88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (24 page)

The meeting ended uncomfortably: me sticking firmly to my story, and Jafar just as firmly unconvinced. I’m sure, though, that when we parted that morning, Jafar felt he’d underscored for me a valuable lesson. Indeed he had. I could see that he was at least as concerned over the fallout from the Abdul Haq disaster as I; and that whatever ambiguities might exist in the Pakistani attitude toward the Taliban, I could count on Jafar’s support if and whenever I needed it.

Apparently feeling they hadn’t done enough, CTC/SO sent us a cable later on October 27, demanding to know who had provided McFarlane with the phone number of the Global Response Center. In addition to being an outrageous accusation, there was more than a little irony in this, as McFarlane reportedly had been in direct touch with headquarters before Haq’s entry into Afghanistan, and it was they who had demanded that the station offer him support. Dave and I were still shaking our heads over this one as Greg, believing he was the primary suspect, fired off a blistering message denying any involvement in the debacle other than what our supportive headquarters colleagues had mandated. If we had needed any confirmation, this was it: Langley was definitely in unfriendly hands.

OCTOBER 29, 2001

A
LL THE WHILE HE
listened, General Franks kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. His gaze conveyed what I considered to be the proper mix of keen interest and wary skepticism. I had developed the clear sense during our first videoconference in September that the general from Midland, Texas, was an extremely canny fellow; his interactions now with our two Afghan guests were greatly reinforcing that impression.

The general was leaning forward in an overstuffed chair. Spread out on the low coffee table before him were stacks of photographs and a now familiar campaign map festooned with carefully drawn arrows, all converging on Kandahar. Now, however, the arrows emerged from a long, narrow valley on the Pak-Afghan border whose name had only recently entered our lexicon: Shin Naray.

Sunlight streamed into the room from a huge picture window. One could see dense thickets of olea, acacia, and tecomella extending gently upward for several kilometers, to a point where the Margalla Hills rose almost vertically from the streambeds below, eventually disappearing, ridge upon ridge, into the bluish haze of the northern Pakistani sky. I had always thought the view from the U.S. ambassador’s office was the most spectacular in Islamabad. The scene inspired a sense of infinite possibility, which is precisely what Engineer Pashtun was now trying to convey.

General Franks had sent word before this, his first post-9/11 visit to Pakistan, that he wished CIA to introduce him to some Afghan
tribal leaders. Already concerned by CTC’s clear lack of enthusiasm for Shirzai, I seized on this as a potential opportunity to develop General Franks’s independent support for him. I had given Mark, Shirzai’s contact, strict guidance as to how I wanted these two Barakzai to look and act: Franks wanted to meet with Afghan tribals, and by God I wanted him to know he was getting the genuine article. Engineer Pashtun, I knew, was given to Western dress, and I could see from my own first meeting with him that years in exile had caused Shirzai to adopt the outward appearance of a Pakistani feudal lord, rather than that of the Kandahari tribal leader he was. “Turbans,” I had said. “Make damned sure they’re wearing turbans.”

Also before the meeting with Franks, Mark and his Special Forces partner had impressed upon our friends that if they expected to have U.S. air support, they were going to have to undertake their assault on Kandahar in stages. Their willingness and ability to take the war to the Taliban capital was going to have to be demonstrated before American support would come, and so Engineer Pashtun adapted his plan accordingly. As he laid it out for Franks, Shirzai and a small band of armed, truck-mounted followers would cross the border and enter the Shin Naray Valley at its far eastern end. They would immediately move a small blocking force to the narrow western entrance to control access to the valley from the Afghan side. The valley could then serve as a secure rallying point for Shirzai’s tribal followers from the Afghan side of the border, easily defended from high ridges to the north and south—provided the fighters materialized, I thought, and provided they did not kill the ex-governor when they did. Once he controlled this territory, we could provide Shirzai with a drop of weapons and ammunition for those who would join; and once he had successfully engaged hostile Taliban forces, we could provide him, in principle, with a CIA–Special Forces team. If Langley should prove unwilling, my hope was that pressure from General Franks would force the issue. This was where the general’s patronage might prove useful later on, although I was not prepared to say so just yet.

There were other little wrinkles in the plan with which we did not burden the general. As Shirzai would be entering Afghanistan by road, and in armed force, I would need to make advance arrangements with the ISI to ensure there would not be any armed confrontations with Pakistani troops at any of the border checkposts. Given the possibility that advance warning of Shirzai’s plans could find its way through the Pakistanis to the Taliban, I would have to seek my headquarters’ permission before doing so; and with CTC’s rabid distrust of the Pakistanis, I knew, this would be hard to obtain.

There was yet another cloud forming on the horizon. As with so many of these recurring issues, Dave had a clever, if obscure, phrase for it. “The game’s on the radio,” he would say. “Everyone wants to get into the game.” With Afghanistan and Pakistan suddenly at the top of the U.S. national security agenda, everyone wanted a piece of it. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, a number of CIA domestic field offices suddenly managed to find an immigrant pizza deliveryman who could claim a second cousin/brother who was an Afghan warlord ready to lead a revolt against the Taliban, or a Pakistani tribal
malik
who knew where bin Laden was. Most of these stories were transparent fabrications and easily brushed aside, even if they required precious time and effort to do so. One of them, though, seemed to hold at least marginal promise.

The chief of one of our domestic offices, a capable and respected officer whom we’ll call “Mark C,” had made indirect contact, through a tortuous line of intermediaries, with an infamous Afghan heroin smuggler known as Haji Juma Khan Baluch. A native of remote Nimruz Province, in the far southwest of Afghanistan near Iran, Haji Juma Khan offered to put us in touch with Abdul Karim Brahvi, a former governor of Nimruz Province who had been driven into exile by the Taliban. Although some might have balked at dealing with a notorious international drug dealer, it seemed to me that we could not afford to be too selective in choosing whom we might associate with, so long as we kept our eyes open and did not allow ourselves to be manipulated. Juma Khan was clearly attempting to do just that, and had the advantage of dealing with stateside American contacts whose ignorance of Afghanistan made them ripe for exploitation. Perhaps his most outrageous gambit, breathlessly reported to us, was his offer to “permit” American forces to use a desert airstrip in the Registan Desert,
some 100 miles southwest of Kandahar. Juma Khan’s permission wasn’t terribly valuable, as he didn’t control the strip or any territory remotely close to it; in fact, he had nothing to do with it. The landing field and an associated compound had been built by royal princes from the United Arab Emirates for their use, for a few weeks each year, in hunting the migrating houbara bustard through the trackless desert south of Kandahar. We encouraged Mark’s pursuit of the lead, making clear that under no circumstances should any long-term commitments be made to Juma Khan; any assistance provided to him should be calibrated, we said, solely for the limited purpose of making contact with Brahvi, and encouraging his return to Nimruz.

Dave and I were suspicious, to say the least, of the response from CTC/SO. Guarded as they were about Gul Agha, they could hardly have been more enthusiastic about Karim Brahvi, though his tribal base in the far southwest would make him a minor irritant to the Taliban, at best. We could only guess at the combination of factors behind their eagerness. The Clandestine Service greatly values loyalty: like many closed societies, at its best it is a band of brothers and sisters; but at its worst it is a scrum of competing mafias. I had no idea what links existed between Mark C and the leaders of CTC/SO, but suspected they were significant. I supported the effort to encourage and empower Brahvi: it would do no harm, I reasoned, and might do some good. But I was wary.

Now, having sat patiently through Gul Agha’s enthusiastic exposition on the past military triumphs of his family and his tribe, as well as his expressions of gratitude for American assistance against the Communists, and having made a show of solemn respect for Engineer Pashtun’s prowess as a military tactician, General Franks smiled, and thanked them for their excellent briefing. With a nod to Mark and me, he said he was sure they would continue their preparations in close coordination with us, and he looked forward to further word on their progress. As he stood to leave, I could almost see him wink.

In the month since our first videoconference and well before his meeting with Shirzai, General Franks and I had begun to develop an odd sort of indirect relationship. Shortly after hostilities commenced
on October 7, the CIA representative to CENTCOM, Pat Hailey, forwarded to me a series of questions, for my eyes only, from the general soliciting my analysis of the progress of the campaign. I was happy to provide it, but this put me in a potentially awkward spot. I certainly didn’t want anyone at headquarters interfering in any way with the analysis I provided to the CENTCOM commander. On the other hand, if they were to find out about this channel from anyone other than me, it would look as though I were bypassing my own organization and chain of command to provide uncoordinated advice to a senior intelligence customer—which, of course, was precisely what I wanted to do. My excuse, valid as it went, was that this was what General Franks had requested, and I was responding in good faith. I therefore informed headquarters of the request, including the general’s desire that neither the questions nor the responses be disseminated, and nonchalantly told them I would fulfill it. Fortunately, no one raised an objection.

This was but the first of a series of inquiries I received from the general throughout the war, to which I did my best to respond. I would send my analyses off to Pat to be conveyed to Franks, and wouldn’t hear another thing until eventually I received another set of questions.

It wasn’t until months later that I learned directly from Pat about the typical sequence of events surrounding these exchanges. General Franks, apparently, was quite mercurial and exceedingly demanding of his staff, with various subordinates regularly coming into, or falling out of, his favor. According to Pat, one of the best ways to chart who was in and who out was to examine the list of authorized recipients of my bits of wisdom. The chosen would meet with the general in a closed-door session to review my recommendations and discuss the progress of the campaign. As my comments usually contained at least some implied criticism of whatever it was the military was doing at the time, General Franks would typically react badly to my pieces: He would fulminate aloud, asking what the hell I knew about thus-and-such, and questioning why he’d asked me in the first place. The first couple of times, Pat concluded that my advice was being dismissed out of hand. But then he would notice various things being tweaked in apparent response to my
observations, and in a couple of weeks or so, another set of questions would emanate from the general’s staff for passage on to me.

On only one occasion did I try to provide unsolicited advice. Catching wind that CENTCOM intended to launch an airborne Special Forces raid on Mullah Omar’s compound west of Kandahar City on October 19, I was incredulous. I phoned Pat.

“Why are we doing this? Don’t they know no one’s there?” I asked. Omar’s compound had of course been struck with cruise missiles, at my suggestion, on the first night of the air campaign. Omar had not been back there since, and we knew from our sources in Kandahar that no one else was there, either.

Pat cut in before I could go any further. He wanted to save me the trouble. “Bob,” he said. “God himself could not turn this off.” Let us say I got the clear impression from Pat that there was considerably more of intra-DoD politics than military necessity in this operation, and that the desire of the Rangers and of Delta Force to demonstrate the relevance of their airborne capabilities in what was shaping up to be a CIA/Green Beret fight might have had a great deal to do with it. It may also have been that General Franks and the Pentagon were eager to demonstrate visibly to the American public that action was in fact being taken against the Taliban on the ground, as well as from the air. Whatever the case, Mullah Omar’s compound was indeed empty when the special operators arrived. While extracting, they came under heavy fire from a Taliban force which rushed to the scene, and one American was wounded. Worse, a helicopter staged at Dalbandin in Pakistan as part of a Quick Reaction Force associated with the operation rolled over in a “brownout” while attempting to land. Two Rangers were killed. It was cold comfort that we were not the only ones having to suffer politically inspired meddling from stateside; at least for us, the consequences thus far had not been lethal.