88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (21 page)

Hamid Karzai had been but one of these tribal leaders, and by no means the most promising at the time. Educated and urbane, fluent
in many languages, Karzai was a prominent member of the so-called “Rome Group,” which had formed around Muhammad Zahir Shah, the former Afghan king, driven into exile in 1973. Hamid was a well-known proponent of religious tolerance and multiethnic unity among Afghans. As such, he played well in the diplomatic salons of both Europe and South Asia. There also was no denying his family and tribal pedigree: grandson of a respected Afghan politician and son of a notable tribal leader, he was now the preeminent elder of the Popalzai, a prominent tribe of the Durrani Pashtun tribal confederation. Durranis had been kings of Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century.

Still, I had my doubts about him. He had been a Pakistan-based fund-raiser and administrator during the anti-Soviet
jihad
, with few if any credentials on the battlefield. Whatever his political attractions and abilities, he certainly didn’t seem like a warrior. What did most distinguish him was his burning desire to drive the Taliban from power. The Taliban had killed his father, gunning him down on a street in Quetta on July 14, 1999, just after my arrival in Pakistan. A month later a massive truck bomb exploded just outside the outer wall of Mullah Omar’s compound in Kandahar, killing several members of his household. There was never any evidence connecting Karzai to that attack, but the Taliban were convinced he was behind it. They had even tried to have him extradited from Pakistan shortly before 9/11, and had plotted to murder him in the event they were refused. “By their enemies,” it says in Christian scripture, “ye shall know them.”

Once in direct contact with him, we quickly came to realize that beneath the Pashtun’s smooth, regal manner lurked a considerable amount of anger and resentment—and not just toward the Taliban. Hamid deeply resented the fact that the United States had abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, and had apparently been content to see it fall under the sway of Taliban brutality. “Where have you been all this time?” he demanded. Make no mistake: this was not a man who would ever be a “controlled” source of the CIA. But to achieve his political goals in Afghanistan, he would need American help; and we would need his, or that of others like him, if we were to achieve ours.

Serendipity and luck play far larger roles in our lives than many of
us are prepared to admit. Having established preliminary contact with a large number of Afghan commanders, it was necessary to spread out responsibility for vetting them among a larger number of officers. Given his isolation from the main body of the station, I was keen to have “Greg,” one of my dispersed “base chiefs,” the head of a small unit subordinate to me as station chief, thoroughly integrated into this effort. My assignment of Greg as Hamid Karzai’s contact was arbitrary. I’m sure I had good reasons for making this particular decision at the time: I just can’t remember what they were. In any case, fate would reveal it to have been an inspired choice, and no less so, I would contend, for having been inadvertent.

On the surface, they made a very odd pair. As smooth and polished as Hamid was, Greg was blunt and profane. A tough, wiry paramilitary specialist with an outrageous Fu Manchu and an even more outrageously ironic sense of humor, he did his best to hide an incisive intelligence beneath multiple layers of self-deprecation. Also hidden beneath that flinty exterior, though, was a rather thin skin, and a sensitive soul.

Paramilitary specialists in the Clandestine Service are a wary and misunderstood breed. Chosen for their military knowledge and abilities, they live within an organization in which people are generally valued for an entirely different set of traits. Most receive a measure of espionage training, but for them it is almost always an underdeveloped, secondary skill. They consider themselves warriors, but are not allowed to be real soldiers. Normally called upon to provide training and guidance to irregular, indigenous forces, or to serve as a liaison between U.S. Special Forces and CIA spies, they have a foot in both camps, but are generally not fully accepted in either.

Greg was among the relative few in his tribe who excelled in both intelligence and paramilitary operations; but the same could not be said for all those paramilitary specialists who clambered to join his team after I’d approved his nomination as base chief. He took strong exception when I tartly pointed out that I was looking for intelligence officers and not gunslingers to join him, and so I went out of my way when he arrived in the field to cultivate him. It was time well and amusingly spent. Greg and I developed a bond traipsing about the gun shops and bazaars of old Peshawar, and hoisting drinks late into the night at the fabled Khyber Club. Socializing with our spouses, we found wry camaraderie as the husbands of sharp-tongued, independent women who were distinctly underwhelmed by the supposed brilliance of their husbands. I found in Greg an avid student of South Asian history, and a gifted linguist. Within months of his arrival at post, he was bantering comfortably in Pashtu with the guards outside his compound. But perhaps even more than his intelligence and restless curiosity, I learned to value his humor. You simply could not spend any time with the man without frequently finding yourself doubled over in hilarity.

Greg had needed all of his skills, and humor as well, in dealing with Karzai. In the late summer of 2001, Hamid was showing considerable promise, but just as often was hopelessly mercurial. His plans seemed to change on a daily basis.

In August, a network of his followers set about surreptitiously delivering “night letters” in and around Kandahar. The night letter is a sort of Afghan institution: notes are anonymously slipped under doors or tossed over compound walls in the dark of night. Used for propaganda or intimidation, its effects are insidious. It conveys the impression to those in power that their enemies are everywhere, moving with impunity right under their noses. Hamid’s people managed to deliver some 800 of them during the month, denouncing the Arab presence in Afghanistan.

By late August, days before 9/11, Hamid was already contemplating his return, perhaps to Helmand or Kandahar provinces, the primary seats of Taliban power, so that he could direct his people more closely. Greg counseled him against doing so without a sensible plan, but even after 9/11, when Greg began pressing Karzai to return inside as quickly as possible, the elements of a plan were excruciatingly slow in coming together.

When on September 26 the ten-man CIA “Jawbreaker” team, led by my old friend Gary Schroen, arrived to establish a liaison with the Northern Alliance in the far northern Panjshir Valley, it was a welcome development, but it ratcheted up the pressure on us considerably. Gary
was making a start at reinforcing the capabilities of the Taliban’s fierce ethnic rivals in the north; that meant all the more that we needed to get something going in the south, although that would be a far greater challenge. Beset though they might have been, the Northern Alliance had large, established, relatively conventional armies equipped with tanks and heavy weapons; they still controlled substantial amounts of territory in the north. Gary and his team faced considerable hardships and dangers, certainly, but nonetheless were able to operate in relative security behind friendly lines. In the south, it would be completely different. Any teams we contemplated inserting there would be behind
enemy
lines, operating as guerrillas in an insurgency mode.

Having had responsibility for the past two years for all of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the task in the south naturally fell to me. CTC, though a headquarters support organization, had jealously retained control of our contacts with the Northern Alliance in past years, and now insisted that Jawbreaker, and any other teams in the north, would report directly to it. This was an anomaly: normally, one would have expected our contacts with the Northern Alliance to have been maintained by an overseas CIA outpost—perhaps in Central Asia. But there was no such outpost there on a par, in terms of influence or bureaucratic heft, with Islamabad. The normally desk-bound headquarters case officers in CTC were able to assert primacy in the north in a way they never could in the south. Thus, the CTC-vs-Islamabad, Northern Alliance-vs-southern strategy dynamic, which had arisen in the spring of 2001 through differences of opinion as to how best to exert pressure on the Taliban, was now being further reinforced.

Before 9/11, we had hoped for a Presidential Finding that would permit us to encourage, fund, and support a Pashtun insurgency against the Taliban; the finding never materialized. Now, within days of the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, we had all the authorities we could possibly want or even imagine; and an administration that previously would not be railroaded into fomenting armed action on the part of anti-Taliban Afghans was pressing us breathlessly to do just that, as quickly as possible.

Night after night, in the days and weeks after 9/11, my officers had
been meeting with tribal leaders, former Pashtun warlords from the
jihad
era, and representatives of some currently serving Taliban commanders. Each morning they briefed me on the myriad excuses they had received for inaction. Even after the U.S. air campaign started on October 7, the bottom line was that most of these self-regarding warriors were not about to declare themselves against the Taliban, and take the risk of attempting to rally their respective tribes, until they had a better idea of how this fight would turn out. In a land where internecine warfare was endemic, you learned to pick your fights carefully, and generally entered only the ones you were relatively assured of winning.

The Taliban commander of a base which housed a training camp for al-Qa’ida fighters actually had the temerity to send word via a courier that he had defected “secretly,” and was “with us in his heart.” We sent back word that until he did better than that, he would be considered an enemy subject to attack. Another encounter, between a Dari-speaking officer and a very well known but now aging senior commander who had distinguished himself against the Soviets, particularly sticks in my mind. The officer was young, slender, soft-spoken, almost effeminate in manner. After an hour or so of polite conversation, during which he heard and diplomatically rejected a long list of excuses, the officer finally lost his temper. Rising to his feet, he stood over the grizzled old warrior.

“You call yourself commander? You’re no commander—you are a coward. You are not even a man; you are a woman! You are a disgrace to your tribe!”

He went on in this vein for some time, and these were the more polite words he used. In fact, the impact of what he said actually suffers in translation from the Dari. I winced as he recounted it. To any self-respecting Pashtun, these were fighting words, cause for an all-out blood feud. But the old commander had just sat there, head down, and taken it. He simply did not want to risk ending up like Najibullah, the former Communist president of Afghanistan, who had been castrated, dragged behind a vehicle, and hanged in public when captured by the Taliban.

Given our lack of progress with others, Greg had been under all
the more pressure to get Hamid back inside Afghanistan. Still, plans kept changing. On September 30, Karzai told Greg he had hit on a plan to go to Ghor Province in the west. There he could receive assistance from Isma’il Khan, the Northern Alliance commander whose base of strength was in Herat. He would then make his way east and south to his tribal area. This plan, too, fell through.

Sometime during this period I had received a direct call from Hank. He underscored the importance of getting CIA teams formed on the Jawbreaker model matched up with cooperating Afghans in the south. I told him I couldn’t agree more, that he could see from the cable traffic we were pressing every likely candidate we could find. We had particularly high hopes for Karzai, I said, but in the end, as stipulated in the war plan, success would depend on the willingness of Afghans to confront the Taliban. I was confident that southern anti-Taliban leaders would emerge, but in the meantime I would not make promises I didn’t know I could keep. To that point, neither of us had told the other anything he didn’t already know.

Then Hank suddenly went off in a new direction. Did I think Karzai would be willing to work closely with Isma’il Khan if the latter were able to move forces down from Herat? This was entirely speculative, as the old Herati commander had not yet returned to his base of support. I replied blandly that Khan would not be able to operate very effectively outside his traditional tribal area, but that certainly he and Karzai got on well; Hamid had even briefly considered trying to stage from Khan’s area. Hank was noodling something, but I had no idea what—that would become clearer later on.

On October 1, looking ahead to what we hoped would be the imminent arrival of Karzai in Afghanistan, we had sent a cable providing our initial thoughts on when and how an American team should be dispatched to join him. Although CIA had taken the lead in the north with Jawbreaker and only been joined by Special Forces later, we believed that we should have Special Forces with us at the outset in the south, where we would be operating behind enemy lines. The ability of professional military operators to provide laser guidance to aircraft flying in close combat support would be critical, as would our ability to
extract a team that suddenly found itself
in extremis
. We should only contemplate bringing Americans in to join Karzai, we said, when he had rallied a sufficient number of fighters to hold territory and defend a landing zone. Our thinking was very much influenced by Greg, but the truth was we were all making it up as we went along.