88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (51 page)

The multiple, crushing defeats of 2001, in combination with the loss of grassroots political support in the south, brought the Taliban back down to earth. Theirs was a religious
movement
, never a political
party
. In their many confused interactions with Hamid Karzai as he made his way south from Uruzgan, they were not so much seeking a political settlement as assurances of personal safety for themselves. During his negotiations, Karzai tried to wend his way through a political minefield, attempting to reassure the Taliban leadership so as to secure their de facto surrender, without alienating his foreign patrons. In the process, he made promises he could not keep, which would ultimately undermine his credibility.

With the prominent exception of Mullah Omar himself, many in the Taliban leadership were quite willing to accept Karzai as head of the interim government established and blessed at the UN Conference in
Bonn. As the self-styled “Commander of the Faithful,” Omar was not about to bow down before any secular authority, but he did not object if others chose to. He merely advised them not to trust Karzai, and fled—most likely to Pakistan, where he probably remains to this day. There were never, to my knowledge, any clear discussions, let alone any agreement, between Karzai and any American authority concerning the status or potential reintegration of senior Taliban members into Afghan political life. To the Americans, and particularly to the Department of Defense, which acted as an independent authority in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s defeat, most if not all senior members of the Taliban were necessarily connected to al-Qa’ida, and their detention therefore an imperative of the “War on Terror.” Still other Taliban commanders were wanted under UN war crimes’ auspices for the massacres previously visited on the Shiite Hazara minority during the civil war.

Given the ambiguity of their circumstances immediately after the surrender and evacuation of Kandahar, senior Taliban were no doubt paying close attention to the actions of the victors. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founding member of the Taliban and the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, was arrested by the ISI and turned over to the U.S. military immediately after the Taliban government’s collapse in December 2001. He would soon find himself in Guantánamo, and remain there until 2005. In my contacts with him since his release, Zaeef has claimed that he had firm assurances from Karzai that he would not be touched following the Taliban’s surrender. Regardless of what he might actually have been told, Zaeef, who despite having withdrawn from the struggle against the Americans and the Afghan government remains a respected figure among the Taliban, still denounces Karzai’s role in his treatment. He does so while splitting his time between Kabul and Doha, Qatar. His attitudes may be representative of others in the Taliban leadership: either he was actively deceived, he says, or else Karzai had no real authority, and thus was a puppet of the Americans.

Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the former foreign minister, approached people associated with Gul Agha Shirzai in Quetta in early February 2002, seeking their intercession with the Americans. He was escorted by Gul Agha’s men to Afghanistan, and turned over to the U.S. military
at the Kandahar Airport, where he was detained. Although by that time I no longer had any direct role to play in Afghanistan, I believed Muttawakil’s imprisonment to be a gross mistake. It seemed clear that there would have to be some process of reconciliation with the rank-and-file of the Taliban, and that to be credible, reconciliation would have to extend to members of the leadership who were neither under indictment for crimes nor had any continuing relations with al-Qa’ida. Surely, I thought, Muttawakil, who was no terrorist and who had little real authority within the Taliban, should not be seen as a threat. I feared that others, who might otherwise be willing to reconcile with the government, would draw lessons from his arrest. It took several years and strong lobbying to get Secretary Rumsfeld, whose personal authorization was required, to agree to his release. By then, the harm had been done.

From the collapse of the Taliban government in December 2001 until my departure from Pakistan in June 2002, I neither sought nor received any sort of policy guidance regarding senior Taliban figures, many of whom were thought to have fled to Pakistan. On the Pakistani side of the border, we were focused on one thing: finding and capturing as many fleeing al-Qa’ida members as possible, preferably to include Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their senior lieutenants. Virtually all of our intelligence collection was geared in that direction. We would see the occasional report to indicate that members of the Taliban
Shura
were pitching up in Quetta or Karachi, and we sought ISI help in investigating these leads. Somehow, though, the effectiveness which characterized the ISI’s pursuit of al-Qa’ida did not apply where the Taliban was concerned.

By early 2002, it was obvious to me that the Pakistanis had no interest in pursuing these people. And no wonder: already one could see that the new government in Kabul would be dominated by the former Northern Alliance, and that it was forging close ties with India. Pakistan’s past relationship with the Taliban had always been wary and mistrustful, and its active aid to the forces which attacked and overthrew the clerical regime had surely done little to improve it. Nonetheless, the Taliban was the only Afghan entity capable of serving as a counterweight to the despised government in Kabul, and Pakistan was not
about to gratuitously foreclose future dealings with it. I tried to make that clear to every visiting American official who would listen.

I refused to allow Pakistani hedging regarding the Taliban to become an issue between us. We were focused as a laser beam on al-Qa’ida. Countries will not act in ways which they believe detrimental to their interests. Knowing that I would get no traction on the Taliban, I wasn’t about to let a moot issue complicate or undermine the success we were enjoying against al-Qa’ida, whose members were being snatched up on an almost nightly basis with the ISI’s help. I believed the Taliban were spent. To the extent I was concerned over their capacity to make a political comeback, I felt that the best means of foreclosing that possibility lay not in Pakistan but in Afghanistan. The Afghans had been given a chance at a new beginning. If they succeeded in governing themselves, there would be no need of, or political space for, a Taliban.

It would be hard to overstate how surprised and encouraged many of us were, in the wake of the Taliban defeat, at how Afghans were behaving. The Afghan national mood reflected a strong desire to avoid repeating the abuses that had brought the country low. Where one might have expected the sweeping Northern Alliance victories in the north and their conquest of Kabul to precipitate an orgy of vengeance on the minority Pashtun communities now under their sway, such outrages were relatively few. It felt as though the country were embarking on an “era of good feelings,” that the past was in the past, and that everything was possible.

But if Afghans were ready for a new national beginning, the United States proved unready and unwilling to do what was necessary to encourage it. As early as January 2002, I could see the relevant elements of the vast U.S. government bureaucracy, which would have to combine and coordinate efforts in new ways if we were to achieve our goals in Afghanistan, reverting to old instincts. People naturally gravitate toward the prescribed and the habitual, to stay in their comfort zones. Bureaucrats never welcome interference from outside their own organizations.

Shortly after my return to Islamabad from Kandahar in January 2002, Andrew Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International
Development (AID), stopped in en route to Kabul. I desperately wanted to speak to him about how CIA’s relationships with key leaders around the country could serve his interests. Somehow, his traveling staff and my local AID contacts couldn’t get me on his schedule. I’m sure they felt they didn’t need advice from me as to how they should do their jobs.

A few weeks later, I met with a couple of senior Drug Enforcement Agency managers from Washington. They paid a call on me before going to Afghanistan to survey what DEA ought to be doing there. I pointed out that the Taliban had had more success in wiping out narcotics production than we, or any future Afghan government, could ever hope for. I said they should work with the State Department to reinforce and extend the Taliban’s success with value-added crop-substitution programs. I could see their eyes glaze: their job was to pursue narcotraffickers.

Even within my own organization, I could already see my colleagues reverting to normal practice. In Kandahar, I had advised a colleague to stay as close as possible to Gul Agha and his people. A small Special Forces contingent had set up shop in the palace to help with security. “Stay with them,” I said. “Gul Agha is a decent sort, but he needs guidance. The best way to meet our counterterrorism goals is to ensure that Gul Agha retains political support.” My advice was ignored. CIA officers typically do not want to be in the business of political mentorship: they want to collect intelligence and chase terrorists. This was as understandable as it was regrettable; it was the natural order of things, even if it meant we would be thoroughly unequal to the needs of the hour.

When I returned to Washington in June 2002, it wasn’t clear at first what I would be doing. Tenet wanted me around on the seventh floor, and so Jim Pavitt created an associate deputy director position for me as a placeholder while they figured out what to do with me. I wrote a long memo for George laying out the role I thought the agency
ought
to be playing in Afghanistan. CIA had relationships with many of the major political players around the country. We should take the lead in leveraging those relationships. We could bring together teams comprised of Special Forces, the State Department, the Agency for International Development, and others, who would lead the regional engagement of
their respective agencies in the physical and political reconstruction of Afghanistan. In my suggested scheme, CIA and the Special Forces would work with the regional warlords hosting us to raise and train militias, which would be responsible, among other things, for protection of the American teams. The name hadn’t yet been coined, but the interagency units I was describing were a more robust version of what would later be called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which unfortunately included neither the Special Forces nor CIA.

There would have been many pitfalls in my suggested approach, had it been adopted. If we were not careful, American support could be misused. Militias, if they were not again to become the scourge they had been in the past, would have to be tied, even loosely, to some national authority. Regional warlords would have to be subject to local accountability, through representative
shuras
or otherwise. But political power in Afghanistan has always been highly decentralized. If we hoped to realize our goals there, it would have to be through Afghans and on Afghan terms, and not by trying to make the country something other than what it is. Provincial Reconstruction Teams, when they were eventually set up, generally failed because of their isolation and estrangement. They pointedly did not include an organic Afghan component, and lacked local political support. Operating alone, they were not reinforced by the greater U.S. military presence.

The memo returned with a note from Tenet. “This is excellent,” it said. “But what do I do with it?”

I had thought the director would forward it to Dr. Rice for consideration by the National Security Council, which might then adopt a plan to be implemented by the various agencies of government. Tenet’s comment reflected a tacit recognition that a detailed operational plan was unlikely to be successfully imposed from Washington. Concepts half-understood at the cabinet or subcabinet level were unlikely to be coherently communicated downward through the separate bureaucracies. The hope of success was based on those in the field coming together to agree on a sustainable way forward. No one should have understood that better than me. But if the true path lay in making Afghan warlords the best warlords they could be, the international mission in Afghanistan would fail to realize it.

Taliban commanders and fighters did not flee immediately en masse to Pakistan following the fall of Kandahar. Although much of the senior leadership left, most cadres—many of them local mullahs—returned to their villages, particularly in the south. In many cases, they faced harassment and abuse from the dominant tribals whom the Taliban had previously neutered. The extent of such harassment may never be precisely known, but there was enough—accompanied by oft-repeated stories concerning the alleged abuse of respected Taliban figures—to have convinced many in the Taliban by 2005 that there was no place for them in the new Afghanistan. A number of them joined their seniors in Pakistan. As men who were literate and knowledgeable of religion, though, they retained respect and influence in the rural areas, and were ready to come back when the opportunity presented. Some less prominent tribes, previously favored by the Taliban but now shut out of power and unable to share in the business opportunities generated by reconstruction spending, were drawn by the mullahs into insurgency. There was no general template. Each Pashtun district had its own dynamic, and its own story. But by spring of 2005, as I strolled the palace grounds in Kabul, the Taliban was well on the way to reconstituting itself in many areas, though we were only just becoming aware of the threat.

Within weeks of my return to Washington, a new job began to take shape. In August 2002, Tenet emerged from a beach vacation to meet with Jim Pavitt and me. “Start studying up on Iraq,” he said.

For the next two-plus years, through war preparations, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and the first year and a half of counterinsurgency warfare, I served as CIA’s Washington-based Iraq Mission manager. Although I lacked the rank, John McLaughlin persuaded the National Security Council to allow me to represent CIA on the Deputies’ Committee. I traveled widely throughout Mesopotamia. In over two years of thrice-weekly meetings in the White House Situation Room, I had a front-row seat on some of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions in our history. It was a deeply disillusioning experience.