by Steve Coll
Kayani advocated first reducing the war’s violence through ceasefires, then isolating Al Qaeda, and then developing a new consensus about the Afghan constitution that the Taliban might accept. The measure of success, Kayani reiterated, could not be how many guerrilla commanders were captured or killed or how much territory the Karzai government or the Taliban controlled at any one time. The measure of success was “Are we gaining or losing public support?”
Obama’s initiative to explore a deeper strategic partnership with Pakistan was “very important,” Kayani wrote, but the administration’s ambition had to be grounded in “the relationship between the people of the two countries.” Yet the Obama administration was undermining such a possibility. “The impression that we are constantly under pressure to do more does not help,” he argued. He went through America’s assumptions about the army and I.S.I. You think we are in bed with the Haqqani network, he wrote. That is false. You think we are accommodating the Quetta Shura. That is completely false. He wanted to play a role in any negotiations with the Taliban.
Pakistan “would like to remain a part of the solution and not the problem,” Kayani wrote.11
Obama’s advisers had diverse reactions to Kayani’s paper. At the White House, Lute saw Kayani’s personal investment in the document as a rare opportunity to align with Pakistan, perhaps the most promising opening since September 11. At the Pentagon, skeptics of I.S.I. read the paper as a kind of coercive ultimatum: You are doomed without us, and if you don’t manage Afghanistan while accommodating our core interests, you will fail.
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On October 28, a month after Petraeus had spoken publicly about negotiations with “very high level leaders” of the Taliban, the C.I.A. confirmed that the Mullah Mansour feted in Kabul was a fake. “We’re sending him a bill for $150,000,” one of the president’s aides quipped. The C.I.A.’s line to Hekmatyar also looked unpromising. That left Holbrooke where he wanted to be, in position to pursue a war-altering deal with the Taliban’s leadership, through Tayeb Agha. Holbrooke insisted on referring to the envoy by the code name “A-Rod,” the nickname of Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees slugger.
Holbrooke called his deputy Frank Ruggiero to inform him that he would be the initial negotiator with the Taliban. The administration told Kayani and Karzai of the outline of their negotiating plan, but withheld details. Since the disclosure of Tayeb Agha’s position the previous winter, Saudi Arabia had dropped out of the talks. Tayeb Agha had in the meantime reset his refuge in the Persian Gulf by deepening his ties to Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. The emir was an American ally who allowed the Pentagon to operate a massive air base in his kingdom, yet he also maintained ties with Islamist movements and tried to position Qatar as a neutral facilitator.
Early in November, Michael Steiner, the German special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed to Holbrooke a Taliban position paper about talks with America. The paper was on Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan stationery, dated 23 Ramadan, or early September 2010, but it bore no signature. It was what diplomats call a “nonpaper,” or deniable negotiating memo. It stated that the Taliban agreed to talks with the Americans on two conditions: that there be no arrests, and that negotiations take place in total secrecy. Steiner proposed that they hold the first meeting in a safe house in a suburb of Munich, his hometown. The paper also said the Taliban wanted German officials in the room and had selected a “Muslim brother,” Qatar, to participate as well. Steiner noted that the Taliban leaders had previously been tricked into attending meetings, only to be arrested by the C.I.A. or I.S.A.F. and shipped off to Guantánamo. How could Tayeb Agha be sure that this was not another American sting operation?
Lute approached Obama. The president said that they should convey his personal word through Steiner that the United States would not interfere with Tayeb Agha’s travel to or from Munich. Lute decided not to tell the C.I.A. about the meeting, out of fear that the information might trigger some kind of snatch operation down in the bureaucracy that the White House wouldn’t know about in time to stop it. The German government would fly Tayeb Agha in one of its own planes; surely the C.I.A. would not mess with the Taliban envoy on German soil, even if it did detect what was going on.
The Qatari emir informed the Americans that he judged Tayeb Agha to be authentic. The Taliban could not afford to alienate Qatar, a source of refuge and finance. “They might fool you,” Al-Thani said, “but with all due respect, the Taliban are not in a position to trick me.”12
On November 26, the German intelligence service arranged a plane to pick Tayeb Agha up in Doha and fly him. Worried about Pakistani surveillance, Agha dressed in Western street clothes as the Germans drove him to a safe house. Once inside, he changed into a shalwar kameez and jacket.
Jeff Hayes, the Defense Intelligence Agency analyst working for Lute, and Colonel Christopher Kolenda, a West Point graduate and former aide to McChrystal who had served four tours in Afghanistan and now worked on regional policy at the Pentagon, flew to Germany with Ruggiero. Hayes and Ruggiero were not happy about Kolenda’s role, but the Pentagon had insisted on having its own member of the negotiating mission. Hayes would accompany Ruggiero to the meeting; Kolenda would stay in a nearby hotel. They went over some icebreaker talking points. Ruggiero had served in Kandahar and knew the Arghandab, where Tayeb Agha had grown up. That might be a good subject for casual chat.
On November 28, Tayeb Agha appeared alone to meet with the Americans, his hair closely trimmed and his black beard cropped short. He said he was thirty-five years old but he looked younger. His manner was reticent, calm. He spoke English well but not fluently. In addition to Steiner, who happened to be celebrating his sixty-second birthday that day, a German diplomat and a B.N.D. intelligence officer joined the meeting, as well as a Qatari prince.13
Steiner proposed a three-part agenda. First, they would introduce themselves to one another. Then they would talk about confidence-building measures, including the possibility of prisoner exchanges. Finally, they would agree on next steps.
Tayeb Agha said he wanted to read an opening statement, which he unfolded before him. You won’t like this, he warned Ruggiero and Hayes, but I must read it aloud. The essence of it was: America invaded Afghanistan unjustly, falsely accusing the Taliban of terrorism, martyring thousands of innocent Afghans. Now the United States carried out an unjust occupation and continued to kill innocents. “The Taliban [have] been unjustly accused of responsibility for 9/11 and labeled as terrorists,” Tayeb Agha said. “There [is] no point in talking to other Afghans if the U.S. considered [the] Taliban a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.”
When Ruggiero’s turn came, he delivered a long statement on why the Americans had intervened in Afghanistan, and why the world’s nations had joined in the effort to rebuild the country. The instructions worked up for Ruggiero at the White House included an admission that it did not look like either N.A.T.O. or the Taliban would win on the battlefield, so the United States was looking to develop a form of political talks that would allow Afghans to talk to Afghans, to settle the war.
Ruggiero also said, in essence, “You know who we are—we work for the American government. You know who our boss is, President Obama. But we’re not sure who you are—or where you stand with the Taliban.” The United States needed evidence that Tayeb Agha had authority. At one point, the Americans asked a question they had rehearsed: “Who knows you are here today?”
Tayeb Agha answered that everything he did was under the authority of Mullah Mohammad Omar, but that Omar did not know about this specific meeting. “I see him and will see him again,” he added.
Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the Taliban number two, did know about today’s meeting, however, he continued. Ruggiero asked if Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, who commanded the Taliban’s military campaign, knew about the meeting. No, Tayeb Agha said, Zakir had no need to know. They asked about I.S.I.’s knowledge. Although Taye
b Agha traveled on a Pakistani passport, he said he doubted that the Pakistani spy service knew exactly what he was doing because he “travels a lot.”14
The discussions lasted six hours over a day and a half. Tayeb Agha seemed unaware of the Obama administration’s announced plan to dramatically reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan between 2011 and 2014 and hand off the war to Afghan forces. At one point he said the problem between the United States and the Taliban was the presence of foreign forces, but that the international troops should withdraw gradually. But his priorities were the development of a prisoner exchange, improved treatment for Taliban prisoners in Afghan custody, the abolishment of sanctions against the Taliban, and the opening of a Taliban political office in the Gulf.
The full negotiation over prisoners would take months to develop, but it seemed to some of the Americans involved to be Tayeb Agha’s first priority. He had won support from the Taliban’s political commission, the Taliban envoy said, for confidence-building measures that would begin with the release from Guantánamo of six Taliban detainees and the reciprocal release by the Taliban of Sergeant Robert “Bowe” Bergdahl, held by the Haqqani network. Bergdahl had wandered off a base in eastern Afghanistan in the summer of 2009 and had ended up in the hands of the Haqqanis. The detainees Tayeb Agha sought were Mohammad Fazl, a former deputy minister of defense and army commander in the Taliban government; Abdul Haq Wasiq, a former deputy minister of intelligence; Mullah Norullah Noori, a former commander and governor; Khairullah Khairkhwa, a former minister of interior; Mohammad Nabi Omari, a former security chief; and Awal Gul, whom the Pentagon described as a former military commander. As they studied the files of these men, Khairkhwa intrigued some of the Americans involved because he looked as if he might have the potential to become a valuable political negotiator. (Gul died in custody on February 11, 2011, leaving five others to be considered. The Conflict Resolution Cell began to refer to these prisoners as the “Varsity Five,” to distinguish them from a second list of lower-ranking Guantánamo prisoners Tayeb Agha also wanted released. They were referred to as the “Junior Varsity Seven.”)
None of the six Taliban leaders at Guantánamo were captured on the battlefield fighting the United States, Tayeb Agha pointed out. They had all either surrendered to the Afghan government or offered their cooperation to the United States. (Nabi Omari reportedly said in an interrogation that he accepted $500 from a C.I.A. operative to help track down Mullah Mohammad Omar and Al Qaeda figures in Afghanistan.) “The charges that some had been involved in the killing of Americans were false,” Tayeb Agha said. He said that a prisoner exchange would be a way for the United States to demonstrate good faith to skeptical Taliban fighters and commanders, opening the way to a more comprehensive negotiation that could lead to cease-fires and political agreements.
A prisoner exchange could empower those in the Taliban who valued peaceful politics. “Many in the Taliban questioned the utility of talks with the Americans, but all agreed it was a sacred Islamic duty to rescue prisoners,” he said. If the Taliban political commission that had appointed him “could deliver the release of these detainees, it would enable the leadership to gain the support of the fighters for a political process.”
Ruggiero said the Obama administration would consider all of these issues but could not agree to anything now. He had instructions from Holbrooke not to respond positively to anything Tayeb Agha proposed in the first meeting. “Have a second meeting,” Holbrooke had told him. On America’s highest priority, the isolation and destruction of Al Qaeda, Tayeb Agha said this could be resolved “at the end of the process.” On his ability to deliver the Haqqani network’s commitments as part of a negotiation, he said the idea that there was a split between the Taliban and the Haqqanis “exists only in media.”
They talked about how Tayeb Agha could prove that he had authorization from the Taliban leadership. One possibility was to agree in secret on an unusual statement or reference to a foreign event, such as the war in Somalia, to be inserted into a public communiqué in the name of Mullah Mohammad Omar, to be released through official Taliban media. They would agree on the event and the comment and Tayeb Agha would show them a draft three days in advance of its release. That would show that Tayeb Agha had the juice at least to produce statements under Omar’s name. That would be an item for future discussion.15
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At sixty-nine, Richard Holbrooke extended himself as if he were in his thirties. He often exuded great energy, but he could also appear exhausted. At Army House, in Pakistan, during meetings with Pasha and Kayani, he sometimes fell asleep from jet lag. British or French diplomats visiting him in his ground-floor suite at State that autumn would find him on the phone to his wife Kati Marton, recounting his plans for a new trip to London and Dubai while also finalizing a dinner party in New York for the coming weekend.
The truth was that Holbrooke was deeply discouraged about the Obama administration’s prospects and his own “AFPAK” project. “Our current strategy will not succeed,” he wrote to Clinton in the second half of 2010. “Even though everyone paid lip service to the proposition that ‘counter-insurgency’ required a mixed civilian-military strategy, last year the military dominated and defined the choices. And even though everyone agreed the war would not end in a purely military outcome, State was never able to make a detailed presentation to the full N.S.C. on the civilian-political process or the possibility of a political solution to the war.”
He had been deprived of a chance to convince the president personally, despite the enormous stakes in the war. “Unlike the military, the civilians never had a meeting alone with the President, with the important exception of your weekly private meeting with the President, which I attended once.” Petraeus was selling “tempered optimism,” he continued, but “I have my doubts. . . . There is a fundamental flaw in our strategy: the mismatch between our stated objectives and the time and resources allocated to achieve them.”
At this point, he continued, “The best that can be hoped for is a bloody stalemate. Moreover, as far as I can tell, one constant about counter-insurgency: It does not work against an enemy with a safe sanctuary—and I do not believe we can get Pakistan to see its strategic interests as being symmetrical with ours.” He had been working on these problems since he took office; it sounded as if he was giving up.
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On Thursday, December 9, Holbrooke lunched with one journalist, Susan Glasser, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and dined with a second, Michael Abramowitz, a longtime Washington Post reporter and editor who had recently taken up a senior position at the Holocaust Museum. Holbrooke met Abramowitz at 1789, an expensive Georgetown restaurant. (Holbrooke complained that while in government service, his expenses were outrunning his income by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.) They talked for two and a half hours about family and journalism. Holbrooke lamented the passing of “fact-based” reporters and the rise of bloggers who trafficked in drivel.16
The next morning, at 7:30 a.m., Holbrooke called Ruggiero to prepare for a briefing later that morning with Hillary Clinton. The White House had scheduled a Principals Committee meeting for Saturday, December 11, to review drafted assessments by the national security staff that reviewed how the Afghan war was going a year after Obama’s West Point speech.
Holbrooke arrived late on State’s seventh floor and found Clinton with her aides, including Jake Sullivan. He joined the discussion but suddenly turned very red.
“Richard, what is the matter?” Clinton asked.
“Something horrible is happening,” he answered.17
Clinton told him to seek treatment from State’s medical unit at once. Soon Holbrooke lay prone in an ambulance racing to George Washington University Hospital. Doctors found a tear in his aorta. They operated for twenty-one hours but did not emerge optimistic.
Clinton attended the Principals meeting on Saturday with Ruggiero to discuss the Munich meeting wit
h Tayeb Agha. Everyone was in casual weekend clothes. Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were in a pitched battle with Doug Lute and his national security staff over the staff’s judgments about progress—or the lack of it—in Afghanistan.
Gates argued that the N.S.C.’s paper understated military gains on the Afghan battlefield. Clinton argued that State’s diplomatic and civilian efforts in Afghanistan were going better than the N.S.C. paper described. The pair was “furious” at Lute’s pessimism about the war, in Gates’s characterization. Gates argued that Lute “appeared to question the strategy itself rather than identify how to make it work better.”18
Yet to Lute and his staff, the facts were stubborn: The war was not going well. Why shoot the messenger? Since the late 2009 West Point speech, the I.S.A.F. command had expanded the number of “key terrain districts” to ninety-six, effectively enlarging the size of the battlefield N.A.T.O. was supposed to subdue. Lute and others at the White House were digging in against any effort by Petraeus and Gates to prolong a counterinsurgency war that they believed was not sustainable. Lute’s position, backed by his N.S.C. staff, was that the color-coded metrics on the C.I.A.’s District Assessment maps of Afghanistan, updated late in 2010, had not changed much—the hard data described a stalemate that might slightly favor the United States, although it wasn’t clear for how long. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate, a product of the entire intelligence community, was pessimistic. Petraeus, Gates, and Clinton might “feel” progress being made, but where was the objective evidence? Moreover, Lute argued, whatever territorial gains might be made in Kandahar and Helmand, on what basis did anyone think the gains would be held once American forces departed?
