by Steve Coll
Kayani said he agreed. In fact, his army’s experiences in the tribal areas since 2008 had led him, by 2012, to an outlook similar to Lute’s: Enough with clear-hold-build-transfer. He had lost faith in the effectiveness of military clearing operations. And after the annus horribilis of 2011, it was a relief to be freed from the grand ambitions of Plan Pakistan. If this was a transactional relationship, a matter of hardheaded interests, not a deep strategic partnership, then it was possible to let go of some of the emotions of betrayal and disappointment.
Kayani’s idea was to approach the problem of reducing violence in Afghanistan subtly, privately, through local managed cease-fires and political experiments in different Afghan provinces. But when Lute and Lavoy pressed Kayani for specifics, they felt he often drifted off into abstraction. The Americans sought to draw the discussions toward a negotiating plan, to revive the suspended talks with Tayeb Agha, to achieve the goals already identified—a prisoner exchange, a Taliban political office in Qatar, and the advancement of comprehensive talks that would include Karzai’s government and its democratic opposition.
In April, Ryan Crocker and Marine General John Allen concluded months of negotiations with Karzai over a new strategic partnership agreement between the United States and Afghanistan, one designed to publicly ratify American commitment to Afghanistan’s future security. Obama agreed to fly to Kabul to sign the document with Karzai, a symbolic and visible gesture of public diplomacy. Karzai wanted a grand ceremony where elders from across the country would attend. Crocker, too, thought a grand event would send a strong signal. Yet the Secret Service, taking note of the suicide bomber who killed Rabbani with explosives hidden in a turban, insisted that anyone in Obama’s presence would have to remove his turban and be fully searched. There was no way Karzai could honorably ask Afghan leaders to subject themselves to such a search. He fulminated and fumed to Crocker and the White House. In the end, Obama stayed six hours in Kabul under cover of darkness, flying by helicopter from Bagram to the Arg for a brief one-on-one with Karzai before they signed at midnight. The president seemed distant and distracted. Karzai offered him tea or coffee, but Obama refused, an insulting breach of local protocol, as the president surely knew by now. In a televised speech from Bagram, Obama acknowledged more directly than ever before his administration’s secret talks with the Taliban, and he spoke of “a future in which war ends, and a new chapter begins.”
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That spring, Kayani announced that Ahmad Shuja Pasha would retire as I.S.I. chief, three and a half years after he took charge. Kayani named General Zahir ul-Islam as Pasha’s successor. Islam was a Punjabi whose father had been a brigadier in the Pakistan Army. His most notable physical feature was an impressively bushy mustache. He had most recently served as the powerful corps commander in Karachi. Earlier, he had done a tour as an officer in the I.S.I. section that manipulated domestic politics. Pasha moved to Abu Dhabi to enroll his son in school there.
Barnett Rubin flew to Islamabad to try to understand Pakistan’s position after the breakdown with Tayeb Agha. He met twice over the next few months with Major General Sahibzada Pataudi, the I.S.I. director of analysis, as well as his deputy, Brigadier Saleem Qamar Butt, who ran the desk that analyzed the United States. For the first meeting, Rubin rode to I.S.I. headquarters with an embassy note taker. The second time, they agreed to speak more informally. Pataudi served lunch. They agreed that they were talking as individuals, not negotiating for their governments.
“We don’t want to be a spoiler, and we don’t want the Taliban breathing down our necks for some spite that was never intended,” Pataudi said. “We need to see a process out in the open that we can rely on. We can’t guarantee anything.”
Rubin asked Pataudi what he thought the Taliban’s negotiating position would be, if they got that far. The I.S.I. general said he thought the Taliban had matured while in exile. They had started as “young kids just out of the madrassas, eager to kill. When they started to govern, they imposed a tough version of Sharia, and people are afraid that will happen again.” Yet over the past ten years of exposure to Pakistan, the international community, traveling to Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States, many Taliban leaders had developed a different worldview. “Look at the new stuff, the idea of women soldiers,” Pataudi said. “It all seeps in.”
Pakistan’s worst fear, he went on, was another civil war in Afghanistan—more drugs pouring into Pakistan, more guns, more warlords. “We’d like to fence the border.” The Taliban were on the ascendance, Pataudi believed. The only incentive that might work would be to offer the Taliban a share of political power through a transparent process, after adequate confidence-building measures.4
Rubin and Chris Kolenda at the Pentagon coauthored a new classified strategy document. The paper outlined a regional framework, one that could be a basis for negotiations with the Taliban, Pakistan, Karzai, and other Afghan groups, as well as neighboring governments such as China and Iran. Lute and Lavoy agreed that leveraging China’s influence over Pakistan could be helpful, even decisive, in developing a durable peace plan, although the idea of involving Iran looked too complicated, given the separate track of nuclear negotiations under way. It was hard for Rubin to inventory how many papers of this ilk he had written or cowritten since arriving at the State Department in 2009. He had never had faith in his government’s ability to use its power constructively in Afghanistan, but now his enthusiasm about trying had started to wane. The obstacles seemed so great.
One afternoon that autumn, Rubin arrived at one of the White House visitor gates for a meeting of the Conflict Resolution Cell that had been called to discuss his latest paper. Rubin had a top secret security clearance and was typically cleared into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building without incident. But a guard pulled him aside and said that he would require an escort. The guard called Lute’s office but couldn’t find anyone. Fed up, Rubin told the officer, “It’s okay. If I’m too dangerous to national security to discuss my own paper, I’ll leave.” He went back to his office at State.
Jeff Eggers, Lute’s deputy, soon called him, asked him to return, and apologized. Rubin noted that this had been happening to him throughout his time in government, but only when he visited the White House. It was a running joke among them: “No Taliban in the White House.” Lute asked the Secret Service what was really going on. They told him they couldn’t disclose the answer, due to privacy laws.
“Look, if it’s because he has contact with some dubious people, and he has phone calls with some dangerous people—he’s doing that for us.”
No, the reply came. “It’s a criminal matter.”
When he heard that, Rubin knew right away what it was. At Yale, as an activist with Students for a Democratic Society, he had been arrested several times in connection with protests over the Vietnam War. He had an F.B.I. file. Half a century later, he could hold a top secret clearance but could not walk around the White House without an escort. Eventually, the Secret Service agreed to waive their policy in his case.5
The cabinet principals approved the Rubin-Kolenda strategy paper for renewed negotiations with the Taliban on November 30, 2012. Around the same time, through Sheikh Faisal and the Qatari government, the Conflict Resolution Cell revived their confidence-building plan to break the deadlock with Tayeb Agha.
They returned to the idea that opening the Taliban’s political office in Qatar would provide a visible, practical springboard to negotiations, a new atmosphere for diplomacy. The two sides could pursue the prisoner exchange plan from there. Earlier, they had tried to resolve all the issues in advance. Now they would concentrate on opening the office and then negotiate about prisoners.
To try that, however, they would have to persuade Hamid Karzai to drop the “poison pill” objections he had made, such as his demand that the Taliban talk to his government first. The Obama administration invited Karzai to Washington for a state visit in January. The
visible purpose was to try to coax Karzai into a security agreement that would allow American forces to remain in Afghanistan after 2014. In private, they also worked to move Karzai off his blocking position.
After Karzai and his senior aides settled in at Blair House, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon summoned them to the Situation Room. Lute introduced an intelligence briefing on how the United States saw its future in Afghanistan. The briefing made a factual case that the Taliban were essentially self-sufficient, indigenous, had no meaningful connection to Al Qaeda, and were not owned and operated by I.S.I. The latter finding was a matter of emphasis; even if Directorate S did not run the Taliban’s war, was it not culpable for the sanctuary the Taliban leadership enjoyed on Pakistani soil? As Marc Grossman once put it to Kayani during this period, “They’re not called the Milwaukee Shura.” Still, the briefing challenged Karzai’s bedrock belief that his country would not be at war if it weren’t for Directorate S and I.S.I. The Afghans erupted into conversation in Dari and Pashto, evidently shocked by the assessment.
Later, Lute explained to Karzai what the intelligence analysis implied about the American mission in Afghanistan after the end of N.A.T.O.-led combat in 2014: The United States would stay on to fight Al Qaeda, not the Taliban. The war against the Taliban—or negotiations to settle the war against the Taliban—would belong to the Afghan government and its security forces, with international subsidies, training, and assistance. It seemed evident to the Americans that this had been the plan all along, but again, Karzai seemed shocked and disoriented. He had never accepted that the Taliban constituted an internal insurgency against his government. In his analysis, they were I.S.I.’s proxy force, mysteriously tolerated by Washington. The Obama administration and Karzai were bound by enormous sacrifices in expenditure and blood, and yet they saw the war in fundamentally different terms.
In their one-on-one, Obama urged Karzai to support a restart of the talks with Tayeb Agha, to drop the “poison pill” terms that had killed the negotiations a year earlier. We need to get past this deadlock, Obama said. He asked Karzai to relent on his condition that the Taliban meet with the Afghan government first. Also, the president went on, they needed to move forward with Qatar. The emirate provided the most credible channel for negotiations. Everybody involved in this—Karzai, the Pakistanis, and American intelligence—assessed that Tayeb Agha was the real deal, Obama said. Let’s not mess around with another mediator, he urged.
Karzai said he was open to compromise. His aides worked to develop a joint statement by Karzai and Obama that would carefully describe the Taliban’s prospective office as being for talks—a form of permission for the office granted by Karzai. The statement said Obama and Karzai “would support an office in Doha for the purpose of negotiations” between Karzai’s High Peace Council “and the authorized representatives of the Taliban.” Qatar then issued its own statement, calling on “the armed opposition to join a political process,” so the Taliban could say that it was their concession. Over dinner with Hillary Clinton, who was in her last weeks at the State Department, Karzai agreed that this would be adequate.
The idea was for the Taliban to have a legitimate political address for the first time since 2001 in just a matter of weeks.
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Obama had moved Karzai, at least temporarily, but the Afghan president remained thoroughly estranged. “You’ve failed,” Karzai told Zalmay Khalilzad over dinner one night late in 2012, referring to the United States. Karzai could sound despondent and threatening at the same time. “Everything will collapse. The army is rubbish. The government is a puppet. And nobody can hold elections in this country. The Americans did not let me come to an agreement with the Taliban, but I can tell you—I can come to an agreement.”6
The C.I.A. and other quarters of the intelligence community continued to circulate classified analysis of Karzai’s mind-set. The best-informed takes on Karzai accounted for his understandable fears and grievances as well as his misguided fantasies about American designs on South and Central Asia. Prohibited by the Afghan constitution from seeking reelection, Karzai sought to remain relevant and influential as the 2014 vote to choose his successor neared. Being disruptive was one way to do that. It was also plain from Karzai’s remarks that, like many political leaders nearing the end of their time in power, he was concerned about his legacy in Afghan history. He was determined to avoid being remembered as an American quisling. Moreover, Karzai believed what he said about the damage done by the American military’s home invasions and battlefield mistakes. Yet his theatrical, emotional remarks over the last few years had left Obama and his aides increasingly jaundiced, beyond frustrated. Karzai was not the only one in this relationship who took things personally.
James Dobbins was seventy years old when Secretary of State John Kerry asked him to become the special envoy early in 2013. Dobbins had worked on the Vietnam peace talks as a young diplomat. He supported the Obama administration’s outreach to Tayeb Agha but had constrained expectations about how quickly it might produce results. On Karzai, his advice was to wait him out and not become too aggravated. It seemed clear to Dobbins that a majority of the Afghan political class, including all of Karzai’s most likely successors, wanted to reach an agreement that would keep some American forces in the country after 2014. If Karzai chose not to sign a deal, his successor would.7
Because Karzai believed that the United States could make Pakistan do whatever it wanted, and that the I.S.I. could turn off the Taliban’s insurgency effortlessly, their failure to act still seemed to him evidence of malign American intent. He seemed to countenance a theory that the United States was deliberately promoting violent instability in the region in order to control Afghanistan or to make things difficult for Iran and China.
“Mr. President, between Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, you have several million documents to examine—can you find any mention of such designs?” Dobbins said. “Do you really think I would lie to you about this?”
“Maybe you don’t know about the plan,” Karzai replied. He referred to there being a “deep state” in America.
“Mr. President, there is no deep state,” Dobbins insisted.8
Chuck Hagel, who became secretary of defense early in 2013, had a history with Karzai dating to the Bush administration. Hagel flew to Kabul on his first trip abroad as defense secretary. Karzai marked his arrival by issuing public invective, asserting that America was aligned with the Taliban to destabilize Afghanistan. Karzai tried to put off meeting Hagel but eventually agreed to see him one-on-one at the palace.
“Mr. President, this has to stop,” Hagel told him. “You may have John McCain and Lindsey Graham and a few senators who will be with you to the end. But that’s not where Congress is, that’s not where the American people are. If you keep screwing around with this you’re going to find yourself way out alone, because this president will pull the plug on you, and the Congress will too. This country has a belly full of you.
“How do you think this plays out in the American press?” Hagel went on. “We’ve got kids out here dying, we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, kids coming back with no legs, and then the blaring headlines are, ‘Karzai accuses us of being traitors.’”
Karzai rarely took the bait in these sorts of conversations. The words just seemed to wash over him. “I understand, Mr. Secretary. You and I have known each other a long time. I value what you’re telling me.”9
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Because it played into Karzai’s paranoia (or, as Karzai might say, confirmed his analysis), the Americans concealed the extent of their collaboration with Kayani after the smoke-filled-room sessions at Army House. Early in 2013, the Qataris worked with the Taliban political leadership to assure the guerrillas that the American desire to revive negotiations with them was legitimate, and that despite the previous failures, the Obama administration would support the opening of a political office in Qatar soon. As for Kayani
and I.S.I., the Americans could never quite tell what they were doing with the Taliban leadership. Kayani continued to repeat his “contact but not control” mantra, and the White House did not initially ask him to take action. The fragmentary evidence available reinforced the impression Tayeb Agha gave that he was hostile to I.S.I.; at one point, the Americans learned that I.S.I. had detained members of the Taliban envoy’s family in Pakistan and threatened the negotiator if he chose to return to Pakistan.
Although they made no public announcement, the Taliban agreed to return to the talks. There ensued weeks of work on two draft documents. One was called the “Office M.O.U.,” or memorandum of understanding. The draft provided that the Taliban could not command or control the insurgency in Afghanistan from the Qatar office. Another provision held that they could not issue propaganda from there. A third was that they could not conduct fund-raising. The Qatari government would finance the office, with no outside contributions, and the money would be monitored by Qatar. Also, the M.O.U. said, the Taliban could not call the office an outpost or embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as they had named their government while in power during the 1990s. Lute’s team came up with a name that the Americans, and later, Karzai, felt was acceptable: the Political Office of the Afghan Taliban. The Taliban representatives stationed there could meet with other diplomats—Europeans, nongovernmental agencies working in Afghanistan, the United Nations. The M.O.U. was to be signed by President Obama and the emir of Qatar. But the Qataris would not go forward unless the Taliban agreed to the final terms. British and Norwegian envoys continued to meet with Tayeb Agha, so they worked as well on bridging the last gaps.
All along, the idea had been that the Taliban would issue a public statement when the office in Qatar opened, repudiating Al Qaeda and terrorism in some fashion. In Washington, Jeff Hayes went back through recent Eid statements issued in the name of Mullah Mohammad Omar. He essentially copied and pasted language previously issued by the Taliban into a single draft statement for the Taliban to release on the big day. (“This sounds like fourth-grade English,” as one American participant put it. “This isn’t the Marshall Plan.”)
