88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (33 page)

Rocket-propelled grenades whizzed briefly overhead as the helos disgorged their passengers; the RPG-7s were suppressed with automatic weapons fire from the small Afghan reception team. Karzai, concerned that the diverted helicopter had gone toward a village controlled by Taliban sympathizers, and quite oblivious of any danger to himself, took off after it at a run in his white sneakers. Greg, Jimmy, and one member of the Afghan reception team ran in pursuit, catching him with difficulty at the top of a steep hill. It took two hours for the entire entry team to regroup in the darkness, and another three hours for them to make the dangerous climb down a cliffside to a mud-walled compound held by a local notable loyal to Karzai. One of the CIA paramilitary specialists had badly injured his ankle in the crash landing. An inauspicious start.

The following morning, Echo Team received its first airdrop of weapons, with Karzai overseeing their distribution to various small groups of followers who bounced seemingly randomly into the camp. Most took their weapons and returned to their villages; it was not at all clear how many of them Karzai would be able to rally to his cause when he needed them. To Echo, the whole exercise thus far was one of faith.

Reports filtering in from Tarin Kowt, though, were encouraging. The Taliban defeats in the north and rumors of Karzai’s return were
apparently feeding political restiveness in the provincial capital. That night, the Taliban deputy governor who had been so cooperative with Karzai, along with three of his colleagues, were beaten and killed, strung up in the street by an anti-Taliban mob.

With Hamid optimistically predicting that 2,000 supporters would be awaiting his arrival in Tarin Kowt, Greg agreed that they should move immediately to the governor’s house. He made a priority request for an airdrop of food for a hoped-for 1,000 fighters: best to plan for success.

On the 16th, they began their tactical move toward Tarin Kowt. In his report that day, Greg compared the operation unfavorably with the Oklahoma land rush: A small band of armed farmers piled into whatever vehicles were available, and raced pell-mell to the east, with Echo trying to preserve as much order as it could. They arrived after nightfall, only to be informed by local leaders that a large number of Taliban were moving north to retake the town. Unsure how large a force they might face or when it might arrive, the ODA, now at full strength, moved out before dawn to set up an observation post on a ridge commanding the southern approaches to the area.

On the morning of November 17, the lead elements of a large Taliban force mounted in perhaps eighty vehicles, led by an old Soviet “BMP” armored personnel carrier, came into view. The Taliban split into three motorized columns, rushing forward across the broad, sandy valley below. With the first American attack aircraft coming on station, it was a perfect opportunity to catch them in the open. But as the Air Force combat controller began guiding the initial strikes, the rest of the Special Forces troopers turned to see their Afghan security contingent piling in panic into their trucks, about to flee. Faced with abandonment, having no vehicles of their own, and not enough guns to protect themselves from the onrushing Taliban, they had little choice but to jump into the vehicles themselves before they raced off. The little convoy’s chaotic arrival back in Tarin Kowt was what prompted Greg’s verbal assault on Karzai.

The Popalzai elder had been distracted as usual, speaking on a sat phone with the media, as was his wont, but the sight of Greg, fairly
spitting with fury and threatening to leave, concentrated his mind. He immediately rushed off to find his most capable commander, ordering him to gather some men and return to the fight with Echo and the ODA. By now, the Taliban had long bypassed the ODA’s initial observation post and the three columns were closing in fast on the town. Rushing to the closest high spot they could find, the Special Forces air controllers returned to providing guidance to the fighter-bombers high above. If the Taliban could make it into the town, both the Americans and the Afghans would be surrounded, and airstrikes would be useless. They were minutes from annihilation.

In Islamabad, CW3 Poteet, the redoubtable Special Forces veteran, burst into my office.

“My God,” he said. “This is turning into a turkey shoot.” Alerted that a major Taliban attack was under way with Americans in direct danger, fighter aircraft had been scrambled from carriers in the Arabian Sea and were being diverted from seemingly everywhere in theater. Poteet was listening in on the chatter as pilots requested clearance to make bombing runs on the Taliban columns, which continued to press relentlessly forward. There were so many aircraft, he said, they were being stacked in holding patterns to wait their turn.

“Everyone wants in on this!” It sounded like an easy victory in the making. We had no idea just how close the southern campaign was, even then, to catastrophe.

By the end of the day, of the approximately eighty Taliban vehicles involved in the attack, some forty-five had been destroyed, with the rest finally breaking off and fleeing in disorder. Many scores of Taliban were killed—most buried too quickly by local villagers to get any sort of accurate post-battle count. It was another huge setback for the Taliban, following on the heels of the fall of Kabul and the other disasters that had recently befallen them in the north, but this time in a Pashtun area close to Kandahar, which they had dominated almost since their founding and which was home to some of their most senior leaders.

Still, it had been a very close thing: even with the enormous weight of uncontested American airpower on their side, Karzai and his adherents in Tarin Kowt had nearly been overrun. Tactical stupidity—rushing
forward headlong in vehicles over open ground in spite of sustained air attack—had been at least as much a factor in the Taliban defeat as had U.S. air superiority. Had Karzai perished, as well he might, it would have left the Taliban free to concentrate their reserves on Gul Agha, and would doubtless have convinced the southern Pashtuns of the futility of resistance to the Taliban. It would certainly have changed the whole complexion of the struggle in the south, and might have forced us to “Americanize” the war and abandon altogether our strategy of assisting the Pashtuns in their own liberation.

As it was, Pashtun elders in Uruzgan who had been chafing under the Taliban but who had been unwilling to declare themselves without indications of imminent Taliban defeat were now coming forward in growing numbers to declare fealty to Karzai, their native son. They sought his patronage and promised fighters to his cause.

By any objective measure, neither Karzai nor Gul Agha, at this or any other stage, posed much of a military threat to the Taliban, per se. In those days I thought of them primarily as mobile lightning rods, able to attract attacks by Taliban forces who had no tactical answer for the problem of air-delivered smartbombs. With the relative immunity afforded them by American airpower, the threat they posed to the Taliban was primarily political, not military. It is worth remembering that many of the major victories won by the Taliban during their northward march in the first years of their existence were not won through force of arms. Instead, whole populations, tired of the depredations of feral local warlords, had risen up to embrace the pious rectitude which the Taliban represented, driving off their oppressors in the process and sending their sons to join its army. Now, the process was working in reverse. Our own understanding of this broad sociopolitical shift was hazy at best. The Taliban were far more capable of understanding what was happening to them.

NOVEMBER 17, 2001

H
EY, CHIEF.” THE COPS
(Chief of Operations) was leaning through my doorway. “Jalil’s on the line. He sounds pretty excited.”

I hadn’t been sure if I’d ever hear from Mullah Jalil again. But given that he was calling me, I was not at all surprised that he was upset. I crossed the hall and took a moment to collect my thoughts before picking up the sat phone receiver.

“Haji Mullah, how are you?” I said breezily.

“They tried to kill me!” he wailed. “They bombed my house!”

I feigned shock and surprise. “What? Haji Mullah, this is terrible! This was not supposed to happen! Are you all right?” The bombs had fallen the night before, destroying the Foreign Office Guesthouse where Jalil made his residence, at a time when he would normally have been present. He had left home just two hours before the attack; when he returned in the early morning, he found the place in ruins.

The start of hostilities on October 7 had done nothing to discourage Mullah Jalil from continuing to speak with me. On the contrary, it gave him all the more reason to stay in touch, and to try to manipulate me or to seek my assistance in pursuit of his many schemes. If there were a common denominator in the little cleric’s constant machinations, it was that he hoped to find a way to end the war. To the extent that could be done on terms maximally favorable to the Taliban, so much the better; but he clearly wanted to find a solution to the conflict before it wrecked the movement. Within that overall framework,
though, there was no telling how many different conspiracies he might be pursuing at any given time, or how far he might go in his pursuit of each. For my part, I was looking for instances where our tactical interests might overlap, or where gambits he was pursuing to his own ends might be twisted or exploited in ways the mullah did not intend.

To say that Jalil was highly conspiratorial was not to say that he was particularly schooled in deception; his motives were generally easy to trace. You could never trust what he said, of course, but there were many instances when it was to his advantage to tell the truth, and in any case it was always useful to measure what he was saying against what we knew from other, more reliable sources. My contact with him also provided me a means to pass useful messages to the Taliban leadership.

In one of our conversations near the outset of the war, Haji Mullah suggested to me what he hoped I would see as a useful operational ploy. If I were to send a doctor in my employ to Kandahar, he suggested, say from another Muslim country, senior Taliban leaders would bring their families to him for treatment, thus providing the physician—and therefore me—with a wonderful means of eliciting information. Jalil would gladly facilitate the process, and help install the doctor. There were times when his manipulations were so childishly transparent they were almost endearing.

On October 18, Jalil suggested something more interesting. He hoped to arrange meetings between me and “some Taliban leaders and commanders.” Some of the Taliban leadership would be aware of what he was doing, he said elliptically, and some would not; Mullah Omar, he said, would be in the latter category. As a test, and partly out of concern for some sort of ambush, I asked whether he would object to having these meetings set up with ISI assistance. He warily replied that that would very much depend on who in the ISI was involved. He readily agreed to my suggestion of Brigadier Suhail, the nattily attired Taliban expert and my good friend, but volunteered that under no circumstances should “Major Hadad,” a radical supporter of the Taliban in the mold of Colonel Imam, be made aware of what was happening. In seeking General Jafar’s agreement to employ Suhail in the effort, I underscored my concerns about Hadad and others of his ilk. Jafar fully
understood: Imam, he said, had been sent back into retirement for just that reason.

The meeting took place in Karachi on October 24. The experienced officer I sent in my stead met with Abdul Qadir, the Taliban military attaché in Pakistan, who was acting as a personal emissary for Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder, with Mullah Omar, of the Taliban, and now the Taliban’s deputy chief of Army Staff. Baradar was a respected commander from the
jihad
era and, like Hamid Karzai, a Durrani Popalzai from Deh Ra’ud, in Uruzgan. Speaking through his emissary, Baradar promised to give us “five [senior] Arabs,” presumably including bin Laden, but said there could be no change in overall Taliban policy concerning al-Qa’ida. That was unacceptable, of course, but an interesting beginning. We passed the emissary a satellite phone for Baradar’s use, with an invitation to contact me directly.

On November 8, Jalil passed on a more interesting message still. Baradar, he said, wanted to join the opposition with 700 or 800 fighters from his home area of Deh Ra’ud. But first, the commander wanted to know two things: Would we support him? And second, were there any other Afghans who would fight? These were not unreasonable questions. If he were to break militarily with the Taliban with only a small force, Baradar would need our assistance to survive more than a few days, and unless other Pashtuns were willing to oppose the Taliban, he would be condemned to ultimate failure. Neither Abdul Haq nor Karzai had received effective assistance from us up to that stage; the former was dead, and the latter had barely escaped Afghanistan with his life a few days before. It was not at all clear whether any other Pashtuns would take similar risks.

But still, this didn’t smell right. It sounded as though Baradar—or perhaps Jalil—hoped to lure Americans into an ambush, or to sniff out whether there were other Pashtuns who were preparing to take up arms against the Taliban. And even if Baradar were sincere, why would Jalil help him? Jalil had never given any indication that he would turn against Omar, or otherwise help us to eliminate other senior Taliban whose recalcitrance was standing in the way of a settlement. I responded that we would be willing to provide assistance to Baradar, or
anyone else who took up arms against the Taliban for that matter, but that we would only do so if Baradar publicly broke with the organization and inflicted casualties on their forces. And as for others, Jalil should know that there were many Pashtuns who opposed the Taliban. The wily cleric indicated that he understood; he would convey our message to the deputy chief of staff. Days later, there was still no response from the senior Taliban commander. Jalil told me on November 10 and 11 that he had discussed the situation with both Baradar and Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, the minister of civil aviation. Neither, he said, could decide what to do.