88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (41 page)

That out of the way, we moved on to a broader discussion, with Hamid recounting the events of the day. He had met with Taliban defense minister Obeidullah and former interior minister Abdul Razzak, both senior and influential members of the Taliban. Minister of Aviation Akhtar Muhammad Mansur was not present, but he had been strongly associated with the talks. It was agreed that Mullah Naqib would begin at the western end of the city, moving from checkpost to checkpost, disarming the Taliban and collecting their weapons. At the eastern end of the city, Taliban forces were to go to the airport, where Gul Agha would disarm them.

I didn’t say so, but this all sounded too simple and orderly to be realistic. I wondered if Karzai believed things would unfold this way. He had promised amnesty for low-level Taliban members who agreed to be disarmed. I didn’t even ask about the disposition of the Taliban leadership. Everything we were discussing was dependent upon the voluntary compliance of the Taliban. Between Karzai and Shirzai, there were not enough forces to ensure compliance with anything, and Karzai’s men were still well outside Kandahar. Although there was regular bombardment of Taliban targets within the city, which was increasing as our intelligence and targeting improved, it was not as though we had the area surrounded and could block anyone’s escape. With Karzai having reached nominal agreement, we would have to see how things unfolded.

When I expressed some misgivings about Naqib, Karzai said he shared our wariness. He fully understood that the reason the Taliban wanted to use Naqib as an intermediary was that they trusted him. That was useful for the moment, he said, but it also meant that Naqib should be watched carefully. In any case, given that the Popalzai, Barakzai, and Alikozai were the principal tribes represented in the city, it was important to include Naqib, as a respected Alikozai elder, to reassure his people that their interests were not being overlooked. It all made eminent sense.

Finally, the Taliban representatives had assured Hamid that the Arabs were in the process of leaving. Hamid had responded that the bombing of the city would continue as long as the Arabs remained.

I thanked Hamid and congratulated him again. I then lost no time in informing both Mark and Greg what had been agreed regarding Shirzai. It was up to them to facilitate things from there.

As light dawned on the morning of December 7, the streets of Kandahar were in chaos. Mark sat on a hill just beyond the eastern outskirts of the city, monitoring developments. He and an Arabic-speaking member of Gul Agha’s family listened on a walkie-talkie captured from an Arab west of Takht-e Pol as leaders of the fleeing Arabs tried to organize their departure. It was almost like listening to a group of tourists preparing for an excursion. They heard someone say, “Be sure you have your passports!” As the convoy emerged from the city, Mark could count fifty vehicles. A single massed airstrike might have wiped them all out, but there was no one close by who could call it in. They watched as several hundred Arab followers of bin Laden drove off, disappearing to the north on the Kabul-Kandahar highway.

Meanwhile, Gul Agha led a large force in an attack on the airport, only to find that the Arabs and the Taliban had left. The way into Kandahar was open. Grabbing a portion of his force and piling them into a handful of vehicles, he dashed into the city, with Mark and part of the ODA in tow. Finding no opposition, they went straight to the Governor’s Palace, and immediately occupied it. This was not quite in accordance with Karzai’s carefully laid out plan. While Gul Agha was thus engaged, the newly appointed chairman was unsuccessful in his attempts
to contact him by sat phone. Hoping to mediate between Gul Agha and Naqib, he planned to formally name Shirzai governor, but only if the latter would accept the Alikozai master of Arghandab as a partner in the liberation of the city. The deal would have to wait.

Mark’s reports throughout Shirzai’s campaign, for all that they were usually written in haste, often in appalling conditions and while their author was on the verge of exhaustion, frequently had a lyrical, understated, almost haunting quality. Now, having reached his objective, he paused to write a sitrep in which he described the first concrete sign of the city’s liberation. Much has been written since then about kite-flying, and the symbolic place it holds in Afghan culture. The Taliban, who had banned kite-flying as a sinful frivolity since their takeover in 1994, had been gone for only a few hours. But as Mark stood looking out a window of the Governor’s Palace, he could see, high above the darkening rooftops, that the last rays of sunset were illuminating a handful of kites as they swooped and darted in a bright azure sky.

It had been eighty-eight days since a series of attacks in a strange country many thousands of miles away had somehow unleashed a war for which no Afghans had been prepared. Now, this ancient city, traditional capital of an ancient land, would have the chance of a new beginning.

DECEMBER 8, 2001

I suppose it was inevitable. The dispute between the Afghan liberators of Kandahar was spreading to their American mentors. On the morning of December 8, Mark called to complain. He had contacted Greg to work through some remaining points of contention between their respective principals regarding the role of Naqib in securing the city. Some of Karzai’s people had allegedly begun throwing their weight around, generating considerable resentment in Gul Agha’s ranks, and now Mark was concerned that it could lead to violence. Greg, apparently, had been less than sympathetic.

“Hamid’s just been named leader of the country. I think that makes
him just a little bit more important than your guy, don’t you?” he was supposed to have said. I winced. This was no time for Greg to be Greg.

“Look, Greg,” I said, when I got him on the phone. “Mark doesn’t know you like I do. He doesn’t know how to take you, and he doesn’t know when to ignore what you say.” This was my lead-in to what I expected to be a counseling session, but the ex-Marine immediately burst out laughing.

“Okay, Chief, I got it. I hear you, five by five.” He was still laughing. “You won’t have any more trouble from me.” We talked over the need to mediate between the two leaders; otherwise, we risked having our Afghan allies at war with each other, and it was entirely too soon for that.

When I got back to Mark, he explained that for his part, he’d had to get pretty rough with Shirzai. When our voluble friend had threatened, in a fit of anger, to attack Karzai’s men, Mark had left him in no doubt of the consequences:

“Shirzai, if you attack, you won’t just be attacking Karzai’s men. You’ll be attacking us, because we’re with them. That will make you an enemy, and we will have to treat you accordingly.” That got the big man’s attention. It was something he could understand: “If my friend attacks my brother, I must attack my friend.” There was no more talk of fighting with Karzai.

Later that day, I sent out a strongly worded message to both teams. Karzai, who was still moving south from Shawali Kowt, would be entering Kandahar for meetings at the Governor’s Palace on December 9. On the margins of those meetings, CIA was to broker a private session between the new chairman and Gul Agha, at which both Echo and Foxtrot teams were to be present, and all outstanding issues were to be worked out. The two could bicker later, I said, but for now, with the situation in Kandahar still so unsettled, nothing must be allowed to interfere with our counterterrorism objectives. To that end, we would need immediate manpower and assistance from both men. Specifically, Echo and Foxtrot were to set up a joint counterterrorism “pursuit team” of the sort advocated by headquarters to round up any Arabs in the area and to follow up on all counterterrorism leads. We would need a dedicated detention and interrogation facility for any al-Qa’ida
or senior Taliban officials captured, where they could be held pending a determination as to their disposition. A special security force should be established to control access to all designated sites associated with al-Qa’ida or with the Pakistani-based Ummah Tameer-e Nau, which was suspected of providing assistance to al-Qa’ida in developing weapons of mass destruction. And finally, a joint committee should be formed to oversee the equitable distribution of humanitarian aid in the city and the surrounding area.

The December 9 meeting went better than we could have hoped. Thanks in part, I’m sure, to American preparation, everyone was on his best behavior. Karzai, Gul Agha, and Mullah Naqib met, with both Gul Agha and Naqib pledging their fealty to their new leader. At Karzai’s direction, it was agreed that during an interim period, Shirzai would take charge of security in the southern part of the city, south of the main highway, and that a senior lieutenant to be named by Naqib, though not Naqib himself, would assume responsibility for the northern part of the city. Once the situation had been stabilized, Shirzai would assume his full duties as provincial governor. It was a masterly stroke by Karzai, and it greatly eased the tensions between the Barakzai and Alikozai chiefs.

A cloud of suspicion still hung over Naqib because of the effective escape of both the Arabs and the Taliban leadership, which had occurred under the cover of a surrender agreement he had brokered. Realistically, even if Naqib had given the Taliban political cover to negotiate a handover of the city, political cover was about all he had been in a position to provide. No one could have prevented the Taliban’s escape from Kandahar. The American failure to strike the fleeing Arabs, though, was a costly error for which we could blame no one else, and for which we would eventually pay a heavy price.

If Naqib had played a role in “saving” the Taliban leadership, he was no more complicit than Karzai. I was not entirely comfortable with the chaotic way in which the war had ended, but the Taliban had done us a great favor in abandoning the city. Had they and the Arabs decided to make a last stand in Kandahar, we would not have had sufficient Pashtun forces to root them out. Employing some combination of Northern
Alliance and American troops and U.S. airpower to do the job would have wrecked the city, generated heavy casualties, and completely changed the whole political character of the war in the south, probably precluding any chance of an effective peace. As it was, both Afghans and their foreign benefactors would have the opportunity, at least, for a new beginning, a chance to build a unified nation that would no longer serve as a base for international terrorists.

The question was whether they, Afghans and foreigners, would have the wisdom and the patience to succeed.

MID-DECEMBER 2001

T
HE OFFICE DRAPES HAD
been drawn, shielding us from prying eyes in the apartment block several hundred yards away. Once again, I sat on the threadbare couch, feet propped up on the blond wood coffee table, rubbing my eyes to ward off exhaustion as “Kate,” the senior communicator, fussed with the video connection.

A strong, broad-shouldered, handsome woman in her mid-thirties, Kate had always been something of an enigma to me. She was highly competent, reliable, and devoted to her job, which she performed in the obscurity of her stoutly vaulted spaces. It is one of the great ironies that communicators occupy one of the lowest social rungs in their organization, and yet theirs is perhaps the most sensitive position. They are the keepers of the secrets. Everything flows through them.

Kate was perhaps more sensitively aware of her caste, and more affected by it, than most communicators. Among other things, it made her all the more fiercely loyal to those who served under her. She wore her chip quite clearly on her shoulder. Unless it was a professional necessity to enter my office, she would not do so. It soon became apparent that she would not pay the boss a call unless summoned. If I wished to interact less formally, I would have to come to her. I was more than happy to do so. And if such visits were not as frequent as they might have been, Kate was gratified at the mark of professional respect they implied.

After 9/11, things changed a bit. Where once Kate would have established the video link and returned to her office, after 9/11 she lingered
to view the goings-on. The reason soon became apparent: she fixed me one day with an appraising eye during a series of particularly politically charged sessions. “It’s interesting to watch the way you maneuver,” she said. “It’s pretty neat.” I remember it as one of the best compliments I have ever received.

On this occasion, the screen before me was filled with boxes, most representing the various military entities—in Tampa, Qatar, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan—involved in sharing information and coordinating actions for the Tora Bora campaign, which was now getting under way in earnest. This was the first of a series of virtual conferences with CTC/SO acting as host, and determining CIA participation, which meant that shortly I would be cut out, as CTC was eager to get me out of Afghanistan and restrict me to my Pakistani lane. But for some reason I was included in this one.

The key CIA field participant in the conference was Gary Berntsen, leader of Team Juliet, successor to the original Jawbreaker team led by Gary Schroen in the Panjshir Valley, and now directing the effort in Tora Bora. I had never met Berntsen, but had heard about him. He was reputed to be a bit of a wild man, which colored my perceptions. It would be fair to say that he made a very energetic presentation, punctuated with descriptions of complicated, synchronized movements of attacking forces, blocking forces, and so on. Apart from the handful of CIA paramilitary officers and SF troopers with him, he had only loosely organized rump Afghan militias at his disposal. It was hard for me to judge the soundness of his plans, as I lacked sufficient knowledge of precisely what was happening on the ground, but I do remember thinking that what he was describing was well beyond the capabilities of any group of Afghan militias I had ever heard of.

Hank was the senior CIA participant at the headquarters end. He said surprisingly little, and when he did speak, it was in a halting and hesitant manner. The meeting broke up in mild confusion. The whole thing struck me as bizarre, so much so that I contacted Pat Hailey at CENTCOM, who had been sitting in, to ask.