88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (2 page)

General Abdur-Rashid Dostum,
militia leader, Northern Alliance

Abdul Haq,
opposition leader

Hamid Karzai,
Afghan tribal opposition leader; president of Afghanistan

Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur,
Taliban minister of aviation

Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil,
Taliban foreign minister

Mullah Naqib,
Afghan tribal leader

Mullah Mohammed Omar,
“Commander of the Faithful,” founder and leader of the Taliban

Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani,
“Mullah Osmani,” Taliban commander, Southern Zone

Mohammed Yousaf Pashtun,
“Engineer Pashtun,” advisor to Gul Agha Shirzai

Gul Agha Shirzai,
Afghan tribal opposition leader; governor of Kandahar

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef,
Taliban ambassador to Pakistan

PAKISTANIS

Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq,
Director-General, Inter-Services Intelligence (2001–04)

Colonel Sultan Amir Tarar,
“Colonel Imam,” Afghan expert, Inter-Services Intelligence

“General Imran Zaman,”
senior officer, Inter-Services Intelligence

“General Jafar Amin,”
senior officer, Inter-Services Intelligence

General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani,
Director-General, Military Operations; Director General, Inter-Services Intelligence (2004–07)

Maleeha Lodhi,
Pakistani Ambassador to the United States

Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed,
Director-General, Inter-Services Intelligence (1999–2001)

General Pervaiz Musharraf,
president of Pakistan

“Brigadier Suhail Majid,”
Afghan expert, Inter-Services Intelligence

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

General Jerry Boykin,
Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

General Ron Burgess,
Director for Intelligence, “J-2,” on the Joint Staff

Steve Cambone,
Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

Douglas Feith,
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

General Tommy Franks,
Combatant Commander, U.S. Central Command

“Marco,”
senior representative of Joint Special Operations Command in Islamabad

General Stanley McChrystal,
Commander, Joint Special Operations Command

Chief Warrant Officer (CW3) Poteet,
Special Forces liaison to Islamabad Station

“Greg R,”
“Captain Greg,” Special Forces liaison to Islamabad Station

Donald Rumsfeld,
Secretary of Defense

Paul Wolfowitz,
Deputy Secretary of Defense

DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Richard Armitage,
Deputy Secretary of State

Robert “Bob” Blackwill,
U.S. Ambassador to India; deputy national security advisor for Southwest Asia

Chat Blakeman,
political counselor, Islamabad (2001–03)

Wendy Chamberlin,
U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (2001–02)

David Donohue,
U.S. Consul-General, Islamabad

William “Bill” Milam,
U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (1998–2001)

Nancy Powell,
U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (2002–04)

John Schmidt,
political counselor, Islamabad (1998–2001)

Michele Sison,
deputy chief of mission, Islamabad

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

Dave Falco,
FBI special agent

Jenny Keenan,
Assistant legal attaché, Islamabad

Christopher Reimann,
legal attaché, Islamabad

WHITE HOUSE

J. D. Crouch,
deputy national security advisor (2005–07)

Stephen Hadley,
deputy national security advisor (2001–05); national security advisor (2005–09)

Zalmay Khalilzad,
National Security Council

Dr. Condoleezza Rice,
national security advisor (2001–05); Secretary of State

Fran Townsend,
Homeland security advisor

OTHERS

“Akbar,”
unofficial Afghan-American facilitator between the U.S. government and the Taliban

Dayna Curry,
American member of the NGO “Shelter Now International” in Afghanistan

Heather Mercer,
American member of “Shelter Now International” in Afghanistan

Georg Taubman,
head of “Shelter Now International” in Afghanistan

SEPTEMBER 23, 2001

S
USPENDED IN THE HAZY
netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, I gradually became aware of an irritating sound somewhere near my head. It took a few seconds to orient myself. I was in my bedroom, safe behind bolted steel doors. The sound was coming from the secure phone on the nightstand. The clock indicated I’d gone to bed just four hours before.

“What in God’s name do they want now?” I thought. I raised the receiver and managed a raspy “Hello.”

“Did I wake you up, son?” It was the unmistakable voice of George Tenet.

I wasn’t much in the habit of being awakened by the director, but what caught my attention was being called “son.” George wasn’t all that much older than me.

“No, Mr. Director,” I lied. “I was just getting up.”

“Listen, Bob,” he began, after our encrypted phones had synched up. “We’re meeting tomorrow morning at Camp David to discuss our war strategy for Afghanistan.

“How should we begin?” he asked. “What targets should we hit? How do we sequence our actions? Defense is telling us that there are almost no military targets available.” We can see from overhead reconnaissance, he added, that the Arab al-Qa’ida fighters, whom we called the “Afghan Arabs,” had evacuated their camps. “Should we bomb empty camps?”

These questions had been troubling me for the twelve days since
September 11, while the situation in Afghanistan rapidly evolved. As the CIA station chief in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, for the past two years, I was responsible for all U.S. clandestine intelligence activities in both Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—fully 90 percent of the country. For two years, it was my job to lead the men and women charged with ferreting out the region’s secrets and penetrating its mysteries. I had devoted nearly every waking minute to understanding problems: the rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir; Pakistan’s covert support to terrorist groups; its construction and proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles; the plans and intentions of Pakistan’s military dictator, General Musharraf; and, most important, the terrorist enterprise of Osama bin Laden and its relations with the Taliban, the Afghan religious student movement that dominated the country and provided him with safehaven and support. Now, after 9/11, I knew that it would no longer be enough to report on problems. As the senior CIA officer on the scene, I would have to try to solve them.

For a few days after 9/11, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had gone silent. The normal flow of secret message traffic had dwindled to a trickle. It was as though the American giant had been staggered. Then, in the days immediately preceding George’s call, the giant had come back to life, and Langley was pummeling me with questions and demands.

We were facing the imminent prospect of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. I had visions of large numbers of U.S. troops operating in a vast and difficult terrain, trying in vain to find and strike an evanescent enemy, with no defined targets and no clear long-term objectives. This seemed like a prescription for a Soviet-style Afghan disaster.

Just a few days before, on September 19, one of my officers had gathered our first piece of “smoking gun” evidence of al-Qa’ida’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Our best source on the Afghan Arabs—an agent who had been carefully vetted and whose information had been fully corroborated dozens of times—had attended a meeting of over 100 Arab fighters hosted by bin Laden near Jalalabad, in northeastern Afghanistan. Contradicting his previous public denials
of responsibility for 9/11, in this private gathering Shaykh Osama had taken full and triumpant credit for the attacks. He exulted over what he said was an imminent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which would at last draw the Americans into open combat and surely lead to their defeat. I shared the desire to deal with bin Laden once and for all; but I also feared that if we acted carelessly, his prediction could prove accurate.

As George was talking, my mind was focused on President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech three days before, on September 20. Speaking before the joint houses of Congress, with British prime minister Tony Blair in attendance, the president had laid the cornerstone of a conceptual framework to guide the way forward. The speech had been replete with demands and ultimatums for the Taliban: Turn over Osama bin Laden; close the terrorist training camps and subject them to international inspection; deliver all terrorist fighters associated with bin Laden to competent foreign authorities. Failure to do so, Bush said, would condemn the Taliban to share the terrorists’ fate.

Hidden in that hard message, however, was a ray of hope and the possibility of redemption. The president was drawing a line in the sands of time. As of 9/11, he was saying, the rules of the game had changed. Henceforth, nations and subnational groups who acted as sponsors of terrorism would be held to account. There was an implicit opportunity for erstwhile terrorist sponsors to reject terrorist tactics and those responsible for them. That opportunity was the message I thought we should extend to elements of the Taliban, and to all Afghans willing to break with the Taliban policies of the past. Reinforced by the international solidarity which had immediately manifested itself after 9/11, that positive message would guide our policy, and provide the justification and the rationale we would need as we took what would most likely be the tough military actions necessary to bring al-Qa’ida to heel and to deny it safehaven.

“The President has set the policy for us in his speech,” I said. “In effect, he has invited the Taliban to join the international coalition against terrorism.

“We shouldn’t think about this primarily in military terms. What’s
important is for us to focus on our political goals in Afghanistan. We can’t permanently rule the country ourselves. Everything we do should be consistent with the long-term need to create a new political dispensation in Afghanistan, one willing to drive out the Arabs and to keep them out. Any military means we employ should be designed to serve and to reinforce our political objectives.

“We begin with Mullah Omar. Our initial demands focus on him. If he refuses to change policy, to break with bin Laden, we hit him. That serves notice on the others in the Taliban leadership, who have never much liked bin Laden or the Arabs anyway. We extend the promise and the ultimatum to them, and if they refuse, we have the rationale to hit them too.” George stopped me with questions.

“Mr. Director,” I said, “this isn’t going to work. I need to write this all down clearly.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s 11:30
PM
here, and I’m meeting the helicopter at 6:00
AM
tomorrow for Camp David. I need to get some rest. Can you get something to me by 5:00
AM
?”

I told him I could. As I sat at my desk to write, it was as if I were merely transcribing something I could see plainly in my head.

This was breaking all the rules. No one knew that better. Every CIA officer is taught that we are never to be “policy prescriptive.” CIA’s job is to inform policy, never to make it. I had just spent three years as chief of “the Farm,” the Clandestine Service’s equivalent of West Point for the Army and Parris Island for the Marines, where it was my job to make sure that the next generation of CIA officers knew its proper place in the world. And yet here I was, purposefully violating one of the cardinal rules I had spent a career upholding.

There wasn’t an approved format for the piece I was writing. I framed it as an “Aardwolf,” CIA’s code name for a chief of station field appraisal. Such appraisals, analytic pieces from senior CIA representatives abroad, are relatively rare, prepared only in response to watershed events. They get a lot of attention from high levels in the executive branch. I knew the senior reports officers at CIA Headquarters, who normally reviewed all incoming intelligence reports for conformity to format and adherence to the rules, would not be pleased when they
saw a field appraisal specifically intended to prescribe policy. Their ranks traditionally dominated by women, the senior reports cadres were sometimes waggishly referred to,
sotto voce
, as “the Sisterhood.” To me they were the Vestals, the guardians of the flame.

But they wouldn’t get a vote. They would see this chief of station field appraisal, but only after the fact: it was going directly to Tenet, outside normal channels, for his own use with the cabinet principals.

I banged out the piece, eight pages, in three hours. By the time I was finished, all my senior guys were in the office, and I circulated the draft to them, made modifications based on their comments, and sent it on to the director’s security staff with instructions to hand it to him as soon as he awakened.

It would be days before I learned of its fate. George had reviewed it at five in the morning and had immediately sent copies to the full War Cabinet, who used it as the point of departure for their discussions, held without the president present, that Sunday morning. The principals presented their conclusions to the president in the White House Situation Room the following day and, after more discussion, the eight-page document was approved by President Bush as the conceptual template for the war effort. Tenet was directed to put me in touch with General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command (CENTCOM), and the senior combatant commander charged with leading the Afghan campaign, to make sure his war plan conformed.