Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  British prime minister David Cameron, who was collaborating with Obama on the negotiation, had hosted Karzai and Kayani at Chequers, his country residence, to encourage them to support reconciliation. On April 23, 2013, John Kerry, the secretary of state, also hosted Karzai and Kayani at Truman Hall, the twenty-seven-acre residence of the U.S. ambassador to N.A.T.O. in Brussels. They set up a U-shaped table in the ambassador’s living room, looking out on his gardens. Kerry, Karzai, and Kayani took a walk together on the wooded grounds. During the summit, Lute handed Kayani a copy of the draft statement for the Taliban that Hayes had prepared. Kayani had now achieved the position that I.S.I. had always said it sought: negotiating agent for the Taliban.

  Kayani insisted that he did not know where Mullah Mohammad Omar was. More than two years later, the Taliban would admit that on the very day Kayani, Karzai, and Kerry met in Brussels, Omar died of tuberculosis in a Karachi hospital. If Kayani knew of the Taliban emir’s dire condition, he kept it to himself while working on the statement in Omar’s name. None of the Americans involved had a clue. Kayani continued to represent to the Americans that he was carrying messages from Omar. Afghan intelligence did have a sense that Omar might be dead, but it could not prove it to the satisfaction of the Americans. The National Directorate of Security had developed a source with access to a wife of Mullah Omar’s. The wife reportedly traveled to Karachi for conjugal visits with her husband every few months. That spring, the source reported that on the wife’s regular visit, she had not been able to see him and had gleaned that he had died. But this was a single source, reporting hearsay from an agent that nobody had vetted.

  The effort to finalize all the documents for the Qatar grand opening proved to be a grind. They went around and around about the office M.O.U. Karzai remained sensitive about any form of agreement that would appear to elevate the Taliban to a status equivalent to that of his elected government. They finally decided to abandon the memorandum and replace it with a series of letters. The Qatari government would write a diplomatic note, encompassing the previously agreed terms of the M.O.U., addressed to the State Department, assuring the United States that the rules would be followed. And Obama would write a letter to Karzai, essentially offering his own guarantee: no command and control, no fund-raising, and the outpost would be called the Political Office of the Afghan Taliban. Obama also telephoned the emir of Qatar to cement the understanding. It was questionable how firmly these documents bound the Taliban to terms.

  The grand opening was scheduled for June. The average daytime high temperature in Qatar during June well exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Doha sinks into a shimmering torpor. To oversee the preparations, Jeff Hayes, Jarrett Blanc (a deputy to Dobbins), and Barney Rubin flew to Qatar. There were more delays. Rubin and Blanc left before the opening.

  At last, it was agreed to debut the office on June 18. A few nights before, a C.I.A.-N.S.A. team of black-bag specialists broke into the Taliban office compound in Doha to plant listening devices. These were offshore specialists who came and went from break-in jobs around the world, focused only on the narrow task assigned them. Once inside, the team members saw firsthand all the preparations the Taliban had made for the grand opening, but they were not briefed on what agreements had been made about the movement’s presentation. The team did its work and reported nothing amiss.

  Opening day, the Conflict Resolution Cell learned that Al Jazeera was planning live coverage of a debut press conference given by the Taliban at the new office. Lute watched the broadcast in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. At the State Department, in the special envoy’s ground-floor suite, someone had brought champagne. Years of work, long days, endless flights, and hundreds of memos and meetings had finally produced a diplomatic breakthrough that might yet reduce Afghanistan’s violence and end some of its suffering.

  Al Jazeera’s anchor cut to the scene. The screen showed a giant sign behind the speaker’s podium that read ISLAMIC EMIRATE OF AFGHANISTAN. Out front of the building, the broadcast showed, was a flagpole. It flew the former black-and-white flag of the Islamic Emirate high above the compound’s wall.

  “Fuck,” Lute announced.

  The Taliban had blatantly violated terms Obama had guaranteed to Karzai. The Afghan president reacted furiously and quickly. He announced his withdrawal from the American negotiation effort. Later, in public, he waved around the guarantee letter Obama had sent him, to illustrate that no guarantee of the United States could ever be trusted.

  After a round of phone calls, threats, and pleadings, the Taliban removed their Islamic Emirate sign. Rubin was flying back to Qatar. When he landed in Doha his BlackBerry scrolled one panicked message after another. The Americans told the Taliban they had to remove their flag and sign permanently if they wanted to keep the office. The Taliban signaled that they’d rather close it down. Lute sent Rubin over to the Taliban office several days in a row, to document whether the Taliban had pulled down the flag and sign. At first it turned out that they kept raising their prohibited Islamic Emirate flag in the morning, but only to half-mast so that it could not be seen outside the high walls of the compound.

  It did not take long for the Conflict Resolution Cell to accept that the fiasco was irreversible and that the negotiations they had met on biweekly for three years were dead. They had too many other issues with Karzai—particularly around the continuing security presence in Afghanistan after 2014—to play this losing hand any longer. John Kerry called Karzai and apologized. The United States would not recognize the political office as planned.

  The Doha office failure was an episode of remarkable diplomatic incompetence. The decision to replace the office M.O.U. with letters had created too much ambiguity. The Americans mainly blamed Sheikh Faisal. They suspected he had told the Taliban they could call themselves whatever they wanted, without focusing on where that would leave the Obama administration and Karzai. A deputy foreign minister of Qatar stood at the podium in front of the giant prohibited sign at the debut press conference. At the State Department, a senior career foreign officer told colleagues, “The Qataris fucked up every mediation they’ve been involved with. What made us think this would be any different?”

  For others who had given years to the project, the causes of the failure seemed to lie closer to home. How could the most powerful government on Earth, with tens of thousands of troops at war, at a pivotal moment of negotiations aimed at exiting the war, mess up so badly? How could it be that a scholar on contract with the State Department, an aide to a State Department envoy, and a D.I.A. analyst constituted the entire on-the-ground effort to make sure a complicated, vitally important agreement hit the mark at the moment of its announcement? Where was the U.S. embassy? Where was the C.I.A.? “It was so much the amateur hour, Keystone Kops,” as a participant in the effort put it. “It was just terrible. Terrible. This is the United States. This is what we do?”

  Kayani, too, was stunned at the ineptitude. The message from many of the Pakistanis who had entered the negotiations after the Army House sessions was simple: “How could you guys fuck this up so bad?” For their part, the Taliban had started out believing—insisting, again and again—that the United States was an indispensable party to any negotiation. After June, they shifted toward thinking that the United States was an “utterly incompetent obstacle to anything they might want to achieve,” as the American participant put it.10

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  At the end of 2013, Rob Williams, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, oversaw another National Intelligence Estimate about the Afghan war. It examined several scenarios and found that the level of international support would be the biggest factor determining the future of the Kabul government. If there were no international troops and no international aid available, the regime would likely collapse quickly. One way to interpret the N.I.E. was that the N.A.T.O. troop surge had bought a decent interval before the Afghan government fell under the Taliban’s pressur
e, but unless the United States or its allies were prepared to make a decades-long, South Korea–like commitment to Afghanistan’s security, it had bought little more than that. Looking ahead, there was no way that the Kabul regime would be able to pay on its own for the Afghan National Army and police. This meant any forecast of the durability of the Afghan forces had to account for the willingness of Congress, European governments, Japan, and others to write large checks to subsidize Kabul indefinitely. At the C.I.A., officers like Chris Wood, who had been working in the country since the fall of 2001, told colleagues that they were confident the Taliban would be back in power by 2017. The Afghan forces were being asked to take charge of their war very rapidly. At the beginning of 2013, there were about 100,000 international troops in the International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan. Of those, 68,000 were American, 9,000 were British, 4,400 were German, 3,000 were Italian, and almost 2,000 were Polish. A year later, the total international force had shrunk to about 57,000, with 38,000 troops from the United States. The force was on a fast glide path to fewer than 20,000 international soldiers.11

  The National Intelligence Estimate pointed out that when the Soviet Union withdrew from its Afghan war in the late 1980s, Moscow was able to hold off the C.I.A.-backed mujaheddin rebels by pouring in subsidies to its client government in Kabul, which was led by former Communists. The numbers were admittedly squishy, but the Soviets poured in between $3 billion and $6 billion annually, in 2011 dollars, the analysis estimated. But Moscow did not have an independently elected Congress to worry about and could print money at will. And the Soviets were willing to provide an enormous amount of equipment by land and air. The estimate raised doubts about the comparable durability of N.A.T.O. and American commitments to Karzai’s successor. In the short term, the N.I.E. forecast, the Taliban would gain more territory in the countryside. About the major controversy of the war, the role of I.S.I., it found that to bring the Taliban to heel, it would be necessary to do something about the movement’s safe havens in Pakistan, but the analysis also held that the sanctuaries were not the only cause of the Taliban’s revival. The movement had its own political objectives—restoration of the Islamic Emirate—that it pursued by guerrilla and terrorist violence, without reference to Pakistan.

  C.I.A. analysts had taken a dark view of Afghanistan’s prospects for years now. They had been equally confident in 1989 that the Soviet-backed government in Kabul would collapse quickly, and that analysis had proved wrong. President Najibullah’s regime fell only after the Soviet Union itself dissolved and its subsidies ended abruptly. James Dobbins was accustomed to reading predictions of doom from his intelligence counterparts. He knew they weren’t always right. Afghanistan was not the same country it had been in 1989 or 2001. In the decade since the Taliban’s fall, it had undergone rapid urbanization, and there was a new anti-Taliban generation in the cities that enjoyed connectivity to the world and rising literacy rates. He thought it was hard to say how Afghan elites and networks would perform after the withdrawal of the large international military force, although he agreed with the N.I.E.’s forecast that a rapid and complete withdrawal might lead to the collapse of Karzai’s government. The willingness of Congress and N.A.T.O. governments to subsidize Kabul adequately was an uncertainty, but it was not a given they would withdraw aid quickly, he argued.12

  The debacle at Doha left Dobbins and Lute to turn to the forthcoming Afghan presidential election to try to manage the risks of a failed transition at the Arg Palace. Now that he had been proven right about the American talks with the Taliban, Karzai went back to probing for negotiations with the Taliban on his own. In September 2013, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif released from prison Mullah Baradar, the longtime Taliban number two. The Karzai family had long pointed to Baradar as a potential Taliban peacemaker, but it wasn’t clear that this hope had any basis in fact. There were intelligence reports that while in I.S.I. custody, Baradar had suffered a stroke and had become reticent, or that he had stopped taking important medication, or that he had taken too much medication. At least one official who read the reports thought that perhaps Baradar, fearful that he would be forced into talks with Karzai’s government, which he still rejected as illegitimate, had somehow figured out a way to become silent. Like Mullah Mohammad Omar’s health condition, here was another Taliban mystery inside a mystery, shrouded by I.S.I.

  With the Obama administration, Karzai continued to thrash about, refusing to sign an agreement that would allow U.S. forces to remain. The White House leaked word to the press that it might preempt Karzai by adopting a “zero option,” a complete pullout of all American forces. At one point during this back-and-forth, early in 2014, Karzai telephoned Zalmay Khalilzad from Kabul to talk about the issue. Karzai was in “broadcast” mode, meaning that he knew his phone was being listened to by diverse intelligence agencies. He spoke with those audiences in mind.

  “You should think about the implications if the U.S. decides to go for the zero option,” Khalilzad told him, “not only for the current generations of Afghans, and for all that has been accomplished, but for future generations. Once in a while you are confronted with big decisions. And this is perhaps the biggest decision facing Afghanistan since the Soviet departure.”

  Karzai said that if the United States continued to conduct military operations in which innocent Afghans died, “It is better that they leave than that they stay. They are in bed with Pakistan and they won’t restart a peace process, which they could easily do. If they leave, then we will have to deal with Pakistan ourselves, as to what to do.”

  “Look,” Khalilzad said, “if you wanted to show that you are not a lackey of the United States, you have accomplished that. That box has been checked. Now one has to think about the future of thirty million Afghans, as well as future generations. If it all unravels, who knows when it can be brought back together again? You have to think of your responsibility to this, to the people, and to future generations.”

  “I am very much at peace for the first time,” Karzai answered. “I am more at peace than I have ever been because I know this is the right thing to do. Either America stays in a different way or it leaves. If the U.S. leaves, I can explain it to the Afghan people, and they will understand.”13

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Coups d’État

  Rahmatullah Nabil first took charge of Afghan intelligence in 2010, after Hamid Karzai forced the resignation of Amrullah Saleh, amid Karzai’s flirtations with I.S.I. Nabil was not connected to any of the major armed factions from the eras of the Soviet occupation and the subsequent civil war. Before the Taliban’s fall, he had worked for a decade in Kabul for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, as a manager. He remained at the U.N. after Karzai took power, until 2003, when he joined the staff of the new National Security Council at the Arg Palace. Soon, Karzai appointed him to supervise his bodyguards and Palace Protection Service, akin to the United States Secret Service. The job required coordination with the C.I.A., the State Department, European security services, and private contractors. Karzai and his closest advisers wanted a capable manager who was also a reliable Pashtun. Nabil gradually became a trusted member of Karzai’s inner circle and watched up close as the president struggled with the pressures of office and became alienated from the United States.

  When Karzai removed Amrullah Saleh, he initially appointed another personal confidant, Ibrahim Speenzada, as acting director of N.D.S. But he did not want the job permanently. Karzai summoned Nabil to the palace. “What do you think if I send you to N.D.S.?” he asked.

  Nabil had the leadership experience to do the job, he believed, and he said that he would work honestly. “But the biggest problem is, I don’t have any political support.” N.D.S. officers knew the secrets of powerful politicians and gunmen, they tapped phones, they monitored coup plots and other security threats. The legacy of K.G.B. training and Panjshiri patronage at N.D.S. that had grown up under Engineer Arif and th
en Amrullah Saleh, both aides to Ahmad Shah Massoud, would be difficult for a Pashtun technocrat to take on, and Nabil had no network of his own to call upon. Yet Karzai insisted.1

  When Nabil moved into Amrullah Saleh’s office that summer, he noticed a framed photograph of Hamid Karzai on the wall and beside it markings that indicated a second picture had been removed. He asked what had been there. It was a photograph of Commander Massoud, one of his new aides explained. Saleh had taken it with him when he departed. Nabil ordered another photo of Massoud mounted in its place. It was going to be difficult to convince his colleagues that he aspired to be a postethnic Afghan patriot, but he had to start somewhere.

  Gradually, Nabil educated himself about the secrets he had inherited. He learned about the source networks Saleh had built to watch the Taliban, particularly across the border in Pakistan. One of the most sensitive operations involved the Pakistani Taliban. After C.I.A. drone missiles killed Baitullah Mehsud, the founder of the movement, his brother Hakimullah had succeeded him as emir. During 2009, under Hakimullah’s spur, the Pakistani Taliban entered into a full-blown revolutionary war against the Pakistani state, often including I.S.I. The National Directorate of Security was also in a full-blown war against the I.S.I. Under the old adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” there seemed scope for Afghan intelligence to cooperate with the Pakistani Taliban. At first, N.D.S. developed sources in the movement only for intelligence collection, Nabil learned. The Pakistani Taliban were present throughout Waziristan, so Mehsud tribal sources could offer helpful information. Hakimullah Mehsud later sent a deputy, Latif Ullah Mehsud, to Kabul, to deepen cooperation. For their part, I.S.I. officers repeatedly told American counterparts that Pakistani Taliban commanders were agents of India and N.D.S. The Americans often discounted these claims; with reason, they saw the movement as blowback from the Pakistan Army’s long succoring of militancy. In any event, while it was not clear what role, if any, India had in Nabil’s operation with the Mehsuds, the N.D.S. director and his senior officers had no qualms about signaling to Pakistan that they could always do to Pakistan what I.S.I. did to Afghanistan, even if they had to work with murderous figures like the Mehsud leaders.2