Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Saudi Arabia still feared Iranian influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The Taliban were useful allies for the aims of Saudi statecraft, but they also promoted Islamic values in accord with Saudi theology. Although there were important differences between Saudi Islamic orthodoxy and the Taliban’s strange Deobandi rule making, there were also many similarities. There was a naïve purity about the Taliban that attracted Saudi missionaries.

  For his part Prince Turki believed the Taliban would grow and evolve into a more normal, worldly, conservative Islamic political force. All revolutionary movements started out in a radical vein and gradually moderated, and so would the Taliban, Turki thought. In the meanwhile, the Taliban had much to recommend them: They were not corrupt, they brought order to Afghan cities, and they gratefully accepted Saudi and Pakistani patronage.

  Saudi Arabia itself had been born seven decades earlier under the sword of a radical Islamic militia, the Ikhwan. Gradually the kingdom had grown up, stabilized, and partially modernized. More than any other previous Afghan militia or political movement, the Taliban presented themselves in the Saudi image. Surely, Prince Turki believed, they, too, would mature.46

  AT THE U.S. EMBASSY in Islamabad the Taliban’s rise was evaluated as an isolated Afghan mystery. American diplomats in the Pakistani capital and in Peshawar sifted contradictory rumors and reports, unable to discern the Taliban’s supply sources. “The Taliban have been characterized as simultaneously Pakistani tools and anti-Pakistan,” the Peshawar consulate told Washington in a Confidential cable dispatched on November 3, 1994, as Mullah Omar consolidated control. The consulate said it was “very possible” that the Taliban had received aid from “a number of sources, including Pakistan,” but “their backers may find that they have created a tiger that is more than willing to take independent action and not be anyone’s tool.” The consulate reported ISI contacts with the Taliban but conceded that the movement’s “origins, goals and sponsors … remain unclear.” A second November 1994 cable from Peshawar to Washington, sardonically quoting the lyrics of the rock band the Who, asked about the Taliban: “Meet the New Boss… . Same as the Old Boss?” The movement’s military equipment, some of it freshly unpacked from crates, seemed “too much of a coincidence,” the Peshawar consulate initially reported, and probably suggested covert Pakistani involvement of the type that had previously strengthened Hekmatyar. Abdul Haq warned an American diplomat that same month, “It looks like Afghanistan was first destroyed by the communists, then by the fundamentalists, and now we might be destroyed by the mullahs.” But the State Department was not ready to leap to such conclusions. Its cables that autumn and winter of the Taliban’s rise described the militia as “an enigma” that was “certainly not acting to the exclusive benefit of any of the established vested interests,” and enjoyed widespread popular support. As the Taliban swept west from Kandahar in sophisticated military formations, the U.S. embassy reported that their “use of tanks and helicopters strongly suggested Pakistani tutelage or direct control.” Still, the extent and character of any Pakistani involvement remained “very much in doubt.” Two American diplomats traveled to Kandahar on February 13, 1995, to meet with the Taliban mayor. The session began with a prayer calling for the conversion by unbelievers to Islam. The mayor refused to answer questions from the Americans about the Taliban’s leadership or organization. The movement’s leaders “appeared coached and the overall impression was one of disingenuity and a degree of deception,” the American officials cabled afterward to Washington. It was the beginning of a long string of such lies and evasions—but the U.S. government had few resources in the region to dig beneath the surface. The CIA station and the Pentagon’s defense attachés had other priorities. Afghanistan’s civil war was no longer an important subject for intelligence collection.47

  Benazir Bhutto, who was secretly authorizing the Taliban’s covert aid, did not let the Americans know. She visited Washington in the spring of 1995, met with President Clinton, and promoted the Taliban as a pro-Pakistan force that could help stabilize Afghanistan. During her discussions with Clinton, “Afghanistan was not very high up in either person’s agenda,” Bhutto recalled. The country was “a dying issue.” But she found a receptive audience among midlevel officials for her message about the Taliban’s potential to bring peace. During her visit and for many months afterward Bhutto and her aides repeatedly lied to American government officials and members of Congress about the extent of Pakistani military and financial aid to the Taliban. At a meeting with then acting Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in Washington, Bhutto’s foreign minister and ISI chief both “categorically denied that Pakistan provided military assistance to the Taliban,” as a contemporaneous State Department cable put it. Talbott warned in reply that Pakistan’s policies in Afghanistan were likely to produce “unintended consequences,” because ultimately, groups like the Taliban “could not be controlled.” Later Bhutto herself brazenly lied to Senator Hank Brown and Congressman Charlie Wilson over lunch in Islamabad, telling them that Pakistan’s government “backed the U.N., not the Taliban, in Afghanistan.” Bhutto had decided that it was more important to appease the Pakistani army and intelligence services than to level with her American friends.48

  The relatively small number of American officials at the White House, the CIA, and the State Department who followed Afghanistan tended to accept the Taliban’s own narrative: They were a cleansing, transitional force that would unite Pashtuns and create a new basis for peace. Regional specialists at State—influenced by such Westernized Taliban supporters as Hamid Karzai—welcomed the rise of a militia that might finally pull divided Pashtuns together. At the National Security Council the Taliban were seen in the early stages “as a force that could bring order to chaos,” as one senior official there recalled it. At the CIA, analysts also concluded that the Taliban could stabilize Afghanistan. The Taliban might reduce factional bloodshed, curtail heroin trafficking, and create conditions for realistic peace talks, they believed. The speed at which the Taliban began to rack up military victories left some CIA analysts shaking their heads in amazement. But the Taliban seemed an idiosyncratic Afghan group with no larger significance. The dominant response to the Taliban by the American government was indifference. When Senator Brown, a Democrat from Colorado, tried to organize a new policy initiative, he hit a “wall of silence” at the State Department. “It wasn’t that they favored the Taliban,” he recalled. “It was simply that they didn’t want to get engaged.”49

  Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel, the Clinton administration’s most active Afghan policy maker, accepted many of Benazir Bhutto’s claims and arguments about Afghanistan, and supported Bhutto’s drive to open new trade routes between Pakistan and Central Asia. She defended Bhutto in public against charges that Pakistan was the secret force behind the Taliban’s rise. She also wanted to lift U.S. economic sanctions against Pakistan. She thought the sanctions drove America and Pakistan apart without having any impact on Islamabad’s nuclear ambitions. She and Clinton ultimately won new American aid for Bhutto’s government. They hoped it would strengthen the prime minister’s hand in her struggles with the army and ISI. Since the Clinton administration was heavily invested in Bhutto and since she personally advocated U.S. support for the Taliban, hardly anyone in Washington was inclined to raise doubts as the militia swept north toward the outskirts of Kabul.

  By then American policy in Central Asia had found another impetus: oil and gas.

  As Benazir Bhutto had done, executives at America’s largest energy companies began late in 1995 to imagine the future by studying historical maps. Across Afghanistan travelers along the Silk Road had created fortunes for centuries by moving spice, jewels, and textiles to new markets. The profitable game now—created by the Soviet Union’s collapse—was oil and natural gas. The key trade routes were the same as they had been for centuries. Many led through Afghanistan.

  Robin Raphel and others at the State Department and the White H
ouse believed that for American oil companies, too, the Taliban could be an important part of a new Afghan solution.

  17

  “Dangling the Carrot”

  MARTY MILLER’S LONG, strange journey into Afghanistan began during the summer of 1995. He was edging toward the end of his career, and he itched for a grand achievement. He had recently read The Prize, Daniel Yergin’s epic history of global oil conquest and politics, and the book fired Miller’s imagination. He had spent three decades in the oil business, all with one company, Unocal, America’s twelfth largest energy corporation. He owned a comfortable house beside a golf course outside of Houston, Texas. His daughters had grown up and gone to college. He had worked over the years in faraway places—Indonesia, the North Sea, Thailand—and had risen to vice president in Unocal’s Exploration and Production Division. Now he sought adventure. He could afford to take some risks.1

  Unocal needed a gusher. After more than a century in the oil business, the company faced an identity crisis. It had lost $153 million during 1994, the result of sinking profits in its normally reliable refining and marketing division, and it continued to lag well behind the largest American oil firms.2

  Miller’s superiors thought they saw an opportunity to leapfrog ahead. Vast tracts of land and sea in former communist countries, previously closed to American oil companies, had suddenly been thrown open for exploration. Instead of settling for life as “a midsized, integrated oil company,” chief executive Roger C. Beach proclaimed that Unocal would bid to become “the world’s largest energy resource company.” The key was to go places where no one else dared. Afghanistan was such a place.3

  Beach charged his deputy and designated successor, a charismatic yachtsman named John F. Imle Jr., to lead Unocal’s gambit. Imle needed project managers who shared the company’s budding appetite for risk. In Marty Miller, an avuncular, round man with combed-back white hair and a rosy face, Imle found a willing partner. As a boy Miller had worked in his grandfather’s Colorado coal mine. He had barely been able to pay his way through college. When Unocal offered him a summer job on an oil rig, he switched his studies to petroleum engineering. After decades of international travel as an oil and gas executive, he remained a slangy, direct, casual, profane American businessman who called it as he saw it and who believed in capitalism, charity, and golf. He was a transparent Texan. He had sympathy for people everywhere but did not pretend to be a scholar about their cultures. Afghanistan, as Miller understood it, was “a friggin’ mess.” He had not really heard about the Taliban. He asked questions and learned that they did not like to have their pictures taken and that “they were very oppressive toward women and that kids couldn’t fly kites and all this kind of stuff.”

  Unocal’s Afghan strategy began in Turkmenistan, a newly independent republic carved from the corpse of the Soviet Union. The problem—and the opportunity—was referred to by oil men as “stranded gas.” Turkmenistan’s gas reserves ranked in the top dozen in the world, yet nobody bought them. The country had been independent for four years, but Russia still owned all the pipelines leading away from its gas fields. Russia and Turkmenistan fought bitterly over how the pipelines should be used. Their battles finally shut the fields down altogether. Until new pipelines were built, or the conflicts with Russia were resolved, Turkmenistan was stuck with 159 trillion cubic feet of gas, 32 billion barrels of oil, and no place to sell any of it.4

  Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan faced an energy crisis. By 2010 the country would need nearly a trillion cubic feet of gas more than it could produce on its own.5 Unocal saw a solution in the Central Asian trading routes that had captured Bhutto’s imagination. John Imle authorized a development project in which Unocal would seek to build pipelines from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, across war-ravaged Afghanistan. The easiest way would be to pass through Kandahar along the same southern route favored by Bhutto for her trucking and transport schemes. This was now Taliban country.

  Imle assigned the Afghan pipeline project to Marty Miller. It was “a moon-shot,” Miller thought, but there was a romantic, grandiose scale to the plan. Miller’s pipelines would cross ancient steppes traversed by Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, and Genghis Khan. He asked Daniel Yergin over dinner one night whether, if he pulled the project off for Unocal, he might even get a mention in The Prize’s next edition. “It would probably get a chapter,” Yergin told him.6

  MARTY MILLER stepped out of the climate-controlled interior of Unocal’s Gulfstream jet and into a blistering Turkmenistan summer. It was August 1995, and the new $89 million airport in Ashkhabad, the country’s capital, was still under construction. It would soon allow up to 4.5 million people to enter each year. The dreary city had never seen a tenth that many visitors, but Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s autocratic leader, expected that with guests like Miller, the country’s fortunes were about to change. Soon Turkmenistan would teem with European venture capitalists, Arab sheikhs, and American petroleum company executives. They would come to get rich on his oil and gas, or to entertain themselves at his planned Disneyland-style resort. Turkmenistan would become “the new Kuwait,” Niyazov boasted. There had been a few glitches, however. In his zeal to construct a truly distinctive airport, Niyazov had built the control tower on the wrong side of the runway. Air traffic controllers looking to guide pilots into Ashkhabad had their views blocked by the gaudy new terminal.7

  Miller’s mission was to persuade Niyazov that Unocal was the right company to pipe his gas through neighboring Afghanistan. It was difficult to know how to construct a sales pitch for a president like Niyazov. He was a creature of the Soviet system, a Communist Party apparatchik trying to remake himself as a nationalist leader. Everywhere Miller looked in Ashkhabad, the plump, silver-haired face of Niyazov was there smiling back at him—from billboards, parade floats, and vodka bottle labels. Turkmenbashi (Father of All Turkmen), as he preferred to be called, had built a personality cult on Stalin’s model. In the country of 4.5 million he brooked no opposition. Many trappings of the old Soviet system remained: a state-run press that spewed fawning doublespeak about their great leader, a rubber-stamp parliament that periodically extended the president’s term, and an intelligence service that listened in on just about anything Niyazov wanted to hear. Yet he had been slow to introduce free market reforms, and the idea of negotiating multibillion-dollar international oil and gas deals with Western companies was new to him.

  Niyazov had erected twenty-four brand-new, white marble, wedding cake–style hotels on the south side of Ashkhabad. Each hotel belonged to a government ministry, and Miller checked into the oil and gas ministry’s favorite. The rooms had panoramic views of the Iranian mountains. They were as outsized as the airport and just as dysfunctional. Each day that summer Miller turned his little window air-conditioning unit on full blast, but to no avail. He roasted. Daily negotiations with his Turkmen counterparts did little to cool him down. Across the table there “was a lot of shouting, threats, intimidation, a very different approach to what we were used to,” Miller recalled. “But at the end of the day you go and you drink some vodka and have some toasts—all this stuff, you know—and all’s forgiven. Then the next day you put on the pads and away you go again.”

  To break out of this situation Miller called in John Imle. Niyazov invited Unocal’s senior executives to his pink Italian-built summer mansion on the outskirts of Ashkhabad. They raised more vodka toasts. Imle and the Father of All Turkmen grew to be “real, real cozy,” as Miller recalled it.

  Miller turned to the U.S. embassy in Ashkhabad for more help. Tying a pipeline deal into the broader agenda of American foreign policy could provide Unocal with a competitive advantage. Some European or Middle Eastern companies seeking oil and gas deals in Central Asia arranged payoffs to local officials. Apart from Unocal, Niyazov dealt with an array of American consultants and middlemen, some of them thick with mysterious connections in Turkey and the Middle East. Unocal itself had a mysterious Saudi partner called Delta with little
experience in the oil and gas field. If it was not on board to facilitate commissions to middlemen, its role was otherwise difficult to explain. But the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States made it very costly and risky for a large American company like Unocal to become directly involved with payoffs. What Unocal executives could offer instead was the credibility of a security alliance with the United States, grounded in big energy deals. As a salve for Russian pressure, Niyazov had long sought the attention of the U.S. government. By striking a major deal with Unocal he could insure himself against Russian intimidation. For its part the Clinton administration saw the promotion of American oil interests in the newly independent countries of Central Asia as sound foreign and economic policy. Trade between the United States and the newly independent states was soaring—up to $4.6 billion in the first half of 1995, a 35 percent increase over the previous year. Oil and gas interests led the way. In Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan lay between 50 billion and 100 billion barrels of oil, plus nearly 250 trillion cubic feet of gas. The ex-Soviet governments in charge needed foreign companies to lift and export this energy.8