88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (50 page)

Although the Pakistanis would often complain of U.S. inconstancy, neither they nor the Americans would admit to the mendacity underlying relations on both sides. The unwritten rule for Pakistan has been never to admit engaging in activities of which Washington disapproves; and in fact, such duplicity is tacitly welcomed by the Americans during times, such as the one in which we then found ourselves, when the United States too would not want to admit that it was looking the other way on banned Pakistani activities.

That was why, I knew, President Musharraf had been so outraged the previous December when, in the aftermath of the attack on India’s Parliament, Ambassador Chamberlin had pressed him on Pakistani support to the militants. At first, Musharraf had engaged in the usual, ritual denials. But when Chamberlin refused to be put off, he had become enraged. In effect, she was breaking the tacit rule: “You
must
understand
our compulsions,” he had complained. After all, wasn’t he giving us everything we wanted in the War on Terror?

General Ehsan, I feared, would not be so candid. At this point, I was already focused not on the present crisis, but on the next. Now that the United States was finally engaged, and had put both Pakistanis and Indians on notice, I thought there was a fair chance that the deputy secretary could gain Pakistani agreement to cut off infiltration of Kashmiri militants across the Line of Control, and that this would be enough to satisfy New Delhi—at least for the nonce. But I didn’t believe for an instant that the Pakistanis would make the cutoff permanent, and feared that once the Indians realized this, as they would, they would not be dissuaded from attacking in response to the next, inevitable terrorist outrage.

On January 2, President Musharraf had delivered a much-anticipated address to the nation dealing with religiously inspired militancy in their midst. Extremism, he stated forthrightly, was destroying Pakistan from within, and had to be opposed. We had hoped, in the process, that he would clearly and permanently forswear support to those engaged in violence in Kashmir, many of whom, we knew, were Pakistani nationals. Sitting at home that evening, I had listened carefully to the coded language he employed—and came away disappointed. The following morning, Ambassador Chamberlin and Chat Blakeman, the political counselor, were exultant, but I was depressed. Yes, the president had forsworn any Pakistani support to terrorism, but how could he do otherwise? It was all a matter of definition, I knew, and unless Musharraf placed his words in the context of a change in policy on Kashmir, those words would be meaningless. On the issue of Kashmir, Musharraf had been implacable; absent any other means of exerting pressure on New Delhi, I felt certain, sooner or later support to militants would inevitably continue.

That Saturday, June 1, I sat alone with Ehsan for well over an hour. I approached the topic carefully. I reviewed the past history of U.S.-Pakistan relations, noting the layered, institutionalized duplicity which had always characterized them. I pointed out that it is the habit, and indeed the duty, of diplomats, and spies for that matter, to lie to one another.
That was how they protected their national interests. He smiled in wry recognition. I fully expected more such ritual duplicity, I said, when Mr. Armitage came to town. But at a certain point, duplicity would no longer serve either of our interests.

“Please don’t misunderstand me,” I continued. “I fully support my country’s policy. I believe Pakistan should immediately and permanently end its support to armed militancy in Kashmir and cease militant infiltration across the Line of Control. That is what we will want to hear when Mr. Armitage arrives. But if that is not what you actually intend—if other things must happen before you will actually make the cutoff permanent—then saying otherwise will not serve your long-term interests, or ours. If there is in fact more that must happen to achieve a permanent cutoff, then you must tell us.” Ehsan looked at me thoughtfully. I had gone as far as I could go, and probably further than I should.

On June 6, Rich Armitage arrived in Islamabad and held high-profile meetings with Abdul Sattar, the foreign minister, with Foreign Secretary Inam ul-Haq, and with the chief secretary for Kashmir. He sat for two hours with President Musharraf, and came away with at least vague assurances. He had one other scheduled meeting before departing for New Delhi.

The three of us sat on a long, low couch, with the late-afternoon sun pouring over our shoulders through the plate-glass window directly behind us. Lieutenant General Ehsan sat between Armitage and me, slim and dapper as always. He had abandoned his uniform in favor of a well-cut dark suit. He bore the uncomfortable look of a smooth and clever man who has suddenly found himself cornered. Normally, a discussion like this would have taken place in General Ehsan’s offices but, given the sensitivity of the situation, all had thought it best to keep the meeting as low-key as possible. We were meeting in the residence of the American ambassador.

As we sat together, General Ehsan repeated the assurances newly provided by General Musharraf; Ehsan would be the one charged with carrying them out. A beat passed in awkward silence, as I waited to hear a “but . . .” It was not forthcoming. At last, I put the question to
him directly: “Will you need some reciprocity from the Indian side to make these assurances permanent?” The general looked at Armitage furtively for a moment, and then managed a tentative, equivocal “Yes.”

But the opportunity, such as it was, had passed. Ehsan did not press the point. Deputy Secretary Armitage had what he needed. The following day, June 7, he presented the Pakistani assurances, such as they were, to the Indians as a firm commitment to cut off militant infiltration into Indian-held Kashmir. The Indians were guardedly mollified. Soon they would see a drop in infiltation across the Line of Control. It would take several months more before the two armies would end their mobilization and pull back completely from the frontier, but the point of greatest danger had passed.

I had hoped, perhaps naively, that Armitage’s shuttle diplomacy would lead to concerted U.S. engagement to deal with the underlying dispute over Kashmir. I thought this close brush with open warfare between two nuclear-armed powers would convince us that the status quo was unacceptable. I had stressed to Rich that difficult as that might be, a resolution of Kashmir was necessary if we were to achieve our regional objectives, including in Afghanistan.

But the deputy secretary didn’t need guidance from me, and my concerns did not change the objective circumstances. Despite a UN Security Council resolution dating from 1948 demanding a plebiscite in the disputed territory, India had always refused any outside involvement in Kashmir, considering it an internal matter. And the United States was not about to put its potential strategic relationship with India at risk in deference to a negotiation that would probably never get off the ground.

And yet, as we would shortly see again, the key to our objectives in Afghanistan, to say nothing of our other regional interests, depended on a genuine peace between India and Pakistan, a peace they were manifestly incapable of achieving on their own; and that peace, if we were to have it, would rest in turn, then as now, on a resolution of Kashmir.

MAY 2005

I
T WAS ONE OF
those perfect days which lingers in the memory. Standing on the grounds of the Arg Palace in Kabul, I could take it all in at a glance: the bright emerald green of the carefully manicured lawns framing the understated, traditional elegance of the palace, and the tall, stately pines that drew the eye upward toward the Afghan flag, which snapped smartly in the wind before the backdrop of a cloudless, crystalline azure sky.

It had been nearly three years since I had left South-Central Asia. Now I was returning on a week’s visit to the region that had once been my home. My courtesy call on Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, which had taken place minutes before, had seemed surreal. We chatted amiably, but there was little reference to the struggles and adventures of the past. Surrounded now by the trappings of position, if not power, I had the impression that the humble, parlous circumstances of Hamid’s rise were perhaps an embarrassment best not spoken of. From the many current, pressing problems which I had been prepared to discuss, the president had seemed to me strangely detached. His mind that day was working on a grander scale. If one hadn’t known better, one might have thought it was within his power to unite all Pashtuns under the Afghan flag, to obliterate the hated, British-imposed Durand Line, and to fix the border with Pakistan at the Indus River.

As I strolled about outside, the air of unreality persisted. I marveled at the improbability of it all. In the fall of 2001, when Karzai was being chased from hill to hill by the pursuing Taliban, it would have been
impossible to imagine a day such as this. Now our courageous if somewhat impractical friend was the duly elected president of his country. It was like a dream. How could things have turned out so well? I should have remembered the age-old admonition about things that seem too good to be true . . .

I had failed to understand the nature and the limits of our victory over the Taliban in December 2001. Having been so concerned at the outset that we would reprise the experience of the British and the Soviets, I was seduced by the deceptive ease with which the Taliban had been driven off in a period of only eighty-eight days since the attacks of 9/11. Rather than fighting on in a twilight guerrilla struggle, the Taliban had simply disappeared as Afghan-American forces closed in on their final redoubt in Kandahar. I concluded, prematurely, that my grave misgivings had been misplaced.

There was so much we all failed to realize. First, for all that I had preached that ours must be a political more than a military victory over the Taliban, I had not quite grasped the underlying politics of the Taliban’s collapse. Very few Pashtun leaders had actively risen up against the Taliban, and yet it had become clear—to the Taliban, if not fully to us—that they had thoroughly worn out their welcome among the Pashtuns who comprised their natural base of support. As defeat piled upon defeat for the Taliban, and as it became apparent that Hamid Karzai and Gul Agha Shirzai would converge on Kandahar, the insurgent leaders were tacitly accepted, if not enthusiastically welcomed, by a population transparently happy to see the Taliban depart. They were simply tired: tired of the Taliban’s fundamentalist repression, tired of relentless taxation, tired of seeing their young men press-ganged into military service, tired of incessant war. It strikes me now that it was the realization of their own political weakness, more than American bombs, which convinced the Taliban that their time in power had passed. American bombers, for all their effectiveness, could not have secured the two dissident Pashtun chieftains from an angry and hostile populace. Similarly, we did not realize how evanescent, or how reversible, this tacit popular support could be.

History, viewed in hindsight, takes on the trappings of inevitability.
The victory of the anti-Taliban opposition in the south was anything but. Much was written at the time, and much has been written since, some of it by former colleagues, about how, in combining rude indigenous forces with small numbers of SF troops and CIA operatives, and supporting them with precisely targeted airpower, we had somehow set a brilliant new template for how future wars would be fought. That will depend very much on the war. The tactics we employed in 2001 were simply an adaptation to the unique circumstances in which we found ourselves. They fit our political need to keep Afghans in the fore and to keep the American footprint small, while taking full advantage of our technological superiority. The approach we took was a function of political necessity as much as military prowess. There was hardly any genius at work in defeating a primitive army, employing primitive tactics, with uncontested airpower and precision-guided munitions. An old nineteenth-century London music hall chorus celebrating the success of British colonial armies against benighted tribesmen summed it up nicely:

For whatever happens we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not.

And yet . . . and yet, it had still been a close-run thing. Even with the full benefit of U.S. air forces on their side, Karzai and his band had come within minutes of annihilation at Tarin Kowt on November 17, 2001. Throughout the southern campaign, the Taliban’s repeated tactical stupidity—rushing headlong, again and again, in truck-mounted attacks over open ground in the face of American airpower—was as much a factor in their defeat as was the sophistication of the weapons they faced. The Taliban have since shown themselves to be a “learning enemy.” We were merely fortunate at the beginning that they were a
slowly
learning enemy.

Had Karzai been lost, the political tenor of the war in the south would have been radically changed. If the U.S. Marines, who fortunately stayed isolated in the trackless southern Registan Desert and out of the fight, had instead been the ones to drive the Taliban and
al-Qa’ida out of Kandahar, the Taliban would have seen their defeat in very different terms. They would not have accepted the legitimacy of the new Interim Administration, and Afghanistan would most likely not have had the window of opportunity which it did, in fact, enjoy for some years to create a stable, peaceful political environment.

Although I did not realize it yet, that opportunity had ended by the time of my presidential courtesy call in the spring of 2005. Its demise was the result of many factors, but to understand what happened, one has to go back to the rise of the Taliban as a political force in 1994. It began as a movement of clerics in the Kandahar area with rather modest goals: to stamp out the rampant crimes and abuses of the many petty, feuding warlords besetting their region and, in the process, to bring some measure of unity and stability. Adherence to
sharia
, Islamic law, would be their weapon and their guide. But as so often happens, success caused the Taliban to expand upon their core aspirations. Shortly after Kabul fell to them in 1996, and with most of the opposition having been consolidated under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Masood, some sort of power-sharing agreement could almost certainly have been reached to bring peace to the country. But by now the Taliban leadership, carried away with power, could only conceive of national unity under its direct control.