88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (20 page)

OCTOBER 3, 2001

S
HE WOULDN’T SAY MUCH,
and she didn’t have to. Her tone of voice said everything. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since I’d reported on my second meeting with Osmani, and I’d made a secure call to the front office of the Near East Division to get a read on the reaction from the seventh floor. It was obvious that the deputy division chief didn’t want to talk to me.

“You’d better talk to [the Chief],” she said. I knew the drill. She wasn’t going to take the responsibility to pass the bad news to someone more senior than she. Still, I wanted to get a better idea what was coming.

“Look,” I said. “Surely they don’t think I’ve somehow abused my authority.” She wouldn’t take the bait.

“You’d better talk to the Chief,” she repeated.

The night before, immediately after my late return from Quetta, I’d sat before my computer with an important decision to make. “Officers,” it is said, “seldom suffer in their own dispatches.” I feared that this dispatch might prove the exception. There were two paths I could take: One would be to provide a minimalist account of my conversation with Osmani, focusing on my attempt to induce him to launch a coup against Omar. That way, if he came back later with an offer to implement a deal, either on his own behalf or Omar’s, I could simply present the offer to Washington without a lot of unhelpful detail about who had initially proposed what. On reflection, though, this path, in addition to being disingenuous, was fraught with peril. Depending
upon future developments, it would invite detailed questions later about what Osmani and I had actually discussed. My failure to report fully at the outset might bring no end of recrimination. No. It would be better to lay it all out, in full detail. Some at headquarters might not like it, but at least it would answer all their questions preemptively. And in any case, I was absolutely convinced I had done the right thing.

The finished product came to over ten pages. In my comments at the end, I made a number of predictions. First, I said, there was little doubt that Omar would reject the offer being conveyed by Osmani. As for the chance that Osmani would lead a coup, his apparent resolve at the end of our discussions and my own high hopes notwithstanding, it was unlikely he’d do it. The problem, I opined, was not a lack of toughness or decisiveness; he had both. Nor did I think his devotion to Mullah Omar was completely unqualified. But after eight hours of conversation, I felt I had some insight into the man. The problem with Osmani, I concluded, was that he simply lacked imagination. In the cold light of day, and without external encouragement, I didn’t think he could see himself playing a larger role than the one he currently occupied.

Still, I went on, we had to be prepared for unexpected success, which would carry problems of its own. The demanded public announcement of a break with al-Qa’ida would be straightforward: either Osmani would do it, or he would not. The attack on bin Laden and the arrest of the others, though, would not be so easy, even if attempted in unambiguously good faith, which was highly unlikely. Bin Laden had been making himself scarce, and might take time to track down. Many of the fourteen al-Qa’ida members we had under indictment were actually rather obscure, might not be well known to the Taliban as they tended to remain segregated, and might be difficult to find. We would have to be prepared to set deadlines, and hope that our arbitrariness was not working against us. Our Taliban interlocutors would doubtless seek more time to delay a military strike. Nonetheless a coup against Omar would probably create fissures within the Taliban that would cripple their ability to defend against the hoped-for U.S.-Afghan coalition against them.

In any case, I concluded, even if he did not move against Omar, the link with Osmani could prove useful to us in the early stages of a military campaign. He was primed for our planned message that we were attacking al-Qa’ida and its known supporters, not the Afghan nation. Even if he wouldn’t take action beforehand, the outbreak of hostilities might yet spur Osmani to take the steps we wanted, particularly if Omar were killed early on. In those circumstances, he would be far more open to our influence than he was presently.

When he called me back, the Near East Division chief wasted no time in letting me have it. “Do you know what the Director said when he read that cable?” he fumed. “He said he wished he hadn’t read it. . . . That should have been a two-page cable; instead, you’ve sent ten. . . . There may be some things you say to get someone to cooperate, but you shouldn’t have put it in cable traffic.” I found that last bit particularly offensive.

“So now we have to be politically correct in our internal operational traffic?” I thought. “Was I sounding too sympathetic to the Taliban for them?” If that’s where we were going as an organization, I wanted no part of it. I was already seeing growing evidence that they were losing all professional objectivity back there, getting swept up in the emotional tide, and it wasn’t pretty.

“Listen,” the chief went on. “You’re a very good chief of station. You need to get out of the policy business, and get back to your job.” There was more than a little irony in this. Years before, during the First Gulf War in 1991, the chief had dealt with a senior Iraqi official, and had had a similar opportunity to sow dissension among the enemy. The official had asked the chief’s guidance; lacking policy direction, he had declined to provide it, demanding instead to know what the official intended to do on his own. Ultimately, the Iraqi had concluded that he was being entrapped, induced to make statements opposed to Saddam’s regime so that he could be blackmailed. He had stalked off. Some would have said that the chief’s cautious approach was the correct one; but this story had stuck with me over the years as a prime example of the cost of timidity. The chief was a good guy, a highly respected senior officer, one who had been something of a mentor and model to me in my junior days. In this instance, though, I had no intention of following his example.

“They’re trying to figure out how to respond upstairs,” he went on. “You’ll get a cable tomorrow.” I had been running on adrenaline for days, and now I suddenly felt exhausted, almost beyond caring. There was little point in arguing; I wasn’t going to overcome a lifetime of professional caution with a few one-liners. And besides, he wasn’t the one I needed to convince; it was the seniors upstairs.

“And for God’s sake, get some sleep,” he concluded.

“What a good idea,” I said.

OCTOBER 4, 2001

“Ref[erenced] cable received a mixed reception at Headquarters,” the response began. That was rather more positive than I had been led to expect. It went on to state that if the Taliban leadership responded positively to my overtures, headquarters would be prepared to put their proposal on the table for policy consideration. A decision, it cautioned, might be days in coming. The tone of the message made it clear that headquarters did not relish the potential opportunity to make such a proposal, and that no one in the policy world would welcome having to decide how to respond in such ambiguous circumstances.

More than thirteen years later, having incurred nearly 15,000 casualties and having spent hundreds of billions of dollars, with the United States heading for the exit after a textbook exercise in imperial overreach, it is a little hard to sympathize with those concerns.

Later that morning, I pulled Dave, my deputy, aside. “There’s no way my career will survive this war,” I said.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re just overreacting.”

“Oh, this latest dustup might not do it,” I said. “But I’m not going to change the approach I’m taking, and there’s no way I’ll survive when this is over. It will come down on my head; no one else’s. But just remember you heard it here first.” It was actually a liberating feeling, to know that you were finished. If I’d had any inclination to pull my punches before, I had no such inclination now.

Later that day, I briefed Wendy Chamberlin on what I was up to, and made the same point.

“Hah,” she snorted. “The people at your headquarters are just jealous. I’ve been jealous of you myself. Just ignore them.” I could have hugged her.

OCTOBER 8, 2001

I looked up to see Tom leaning breathlessly through the doorway. “He’s on the line!” he said. I didn’t have to ask who.

Following our meeting in Quetta on the 2nd, Mullah Osmani had called me on October 6. As translated by Tom, he told me he’d met with Mullah Omar, who had a message to convey. According to Omar, the emotions of the Afghans were running very high. “That again,” I thought. Nonetheless, Omar would make some announcements soon. Of course, he could not make the announcement we had demanded of him right away, as he would have to calm the Afghan people first, due to the American threats . . .

“Mullah Sa’eb,” I began. “There is no time for this. Omar will not carry out the demands; Afghanistan will be destroyed. It’s up to you to seize power, as we discussed.”

There was a long pause.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. Would he consult first with potential supporters? “No,” he replied. He would consider what to do on his own. After some back-and-forth, he agreed to call me by noon the following day—October 7.

That was the day, I knew, when the first American strikes would be launched. Mullah Omar’s compound was at the top of the target list. The day passed without the promised call; late that night, Afghan time, the first aircraft and cruise missiles struck their targets in and around Kandahar and Kabul. Our tribal networks had been working overtime to provide precise geocoordinates for the bombs.

Even before Tom’s announcement of the Southern Zone commander’s 10:00
AM
call on the 8th, we had already received initial reports from our best source in Kandahar. Omar’s compound had been struck by several cruise missiles. Guards and several people in the one-eyed
leader’s household, including his uncle, had been killed, but Omar himself was narrowly missed. He had left the compound just thirty minutes before.

Not long into the conversation, I pointed out that I had warned this would happen. Osmani began shouting and Tom, without a glance at me, began shouting back. “You see? It’s just like we told you! You will not even see them!” This was getting completely out of hand. I grabbed Tom’s arm, causing him to look up, startled, as though I’d shaken him awake.

“Calm down,” I said evenly. Tom returned to translating. I asked Osmani if he’d given more thought to my advice.

“I can’t speak now,” he said; “I’m very busy.” He hung up. I knew precisely what occupied him. We had just received another report indicating that the Taliban
Shura
had concluded that the Americans would invade Afghanistan by sending an army westward to attack Kandahar along the main road from Quetta. Osmani, as the Southern Zone commander, had been charged with constructing defensive positions east of the city.

Later that evening, I received yet another call, this time from Jalil. “Everyone is in an uproar,” he said. It was obvious to Jalil that the initial attacks from an unseen enemy had left senior Taliban officials “quite afraid,” as he put it, but no one would admit it. And although most of the senior Taliban leadership had been quietly hoping that Omar would take the decision of the
Ulema
as an excuse to expel bin Laden, they were not admitting that now, either. At this point, in the face of foreign attack, he said, the Taliban leadership could only back down through the intercession of some third party, like the Organization of the Islamic Conference. In any case, the leadership had scattered to separate locations; no one wanted to meet as a group for fear of attracting an airstrike. They could communicate by “wireless,” of course, but to actually reach a consensus within the
Shura
on a new course of action they would have to meet together to confer face-to-face, and at length: “You know how we are.”

I did indeed. I wrote up the conversation as a formal intelligence report, making clear that the source, whom I could not identify by name,
was both uncontrolled and hostile, and that his comments were meant as much to influence as to inform. Nonetheless, much of what he had to say rang true to me. In a separate comment in the report, I noted that while the source’s remarks were clearly self-serving and that he hoped to see a halt to the airstrikes, the scenario he described, of Taliban officials being culturally incapable of making group decisions unless able to meet face-to-face, contained a large measure of truth.

But none of that mattered. The time for diplomacy was over. Now the logic of war would have to run its course. The political structure of Afghanistan, such as it was, was about to be smashed. The ultimate success of our venture would depend upon creating a new one, and neither I nor anyone else had the slightest idea what it would look like.

OCTOBER 9, 2001

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER OBSERVER
of the initial American airstrikes in and around Kandahar, a surreptitious one. Hamid Karzai, having arrived in Kandahar Province by motorcycle with two companions just the day before, was keeping a low profile. His discovery by the Taliban would have meant a swift and violent death.

Months before, in the spring of 2001, as we were laying the foundations for what we hoped would be a tribal uprising, a small number of my officers had been charged with meeting multiple Pashtun tribal leaders known to oppose the Taliban. We wanted to assess their ability and their willingness to actively undermine the mullahs in Kandahar, in the event we received a presidential order to try. Particularly as these were Afghans, we’d paid little attention to their claims—which invariably exaggerated their influence and the numbers of loyal fighters they could put in the field—and had focused instead on what they could demonstrate on the ground. Though we lacked the authorities necessary to take military action against the Taliban, at that stage we didn’t need them. If a contact claimed large numbers of followers in various locations willing to do his bidding, we wanted to see that demonstrated through verifiable intelligence gathering and dissemination of propaganda, before we ever had to consider whether to turn these people loose to generate armed mayhem.