88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (12 page)

Lodhi agreed. “We’ve got to do something before Pakistan is blamed for the next al-Qa’ida attack. And violence in Afghanistan is affecting Pakistan as well; it must be eliminated at the source.”

Time is of the essence, I stressed. Al-Qa’ida, we knew, was planning to strike us again. “It’s not a matter of if, but of when. Between us, we have to find a way to make them understand.” The ambassador had the haunted look of someone who could see the future when no one else in her government could. Her agenda and mine were certainly not identical, but they overlapped. My goal was to neutralize bin Laden and deny a platform to al-Qa’ida before they could launch another strike against U.S. interests; her goal was to avoid having Pakistan take the blame if and when such a strike occurred. The key to realizing both our goals was Mahmud. If he could be induced to provide some effective cooperation against al-Qa’ida, whose operatives and facilitators were transiting Pakistan with impunity, it might help us disrupt the next attack, and it would change the prism through which Pakistan was seen in the U.S. government. Lodhi’s was clearly the only compelling voice of reason in the Pakistani government, but she was an outlier, with little internal support; I did not envy her position.

“You must engage with Mahmud,” she insisted again. “Besides,” she added, with a sly smile, “he likes you.”

EARLY SEPTEMBER 2001

M
ALEEHA LODHI HAD CLEARLY
checked out. She was staring up at the ceiling, making little pretense of listening. Both she and I had heard this monologue many times before.

In the West Wing of the White House, small increments of power and influence are measured in square feet of office space and proximity to the Oval Office. The space accorded Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, was relatively capacious, and included a small seating area and a conference table, set by a working fireplace. But her deputy Steve Hadley’s office, where we were sitting, could have been mistaken for a broom closet. The Pakistani ambassador was forced to sit upright and primly, lest her right knee touch my left. Seemingly oblivious of the uncomfortable setting and the evident lack of interest from two thirds of his audience, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed droned on with his usual precise diction, in a deep, sonorous voice. He was at his articulate but tiresomely pedantic best.

Maddening as he was, I had long found Mahmud to be a fascinating character. In an army formed on the British model, he was the prototype of the British-style officer. From the bristling mustaches, to the ascot, to the ramrod-straight posture, to the swagger stick tucked under his right arm, he might have stepped out of a picture book of the early twentieth-century British-Indian Army. A classicist and an intellectual, his discourse was strewn with references to Clausewitz, Bertrand Russell, and Aristotle. In his telling, the Amu Darya River, which set the northern border of present-day Afghanistan, was the ancient
Oxus; modern Istanbul was Constantinople, or Byzantium. And yet he startled me on one occasion by quoting, at length and by heart, the lyrics of a recent sentimental Western pop ballad.

Mahmud was said to have rediscovered religion as he entered middle age, and he clearly wore both his personal piety and his pro-Taliban sympathies on his sleeve. In neither respect was he unusual. But among many, to me overwrought, foreign observers he represented something more. He was darkly reputed to be among the “closet Islamists” in Pakistan’s military leadership, holding religiously inspired political views and insidiously advocating a “jihadist” foreign policy.

In any event, for all that he was an unabashed apologist for the Taliban, it was hard to imagine such an urbane and sophisticated man having much personal sympathy for a group of primitive obscurantists who brutally repressed women and refused to see them educated. His strikingly pretty young wife, whom I had met, was highly literate, sharp-tongued and opinionated. Mahmud had told me with some pride that he and his daughter, with whom he was obviously close, were reading Stephen Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time
so that they could discuss it together.

Given the strong ties between the Northern Alliance and India, Pakistan saw support for the Taliban as in its national interest, a view Mahmud clearly shared. But one could not reconcile the private man with his evident personal enthusiasm for the Taliban, which appeared to go well beyond considerations of Pakistani national interest, without assuming a large measure of social and cultural condescension toward Afghans, and what these benighted tribalists might legitimately aspire to. That, too, was consistent with his character.

Now, having regaled Hadley with graphic stories of the obscene depredations of the Afghan warlords whom the Taliban had deposed, he went on to describe the impossible challenges they would face in trying to track down bin Laden on our behalf—in the unlikely event they ever agreed to do so. “The peaks of the Hindu Kush,” he intoned dramatically, “rise over 20,000 feet, and the valleys are so deep that the sun never penetrates.” Allowing for some poetic license, most of what Mahmud had to tell the deputy national security advisor, along with
other senior officials around town, was true enough; and all of it was irrelevant.

In a cable to headquarters in advance of Mahmud’s September 2001 visit, I had warned my senior leadership that “his mission is not engagement, but pacification.” At the time of my hushed late July conversation with Ambassador Lodhi on the flight to Islamabad, there had been yet a glimmer of hope. Now, a little more than a month later, I had concluded that so long as Mahmud was in place, there was no realistic prospect of gaining active Pakistani support either in attacking and disabling al-Qa’ida’s infrastructure in Pakistan, or for a prospective effort to drive a wedge between the Taliban and bin Laden in Afghanistan. We would have to proceed on our own, I said, and hope the Pakistanis would turn a “blind eye” to our cross-border efforts in the likely event they discovered them. Pakistani interference with us would be more easily avoided if we could convince them that we did not seek the downfall of the Taliban per se, but only to drive al-Qa’ida from its safehaven.

Neither Mahmud nor anyone else in the Pakistani government seemed to have any brief for bin Laden or his Afghan Arabs. Logically speaking, and so long as it was kept quiet, there was no reason for them not to cooperate in a limited campaign against al-Qa’ida, and seemingly every reason to do so, if they hoped to rebuild their relations with the United States. In his final lunch at CIA Headquarters, Mahmud suggested that we bribe Afghan tribals to track down bin Laden. But he pointedly did not offer any assistance in the effort.

As we rode together in the back of a chauffeured car up the George Washington Parkway toward the CIA Headquarters building for a final, unpleasant meeting with Cofer Black and CTC, I put the question to Mahmud directly: Given that bin Laden’s presence served no Pakistani national interest, why did he refuse to cooperate against the Saudi and his terrorist followers? There was a long silence. Was it because of the Pressler sanctions? I asked. Mahmud paused, and looked away. “Yes,” he said quietly. It was something I already knew, but his admission was nonetheless significant. The ISI chief had no interest in rebuilding relations with America; he was too busy nursing resentments over the past.

Within Afghanistan, I wrote that August, our best intelligence indicated that ties between Mullah Omar and the Arabs were strengthening, while the animosity of Omar’s senior lieutenants toward the outsiders was growing. These opposing trends had not yet created a fissure in the leadership, and it was not yet clear which side would predominate. On August 27, I sent another message to headquarters, pressing again for an integrated U.S. policy to produce and exploit such a break in Taliban unity. Once again, I argued that if we were permitted to foment a tribal uprising in protest of the Arab presence in Afghanistan, we might sufficiently empower the anti-Arab elements in the Taliban
Shura
to force Omar to expel bin Laden.

CIA, unable to reconcile the conflicting advice between CTC and myself, sent a draft covert action proposal to the NSC combining both our ideas: We should reinforce the Northern Alliance, it said, while simultaneously encouraging a tribal uprising in the south. The White House tabled the draft for further study.

Lacking the new authorities we sought, my officers and I pressed forward aggressively with what authorities we had. In the second half of August, our southern tribal contacts distributed hundreds of “night letters”—propaganda sheets slid under doors or tossed over compound walls in the dark of night—in and around Kandahar, decrying bin Laden and the pernicious presence of Arab foreigners. We hoped they would convey the impression of a groundswell of popular opposition to al-Qa’ida.

The September round of Washington meetings almost concluded, and just before departing once again for Pakistan, I met with Ambassador Lodhi over a private dinner in a restaurant overlooking the Potomac. Though neither of us said so, the sense of resignation was palpable. She could not move her government, and I could not move mine. In fact, there was little of substance for us to discuss.

Mahmud planned to stay on in Washington for several days after my September 7 departure, so that he could make a reciprocal meeting with the chairmen of the two congressional intelligence oversight committees, whom he had hosted at a lavish outdoor dinner in Pakistan a few days before, on August 29. Their meeting was scheduled for September 11.
That morning, as the general and Ambassador Lodhi sat in the Capitol with Representative Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, the group was suddenly approached by an aide who reported stunning news from New York. A television set was turned on, and all watched the scene of smoke rising from the twin towers, until the order came to evacuate the building. I was watching the identical scene from my office in Islamabad.

As the two Pakistanis were driven west down Constitution Avenue, they suddenly saw a plume of smoke rise in the sky off to their left, in the direction of the Pentagon. Time was up. As some of us had feared, and to a greater extent than we could ever have imagined, life as we had known it was about to change.

SEPTEMBER 15–16, 2001

I
WAS LYING ON MY
back, staring up at the ceiling. It was well past midnight, but sleep was impossible. A thousand jumbled thoughts were competing feverishly in my mind. Suddenly it occurred to me: directly across the hall, in a similarly spare hotel bedroom, lay a stone killer whom I’d been threatening for several hours, however politely, with annihilation. Given the animation of our previous discussion, he was surely as wide awake as I was. I couldn’t be sure what sort of impulse control he possessed, but what I had seen from him so far was not reassuring. Outside, down the hall, I could hear the soft murmurings of a group of heavily armed Taliban guards keeping vigil. I was unarmed, and my only ally was an Iranian-American Dari translator in the next room, who might have weighed all of 120 pounds. The latch on the door was laughably flimsy. I got up from bed to push a heavy armchair up against it. That wouldn’t slow down an intruder very much, but at least I’d be assured of being awakened. The drop from my second-story window, I noted with perhaps undue optimism, didn’t look so bad.

Since our initial encounter at Milam’s residence at the beginning of the year, Mullah Jalil and I had established a pattern of regular
Inmarsat
satellite phone calls. I would dial him up at prearranged times from the rooftop veranda of my home, which afforded an unimpeded view of the night sky. The deputy foreign minister was cagey and opaque,
and gave no sign of willingness to compromise himself in any meaningful way; still, he was an intriguing contact, and our conversations gave me some further insight into Taliban thinking. Our interactions would not have been nearly as useful if it were not for the regular flow of clandestine reporting we were receiving from recruited, vetted agents concerning intra-Taliban dynamics. Their reports provided me the context in which to interpret Jalil’s delphic pronouncements.

I had reached Jalil within twenty-four hours of the 9/11 attacks, and pressed him to meet with me. The response came quickly, and from a familiar, if not entirely welcome quarter.

Akbar called to say that Mullah Jalil and Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani could travel from Kandahar to meet with me in Quetta; would I be willing to meet with them? I didn’t have to consider long. Mullah Osmani was the Taliban’s Southern Zone commander, in charge of all Taliban forces in the movement’s southern stronghold, and the de facto deputy to Mullah Omar himself. Our reporting indicated that Osmani was strongly and vociferously opposed to bin Laden. I could only speculate as to what he intended in coming to meet with me; but this might be the opportunity we had been looking for to exploit the differences between Omar and his senior lieutenants over their Arab guests. The meeting was set for Saturday, September 15, at a quiet hotel in Quetta.

I wanted to keep this meeting as discreet as possible. My travel via commercial air to the remote capital of Baluchistan Province, the southern gateway to Afghanistan, mere days after the al-Qa’ida attacks in the United States, would surely have been flagged to Pakistani officials. But as luck would have it, our defense attaché, who had control of a small aircraft, was sending a team to Quetta to evacuate a U.S. Army officer studying at the Pakistan Army’s Command and General Staff College. At my behest, they filed an official flight plan, but one that failed to mention a couple of extra passengers: my Farsi/Dari translator “Tom,” and me.

I was glad to have Tom with me, though not everyone would have felt the same. Tom had started out in CIA as a Farsi-language instructor, and a good one. But even in that limited role, he quickly developed a reputation as a rather difficult personality within the CIA’s
Farsi-speaking subculture. Blessed, as many in the Clandestine Service, with a healthy ego, and aspiring, again like many on the periphery of espionage, to get directly involved in clandestine operations, he had managed to migrate into real-time operational translation—the task he would be performing for me. Like many translators, a certain amount of exposure to what case officers do had convinced Tom that he could do the same as they, and perhaps better: rather than merely translating others’ words, he felt he ought to be running the operations himself. The insular CIA culture is highly disposed to promotion from within. Several of Tom’s supervisors had accommodated him by arranging for him to be trained in operations, despite a certain lack of the requisite judgment and self-control—which he had demonstrated in his first operational assignments. The challenge then became to rein Tom back in. Given his raised expectations, that was far more easily said than done, and many shrank from the job.