Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  On Wednesday, June 2, members of parliament, tribal leaders, businessmen, and activists streamed into the Loya Jirga Tent. The men wore turbans, robes, and vests. Hundreds of women had also been named as delegates. Soon after they found their seats, explosions rang out. Taliban infiltrators fired rockets, inaccurately but loudly, at the Polytechnic campus. Four suicide bombers attempted to reach the assembly. Afghan police took heavy casualties but shot several attackers dead before they could harm anyone and later chased down other suspected conspirators. None of the peace delegates was injured. Yet the attack embarrassed and infuriated Karzai. The assembly went forward, nonetheless. Karzai asked for a mandate for negotiations. He referred to the insurgents as “brother Taliban-jan,” a suffix indicating affection. He urged the Taliban to stop fighting and promised to push for peace “step by step.”14

  On Sunday, June 6, Karzai summoned Amrullah Saleh and Hanif Atmar, the interior minister, to the Arg Palace. Both men knew Karzai was furious about the failure of security, even though, in their opinion, the police and counterterrorist squads they commanded had responded bravely and effectively. They both resented Karzai’s public appeasement of the Taliban and his failure to celebrate the sacrifices of his own security forces.

  Atmar carried a resignation letter in his pocket. Ever since Holbrooke and Biden had promoted him as a possible presidential candidate, Karzai’s insecurities had made Atmar’s position as chief of Afghanistan’s police and internal security less and less tenable. Saleh was in a mood similar to Atmar’s. He was ambivalent about resigning, however, because he knew his departure from office was precisely what I.S.I. wanted. That angered Saleh and made him more determined to stay.

  After they settled into their chairs, Karzai stunned them by declaring that he believed the attack on the peace jirga had been organized by the United States, to undermine his search for a political settlement. He knew this, he continued, because during the hunt for fugitives involved in the attack, he had called McChrystal. The American commander had assured him that if he decided to continue with the jirga for two more days, McChrystal would make sure that the assembly would be secure.

  “Where did he get that confidence?” Karzai asked. “Because they were behind it! And as they saw that the jirga was not proceeding against their interests, they stopped the second episode of the attack,” and allowed the delegates to finish their work. Karzai added that he suspected Saleh and Atmar were part of the American conspiracy.15

  Saleh told him he was wrong. They had enough evidence to be sure this was a Taliban operation, like many other suicide strikes in Kabul before. McChrystal’s forces had chased down and arrested conspirators in Khost.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” Karzai asked.

  “No, you are the president of the country,” Saleh said.

  “Mr. President, you are going too far,” Atmar intervened at one point. “First, this was not the Americans. Second, I am not complicit in this. I would not turn a blind eye.” But when Atmar tried to say more, Karzai told him to shut up.

  At that, Atmar tossed his letter of resignation on the table. “You are not my commander-in-chief,” he said. “I cannot serve you.”

  Karzai turned to Saleh. “If Atmar is resigning, you should do the same.”

  Saleh let a few seconds go by in silence. Then he agreed. “I don’t have a written resignation,” he said, “but for me it’s also enough.”16

  The two men left together. Saleh had concluded that Karzai had lost trust in N.A.T.O. and sought to undermine the American military mission. This much seemed unarguable as the news of his resignation spread around Kabul that night: The Afghan cabinet’s most hawk-eyed foe of I.S.I. had been neutralized.

  —

  On July 14, 2010, about ten weeks after Faisal Shahzad’s Pathfinder fizzled in Times Square, the Pakistani Taliban released a video. It showed Shahzad training with a machine gun and speaking to the camera while gripping a Koran. “I have been trying to join my brothers in jihad ever since 9/11 happened,” he announced, somewhat implausibly. “I also want to inform my brother Muslims living abroad that it is not difficult at all to wage an attack on the West, and specifically in the U.S., and completely defeat them.”17

  The video inflamed again American anger at Pakistan. This was turning out to be less than a congenial summer for “strategic dialogue” about a new American-Pakistani partnership. Yet Kayani persisted. He decided to write something more definitive and honest than the sterile Foreign Office white paper he had delivered to the White House earlier in the year. The general now drafted a second paper about Pakistan’s requirements and strategic goals, a paper more in Kayani’s own voice. It ran more than one hundred pages. This became known as “Kayani 2.0.” It was fashioned as a “think paper,” as Holbrooke called it, providing a “road map for the next five years.” Kayani delivered it to the Obama administration on July 18.18

  Between the paper and Pasha’s conversations with C.I.A. counterparts, the Pakistanis advanced a more candid position than the deny-deny-deny lines of Musharraf vintage, such as “The Quetta Shura is a fiction.” On counterterrorism, Kanayi and Pasha offered a nuanced if self-interested argument. The C.I.A.’s drone war was driving the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Haqqanis into closer cooperation, particularly in North Waziristan, the I.S.I. feared. This was dangerous for both Pakistan and the United States. Yes, Kayani and Pasha said repeatedly, the I.S.I. had contacts with the Haqqanis, but this was to gain influence and information, as surely fellow professional spies could understand. Pasha repeatedly pointed out to his C.I.A. counterparts that the agency, too, maintained direct and indirect contacts with violent militias around the world, to collect intelligence and develop influence. As for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmiri militant group that had struck Mumbai so devastatingly in 2008, it would be a mistake for I.S.I. to break ties and drive it further underground. Pasha said he could have prevented Mumbai if I.S.I. had maintained closer contacts with Lashkar and the Directorate S officers involved had kept him, as the new chief, in the loop. (The United States and India had no evidence that Pasha had personally known about Mumbai in advance.)

  If the Obama administration wanted to change the calculus of the Pakistani public and elites, it would have to make bold bets on the country’s independence, prosperity, and security. As one reader of the Kayani 2.0 paper summarized the general’s evolving line of argument: You Americans are just focused on the military and counterterrorism. You are running up against the hard limits of how far our relationship will go in these fields, and you are getting frustrated, and I’m sorry about that. But I have my realities too. If you don’t visibly address the big deficits in our economy, energy supplies, and water supplies, this relationship is just going to continue to be a muddle.19

  On July 19, as she began to digest Kayani’s “2.0” white paper, Hillary Clinton gave a roundtable interview to Pakistani journalists. Her main purpose was to reinforce the strategic dialogue by talking about energy, water, Afghanistan, India, and the possibilities for mutual understanding. Yet when the questions turned to terrorism, Clinton laid out the risk of a total breach between America and Pakistan—perhaps war—if another attack such as the one at Times Square took place. “If an attack is traced back to Pakistan, people in America will be devastated—devastated,” Clinton said. “I cannot predict what the consequences would be because there would be many people in the United States who would say, ‘Why did this happen? Why are we investing so much in our partnership?’”20

  Kayani received this just as it was intended: as a threat. At the end of the month, he composed an anxious letter to Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I write to you at a critical juncture of our history,” the August 2, 2010, typed confidential letter on Kayani’s embroidered stationery began. “For Pakistan, these are defining moments.” He referred to the litany of recent statements “made by the United States’ leadership s
uggesting that any act of terror in the United States or anywhere else against the United States’ interests having links with terrorists in Pakistan will warrant a direct action by the United States against Pakistan.” The letter continued,

  These are very dangerous thoughts. . . . I am sure you realize that any such action will jeopardize the very basis of our cooperation. It will push the Pakistan Army to the wall and force me to take a position which may nullify our joint efforts of years, made at such enormous costs. The consequences of such a scenario for overall security in the region are not difficult to predict. We must do anything and everything possible to avoid such a catastrophe. . . .

  His reference to “a scenario for overall security in the region” carried an implied threat of his own. In the event of an American attack on Pakistan, his forces might abandon all constraint in backing the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan. Kayani also seemed to interpret the American threats after Times Square as a kind of public pressure campaign designed to force him into pushing his army into action in North Waziristan. He wrote that he could not give in to this pressure, because he lacked the political support in Pakistan to attack in Waziristan. If the United States broke with Pakistan or escalated its bombing in the country, he warned, there would be no return:

  We are fully aware of the United States’ concerns. We also know that terrorists cannot be allowed to attack anywhere across the borders. . . . However, we cannot design operations, the fallout of which can destabilize Pakistan as a country. Pakistan’s Army draws its strength from the bedrock of popular support. Come what may, we shall have to guard this vital fundamental on which we based our campaign right from the beginning. . . . I can feel we are running out of both time and patience. . . . If the people of Pakistan feel let down once again, their alienation with the United States will be complete, and perhaps forever.21

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lives and Limbs

  June 16, 2010: We are at KAF [Kandahar Airfield] now, complete with the poo pond, dust storms, and rocket attacks. We heard the alarms go off last night around dusk. They said it happens about once every three days during morning, night or limited visibility. They target our barracks and the boardwalk. Five civilians were killed in the last few attacks and there is shrapnel on the side of the building we are staying at. It isn’t really as scary as I thought it was going to be. KAF is huge, with 25,000 people on it from multiple nations including Romania, Netherlands, UK, France, US and others I haven’t seen yet. . . . There are seven [military cafeterias] here and TGIF as well [as] multiple gyms. It’s pretty crazy. I can’t wait to be done here and get up to where we are going to operate. . . .

  We had a briefing on COIN and some of the directives from Gen. McChrystal. It was the standard stuff that we have been talking about since we knew we were coming to Afghanistan. I didn’t know how dangerous the rocket attacks are, though. The Taliban have conducted 80 rocket attacks since January and one of their attacks killed or injured 14 civilians. They take 107mm Chinese rockets and place them on a berm or stakes connected to a timer or a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom, so when the water drains, the rocket fires. . . . The Brigade CSM [Command Sergeant Major] and [a] few other field grade officers from Brigade were injured in a RPG [rocket propelled grenade] attack down in Zhari. . . . It is pretty crazy. Coming back from counter-I.E.D. trainer we saw some Afghans outside the wire and they flicked us off or shook their fists at us. Some hearts and mind campaign, huh?

  —Journal of Lieutenant Timothy J. Hopper, First Battalion,320th Field Artillery Regiment, Second Combat Brigade Team,101st Airborne Division, Combined Task Force “Strike”1

  Highway 1 runs west from Kandahar toward Helmand Province, through or near four districts—Arghandab, Panjwai, Zhari, and Maiwand—that were the Taliban’s birthplace. Since 2006, the area had provided the movement an important military redoubt. To the highway’s south lay the irrigated green zone watered by the Arghandab River. It contained tributaries, canals, wheat fields, opium fields, pomegranate orchards, and marijuana crops that sometimes grew ten feet tall. From a soldier’s perspective, grapes were the most significant crop. Kandahar’s vines grew in rows on mud berms or walls. The rows presented staggered obstacles—and protection—comparable to the hedgerows of Normandy. Grape farmers built concrete drying houses that could be used as bunkers or rigged with improvised explosive devices. The region’s lush vegetation varied in thickness by the season. During the late autumn and winter the fields could be brown and denuded. During the peak growing seasons of spring and summer, the zone could feel as wet and thick as a tropical jungle. The foliage was so dense during the high season that Taliban guerrillas hiding in one pomegranate orchard beside a walled American combat outpost could sneak through the trees and toss grenades over the outpost walls without being seen. On foot patrol, every fifteen feet there seemed to be a ten-foot grape berm or a wet five-foot-tall grove blocking the way.

  By 2010 the Taliban used their base in the green zone to menace traffic on Highway 1 and to infiltrate Kandahar City. It was obvious that the guerrillas had a significant presence in the zone but neither American nor N.A.T.O. intelligence had a clear picture of how large the Taliban force might be or how it had prepared its defenses. Canopies of trees and vines allowed the Taliban to hide from aerial surveillance. By early 2010, the American military’s tactical rules forbade helicopters from flying south of Highway 1, over the irrigated areas, because of the likelihood that the helicopters would be shot down. An exception might be granted only if the helicopters tracked directly overhead of a maneuvering ground combat patrol strong enough to prevent the capture of pilots if they were downed.2

  McChrystal’s campaign plan, devised in the summer of 2009, identified Kandahar as the war’s most important geography, the “center of gravity” for Obama’s surge. Kandahar was the Taliban’s first capital and the Karzais’ home region. If the guerrillas regained control there, the movement would enjoy the kind of unmolested supply lines to Pakistan that had fueled its national conquest during the 1990s. It would signal clearly to southern Afghans that the Taliban was again on the march. In the early execution of his war plan, McChrystal had been diverted by the Marines’ insistence on having their own combat theater in underpopulated Helmand. Early in 2010, the Marines mounted a kind of demonstration assault on Marjah District in Helmand, a hub of the opium trade. The campaign required great effort and had produced debatable results by the spring. McChrystal had infamously promised to roll out “government in a box” in Marjah. He meant the Afghan government would deploy a mobile phalanx of civil servants to deliver services and establish the Karzai government’s legitimacy. The idea seemed almost implausible on its face. British officers commanding on the front lines in Helmand saw virtually no evidence of the Afghan government. Taliban forces enjoyed complete freedom of movement. Villagers had little faith that the government could deliver. In any event, the significance of the early American-led action in Helmand paled in comparison to the coming fight in Kandahar. If McChrystal’s “ink spot” strategy of securing critical districts in the south was to succeed even partially, the Taliban had to be cleared out of the green zone. The area connected Helmand and Kandahar. The clearance operation was also necessary to secure Kandahar City.

  American generals sometimes sniffed at the Canadian forces as insufficiently aggressive, yet prior American rotations through Kandahar had not reduced the Taliban’s influence, either, and in some respects the most recent American units deployed there had made things worse. In 2009, Colonel Harry Tunnell commanded Task Force Stryker in Kandahar. Tunnell rejected Petraeus’s population-friendly counterinsurgency doctrine as “musings from amateurs, contractors, plagiarized journal articles, etc.,” as he put it acidly in a dissenting memorandum to the secretary of the army.3 Yet during Tunnell’s command, undisciplined, out-of-control “kill teams” had rampaged against Afghan civilians. Five soldiers from a battalion in Tunnell’s task force were later
charged with murdering Afghans for fun and keeping their fingers as mementos. It was hardly surprising that the Stryker tour had left some Kandaharis shaking their fists as Tim Hopper’s men from the 101st Airborne arrived.

  After Obama’s West Point speech, McChrystal, Mike Mullen, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates selected the Second Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division to fight what they conceived of as the war’s most decisive battle. The brigade had been formed for the invasion of Normandy and had shouldered three rotations to Iraq since 2003. It contained about 3,400 personnel, plus the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, which fielded Apache attack helicopters, Chinook helicopters for air assault and casualty evacuation, and other aircraft. The Second Combat Brigade was ordered to Kandahar as Combined Task Force “Strike,” made up of about 4,800 soldiers, to carry out close-quarters counterinsurgency warfare from small outposts in the green zone. “You’re the main effort of the war,” McChrystal told Colonel Art Kandarian, the brigade’s commander.4

  In February 2010, Kandarian arrived in Kandahar for a predeployment site survey, to ready for full deployment in May. He discovered there were only two small battalion bases and half a dozen platoon-size observation posts in the zone that he was supposed to conquer. In Baghdad, Petraeus had built up small combat outposts shared by American and Iraqi forces almost block by block to enforce security. This would be the model for these agricultural fields, too. There were local villages to pacify but the area was not heavily populated, except by Taliban. The landlords who owned the zone’s orchards, grape, and marijuana fields lived mainly in Kandahar. They hired day laborers and sharecroppers to tend their crops.