by Steve Coll
“PAK ARMY’S CONTRIBUTIONS—SILENT SURGE” read the title of one slide. Its bar graph showed that the number of Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries deployed to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas had grown from just under 40,000 after the September 11 attacks to more than 140,000 by 2009. The “silent” part of the surge reflected Kayani’s reluctance to trumpet these figures in Pakistan, which might aggravate the Pakistani Taliban and other local insurgents by disclosing the scale of the army’s “occupation” of the tribal areas.
“PAK ARMY’S CONTRIBUTIONS—MILITARY CASUALTIES” flashed next. The slide reported that terrorist attacks and fighting in the tribal areas had killed more than 2,300 Pakistani soldiers through early 2010 and injured another 6,800. Nearly all of the casualties had occurred after 2006. A third slide showed that during the same period, there had been more “major terrorist incidents” inside Pakistan than in Afghanistan or Iraq. Kayani refrained from saying what he, Pasha, and many other Pakistani generals believed: Pakistan had paid a higher price than the United States for joining the post–September 11 alliance against the Taliban, and now it was being rocked by the spillover of America’s failed invasion of Afghanistan, against which Pakistan had warned. The I.S.I.’s support for the Afghan Taliban’s revival, if the generals acknowledged it at all, should be understood as a defensive measure—an effort to push the violence caused by America back across the border, into Afghanistan—rather than as a covert offensive aimed at retaking Kabul.3
Kayani flashed a slide showing a blown-up building in Lahore. It was a regional office of I.S.I. bombed by former allies of the spy service who had turned against the Pakistani state. The casualties endured inside Pakistan since 2006 included dozens of I.S.I. officers, Kayani said. I.S.I. could not possibly be fomenting terrorism if its officers were also victims of terrorism, he argued. Eighty percent of I.S.I. officers came from the army. “I know how I.S.I. functions and how I.S.I. operates,” Kayani said. The service is “aligned with army policy.”
He displayed a slide showing Tiger Woods at the top of his golf swing, in his signature red shirt. Kayani went into his thesis, by now familiar to Admiral Mullen and other American interlocutors, about the “fundamentals.” He compared the pursuit of stability in Afghanistan to a sound golf game. One fundamental was the internal discipline and morale of the Pakistan Army. A second was public opinion in the region and America. He concluded by defining what the army and I.S.I. sought across their western border: “a peaceful and stable Afghanistan, a friendly Afghanistan.” Given the I.S.I.’s history, it was hard to avoid hearing this formulation as code, once again, for “Pakistani influence, through the Taliban.”4
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Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who had helped select Mullah Mohammad Omar as the movement’s emir, lived in a two-story concrete home at the end of a muddy road in the Khush Haal neighborhood of Kabul. He had painted his house green. Pashtuns dominated his neighborhood. A small shack occupied by armed N.D.S. soldiers guarded Zaeef’s front door.
One morning during the first week of April, one of the former ambassador’s sons greeted an American visitor and showed him to an upstairs sitting room. As tea was prepared, young children and teenagers wandered in and out, practicing their English. The house was cold and modestly furnished. There were green curtains and green light fixtures with ornamental shades designed as tulips. The bookshelves held leather-bound copies of the Koran, the Sunnah, a Webster’s English dictionary, and a French translation of Zaeef’s recently completed memoir, Prisonnier à Guantánamo.5
It was Zaeef who had put the Germans in contact with Tayeb Agha, Omar’s envoy. After the Germans reported their secret meetings with Tayeb Agha to Holbrooke, Zaeef organized an unpublicized nighttime meeting at Kabul University that brought together former Taliban officeholders and Mike Flynn, the I.S.A.F. intelligence chief, to explore the possibilities of negotiations.6
Zaeef understood from the Americans and Europeans he met that the C.I.A. and the Pentagon presented the greatest obstacle to developing peace talks. “I think the European countries are interested in stopping war and finding an alternative,” he said after the tea arrived that April morning. He was a large, soft man. His untamed beard was jet black. “It’s just the Americans. . . . They are ready to fight and they seek to defeat the Taliban by force.”
He outlined his version of the Taliban’s negotiating position. Foreign troops had to leave Afghanistan. The Taliban should be removed from blacklists and given an address—a safe office—from which to negotiate. The movement did not seek the overthrow of the Karzai government, but would seek amendments to the constitution that would bring the country into line with the Taliban’s understanding of Islamic law. This would not require a return to all the old social rules of the 1990s, when Afghan women and girls were deprived of education, he emphasized. The Taliban would negotiate with fellow Afghans and Muslim scholars to define a new era of women’s access to work and education, in concert with Islamic law. “The people of Afghanistan, they are Muslims, and nobody is rejecting Islam here,” he said. “This is very easy for the people of Afghanistan to come together and solve this. America came here for what? They came for women? No. They came for education? No. They came because they were attacked from Afghanistan and they sought security. This is their right. But they should not occupy or interfere with Afghanistan.”7
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The Taliban had perhaps twenty-five thousand or more men under arms that spring, concentrated in the south and east of Afghanistan. Many high-ranking leaders lived with their families in Pakistan. There they operated training camps. Some of them traveled to the Gulf on Pakistani passports, operated businesses and hospitals, or smuggled war materials to the battle lines inside Afghanistan. The revived Taliban could be described as decentralized because commanders exercised considerable autonomy. These fighters included many young men who had no memory of the Islamic Emirate of the 1990s as well as some opportunists who engaged in racketeering and other crime. The movement could also be described as centralized because its rahbari shura, commonly referred to as the Quetta Shura and headed at least notionally by Mullah Mohammad Omar, appointed and removed governors, supervised the war through a military commission, and issued written policies on everything from smoking to the avoidance of civilian casualties.
It was not easy to gauge opinion among frontline Taliban commanders, but by 2010, independent scholars, journalists, and researchers, as well as N.A.T.O. military analysts, had conducted extensive interviews with some of them. In a classified report, “The State of the Taliban 2009,” an American military task force interviewed Taliban prisoners about their motivations and beliefs. In essence, the survey found, the prisoners opposed all foreigners in Afghanistan, including Pakistanis. The Taliban believed they were winning the war, that they had not been defeated in 2001, and that they were thrown out of power illegitimately. Obama read this document in the winter of 2010 and told his aides it was “one of the most interesting and useful things” he had seen “in a long time.”8
The Taliban of 2010 differed from the movement of the 1990s. Alex Strick van Linschoten, a British scholar who had lived in Kandahar after 2001 and interviewed many Taliban, emphasized that the resistance to American occupation occurred because of the restoration of corrupt, predatory pre-Taliban strongmen such as Gul Agha Sherzai and newer figures such as Ahmed Wali Karzai. The Taliban saw themselves as heirs to Afghan resistance to the British empire, followed by the Soviet occupation, and now followed by the American intervention. In the context of the American invasion of Iraq, the narrative of Islamist resistance to American occupation of Muslim lands offered a fresh international context for the Taliban’s resistance. Also, Taliban leaders forced into exile in Pakistan after 2001 were exposed to diverse strains of Islamist politics they had previously ignored or disdained when they were mired in the Islamic Emirate’s obscurantism. These Taliban leaders joined
a wider international discourse after 2001 about the strategies of Islamist revolution. They absorbed the examples of negotiation and proselytizing advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood and the case of Hezbollah’s tactical power sharing in Lebanon. The expansion of the movement’s political imagination after 2001—and the openness of at least some leaders to negotiations with the United States—was “partly due to the embracing of information technology and the free media,” as one Taliban leader put it, which led to “the circulation of the diverse ideas.” Another factor was a lesson learned from the Islamic Emirate’s overthrow: If the movement came back to power, it would be better if it was not sanctioned or illegitimate in the international system.9
Barnett Rubin argued that there was clear evidence that the Taliban were open to political compromise. The position of some C.I.A. operators in the region, including Chris Wood, was that the Taliban saw negotiations as merely a diplomatic annex to their military campaign. The purpose of talks, from the Taliban’s perspective, might include dividing European governments from Washington or hastening an American withdrawal. But Mullah Mohammad Omar would never accept the compromises necessary for a political agreement to end the war, these skeptics argued.10
The possibility of direct talks with Tayeb Agha at least offered a path to clarify the puzzle of Mullah Omar’s position in the war. In shadowy exile, he had been portrayed by Taliban and Western media as a kind of fire-breathing, screen-projected figure, heard from in periodic statements, never seen.
An arrest in Karachi in the winter of 2010 further scrambled the picture. The C.I.A. base in Karachi had expanded to include about three dozen case officers and assignees from the N.S.A., Special Operations Command, and other agencies, under an agreement worked out with President Asif Zardari and Pasha at I.S.I. In February the base traced a phone call to a house in Baldia Town, a neighborhood in the city’s Pashtun-dominated western reaches. Pakistani forces raided the home and arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, whom the Taliban described as Mullah Omar’s principal deputy. American targeting information led Pakistani police to the address, but the Pakistanis did not know who they had arrested until the Americans informed them. The U.S. side emphasized that they were certain of Baradar’s identity and pressed the Pakistanis to keep the Taliban leader alive: “If you kill him, we won’t understand.”11
The I.S.I. transferred Baradar to a prison. The service’s media wing told the local press that they would not allow the C.I.A. direct access to the prisoner, an assertion of nationalist prerogatives. In fact, Pasha soon allowed C.I.A. officers from the Islamabad Station to speak with Baradar, but only “under I.S.I. guard,” as an officer involved described it. “The ‘truths’ Baradar could tell about I.S.I., not to mention other Pakistani notables,” a cable from the U.S. embassy in Kabul noted, made Baradar a dangerous prisoner for Pakistan.12
I.S.I. pressured and even tortured significant Afghan Taliban leaders. On March 5, 2010, Obaidullah Akhund, a former defense minister for the Islamic Emirate and a field commander after 2001, died in Pakistani custody, reportedly of heart disease. Former Taliban leaders believed it was almost certain he was beaten or tortured to death. The I.S.I. also arrested Gul Agha Ishakzai, a former head of Taliban finance that had been placed on sanctions lists by the U.S. Treasury. When they released him in December 2009, Ishakzai flew from Karachi to Mecca, where he entered a Saudi hospital with life-threatening injuries inflicted during beatings in I.S.I. custody, according to reports relayed by the Saudis. For Afghan Taliban who fell in I.S.I.’s crosshairs, “Pakistani prisons are worse than Bagram or Pul-i-Charkhi,” meaning the dungeons run by the N.D.S., as Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, the former foreign minister, explained to N.A.T.O. interlocutors.
It was almost impossible for the United States to discern which I.S.I. arrests of Taliban leaders were designed to give the appearance of cooperation with Washington and which were carried out to punish Taliban clients who had fallen out of I.S.I.’s favor. The two categories were not mutually exclusive. “We have eleven offices that are with you and one that’s against you, so be careful,” I.S.I. officers explained to Taliban commanders, according to a N.A.T.O. intelligence collector.13
It took months, but N.A.T.O.’s intelligence services gradually documented the leadership succession at the Taliban’s highest levels that followed Baradar’s arrest. Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir ran the Taliban’s war as the head of its military commission. He was a Helmandi who had been sent to Guantánamo early in 2002 but assumed a false identity and fooled American authorities into releasing him late in 2007, after which he returned to the Afghan battlefield to seek retribution. As Baradar’s successor as deputy emir, the Taliban promoted Mullah Akhtar Mansour. During the 1990s, Mansour had held positions in Taliban aviation, including at the state-owned Ariana Airlines. This placed him at the center of Taliban finance because Ariana was the Islamic Emirate’s supply lifeline, operating shuttle flights to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. (Those governments, with Pakistan’s, were the only ones in the world to recognize the Islamic Emirate as Afghanistan’s legitimate regime.) Mansour, an ample-bellied man in his late forties, traveled more frequently than other Taliban leaders to the Gulf and may have had business or financial interests there as well as in Pakistan.14
According to what the Obama administration pieced together, money was another factor in Mullah Mansour’s rise to prominence during 2010. Previously, a Taliban aide named Agha Jan Motasim had carried out Taliban fund-raising in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. He was close to Baradar. During the summer of 2009, Mullah Mohammad Omar, or someone acting in his name, removed Motasim from this role. There were rumors that Motasim had not accounted properly for every riyal he had collected. Later, when he was campaigning to replace Mullah Omar, gunmen ambushed and wounded Motasim in Karachi. He fled to Afghanistan and then to Turkey, to recover in a hospital there. It was around the time of Motasim’s removal that Taliban leaders had informed Saudi intelligence that Tayeb Agha would be their new international and fund-raising envoy. Tayeb Agha told his European interlocutors that he was in direct touch with Mullah Mansour. All that could be said for certain was that Motasim and Baradar were out, and Tayeb Agha and Mullah Mansour were in.15
Tayeb Agha was a relatively young man, believed to be in his thirties or early forties. He said he was from a family of Syeds, or descendants of the Prophet, from around Kandahar. He was related by marriage to Mullah Omar. During the last years of Taliban rule, Tayeb Agha had been visible in Kandahar as a personal secretary to Omar, as well as a translator and press spokesman. He spoke English and Arabic and occasionally spoke for the Taliban to the BBC. He had also played a liaison role with Arab fighters then in Afghanistan. Because of his youth and lack of battlefield credentials, Tayeb Agha lacked gravitas, but he had a documented record of proximity to Mullah Omar. As the Obama administration collected these biographical details early in 2010, the National Security Council designated Tayeb Agha as one of several “threads” of possible contact with senior Taliban leaders. At some point, it also became clear that the Taliban had formed a committee to handle liaison and possible political negotiations with the I.S.I., a committee headed by Mullah Mohammad Abbas Akhund. The underground senior leadership of the movement was organized enough to establish separate diplomatic strategies for the United States and Pakistan.16
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Pasha flew to Washington in April. At Langley, the I.S.I. chief met Leon Panetta in the director’s dining room on the seventh floor of Old Headquarters. Steve Kappes, the C.I.A.’s number two, had informed Panetta and the White House that he planned to retire in May. It was a personal decision; his first grandchild was about to be born, and he wanted to leave the C.I.A. before he started to lose a step. His departure meant the Seventh Floor would lose its most experienced Pakistan specialist. (Panetta had, however, decided to recruit John Bennett, the former Islamabad station chief he had cursed out in 2009, to run the National Clandestine Service.)
“You really ought to be thinking about talking to the Taliban, because you guys are leaving,” Pasha now advised them. “You should cut a deal now. We need to be part of that deal.”17
Panetta was skeptical about talking to the Taliban through any channel. But after the White House digested the German reports on Tayeb Agha, President Obama authorized a classified initiative to explore what might be possible. On April 20, 2010, Doug Lute convened the Conflict Resolution Cell, a highly compartmented interagency group designed to evaluate and coordinate possible political negotiations with the Taliban. The White House wanted strict secrecy because they weren’t confident about their plan and didn’t want to raise expectations before they made progress. Lute chaired the cell’s weekly meetings in a secure conference room. Holbrooke, Chris Wood, Michèle Flournoy, who was the policy chief at the Pentagon, and David Sedney, now one of Flournoy’s deputies, attended the meetings. Rubin and a few others on Holbrooke’s staff also attended often.18
There would be “four cornerstones” to the administration’s approach to peace talks, Lute announced at the first meeting. Any talks had to be Afghan led. To encourage that, the cell quickly abolished the Bush administration’s restrictions that theoretically prevented Hamid Karzai’s government from talking to thirty-one named, blacklisted Taliban and other armed opposition leaders. They also adjusted the positions the Bush administration had set for any negotiations. Under Bush, as a precondition to any talks, the Taliban had to break from Al Qaeda. It could not be incorporated into Afghan politics under arms. And the Taliban had to accept the Afghan constitution. The Conflict Resolution Cell changed these from preconditions for talks to goals of a successful peace negotiation and political settlement. Clinton added a phrase about all Afghans enjoying equal human rights, an indirect reference to the status of women; this would be part of the goal of Taliban acceptance of the constitution. Potentially, Holbrooke said, the work ahead could be “historically important.”