by Steve Coll
I.S.A.F. intelligence sources had warned of the Haqqanis’ truck bomb plan about six weeks before it occurred. But they and the C.I.A. could not pinpoint the truck itself as it rolled into Afghanistan. At one point Admiral Mullen called Kayani and asked him to stop the attack. Kayani said he would try, but how could he locate a single truck in all of North Waziristan? Didn’t the Americans have a better chance with their technical surveillance? When the attack finally occurred, and lives were lost, the Americans were even more aggravated than usual; they had warned I.S.I. and held the service responsible.14
The two deadly Kabul attacks also coincided with secret intelligence reports emanating from I.S.I. It held that Mullah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and Guantánamo prisoner now living in Kabul, had facilitated an American visa for an Al Qaeda operative. The operative, in turn, had joined a plot to carry out car bombings in New York and Washington, to mark ten years since 9/11.
The reporting stretched credulity—how could Zaeef, a known Taliban founder living under Karzai’s protection in Kabul, help anyone obtain an American visa? Yet once such specific threat reporting seeped into the American intelligence system it could be self-propagating, unless it could be affirmatively disproved. Based on the report, the Department of Homeland Security issued heightened warnings and extra New York police poured into the streets. American forces raided Zaeef’s home in south Kabul; he happened to be away. The threat information passed by I.S.I. turned out to be false.15
The Haqqani attacks on Kabul that September infuriated Obama’s war cabinet, however. Marine General James Mattis had taken over Central Command, in charge of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His deputy was Admiral Robert Harward, a Navy SEAL who had served multiple tours in Afghanistan. They saw the Haqqanis’ strikes as a “game changer.” That month, Obama’s national security principals embarked on a near-daily series of meetings to coordinate pressure on Kayani, to deter further attacks, and to try to force the general to do something at last about the sanctuary in North Waziristan.16
The C.I.A., the I.S.A.F., and the N.S.A. had by now accumulated a rich portfolio of evidence about I.S.I. relations with Sirajuddin Haqqani, his brother Badruddin, and other active network commanders. Cell phone intercepts of Badruddin Haqqani made clear that his forces had carried out the truck bomb strike and the embassy assault in September. However, the intercepts did not provide evidence of direct I.S.I. participation. Yet it was clear that the Haqqanis operated with concrete Pakistani support. The Americans had evidence that the Pakistan Army transported the Haqqanis to Rawalpindi for meetings, and that these discussions concerned military operations in Afghanistan.17
Marc Grossman told Kayani that the United States was suspending direct talks with Ibrahim Haqqani. Yet the envoy also told Kayani that the American policy still ultimately sought “inclusive” negotiations among all Afghans. Grossman explained further that the United States would continue to seek the death or capture of Haqqani leaders unless they wanted to reconcile with the Karzai government. Kayani was incredulous. “You can’t say to the Haqqanis, ‘If you don’t come here to talk, we’ll blow your brains out.’” But that was in fact the American position. Grossman and his colleagues thought Kayani was missing the point. The attack on the American embassy crossed a line—Kayani had to do everything possible to bring his Directorate S clients under control.18
It got worse. On September 23, a Taliban assassin with a bomb rigged inside his turban visited the home of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the seventy-one-year-old leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami party in Afghanistan and the de facto political leader of the old Northern Alliance. The assassin bent in greeting, detonated himself, and killed Rabbani. Hamid Karzai had appointed Rabbani to lead his High Peace Council, a body of diverse Afghan figures that Karzai hoped might eventually develop a peace deal with the Taliban, perhaps in concert with European and American negotiations, such as the Obama administration’s secret channel with Tayeb Agha. The attack infuriated him. Karzai was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings. Michael Steiner met him there. Karzai signaled that he might have to shut off talks with the Taliban because the killing of Rabbani might be unforgivable for Karzai’s allies in the old Northern Alliance. The attack also wounded Masoom Stanekzai, one of Karzai’s most important advisers on peace negotiations. It took Stanekzai months to recover from his wounds in a hospital in India, which removed a steady voice about the Taliban conundrum from Karzai’s inner circle during a critical time.
The Taliban kept escalating their strikes in Kabul and the Americans kept hoping that Kayani would do something about it. That month, Kayani held another round of long, one-on-one conversations with Obama’s top advisers. In Abu Dhabi, Kayani met Tom Donilon, the national security adviser. In Seville, at a N.A.T.O. meeting, he talked for hours with Mike Mullen; this was their twenty-seventh face-to-face conversation.
Kayani asked four questions. If there were to be peace talks, who among the Taliban is judged to be reconcilable and who is not? Who does what in the negotiating process? What is the sequencing? And what are the time lines for achieving reductions in violence or a political settlement?
The White House composed a classified paper for Kayani to address these questions. The general said he appreciated the paper, yet his meetings with American officials volleyed back and forth between planning for peace talks and threats about I.S.I.’s role.19
“We’re at a crossroads,” Donilon warned Kayani. If the Haqqani truck bomb had killed seventy American soldiers, the U.S. military would have again attacked inside Pakistan in response, he said. If the Haqqanis continued to hit American targets, “You’ve really turned your fate over” to the network, he warned.20
Mullen was scheduled to testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22. In the Principals meetings about the Haqqanis that month, Mullen had heard Hillary Clinton denounce the enemy in bloodthirsty language: “We ought to hang every one of them,” she had said. Mullen found her remarks bracing and even a little inspiring. Mullen knew that because of his visible relationship with Kayani, he was in a distinctive position to declare publicly that I.S.I. had crossed a line. He decided to speak out. “With I.S.I. support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” Mullen testified to the Senate committee. “The Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.”
The testimony made headlines. To Mullen’s dismay, Clinton and Grossman expressed surprise at his statements—surprise that he had seemed surprised by the revelation that I.S.I. backed Haqqani violence. President Obama also told aides that he thought Mullen was grandstanding. Obama remained firmly committed to the negotiating track with Tayeb Agha; he didn’t want it undermined gratuitously.21
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On October 19, 2011, Hillary Clinton flew in to Kabul on an unannounced visit. With Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador, she met Hamid Karzai at the palace.
“This has been a tough year,” Clinton acknowledged. There had been many casualties suffered by the Afghan security forces, and many killings of Afghan civilians, mainly by the Taliban, but also in mistaken actions by N.A.T.O. forces. “We feel for you,” she said.
“The Afghan people are united,” Karzai told her. “All of them are angry at Pakistan. I’m under immense pressure to do something. Pakistan is the address. How far is the U.S. willing to go?”
“We’re willing to take the fight to Pakistan,” Clinton assured him. She pointed to the C.I.A. drone war in Waziristan. Yet we also have to talk, Clinton went on. We have to structure peace negotiations. We want transparency and to have Afghans in the room. “Pakistan will also have to be there,” she said. “How do we structure the process of talking and fighting?”
Clinton told Karzai about the most recent meeting with Tayeb Agha. There were difficulties, but they were still negotiating for
a possible five-to-one exchange of prisoners—the five senior Taliban detainees at Guantánamo in exchange for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. If that deal was successful, then Mullah Mansour, Omar’s deputy, would lead substantive Taliban negotiations about the war and the future of Afghan politics.
“It has to happen more quickly,” Karzai said. “Put a lot more pressure on Pakistan,” he advised. “Stir up the Pashtuns. They should realize they’re being used as a tool by Pakistan to hurt Afghanistan.”22
Clinton flew on to Islamabad. She met Kayani. Her message was “We can’t get off of talk and fight. This is our policy. We know you think it’s contradictory, but we don’t.”23
Clinton tried to convince Kayani that the Obama administration was unified on both the fight and talk tracks. But Kayani and his advisers, particularly the savvy Washington watcher Maleeha Lodhi, had their own reading. She judged that the White House and the State Department were more invested in a serious exit negotiation with the Taliban than the Pentagon or the C.I.A., which hoped to fight on. With all the high-level American visitors tromping through Islamabad, Kayani and Lodhi had their own exposure to Obama’s interagency diversity, one principal at a time.
Kayani told Clinton that America had to determine when fight-and-talk could converge into a single policy. “You have to consider ways that you get some kind of mutual reduction in violence,” he insisted. That would be more conducive to a peace process than opening a high-level Taliban office in Qatar, he added.
Clinton tried to clarify the messages Mattis and Donilon had delivered the previous month. “We’re not talking about a large military operation” against the Haqqanis, she said. “Can’t you just squeeze them?”
“The clarity has to come on the bigger issues,” Kayani demurred, meaning how negotiations might end the war and create regional stability. “Then the Haqqanis are part of that.”24
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Soon after Clinton returned to Washington, Tayeb Agha delivered the biggest breakthrough yet: He handed over a proof-of-life video showing that Bowe Bergdahl was still in one piece, in Haqqani custody. The video galvanized the Conflict Resolution Cell at the White House. Here was proof that Tayeb Agha, without ever leaving Qatar, had the ability to communicate even with the Haqqanis. And here was a chance for the Obama administration to bring America’s only formal known prisoner of war home.
The video persuaded the White House to move forward with preparations for a prisoner swap, despite the political risks. Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, negotiated with Qatar’s attorney general on a memorandum of understanding that would lay out how the Varsity Five at Guantánamo would be controlled if they were released to Qatar’s care.
Leon Panetta, now secretary of defense, faced a legal requirement, imposed by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, the main defense spending bill, to certify under his signature that the released prisoners would not pose a threat to American civilians. Overall, analysts outside the Pentagon thought the risk was reasonable to bear. The five Taliban had been out of the war for a decade. They could negotiate and enforce close monitoring by Qatar. But the standard in the law was a high bar and the decision weighed on Panetta.
On a Sunday in mid-November, Denis McDonough, then the deputy national security adviser, called Johnson, counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, and other senior officials to the Situation Room to review the case files of the five senior Taliban prisoners. Harold Koh, the State Department’s top lawyer, Avril Haines, the top national security lawyer at the White House, and Michael Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, attended. Frank Ruggiero was there, too, with Barnett Rubin.
The C.I.A. assessed with “high confidence” that the prisoners, absent some control on their movements, would seek to return to the war, and the agency also had concerns that even if they were banned from travel outside Qatar, they might be used by the Taliban for fund-raising purposes.
Johnson said he had received assurances from the highest levels of Qatar—meaning, from the emir himself—that the five prisoners would not return to violence, nor threaten the United States or its allies. Their families would come to live with them and would provide information. Qatar would watch their associations and place the five into some kind of ideological rehabilitation program, reporting every two weeks.
“None of these individuals has been involved in terrorism,” John Brennan reported. “They’re just held because they’re Taliban.” The C.I.A. assessed that Khairkhwa, the former Helmand governor, “could be a threat, but he could also be good for reconciliation.”
Over hours, they reviewed the prisoners’ files and various intelligence assessments. Daniel Fried, a career diplomat who served as a special envoy in charge of seeking the closure of Guantánamo, argued that the record of Qatar and like Gulf States in preventing international travel by former prisoners was poor. McDonough pushed the group to assess the worst case—what if the five prisoners did go back to the war? Would it really be much of a military setback for N.A.T.O. or the Afghan government? They were looking to bring an American home and to explore a political settlement that could stabilize the region. There were risks in every direction.
“None of these guys are game changers,” Brennan said.
The problem, they agreed, wasn’t the law; the detainees’ case files suggested they were eligible for release. The problem wasn’t military risk; these were graying political types, and even if they escaped and tried to fight the United States, they would not alter the war. The problem, as always with Guantánamo, was politics. As Fried put it, “We have to be ready for a hysterical reaction on Capitol Hill.” But the main issue for now was finding a way to enforce a travel ban, through Qatar, that would stick.25
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At Bonn, Germany, in December 2001, Hamid Karzai had been selected as chairman of the post-Taliban interim authority in Afghanistan. Ten years later, with Al Qaeda diminished and Bin Laden dead, but the Taliban on the march, international diplomats reassembled there. The idea was to reaffirm global solidarity with Afghanistan and to support a new phase of Afghan and regional peace negotiations.
Grossman hoped to announce the opening of a Taliban office in Doha within months after the Bonn conference—this would be the biggest advance in diplomacy with the Taliban in a decade. Grossman asked a team of aides to research past negotiations of this character—between Israel and the Palestinians at Madrid, and between factions of the Bosnian war at Dayton, as orchestrated by Holbrooke. Grossman interviewed Henry Kissinger about how the Vietnam talks had been structured. His staff prepared a memo describing a refined approach to decisive negotiations in Turkey, as soon as the summer of 2012, supported by international governments. Most of the classified memoranda of understanding necessary to open the office—providing guarantees about what the office would and would not be used for—had by now been agreed in principle among the Taliban, the United States, and Qatar. Grossman would travel from Bonn to meet Tayeb Agha in Doha, finalize terms for the Taliban office, and then finalize a Taliban statement denouncing terrorism. The idea was that Hamid Karzai would endorse the Taliban political office as an important step toward peace, as would many other governments. From that milestone, they would move quickly toward prisoner exchanges and fuller peace negotiations.
On Sunday, December 4, Grossman and Ryan Crocker met with Karzai in Bonn.
“As I have told you all along, Mr. President, we’re now at a place where I am going to leave the Bonn Conference in two days and I am going to meet Tayeb Agha and complete the negotiation” on the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, Grossman said.26
Karzai blew up. Sometime between meeting Clinton in October and arriving in Germany, he had concluded once again that the Qatar office was proof that the United States planned to cut a separate peace with the Taliban, accommodating Pakistan, at his expense. He now refused to support the Qatar office on the terms Grossman outlined.
He yelled at the
m and made wild accusations. “You betrayed me—you killed Rabbani,” he said. He claimed that he had “never heard any of this” about Grossman’s step-by-step plan toward peace talks.
“Excuse me,” Grossman replied, “I’ve seen you once a month” during the Tayeb Agha saga. He, Ruggiero, and Steiner had kept Karzai fully informed. On the crazy accusation that they wanted Rabbani dead and had conspired in his assassination, Grossman said, “You can’t talk to us like that.”
He and Crocker were flabbergasted. The next day, Karzai invited them and Hillary Clinton to join him for lunch at his hotel. He ripped into Clinton, too, although he refrained from accusing her of murdering Rabbani. Karzai insisted that only he could grant the Taliban the concession of a political office, not the United States.
They were all flummoxed and frustrated, but afterward Clinton said they had to accept that Karzai was the sovereign leader of Afghanistan. “Listen, he’s our ally,” she said. They had many equities in Afghanistan—troops, N.A.T.O.’s commitments, and counterterrorism programs. “We have to take his views into account.” Grossman agreed. He thought he could work Karzai’s terms forward, that they weren’t impossible to manage.
Crocker thought he understood Karzai’s decision, and in some respects he agreed with him. These were not Karzai’s talks. He could not control them, and the Americans’ willingness to talk to the Taliban without Karzai, even preliminarily, signaled his weakness. If the American talks succeeded, Karzai might well lose control of events. If he refused to cooperate, there was less chance that he would become vulnerable.
Grossman canceled his scheduled meeting with Tayeb Agha in Doha and returned to Washington. In January, he flew to Kabul to see if he could bring Karzai back into the negotiation. But in a meeting at the Arg Palace, Karzai presented what some Americans involved came to describe as his three “poison pills,” meaning terms that Karzai knew or should have known were too onerous to be accepted. First, the Qataris had to travel to Kabul to explain the Taliban political office to Karzai. Second, there had to be a memorandum of understanding negotiated between Karzai’s government and the Taliban. Third, before the office opened, the Taliban had to agree to meet with representatives of the Karzai government. The only positive thing he said about the negotiations to date was that he understood the Americans’ humanitarian concern about winning the release of the Taliban prisoner Bowe Bergdahl. He had no objection to a prisoner exchange, including one involving the Varsity Five, if that was the reason. But he was dead set against Grossman’s original terms for opening a Taliban political office.
