseas. His “marching orders” from George W. Bush were to strengthen the C.I.A.’s ability to collect intelligence abroad and to adapt to the challenges of collecting insights on terrorists and guerrillas. Rebuilding a sense of confidence on the Hill “was a bitter pill” for some career C.I.A. officers to swallow. Goss’s decision to bring Hill staff with him rather than draw his new executive team from C.I.A. career personnel redoubled his burdens. He felt that the agency had changed in unfortunate ways since his days as a case officer in the 1960s. Overall, there was a loss of discipline, he sensed, manifested in leaks to the press and a lack of accountability in the chain of command. He wanted to restore accountability, but he underestimated how difficult it would be for an outsider from Capitol Hill to succeed.18

  —

  Early in 2004, the C.I.A. produced a breakthrough about Al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In January, Kurdish forces captured Hassan Ghul, an Al Qaeda–affiliated militant. They transferred him to C.I.A custody. He carried a notebook full of coded phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Ghul translated the codes for his captors. He explained that Al Qaeda had established safe houses around Wana and the Shkai Valley, in South Waziristan. Leaders of Al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan operated from both places. This was the same area from which the assassins who had attempted to blow up President Musharraf had emerged.

  The Bush administration perceived a fresh opportunity to collaborate with Pakistan. Rather than following Zalmay Khalilzad’s advice to pressure Musharraf over I.S.I.’s relationship with the Taliban, the administration adopted something like the opposite policy: It offered more financial aid to Pakistan’s military regime. The White House announced that it would confer on Pakistan the status of “major non-NATO ally” and deliver $700 million in fresh assistance, more than half of it for the military. Musharraf ordered the Pakistan Army to step up its operations in South Waziristan, where he had already sent eight thousand troops.19

  Musharraf and Bush agreed to quietly set up a Special Operations Task Force to attack militants in the tribal areas. The United States supplied helicopters “with precision weapons and night operating capability,” in Musharraf’s description. The campaign’s tactics reflected Musharraf’s neocolonial attitude toward Waziristan’s Pashtuns: The only way to get their attention, he told the Americans repeatedly, was to hit the tribes ruthlessly.20

  The C.I.A.’s main target that spring was a long-haired, charismatic militant leader of the Wazirs named Nek Mohammad. He ruled Wana and distrusted the Pakistan Army. He was a complicated figure—a tribal nationalist who consorted with international terrorists. He accepted Al Qaeda and Uzbek refugees. In Islamabad, C.I.A. station chief Rich Blee used the assassination attempts against Musharraf to try to motivate the president and I.S.I. to strike back: “You have to kill them or they’re going to kill us.” The C.I.A. and the Omega teams based just across the Afghan border, at Shkin and Khost, tracked Nek Mohammad to target him for a drone strike. They worked with Task Force Orange, a National Security Agency signals intelligence unit. The manhunt took place amid a wider, violent Pakistani campaign against Nek Mohammad’s Wazir supporters.

  The Omega base at Shkin lay less than two miles from the Pakistani border. At night, operators and case officers would sit up on a roof, smoke cigars, and watch Pakistani F-16s bomb Wana, often indiscriminately. The Pakistanis closed the town’s bazaar, and refugees from what was already a deeply impoverished population began to walk into Afghanistan to escape the violence and beg for food. Case officers recruited agents from among the locals and sent them back into Waziristan to pinpoint Al Qaeda facilities. These sorts of intelligence operations turned ugly and cost indigenous agents their lives. The C.I.A. “lost a lot of sources—to the Taliban, to a rival family,” recalled a participant. Junior Pentagon and C.I.A. case officers under weak supervision would hand out Thuraya satellite phones and G.P.S. location loggers to local Pashtuns, to record the exact longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of safe houses so the targets could be struck by drone missiles or smart bombs. But walking around with a G.P.S. logger in that region was itself “a death warrant.”21

  The Pakistan Army suffered similar agent losses. “The Taliban went witch-hunting” for American and I.S.I. spies, according to Major General Amir Faisal Alavi, who then commanded the Special Services Group, the commando unit that collaborated with the C.I.A. and Special Forces. Corpses of suspected spies began to turn up “all over Waziristan with their throats slit and a note in Pashto attached to their bodies explaining that the person had been caught, tried, proved to be a spy.”22

  That spring, Musharraf agreed to strike the hundreds of Al Qaeda–affiliated militants gathered in the Shkai Valley. Drone photography showed “training camps, people shooting,” according to a senior i
ntelligence official in the region. The C.I.A. briefed I.S.I. counterparts and placed small teams with Pakistani Special Forces in Waziristan. The C.I.A. officers carted around compact discs containing classified Predator footage approved for sharing with I.S.I. officers, to educate them about its potential to take out individuals and small groups with Hellfire missiles. From these discussions in the first half of 2004 arose the secret bargain on drone operations that would color U.S.-Pakistani relations for the next decade. Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to operate drones armed with Hellfires in designated sections of the tribal areas. The C.I.A. agreed to deny that Musharraf had authorized any such thing.23

  Musharraf argued, “Give the drones to Pakistan.” But the C.I.A. refused him on this—the technology was too sensitive. Musharraf then proposed that the agency paint a couple of drones in Pakistan Air Force colors and go on operating as before, unilaterally. At least then he could more credibly claim that he was in charge. Again, the Americans refused.24

  Both sides still agreed that they wanted Nek Mohammad dead. Not everyone on the American side thought this was a great idea. Assassinating a charismatic Wazir leader would mark a turn away from counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda into counterinsurgency against locally credible commanders, with unpredictable consequences. Perhaps it would be better to try to co-opt Mohammad to work with the Americans. Yet the predominant view among senior decision makers at the C.I.A. and in the American military was that the target was an Al Qaeda ally who posed a direct threat. Musharraf was delivering just the sort of risk taking conventional military operations in Waziristan that the Americans demanded. Nek Mohammad’s tradecraft was poor. On July 17, 2004, as he talked on a satellite telephone, which he used to give radio interviews, and which could be easily traced by the likes of Task Force Orange, a C.I.A.-operated Predator launched a Hellfire missile from the skies above and killed him.25