88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (52 page)

My disillusion was all the greater in that I genuinely believed in the mission to topple Saddam. It never mattered whether he had chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons on the shelf, ready to deliver in March
2003. What mattered was that his regime had the documented capacity to build them, thoroughly catalogued by UN inspectors, and surely would do so again in future, once the UN sanctions regime was ended. Saddam had had every opportunity to make a clean breast of all his programs and to fully account for all his weapons and precursors, but in over ten years of cat-and-mouse with UN inspection regimes, he had failed to do so. We couldn’t know all we needed to know about the Republic of Fear, but what were we to think? I would have thought it criminally irresponsible if the United States had been willing to stand aside while a regime that had launched two regional wars and murdered many thousands of its own citizens, in a position to control a majority of the world’s traded oil, were allowed to rebuild its WMD programs at its leisure. The world could tolerate an Iraq equipped with WMD, or an Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein and his sons, but not both. If the United Nations would no longer forcefully uphold its own resolutions, America should be prepared to do so.

There was never any question that the U.S. military would rapidly defeat Saddam’s army. But the signs that we lacked the collective wisdom to deal with the aftermath were manifest from the start. Where Iraq was concerned, the national security apparatus was completely dysfunctional, its rival elements so far apart that they could not have an honest discussion of the issues. The meetings I attended at the pinnacle of the foreign policy bureaucracy were notable for what wasn’t said, rather than what was: mendacity and indirection were the orders of the day. A rough coalition of the NSC, the State Department, and CIA were able to prevent Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and the vice president from naming an Iraqi government-in-exile and then arbitrarily installing it after the invasion. They wouldn’t say so, but I and others were convinced that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary Doug Feith, and their subordinates in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as the neoconservative stalwarts in the Office of the Vice President, intended to put Ahmed Chalabi, a brilliant but duplicitous longtime Iraqi émigré oppositionist with a Svengali-like influence over them, in charge of that government. We were just as convinced that such a government would never be accepted by Iraqis.

On the other hand, Defense and the vice president quashed the idea of identifying clean, respected figures at the local and regional levels and bringing them together in a sort of constituent assembly to form an interim Iraqi government after the invasion. The United States would be able to influence the selection of such leaders, but could not—and should not—control it. In one critical meeting on the subject, Vice President Cheney was very explicit: Given the choice between political legitimacy and control, he said, we should opt for control. The upshot was that as the U.S. invasion began on March 19, 2003, the U.S. government was internally at loggerheads, unable to agree on a plan for Iraq’s political reconstruction.

As soon as the shooting stopped, Zal Khalilzad, still at the National Security Council, was sent to Iraq by Condoleezza Rice to break the impasse. In what some of us hoped would be the first of several such meetings around the country to identify local leaders with legitimate support, Zal and retired General Jay Garner, designated to be head of the Iraq reconstruction effort, met with local notables from southern Iraq at Nasiriya on April 16. Secretary Rumsfeld intervened before a second such meeting could be held and Zal was ordered home. On May 11, in a move that took me and most of those supposedly in the know completely by surprise, President Bush named Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a former State Department official who had long since left government and had no Middle East experience, to head what would soon be called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). He would be absolute dictator of Iraq, empowered to rule by decree. He would report directly to Secretary Rumsfeld. Defense and the vice president’s office had won. Now the political reconstruction of Iraq would proceed according to their wishes.

The immediate focus was on the Iraqi Ba’ath Party and the army. Bremer, under Pentagon influence, banned the former ruling party and instituted a “de-Ba’athification” program, designed to purge its members from senior jobs in the public sector. His decree may have seemed fairly moderate on paper, but with the vengeance-minded Ahmed Chalabi, still the darling of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cheney, overseeing its implementation, it went far deeper than originally intended. Hundreds of schoolteachers, for example, forced earlier to join the Ba’ath for reasons of career advancement, were thrown out of work.

Rather than calling elements of the regular Iraqi Army back to their barracks and employing them in reconstruction projects, as the departed Jay Garner had planned to do, Bremer formally dissolved it. The army would be rebuilt from scratch, from the bottom up. No senior officers would be retained. The Sunni minority, which had dominated both institutions, got the message: There would be no place for them in the new Iraq. By fall 2003, I was organizing a series of formal CIA briefings, first for Condoleezza Rice and the NSC, then for Vice President Cheney, and finally for the president, to explain that a genuine insurgency was under way in the Sunni-dominated center and west of the country, and that U.S. policy was largely to blame. Religious extremists from all over the Muslim world were flocking to Iraq to join the next
jihad
. Civil war loomed just over the horizon.

Our briefing for the president, called on short notice for November 11—Veterans Day—was more dramatic than I anticipated. Cheney, Rice, secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld, and the rest of the senior foreign policy team from the White House, State, and Defense packed the Situation Room to hear what Tenet, McLaughlin, three of our senior analysts, and I had to say. After the analysts provided a description of the situation on the ground, I launched into a broader summation of the reasons for the insurgency, with much implied criticism of current policy. No sooner had I finished than the president, looking grim, swung his gaze across the table toward a surprise participant just in from Baghdad. “What do
you
say, Bremer?”

The presidential envoy seemed resigned and depressed. He had searched in vain, he said, for effective Sunni leaders who could appeal to their community. The Iraqi army had in effect dissolved itself and could not be recalled. And as much as the Sunnis might wish a rollback of de-Ba’athification, powerful leaders in the Shi’a community would not permit it. In short, there was nothing to be done but to continue on the basis of current policy.

Robert Blackwill, the former ambassador to India during my Pakistan days and now the NSC’s point man for Iraq, asked me to accompany him on a fact-finding trip over the 2003 Thanksgiving holiday. After several days spent with the Coalition Provisional Authority and deployed U.S. Army elements in the field, we agreed that the CPA was
beyond redemption. The only hope was for CIA and the military to somehow stem the insurgency on their own. Blackwill so reported to the White House. President Bush would not countermand the policies pushed by Rumsfeld and Cheney, but he did decide to accelerate the handover of power to an interim Iraqi government the following spring.

In the meantime, as Iraq descended further into violence, CIA reported forthrightly on the worsening situation, in sharp counterpoint to the hopeful reports being conveyed by the military. Day after day, to my great admiration, George Tenet entered the Oval Office to bring the president the truth, long past the point when his message was no longer appreciated. On one occasion he took our Baghdad station chief into the oval to brief the president directly on a particularly stark field appraisal he had prepared.

In senior policy councils, we went through the motions of debating whether the de-Ba’athification process should be revised. In a paper solicited by Blackwill, I argued as persuasively as I could for a rollback. But the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Doug Feith carried the message from the only parties who would have a vote: a change in policy regarding the Ba’ath Party, he said, would “undermine the whole moral justification for the war.”

Meanwhile, the effort to create a “New Iraqi Army” to replace the one we had disbanded was a disaster. Responsible Iraqi military leaders with whom CIA was in touch pleaded for creation of a unifying national institution of which Iraqis could again be proud. There were plenty of clean, capable, and respected officers, both Sunni and Shiite, they said, who could organize proper army divisions and re-create a national command structure under civilian control, along with a national academy to train the next generation of officers along democratic lines. Iraqis, they said, should be taking the lead in fighting an insurgency rapidly falling under the sway of foreign terrorists. Instead, the U.S. Army was training disaggregated, battalion-size militias, with no senior command and no organic support, utterly dependent on their American masters, to serve as cannon fodder for the occupation.

I was able to make some headway in persuading Condoleezza Rice of the merits of reestablishing the “core divisions” of the Iraqi Army.
But she was in no position to overcome DoD opposition, particularly when their opposition was seldom stated forthrightly. The Defense seniors found it much more convenient to obfuscate and throw up roadblocks. But if they were coy, their underlings often reflected their thinking more openly. I recall a lower-level Defense Department official putting it succinctly: “If we ever bring back the Iraqi Army,” he said, “it will be to shoot them.”

When Ayad Allawi, the secular nationalist politician and longtime exile oppositionist, became Iraq’s interim prime minister on June 1, 2004, a DoD delegation led by Paul Wolfowitz journeyed to Baghdad to ensure the new Iraqi leader understood the limits within which he would be working. Allawi made the case for reconstituting elements of the army. Wolfowitz conceded that it was an interesting idea; but just how did the prime minister propose to pay for it?

In December 2004, Dr. Rice called a meeting of the Principals’ Committee specifically to discuss a pair of papers authored by Charlie Allen, the assistant director of Central Intelligence for Collection, and me. Allen was a legend, having begun his career as an analyst in 1958 and having dealt with many of the most difficult and controversial intelligence issues in the decades since. He had just returned from a visit to Iraq. He described his shock at the deterioration in the situation over the previous few months. In my analysis, I predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that the upcoming January 2005 national elections, which the Sunnis were boycotting, would lead to a worsening of the civil war. I still thought the elections should go ahead, but argued again that Allawi should be allowed to take the forceful measures necessary both to deal with the insurgency and to encourage national reconciliation. Again, the suggested course corrections were dismissed by Defense.

Back before the invasion, colleagues at CIA Headquarters had sometimes stopped me in the hall: How was planning going for after the invasion? “They don’t have a clue,” was my stock response. “But they’ll learn.” I had gotten it half right.

My despair over Iraq was further compounded by what I was able to gather about our policy in Afghanistan. For reasons I could not fathom, economic reconstruction there had been very slow to start.
Early on, the United States pledged itself to rebuild the section of the “ring road,” Afghanistan’s great circular highway, between Kabul and Kandahar, but the project suffered from inattention and lack of funding. It became a symbol of the U.S. government’s lack of commitment. There seemed little interest in Washington in expending resources in Afghanistan, and what resources were available were indifferently administered. Yes, there was a lack of command attention from Washington, distracted as it was by the conflict in Iraq; but surely, I thought, a global power should be able to do two things at once? Afghanistan was being left to drift.

Meanwhile, seeds of future instability were being sown. The Afghan Constitution was drafted largely in secret in 2003 by a thirty-five-member panel of Afghans and foreign constitutional experts, all appointed by interim President Hamid Karzai. Unsurprisingly, the product of their work, approved by a
Loya Jirga
(Grand National Assembly) in January 2004, provided for a great concentration of power in Kabul, and specifically in the hands of the president. Not only were cabinet ministers and other national-level officials appointed by the chief executive, but all provincial, and district governors were as well, along with police chiefs and even customs inspectors. The ability to appoint local officials from Kabul was not unique to the Karzai regime—it had been the rule going back to the days of King Zahir Shah. But with foreign reconstruction money beginning to flow into the country, along with the ability to steer lucrative contracts to favored parties, centrally approved local government appointments were becoming licenses to steal, the ill-gotten gains shared back up the line with those whose influence had facilitated them. With little or no local accountability, good governance at the provincial and district levels was seldom a priority for those in power.

Worse, the Pashtun areas were beset by a lack of security. In my analysis for Tenet, I had assumed that local security would be provided for locally, as had been traditionally the case, and that the challenge for a new Afghan government and its foreign benefactors would be to encourage local accountability for militias and police forces organized by traditional tribal leaders, to ensure against their being misused by the
powerful against the weak. I hadn’t thought U.S. and Afghan government policy would be to try to do away with such locally raised forces altogether. But that was precisely the attitude of the U.S. military. To them, local militias equated to warlordism, responsible for the rise of the Taliban in the first place, and were to be discouraged and avoided at all cost. Their views were reinforced by the Karzai government, which did not want to see local rivals for power.