88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (29 page)

She stopped me partway through the second room. “Okay. I take your point,” she said. I didn’t need to give her, or anyone else in the mission, an excuse to make things harder for me still. I had to show I was a team player.

When Secretary Rumsfeld arrived at my door, I was pleased to find him escorted by Michele Sison. Tall, vivacious, strikingly pretty, and—in view of her senior position—surprisingly young, she had cheerily greeted Rumsfeld on his arrival and simply refused to leave his side. The secretary, for his part, seemed very jocular.

“What do you know that I don’t know?” he demanded of me, as soon as we were settled.

“Very little, I hope.” We were sharing everything we knew with his department, I said.

“Tell me about Hamid Karzai.”

I was careful at the outset to state that while of course some of my people knew him very well, I had not yet met the man.

“Oh, I have!” Michele said. She proceeded to provide the secretary impressions from her encounters with Karzai on the diplomatic circuit. We carried on in a relaxed fashion, the secretary posing questions and listening intently. After a few minutes, a doughy, bookish-looking fellow opened the door and walked in as if he owned the place. I would
later come to know Doug Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, much better, in the context of a very different war.

I talked about prospects for a broader insurgency in the south, and the difficulties we were encountering in getting Pashtun leaders to get off the fence and to commit themselves. The secretary glared. “And what are you doing about it?” he demanded in mock exasperation.

“Now you see what we live with,” Feith muttered wanly.

It didn’t seem that Rumsfeld had any particular agenda for the meeting. I think having heard my ideas about the conduct of the war, he just wanted to take my measure a bit. He would seek out my views again in future.

What I neglected to explain to him was that Karzai’s exfiltration should be kept secret. It simply never occurred to me that I would have to. I thought it obvious that with Karzai having publicly announced his leadership of a genuine, independent, indigenously based insurgency in the heartland of Afghanistan, the last thing we would want to do was advertise that the U.S. military had been forced to fly in to save him from the Taliban. The secretary and I were operating on very different assumptions. I would soon regret the oversight.

Late that night, I met with General Ehsan, the new ISI chief, just as he was returning from dinner with Rumsfeld at the presidency. I briefed him on our surreptitious exfiltration of Hamid Karzai, requesting that he keep this information close-hold, and stressing that it would only be a brief period before Karzai would leave Pakistan to return to the fight. No one must know that he’d left. The general agreed, stressing that we needed to make quicker progress against the Taliban, and also offered me exclusive use of his personal aircraft for three days, so that we could ferry necessary supplies and equipment down to Jacobabad.

It was not until the following morning that I found myself in the abandoned schoolhouse that was now Hamid Karzai’s home. After we had conferred quietly for a while, we joined his tribal colleagues in a circle. Hamid introduced his six commanders, extolling each in turn for his loyalty and bravery in confronting the Taliban. I asked a number of questions about their plans and the steps they would take upon their return, with Hamid patiently translating both questions and answers.
We spoke of our common interest in driving foreign terrorists out of Afghanistan, and the terrorists’ Taliban protectors from power. I spoke of the assistance they could expect from America. The discussion was all very warm and bracing, but it hadn’t yet told me what I really wanted to know. Finally, I put to them what was to me the obvious question:

“What you are setting out to do will be very difficult,” I said. “You are taking great risks for yourselves, your families and your clans.” I paused, looking briefly at each of them in turn. “Why are you doing this?”

“Muhammad Shahzad,” a heavyset man whose body seemed to radiate energy and strength, had made a particular impression on me. He had piercing light green eyes, and bore himself with considerable dignity. Karzai had earlier told me privately of his loyalty. He had insisted on remaining next to Hamid at all times; at the points of greatest danger in the mountains, he had remained awake while Hamid slept, and had covered his leader with his own blanket to protect him from the wind. To that point, he had not said a word, but now he spoke for everyone. His answer was simple and direct:

“We’re tired of those bastards from Kandahar telling us what to do in our own area.” That I could understand; it worked for me.

Hamid, Jeff (the senior reports officer), and I then excused ourselves and stepped out to a separate room. I felt I had died a thousand deaths following Karzai’s progress over the past few weeks through brief, often panic-stricken snippets, related secondhand. Now, at last, I had the opportunity to hear the complete tale, calmly, from the man himself, as Jeff took notes and asked questions.

As we knew, on October 8, Hamid and three companions had crossed into Afghanistan on Highway 4, the main southern route from Quetta, riding two motorcycles all the way to Kandahar. They spent the night with a trusted friend, from whose home they could see the booming flashes of a U.S. air raid. The following day they drove northward in a taxi until they encountered a Taliban checkpoint at the crossing into Uruzgan Province. The guard, a taciturn young man barely able to support a beard, was suspicious of the large bag in the back of their car, the one with the satellite phone secreted within it, and wished to inspect it. The taxi’s occupants demurred, and two of their number
went inside to speak with the officer in charge. Karzai and his remaining companion whispered together in the car. Their quest might end right then and there, they agreed, but they would not be arrested that day. They prepared their weapons. Their two friends emerged from the guardhouse. The senior officer, apparently, had not been interested—either in them or their bag. Leaving the border post behind, they continued onward without a stop until they reached Tarin Kowt, the provincial seat of Uruzgan. Hamid Karzai, the son of Abdul Ahad, grandson of the great Khair Muhammad Khan, and scion of the proud Durrani Popalzai, was finally home among his people.

The Pashtuns of Afghanistan are divided into two broad tribal confederations, the Durrani and the Gilzai. The former are concentrated in the central and southern regions of the country, the latter in the east. Tarin Kowt itself was comprised of perhaps 60 percent Durrani, with a plurality of those drawn from Hamid’s Popalzai. As soon as he arrived in the area, Hamid traveled to Kotwan village to meet with the highly respected Amin Zadeh. Amin drew together key notables from both Durrani- and Gilzai-affiliated tribes, including representatives of all the local Popalzai. Together they pledged Hamid their support, but stressed to him that they had few weapons, and not enough ammunition even for those. In subsequent days, Hamid met local chieftains in Khanaka, and later in Ghojurak, canvassing tribal groups in virtually all the villages surrounding Tarin Kowt over the following two weeks. In one excursion in the Dera Juy Valley, his borrowed car got stuck in mud; he and his companions walked onward three hours up the valley to meet with seventy tribals.

Hamid conducted these meetings entirely in the open. He knew from listening to internal Taliban radio broadcasts that the authorities in Kandahar had become aware of his presence within three days of his arrival in Uruzgan, but they could do nothing about it at first. In fact, the deputy chief of the Uruzgan Provincial Council, a Taliban member, met with Karzai and offered to turn Tarin Kowt over to him. Hamid declined, saying he would only take the town when he could defend it. A couple of days later the same official reported that Mullah Omar had complained to the governor about Karzai, citing reports that the opposition leader was circulating freely. The governor explained that he
lacked the forces to arrest the man, and feared the reaction of the local tribes if he should attempt it.

In late October, word came that a large Taliban force—the same one reported by our sources—was moving northward from Kandahar to find Karzai and arrest him. In Pashtun culture, failure to defend a guest is deemed a shameful breach of honor. Fearing that they could not protect him, the local elders asked that Karzai move to a more defensible area, promising to provide him with an armed escort. Hamid’s core group of fifteen armed supporters was soon joined by perhaps thirty-five others; they walked eight hours up into the mountains. The newest volunteers had not been aware of the plan, and had left their homes without food, sleeping gear, or proper clothing.

They camped on a high plateau north of Dera Juy, flanked on the western and eastern sides by ridges that dropped off into steep, rocky, easily defensible slopes. Local farmers provided them with food. Another thirty volunteers arrived the following day. When the first weapons drop came on October 30, Hamid had about 120 fighters—considerably fewer, Jeff and I noted, than he had advertised to us at the time. The weapons, he said, were first-rate, fully assembled and ready for use. In addition to the light arms, he handed out ten PKM light machine guns and eight RPG launchers.

In addition to comestibles, local villagers were regularly providing Karzai’s band with news about developments and Taliban movements in the area. On November 1, they reported that 200 “strangers” were making their way up the valley. Karzai had his men set up a checkpost on the main road below them, where they soon captured two Taliban fighters from Helmand. The two told them that a considerable force of Pakistanis and ragtag Afghans had parked their trucks farther down the valley, and were making their way on foot up the steep terrain from several different directions toward Karzai’s position.

Hamid rushed to set up a defensive perimeter near his main camp along the western ridge, but before he could do so began taking fire, forcing him and his men to withdraw to a separate area where they had additional ammunition stores. Fortunately, they had managed to bring several of the PKMs with them as they fled. From the new position, they could both defend themselves and supply the fighters who
remained along the western ridge. The latter were under sharp attack, particularly at the far northern and southern ends of their defensive position. “Mohamed Alwahhab,” one of Karzai’s commanders whom he did not know, kept up a tenacious defense at the northern end, but Karzai’s men were driven back from the south. These joined Karzai, and the combined force abandoned the ammunition storage area, regrouped on higher ground, and then counterattacked, driving the Taliban back.

Hamid could listen to the Taliban communications on a captured radio. One of their commanders was trapped behind a large boulder as he took concentrated PKM fire from above. Someone ordered him to renew the attack, saying they were under direct orders from Mullah Omar.

“I don’t care if the orders come from my father,” the man had shouted back. “If I try to move, they will shoot my head off!”

The fighting continued until 2:00
PM
on November 2, when the Taliban and Pakistanis broke contact and moved off. The PKMs, he said, had been decisive. Without them, they would surely have been overrun. The Pakistanis were particularly good fighters, and cruel: they had badly abused one of Karzai’s wounded.

Hamid and most of his men had survived, but had no more water, and were very unsure of their position. They could not communicate with the men defending the eastern ridge, which was some way off. Hamid could see armed men through his binoculars, but could not be sure if they were his. If not, he would be in an untenable position. They held a
jirga
to decide what they should do; the consensus was that Hamid should arrange for himself and his senior commanders to be evacuated by the Americans, and then return with greater assistance, while the rest of the force dispersed for the time being.

As it turned out, Karzai’s men on the eastern ridge had held their positions; there had been no immediate need to evacuate. It was an inestimable blessing, though, that they had.

Jeff and I said our goodbyes to Karzai and his elders, and I made my way off for a briefing by Captain Jason Amerine, commander to the ODA that had come down from K2 to accompany Karzai on his return to Uruzgan. He and his people had been studying maps of the Tarin Kowt area, and had come up with what struck me as a rather overcomplicated
insertion plan. I wasn’t about to try to tell this young man his business. The military part of this was his responsibility. I figured that so long as the Special Forces could move Karzai and his elders into a defensible position, U.S. airpower would protect them until they could assemble what we all hoped would be a larger fighting force.

I also took the opportunity to tour the bivouac area where our CIA people would be staged before inserting inside. Spotting Tom, my translator, who was slated to accompany the team, I pulled him aside.

“Can’t you do something about the food?” I asked. I was mortified that we were providing the elders nothing better than cold beef stew, much as they seemed to relish it. Unsurprisingly, Tom had already established contacts at a decent restaurant in town; proper mutton and rice would soon be delivered to the gate. As we spoke, Tom was putting the finishing touches on some “field-expedient” clothing: he had taken a light military jacket, festooned with multiple mesh pockets but several sizes too large for him, and cut off the sleeves to make a vest. Just then, the bearded, hulking Special Forces trooper occupying the cot closest to Tom’s was inquiring loudly as to the whereabouts of his jacket. We both looked at Tom’s vest. The trooper burst out in incredulous laughter, amused at Tom’s sheer audacity. I could only wonder at the reasons for Tom’s apparent kleptomania. Perhaps he reasoned that as all the goods surrounding them were government-issue, they should properly be the property of all. Perhaps he was a just a romantic Trotskyite at heart. Whatever the case, he would not always find such tolerance in future.