by Steve Coll
The American military and espionage machine, hardened by four years of brutal combat in Iraq, could find it difficult to share space with European counterparts in Afghanistan. An American two-star officer deployed to the I.S.A.F. headquarters in Kabul in 2007 found “a typical N.A.T.O. billet—appalling in many ways.” Officers worked from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and then retired to the pub. At night half the command was drunk. He “kept waiting for an attack to penetrate the grounds.” Yet the Bush administration had sold Canada and European governments on the Afghan mission on the premise that it would resemble peacekeeping, not all-out combat.15
Early in February 2008, Condoleezza Rice flew to London to discuss the Afghan war with her counterpart, David Miliband, as well as other British analysts. The Foreign Office organized a seminar. It sometimes contributed to the Bush administration by functioning as a kind of think tank, generating classified white papers and hosting crisp meetings where British experts presented their analyses. To influence the Bush administration, they had to offer ideas within the scope of what the Americans would accept, and yet ideas that were fresh and interesting enough to warrant attention. In the case of Afghanistan, British experts emphasized the importance of political and development strategy in Afghanistan to complement military operations. But what kind of political strategy would defeat or co-opt or at least slow down the Taliban?16
Rice and other key figures in the Bush administration had reached a heightened state of enthusiasm about counterinsurgency doctrine, as advocated for by General David Petraeus. He had commanded Bush’s risk-taking “surge” of fresh American troops into Baghdad in 2007 and by early 2008 the effort was showing success. Eliot Cohen, Rice’s influential new counselor, had worked with Petraeus on counterinsurgency doctrine. Rice came to London “very focused on roads and economy and policing” for Afghanistan, staples of Petraeus’s approach to quelling insurgents. The British were groping for an alternative to counterinsurgency theory for Afghanistan—a more sophisticated political strategy—but were not yet prepared to recommend a radical change of course, such as negotiating with the Taliban directly. In London, they agreed privately on a plan to promote a modest intensification of current policy, while publicly committing to stay the course to show resolve. There were now about 55,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan from thirty-nine countries, four fifths of them under N.A.T.O. command. The rest were American troops that operated independently on counterterrorism missions. Rice and Miliband agreed that the United States and Britain would call on N.A.T.O. to find 1,000 more troops to support the fight against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, while the United States would rotate about 3,200 more Marines into the country later that year. The Iraq war meant the United States had no more troops to offer, and squeezing even 1,000 soldiers out of European governments looked difficult.17
On February 7, Rice and Miliband flew together into Kabul. Hamid Karzai took Miliband to point out a hill in the capital where British troops had fought in their second unsuccessful war in Afghanistan during the nineteenth century. Karzai mentioned that his presidential palace had been built on the site of a British camp; he seemed increasingly to enjoy reflecting on the history of Western failures in his country. He remained an Anglophile suspicious of British motives, particularly its supposed favoritism toward Pakistan.
“Either you know what’s going on or your people aren’t telling you what they’re doing,” he told Miliband. When Rice tried to speak up for Britain, Karzai would have none of it. “America doesn’t have anything to do with this treachery,” he said. Rice was stunned.18
Karzai complained as well about rising civilian casualties caused by the heavy fighting and aerial bombardment in Kandahar and Helmand. This was a complaint Karzai had been voicing regularly to American and British visitors for more than a year, with rising dismay. Bill Wood and his British counterpart in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles both sympathized with Karzai and thought he was essentially correct about the problem of civilian casualties, even if there was little to be done, as the Taliban had to be challenged militarily. But visitors from London and Washington came away with an increasingly bitter taste, receiving Karzai’s dissents as ingratitude.
With Wood and Cowper-Coles, Rice and Miliband flew to Kandahar. “This isn’t a kind of blinding flash of success,” Rice told reporters, assessing the war. “What you have is milestones along the way that you try to reach.” At Kandahar Airfield, she thanked a multinational audience of soldiers, assuring them, “You are contributing not only to the security and future of the Afghan people, but to the security and the future of your own countries, your own people, and indeed, the security and the future of the world.”19
In private, she was more skeptical. “We are winning, Madam Secretary, but it doesn’t feel like it,” Wood said at one point during a session with American briefers.
“Mr. Ambassador,” Rice replied, “in counterinsurgency, if it doesn’t seem like you’re winning, you’re not winning.” She added, “This war isn’t working.”20
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Two weeks after Rice departed, Senators Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Chuck Hagel flew in to Kabul. They were friends, bound by long years in the Senate and on its foreign relations committee. Biden then chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency had just ended, leaving two other Senate colleagues, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to slog it out.
Major General David Rodriguez, commanding 82nd Airborne units in eastern Afghanistan, escorted the three senators on a helicopter tour of his sector. They flew in an armed Black Hawk with their staff trailing in a second helicopter. They visited soldiers at a forward operating base in Kunar Province. On the flight back to Bagram, Rodriguez pointed out the window at the snowy, cragged peaks and said that Tora Bora was just a few miles away. They decided to fly over to take a look.
By now Hagel and Kerry were flying together in the lead helicopter and Biden was in the one behind them. Hagel, who had also served in Vietnam, where he was twice wounded, doubted the wisdom of the Tora Bora tour. “Christ, we’ve got blizzards coming up. We’re running low on fuel. . . . I don’t think you should do it.”
As committee chair, Biden led the delegation. “Let’s do it, but quick,” he decided.21
The snow squall around them intensified and they couldn’t see a thing. The pilot banked suddenly, jockeying in a fierce wind. Over his headset, Biden heard that his helicopter’s pilot had lost sight of the Black Hawk in front of them and believed it had gone “down.” They shortly discovered that it had successfully made an emergency landing on a high ridge above Bagram. They ended up stranded in the snow for hours, watching unknown armed men watching them from a nearby ridge. Soldiers escorting them set up perimeter defenses on both ends of the ridge and they took turns warming up outside by standing in front of the helicopter’s air exhaust. They hadn’t dressed for the cold. I.S.A.F. ordered F-16s above them, flying circles. Finally they hiked about a mile to the far end of the ridge, where a military convoy arrived to take them down to Bagram in predawn darkness.
They joined Karzai for dinner at the Arg that night. As he had been with Miliband, the Afghan president was in a foul mood. Biden sat directly across from him, next to Hagel. Karzai started “popping off,” saying the United States didn’t care about Afghanistan. He rankled all three senators.
Biden started talking back. He was “getting very pissed off.” Hagel tried to catch Biden’s eye and gestured to suggest that he lower the temperature. Biden ignored him.
“Your country hasn’t done anything” to help Afghanistan, Karzai continued. Biden slammed his hand down on the table so hard that every plate jumped and rattled. Then he jolted back his chair and declared, “This conversation, this dinner, is over.” He stormed out of the dining room. Hagel and Kerry followed Biden, but Kerry, who was farthest from the door, hung back a bit.
He pulled Karzai aside. He
told him that he had to understand that Biden had a son about to deploy to Afghanistan, that this was personal to him. All three of us believe in the alliance with Afghanistan, Kerry went on, but those kinds of comments about the United States serve no one’s interests. Karzai expressed appreciation. It was the beginning of what would become Kerry’s run as America’s Karzai whisperer. The work was about to get much harder.22
EIGHTEEN
Tough Love
On July 7, 2008, in Kabul, just after 8:00 a.m., a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani named Hamza Shahkoor steered a Toyota Camry through the morning rush. Near the Interior Ministry, he fell in behind two cars with Indian diplomatic plates. They inched toward the iron gates of the Indian embassy. Scores of civilians stood in line along the compound walls, waiting to apply for visas. Shahkoor detonated two hundred pounds of explosives. The blast could be heard miles away; fifty-eight people died, including the bomber and Brigadier Ravi Datt Mehta, the Indian defense attaché in Afghanistan.1
Afghan N.D.S. investigations into Shahkoor’s history, as well as U.S. National Security Agency intercepts, appeared to show that I.S.I. officers had coordinated the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul by working with commanders of the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. The Haqqanis had inserted the bomber and his vehicle into the Afghan capital. Shahkoor had also been trained by Lashkar-i-Taiba, the I.S.I.-managed insurgent force in Kashmir. The investigation was still developing, but American, British, and other allied intelligence services would eventually conclude that a special Haqqani unit had carried out the attack under I.S.I. orders to hit hostile targets in Afghanistan, including Indian ones. I.S.I. officers knew they were under surveillance, so limited their direct involvement with daily operations, but the intelligence analysis held that they were fully culpable nonetheless. The strike was effectively an act of guerrilla war by the Pakistan Army against the Indian military.2
The Indian bombing infuriated Bush; to that point, no single attack had more hardened the president’s attitude against the I.S.I. The intelligence case against I.S.I. had shifted from ambiguous and debated to definitive—the embassy attack provided one dossier of evidence, but there were others accumulating against I.S.I. that spring as well. The National Security Council met in the Situation Room on July 11 and reviewed the matter. Bush dispatched deputy C.I.A. director Kappes and Admiral Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to challenge Ashfaq Kayani, now the army chief. Among other things, they were to demand concrete “reform” at the Pakistani spy service.3
Kappes flew into Islamabad aboard an Air Force transport five days after the attack. By now Kappes and C.I.A. director Mike Hayden all but operated a secret shuttle service to Pakistan, flying stretched out in the back of C-17s on overnight routes, hauling briefing books so thick they could serve as ballast. Typically Kappes spent time with Kayani alone, one-on-one. The reception party awaiting him included Frank Archibald, now the Islamabad station chief. Archibald was the veteran operations officer who had tried, while serving in Kandahar during 2002, to convert remnant Taliban into a Karzai-tolerant political party, only to have his plan overruled by Washington. Six years later the C.I.A. was still puzzling over how to contain the I.S.I.’s influence inside Afghanistan.4
Kappes was best known at Langley and at the White House for his service at Moscow Station and for his role in negotiating Libya’s surrender of its nuclear and chemical weapons programs during the first Bush term. His connections to Pakistan were less well known. Early in his career, after five years in the Marine Corps, Kappes had served as a C.I.A. case officer in the country, reporting on politics at a time when it was possible to travel freely. His son had arrived in Pakistan at the age of five weeks and spent his early years there. Kappes had also served in India, reveling as a young operations officer in the openness and occasional hilarity of expatriate life in the subcontinent. Now in his fifties, he was bald, bespectacled, and wore a cropped salt-and-pepper beard. He remained fit and muscled, although, in late middle age, his large shoulders had expanded above his narrow midsection, making him appear slightly misshaped, in the manner of a tall, retired football player.
At the meeting, Kayani smoked from his long-stemmed holder. He did not admit to culpability for the deaths in Kabul but neither did he deny communication with Haqqani commanders. He was reticent, professional, a listener, but his method was to never really say yes and never really say no. “You see, any intelligence agency—if they’re going to do their job—you have to have contacts,” Kayani said. “Every intelligence agency has contacts. The C.I.A. has contacts. The I.S.I. has contacts. If I tell the I.S.I. not to have contacts, they will be blind. Contacts are maintained with the worst of the lot. It’s a compulsion of intelligence that you will have contacts with the worst kind of people. But the question is, how do you use these contacts? Do you use them positively or negatively?”5
I.S.I.’s leadership that summer of 2008 was in disarray. The I.S.I. officer in charge of Directorate S was Major General Asif Akhtar. He reported to the spy service’s director-general, Nadeem Taj, who in turn reported to Kayani. Yet Taj had not been Kayani’s choice for the job; it was an awkward fit. Taj was a general notable mainly for his personal loyalties to Musharraf, now out of power. He had worked as a military secretary with Musharraf during the period when the president faced assassination attempts. The Americans didn’t think much of him. He immersed himself in “political machinations,” the embassy reported, and “never seemed comfortable in his role as intelligence chief and was reluctant to engage with his U.S. counterparts.” A senior American officer who worked with Taj and read sensitive intelligence about him that year put it more directly: “He was just a bag man for Musharraf . . . a guy nobody trusted.” That presumably included Kayani, who owed his power to Musharraf but now had to free himself from his mentor’s influence and promote his own lieutenants inside I.S.I.6
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Kappes flew home. The Principals Committee and then the National Security Council met in late July. They had before them new C.I.A. plans to address Waziristan. Hayden and Mike D’Andrea at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center proposed to ramp up Predator and Reaper drone attacks and other intelligence collection in the tribal areas. The plan called for an end to the practice of seeking “concurrence” from I.S.I. about suspected terrorists targeted for death in drone attacks. The C.I.A. also sought to loosen top secret targeting rules for its operations by introducing for the first time practices that would become known as “signature strikes,” meaning that a suspected militant might be killed even if his identity was unknown, as long as his observed behavior showed threatening hostility. They also expanded the target list to include “more Al Qaeda as well as the Taliban and Haqqani leadership.” Altogether, the C.I.A. plans marked a departure from the consultation and restraint that had governed the agency’s drone operations in Pakistan after 2002. Since the killing of Nek Mohammad in June 2004, the C.I.A. had conducted only fourteen lethal drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas over four years.7
Hayden argued that escalation and the new targeting rules would shorten the time required to strike a fleeting, dangerous target—an Al Qaeda bomb maker with a confirmed cell phone riding away from Miranshah, for example. The changes would also prevent I.S.I. from warning targets. In addition, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon proposed expanding authorities for U.S. Special Operations and Omega Team forces to raid compounds inside Pakistan from bases in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, Greg Vogle arrived as C.I.A. station chief to try to salve America’s fraying relationship with Karzai, drawing on their battlefield comradeship during late 2001, and to improve coordination between the C.I.A. and McChrystal’s special operators. Vogle supported more aggressive ground raids into Waziristan.
“After the next attack, knowing what we know now, there’s no explaining it if we don’t do something,” Hayden argued at the White House. Bush heard as well from Pentagon officers who had recently served in Afgha
nistan as waves of Taliban fighters crossed from Waziristan to strike American troops. Mick Nicholson, then a brigadier general running the Afghanistan-Pakistan cell at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had recently returned from a tour in eastern Afghanistan, where his forces had suffered thirty-five killed in action and another thirty wounded because of the Haqqanis, he told colleagues. “We’re going to stop playing the game,” Bush declared. “These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I’ve had enough.”8
Yet even at this turning point, the Bush administration did not wish to break with the Pakistan Army. In essence, the National Security Council decided to confront General Kayani as he took control of the army, and yet, simultaneously, to embrace him more closely, with aid and closer consultation. A major reason was Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. The administration had “regular reports” of Al Qaeda and other groups plotting to steal nuclear weapons. They did not want to do anything that would destabilize Pakistani command and control. As Michael Waltz, an aide to Vice President Cheney, put it: “If we began to retaliate for Pakistan’s support of the Taliban, how far were we prepared to go? Could we really afford to make Pakistan an enemy? Were we prepared to . . . fight the Pakistani Army’s tanks and artillery on the way in and out? Were we prepared to shoot down its Air Force, planes the United States had supplied?” Whenever the cabinet contemplated “such dark scenarios,” it backed away.9
And it was plain that the Pakistan Army was in trouble that summer. Domestic insurgents had seized Swat, a mountainous district about 150 miles to the northwest of Islamabad, and now threatened the Pakistani capital. The Pakistan Army fought back strongly and seemed to gradually contain the threat, yet the durability of this military achievement—Pakistanis fighting Pakistanis, for the most part—was questionable. The Americans wanted to reinforce the tentative progress the army had made in Swat. Kayani had been in charge of the military for less than a year. He had enough history with the United States—at Fort Leavenworth, in Hawaii, on base tours, and line skipping through Disneyland with Dave Smith—to be seen as a potentially constructive partner.