Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Prince Turki recalled that his government told the Taliban in reply, “Well, if you have already offered him refuge, make sure that he does not operate against the kingdom or say anything against the kingdom.” Turki felt that the Taliban had agreed to take charge of “keeping his mouth shut.”12

  Bin Laden had his own plan: He would convert the Taliban to his cause.

  UNOCAL RENTED A HOUSE in central Kandahar directly across the street from one of bin Laden’s new compounds. They did not choose this location deliberately. Most of the decent houses in town straddled the Herat Bazaar Road. Also nearby was the Pakistani consulate, which housed officers from ISI. Charlie Santos, a former United Nations diplomat in Afghanistan, had been hired by Unocal’s small Saudi partner, Delta, to provide analysis and consulting services on Afghan affairs as the American oil company tried to negotiate its contract.

  Unocal visitors and consultants had an up-close view of bin Laden’s rising impact on the city during the early months of 1997. The Saudi sheikh swept through Kandahar in convoys of pickup trucks and luxury Toyota sport utility vehicles with tinted windows. Moving with a formidable bodyguard of Arabs and Afghans, he came and went from downtown unannounced, a spectral presence in flowing white robes. As his convoy passed, Pashtun men in the fume-choked bazaars would point and whisper discreetly, “Osama, Osama.” On some Fridays he delivered sermons at Kandahar’s largest mosque. Afghans reported to Santos that Mullah Omar called bin Laden out of the audience at one sermon and praised him before the crowd as one of Islam’s most important spiritual leaders. With the public rituals of mutual flattery came word of expensive construction projects designed to provide Kandahar with a new face. Ground was broken near the Governor’s House on an elaborate new mosque to be financed by bin Laden and his supporters. There was also planning for a grand new Eid Mosque to celebrate breaking the fast at the end of Ramadan, to be constructed on the southern outskirts of Kandahar. It would be a true people’s mosque, used only once each year. Wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf flew into Kandahar for bustard-hunting in the nearby deserts. The Arabs arrived on chartered jets and brought mind-boggling luxuries for their weeks-long hunts. Bin Laden sometimes participated. These were potential donors to his operations.13

  In addition to his urban Kandahar compound bin Laden installed his family and dozens of his Arab followers on the flat desert plains a dozen miles outside of town, near the Kandahar airport. During the early Cold War period when American contractors built the airport, they also constructed apartment buildings so that their expatriate workforce would have decent quarters. The apartments were some four decades old now, but they still compared favorably to local accommodations. The Taliban allowed bin Laden’s Arab entourage to move in. They also gave him the keys to Tarnak Farm, a walled government-run agricultural cooperative complex on the outskirts of the airport. The farm had several dozen buildings and was isolated and secure in a stretch of empty desert. At least one of bin Laden’s wives and a number of his children moved in during the first months of 1997.14 Local Afghans also reported to Santos and the United Nations that bin Laden had announced plans to construct a training complex for Arab mujahedin in Uruzgan province where Mullah Omar had roots. Bin Laden planned to train foreign volunteers who would aid the Taliban in their continuing military campaign against Massoud.

  The United States still had no legal indictment or covert action plan to target bin Laden. The virtual bin Laden station in Virginia tracked his financial dealings and analyzed his public statements but had yet to direct lethal operations against him. The CIA met with Unocal executives to debrief them on Central Asian pipeline politics, but they never asked for help in watching, capturing, or attacking bin Laden in Kandahar that winter. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad informed Senator Hank Brown late in 1996 that bin Laden had appeared at a meeting in Afghanistan and announced a $1 million reward for Brown’s assassination. Brown was told that he should not travel to the region anymore. Yet this threat still did not galvanize a plan to attack bin Laden, whose paramilitary and terrorist ambitions remained something of a mystery to both the CIA and the White House counterterrorism office. In fact, bin Laden had already dispatched operatives to Africa and elsewhere to prepare for terrorist strikes against American targets, but the United States was unaware of these plans. The White House did not begin to push for covert operations against bin Laden beyond intelligence collection until the end of 1997, a year after he established himself openly in Mullah Omar’s Kandahar.15

  American and Saudi officials met regularly and cordially with Taliban representatives during these months. Unocal sponsored visits for Taliban leaders to the United States so they could see the company’s oil operations, and its lobbyists helped to arrange meetings at the State Department.

  These contacts encouraged the belief in Washington that there were Taliban moderates, sincere young Pashtuns in the leadership shuras interested in international dialogue who would lead their movement toward political responsibility. Mullah Ghaus was often credited with such potential, as was Mullah Rabbani, Saudi Arabia’s protégé. Rabbani traveled that spring to Riyadh and declared after a meeting with the ailing King Fahd, “Since Saudi Arabia is the center of the Muslim world, we would like to have Saudi assistance. King Fahd expressed happiness at the good measures taken by the Taliban and over the imposition of Sharia in our country.”16 The Taliban also retained support during these months from important Durrani Pashtuns such as members of the Karzai family. The triumph of Taliban power in Kabul meant trade and economic opportunity for Durrani Pashtuns across the south. Relative to the recent past, Kandahar was now an Arab-funded boomtown.

  Mullah Omar, who continued to demonstrate that he meant what he said, openly outlined his future plans. “War is a tricky game,” he told a Pakistani visitor in March 1997. “We feel a military solution has better prospects now after numerous failed attempts to reach a peaceful, negotiated settlement.”17

  A few weeks later a Taliban spokesman formally acknowledged that Osama bin Laden had moved to Kandahar. Now bin Laden could “go and see the leader directly.” The world had nothing to fear, he said. “We will not allow Afghanistan to be used to launch terrorist attacks.”18

  AHMED SHAH MASSOUD and his tattered army retreated from Kabul to a cold Panjshir winter. They had known this sort of hardship before, and worse, during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980s. But to lose control of the capital was a deep blow. Massoud blamed his longtime political mentor, President Burhanuddin Rabbani, for failing to make coalition politics in Kabul work while Massoud concentrated on security and war. “Massoud felt cheated because he had never been able to focus full-time on politics,” recalled his aide Haroun Amin. After Kabul’s loss, “He thought that Rabbani and the other political leaders were incompetent—couldn’t be trusted.”19 Massoud’s men recovered steadily because they knew they faced a long war with an extremist Pashtun militia in which surrender would lead to annihilation. Massoud held open the possibility of a negotiated compromise with the Taliban, but his main emphasis that winter was on recovering the battlefield. “He never thought for a second that he would lose Afghanistan,” recalled his brother Ahmed Wali. Within weeks he had assembled a meeting of defeated northern ethnic militias and announced a new alliance, initially called the Supreme Council for the Defense of the Motherland and later recast as the United Front.20

  Massoud had grown isolated during his last years in Kabul. More than ever, he and his closest aides knew, they needed international support. Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan were all threatened by the Taliban’s announced plans to liberate Central Asian Muslims. Massoud dispatched some of his longest-serving intelligence and foreign policy aides abroad to open talks with potential backers. Massoud offered himself as a bulwark against Islamist radicalism. He opened negotiations with Russia about arms supplies and airfield access as Moscow dispatched twenty-eight thousand soldiers to Central Asia, partly to defend against Taliban-sponsored incursi
ons. Iran weighed in with offers of money, weapons, and humanitarian aid. India, ever ready to support an enemy of Pakistan or its proxies, would become another source of funding.

  Massoud had to scratch together money and arms. There was cash available in his Panjshir redoubts from gem mining and drug smuggling. Massoud’s militia ran heroin through Central Asia to Russia. They sold lapis and emeralds at gem shows as far away as Las Vegas. From his base in Taloqan, a ragged town to the west of the Panjshir Valley, Massoud appointed new commanders and intelligence chiefs to begin rebuilding his forces and his information networks across Afghanistan. He told his men that the Taliban would grow vulnerable with time. When Pashtuns discovered that the Taliban were bent on an Islamist totalitarian state, Massoud predicted, dissent would rise. “Day by day,” recalled Mohammed Neem, Massoud’s intelligence chief during this period, his loyal Panjshiri soldiers “gradually saw we could stand against the Taliban.”21

  Massoud and his men were very suspicious of the United States. It was difficult to believe that the Pakistani support for the Taliban they had witnessed as Kabul fell could have occurred without at least tacit American backing. Massoud had captured Pakistani citizens in the fighting around Kabul. Then there was the confusing, conspiracy-shrouded question of the Unocal pipeline project.Where did the Americans stand? Massoud’s inner circle discussed the question at length, but they lacked confidence about the answer.

  Had they known the truth they might not have believed it. Even at this late stage the American government and its intelligence services lacked a complete understanding of covert Pakistani support for the Taliban—an ignorance born mainly from lack of interest and effort. A December 1996 State Department cable reported that Pakistani intelligence was secretly supplying cash, equipment, and military advisers to the Taliban, and that high-level Pakistani officers from ISI were fighting inside Afghanistan along with uneducated recruits from Pakistan. “We recently have received more credible information about the extent and origin of Pakistani assistance and support to the Taliban,” the Islamabad embassy reported. But the question was uncertain enough within confidential American government channels that ambassador Tom Simons could report to Washington just a few weeks later that Pakistani aid to the Taliban was “probably less malign than most imagine” and probably amounted to much less than rumored. “Military advice to the Taliban may be there, but is probably not all that significant,” Simons concluded. Long practiced at covert programs in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis had deceived Washington about the Taliban for two solid years.

  Massoud sought to attract American attention. In a general atmosphere of estrangement, especially from the State Department, there was one opening he could exploit: the offer made by Gary Schroen and the CIA to reopen a direct channel of cooperation. Massoud’s first reaction to the Stinger-recovery proposal, recalled his Washington representative Daoud Mir, was “No way—I want to discuss with them the policy of Afghanistan, the future of Afghanistan.” But with the loss of Kabul he had a new motivation: If he energetically brokered missile sales, “he could have an understanding and good relations between the United States and the United Front,” as his aide Mohiden Mehdi put it. Massoud told his men to start making inquiries about Stingers with commanders across the north. He wanted something to show the Americans.22

  Many of the warlords they approached had previously pledged allegiance to Hekmatyar. When Kabul fell, the Taliban had expelled Hekmatyar from Afghanistan, to exile in Iran. Many in Hekmatyar’s old network switched allegiance to the Taliban, but some commanders in the north who were cut off needed money. Massoud’s network even managed to buy a few Stingers from behind Taliban lines. For Massoud the reward was “to draw attention” from the CIA, as one of his intelligence aides put it. “We wanted to use it as a means of getting our message—the message of resistance and the message of the cause—back to Washington.”23

  Gary Schroen flew to Taloqan in the early spring of 1997 to renew talks with Massoud. He and Alan Eastham, then deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Islamabad, caught a scheduled United Nations charter. The Taliban were pushing north. As Schroen and Eastham prepared to meet with Massoud, a Taliban plane flew over and dropped a bomb. Gunfire echoed on Taloqan’s outskirts.24

  Schroen and his colleagues in the CIA’s Near East Division were skeptical about whether Massoud could be a worthwhile ally against bin Laden. Massoud was candid about the problems: He had to worry about the Taliban, and the Arab training camps that concerned the CIA were a long distance off. He said he was happy to cooperate as best he could, but he didn’t want the CIA to have inflated expectations. For his part, Schroen argued that Massoud could assist not only the United States but his own military cause if he helped eliminate bin Laden from the Afghan battlefield. The agency’s Counterterrorist Center hoped to provide initial supplies of secure communications gear that would permit Massoud’s intelligence aides to send messages and talk to Langley. The Center’s bin Laden unit informed a congressional committee in closed session on April 10, 1997, that it was now running operations designed to collect target intelligence in Afghanistan for use in the future, should the United States decide to capture bin Laden or attack his organization. The communications gear would also permit Massoud’s agents behind Taliban lines to report back about bin Laden’s safe houses and movements. But there was no cash or firm planning yet available.

  Schroen told Massoud that for follow-up contacts it would probably be best to use CIA stations in Central Asia. With Massoud now pushed so far north, it would be easier for officers to meet with him from Tashkent or Dushanbe than from Islamabad. Massoud’s side, too, preferred to interact with the CIA in Central Asia. It had long bothered them that their contacts with the agency were centered on the Islamabad station, which maintained such close ties with Massoud’s enemies at ISI. In Taloqan that March they talked about using CIA storage and transit facilities in Central Asia to move recovered Stingers out of the north.

  Massoud and his advisers remained frustrated by the Americans. The United States was missing the real danger, they felt: the Taliban, Pakistani intelligence, and their Arab volunteers. Massoud and his men interpreted the CIA’s agenda as Stingers, first and foremost. They respected Schroen and saw him as a tough, devoted operative, but their talks with him were fitful and sporadic. The political and military discussions, including those about bin Laden and terrorism, were as yet no deeper than those Massoud and his aides had routinely at foreign embassies. They felt they needed much more.25

  On his own, Massoud rebuilt his intelligence networks and sabotage operations. There were many sympathetic Tajiks behind Taliban lines, especially around Kabul. Traders moved freely between the two zones. Massoud’s special forces, some living as undercover cells in the capital, blew up Taliban equipment at the Kabul airport. His intelligence group established a special unit that year focused on Arab and Pakistani forces that fought alongside the Taliban.

  Through their sources they picked up word about assassination plots against Massoud. They received one report that an assassin had been dispatched to kill Massoud by placing in his shoes a mysterious powder—possibly anthrax. Recalled Neem, the intelligence chief during 1997: “We appointed one person for one year to guard Ahmed Shah Massoud’s shoes.”26

  THE TALIBAN SWEPT into Mazar-i-Sharif that May. The bearded, turbaned Pashtun and Pakistani madrassa graduates who poured into the city center in pickup trucks were as foreign an invasion force as the blue-eyed Russian conscripts who’d rumbled through on Soviet tanks eighteen years before. The largest and most important city in northern Afghanistan, Mazar was a secular, urbane, relatively prosperous city with sixteen channels of satellite television and billboards festooned with the clean-shaven, mustached face of its longtime overlord Aburrashid Dostum, a former communist general who wore his religion lightly. Mazar’s dominant turquoise-domed mosque legendarily entombs a son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, a central figure in the Shia faith, anathema to the Taliban. The Ta
liban’s shock troops were a long way from Kandahar now. They did not speak the local language. But Mullah Omar continued to believe his movement was destined to conquer all of Afghanistan by military force. His new consultant, Osama bin Laden, increasingly urged the revival of ancient Central Asian Islamic empires that would reach all the way to contemporary Russia. And Pakistani intelligence concluded that the Taliban had to seize Mazar if they were to make a plausible claim for international recognition as Afghanistan’s government. ISI calculated in the spring of 1997 “that a recognized Taliban government which controlled the entire country would be easier to deal with than a Taliban movement,” as the Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid put it later. Neighboring countries would have to accept the Taliban as a reality, and they would turn to Pakistan for help, increasing Islamabad’s leverage.27

  Pakistan’s army and president had ejected Benazir Bhutto from office shortly after the Taliban took Kabul. Her plans to buy time in the prime minister’s chair by capitulating to the army’s agenda had failed. She had managed to keep an uneasy peace with the military and ISI on Afghanistan and Kashmir, but she had been unable to control corruption in her family, her cabinet, and her party. She continued to suffer under the delusions of her family’s aristocratic, landed political inheritance, the sense that she had been called to preside over “the people,” or “the masses,” who would buoy her in a struggle against her enemies. Instead she was on her way to London exile once more, a wandering daughter in an updated Greek myth of greed and family tragedy. The army endorsed new elections and arranged for the nomination of its longtime Punjabi businessman client Nawaz Sharif at the head of a military-friendly coalition. Sharif was a dull, agreeable, pasty man from a family of Lahore industrialists. He had managed an improbable career in politics by practicing the chameleon arts of the figurehead. Like Bhutto, he pledged to his advisers as he accepted Pakistan’s prime ministership early in 1997 that he would leave the army and ISI alone.