by Matt Farwell
Rohde’s captivity was one of the better-kept secrets in Washington that winter, his case kept under wraps by an extraordinary international media blackout led by his editors and publisher at The New York Times. For the senior Bush and Obama officials who tracked his case—including Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state made a personal pledge to Mulvihill to get her husband out—Rohde was a living reminder of the limits of Washington’s power, influence, and logistical capabilities in Pakistan.
The day he was abducted in Logar, Rohde assured his captors that he and Luddin were worth more alive than dead. It was a reflexive act of survival that he only later realized encouraged wild overspeculation about what he might be worth; his captors opened negotiations at $25 million and the release of fifteen Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo and Bagram. That was $5 million more than even the highest estimates of what the South Korean government had paid to release more than twenty missionaries, and far from realistic. The kidnapping and ransom (K&R) insurance policy of The New York Times covered just $2 million, his family had no such sums, and releasing prisoners was a nonstarter. Negotiations dragged on for months.
In the Haqqani safe house where he was imprisoned, Rohde found a ten-foot section of dirty rope tied to a three-foot metal chain on a shelf full of wrenches, motor oil, and spare car parts. Each day, when he could, Rohde loosened the rope from the chain, terrified the noise would give him away. On June 19, while the guards slept, he and Luddin climbed down a twenty-foot wall and ran.
For Kayani and the Pakistani government, the fact that Rohde ran to a Frontier Corps base just down the road from a Haqqani prison was deeply embarrassing—and made their denials of coddling extremists that much more implausible. For the Haqqanis, Rohde’s escape was a humiliating end to what had been their most successful American kidnapping, eight months of work literally out the window. Less than two weeks later, Bergdahl was their stunning redemption.
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THREE DECADES OF CONFLICT had taught Pakistan’s generals and spymasters that the benefits provided by their resident extremists outweighed the risks. Context mattered; the mujahideen ideologies and capabilities had been forged in the crucible of the Soviet War and the CIA’s massive covert response. From Islamabad’s perspective, Washington was demanding a Pakistani solution to an American-made problem.
By the spring of 2009, however, the once-isolated infection of radicalism in the FATA was no longer contained. The number of fighters and independent militias, each with its own goals, had reached unprecedented levels. While Lashkar operated under the nominal control of Pakistani authorities, and Haqqani ruled North Waziristan, a new and different threat emerged in South Waziristan: the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a confederation of roughly forty tribal militias that had joined together under the revolutionary banner of the Pakistani Taliban led by Baitullah Mehsud. Unlike Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the legacy mujahideen warlords in the north, Mehsud’s worldview wasn’t formed by the Soviet War—when he had been just a child—but by 9/11. As he watched the Pakistani government collaborate with the Americans against the Taliban, Mehsud decided the problem was the Islamabad government itself. He announced his upstart terror group’s arrival with the December 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Mehsud claimed to have forty thousand fighters at his command, and in the late summer of 2008, his Pakistani Taliban had done the unthinkable and seized power in the Swat Valley. For decades the valley had been a bucolic mountain getaway for upper-class Pakistanis escaping the summer heat and smog in crowded Islamabad and Rawalpindi (home to the government and military, respectively). The Switzerland of Pakistan, as local tourism bureaus touted it, Swat had been a popular stop along Central Asia’s Hippie Trail in the 1970s; its local weavers were some of the same artisans exporting cashmere shawls to Terry Reid and Sharon Davies’s import bazaar in Ketchum, Idaho, a few hundred yards from where Bergdahl had worked at Strega. There was a ski resort in Swat at Malam Jabba, built in the 1980s with financing from the Austrian government. Its hotel was burned to the ground in August 2008 as Mehsud’s fighters moved in. Skiing, they declared, was un-Islamic.
Swat became a Taliban safe haven and a clear sign that Islamabad was losing control. Between 2007 and 2009, the TTP burned down nearly two hundred girls’ schools and beheaded dozens of local government officials and Frontier Corps soldiers. The Swat Taliban was led by Maulana Qazi Fazlullah, a ski-lift operator turned radio demagogue known as Mullah Radio for his pirate FM broadcasts. In local newspapers, Swat police officers took out ads to publicly renounce their secular authorities and save their own lives.
After a failed attempt by the Pakistani Army to take back the valley, the provincial government struck an appeasement deal with Mullah Radio—permitting him to impose his authority in exchange for peace. The government’s legitimacy had never been less certain. When Ahmed Rashid went to see President Zardari in Islamabad in July 2009, the presidential palace was surrounded by concrete blast barriers and more than a half-dozen checkpoint perimeters. But Zardari (who was Bhutto’s widower), downplayed the threat. Instead, he framed the problems facing his country in more historically familiar terms.
“We have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs, or revive the economy. What are we supposed to do?” the president asked. Musharraf had been lavished with $11 billion in U.S. aid, Zardari noted, while he had been given far less. If his country failed, the president told Rashid bluntly, it will be America’s doing. On May 7, 2009, the standoff in Swat erupted into a full-blown air and ground war. Kayani sent in thirty thousand Army soldiers along with heavy artillery, fighter jets, and helicopter gunships. In an unprecedented decision, supporting troops were called in from the border with India, where the government in New Delhi vowed not to exploit the situation with an attack. By the time fighting subsided that summer, three hundred Army soldiers and ten times that many militants had been killed.
As the fighting spread, upward of three million civilians fled their homes, and they took shelter with host families registered by the UN or in dozens of hastily built camps on the lowland plains to the south. By the time the fighting subsided, it would be the largest internal displacement of refugees in Pakistan’s history. In Washington, U.S. officials were both satisfied with Kayani’s results and alarmed by the Pakistani Army’s indiscriminate violence. “The British at least forewarned us and they never targeted innocent women and children. The military was ruthless,” Waziri writer Ghulam Qadir Khan Daur reported. Hundreds of Pashtun villagers were killed in the fighting, and rumors swirled among them that the slaughter was arranged by the Haqqanis and ISI under a false flag designed to produce a new generation of militant recruits.
On the night of August 7, a CIA drone guided by ISI intelligence launched two Hellfire missiles at a remote South Waziristan farmhouse, killing Mehsud and eleven others. The Pakistani military, after three years of near chaos, was finally regaining control. But as Kayani’s offensive extended from Swat into the FATA that fall, it was also notable for what it didn’t do: Pakistani pilots flying American F-16s hit more than a hundred targets in Waziristan, but Haqqani property was largely unscathed.
Obama wrote a personal letter to President Zardari in November, urging the Pakistani president to make a real move on Haqqani’s domain in North Waziristan, where U.S. intelligence believed Bergdahl was being held. Zardari didn’t write back for several weeks, and when he did, his response was vague and evasive. Obama’s demands went ignored.
TWELVE
FIXING INTEL
On Christmas Day 2009, the Taliban paraded their American prisoner in a confident and ambitious new global broadcast. It was Bergdahl’s second public appearance, and the Taliban media affairs team had raised its technical game since July with a variety of slick edits and deft embellishments. Al-Emara, the logo of the exiled Islamic Emirate’s propaganda channel, floats in the upper-right corner in English and Arab
ic. The video features quick cuts and bullet-hole graphics with whooshing sound effects, split screens, and a backdrop image of a U.S. soldier standing alone in a dark desert sandstorm. Arabic captions identify him as “the witness of his people.”
Bergdahl is seated in front of a red and gold tapestry, wearing an army combat helmet. Beneath the helmet, he wears mirrored sunglasses, a prop he would later tell intelligence debriefers was meant to hide his eyes as he read from his captors’ scripts and cues. He’s dressed in an Army combat uniform shirt stripped of identification—no private first class rank insignia, no BERGDAHL name tape, no 25th Infantry Division “Electric Strawberry” patch—much like the “sterile uniform” that the Delta and SEAL operators he admired wore on missions where anonymity was key. Bergdahl’s face is thin, his cheeks hollowed out since July. The skin on his neck is pale and wan, and when he moves and shifts his weight, the shirt betrays his now-bony frame. When his parents saw the video, they guessed he had lost twenty pounds. The Taliban production team may have intended the getup to make him look intimidating, like a real American soldier. But his physical decline is evident, and the overall effect is closer to a cancer patient on Halloween.
The POW ritual begins with Bergdahl confirming he is who he is: name, birthplace, blood type, mother’s maiden name, Army rank and unit. His mouth cracks in a downturned grimace, his voice a narcotized monotone—just like the crew of the USS Pueblo and Daniel Pearl before him, and James Foley and Kayla Mueller after.
I came to Afghanistan on May 3, 2009, and was positioned in the Paktika Province of Afghanistan, in the district of Sharana.
As Bergdahl speaks the screen splits, revealing footage of American soldiers shackling, hooding, and caging detainees in the Global War on Terror. He narrates the indignities suffered “by Muslim prisoners in Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and many other secret prisons hidden around the world,” against a backdrop of hooded prisoners, piles of men stacked in a grotesque parody of the classic American cheerleader human pyramid, and naked men cowering before snarling dogs. Another prisoner stands with arms stretched behind his back, his back and shoulders splattered with feces. Alongside them, American military police prison guards pose and smile.
Knowing the brutality and inhumane ways my country has ravaged the land and the people of my captors, the Taliban, one would expect that they would justly treat me as my country’s Army has treated their Muslim prisoners . . . but I bear witness. I was continuously treated as a human being with dignity.
There are distinct forms and functions to POW testimonials. First, they present proof-of-life, the baseline for further negotiations. They critique specific policies and are crafted to inspire and outrage targeted audiences—in Bergdahl’s case, Taliban foot soldiers, aspiring mujahideen, and persuadable Americans. The Christmas Day video shows the casualties of U.S. foreign policy: the frozen faces of dead children and a frail elderly corpse in a white death shroud, all allegedly killed by American bombs; YouTube footage of an American civilian rapid-firing his pistol into a Koran as it skips across the ground. The arc of Bergdahl’s testimony follows the classic conversion story: the confession of sin, an awakening to higher truths and newfound sympathies, and ultimately, gratitude to the captors.
Far from the continuous brainwashing and false hype-up and propaganda that the Army drowns us in, I had the chance to actually see with my own eyes the people that I was supposed to consider my enemy. . . . Even though I’m a prisoner of war, I had a chance to rethink a lot of things, and to ask myself questions that I never asked myself before.
As Bergdahl reveals his own supposed awakening, his clothing changes from a soldier’s uniform to a simple cloth shirt and no helmet.
And so, do I, my family members, my fellow soldiers in the army and their families, and all the regular Americans—do we or even should we trust those that send us to be killed in the name of America? Because aren’t our leaders, be it Obama or a Bush or whoever, aren’t they simply the puppets of the lobbies that pay for their election campaigns in the first place?
I’m afraid to tell you that this war has slipped from our fingers. It’s just going to be the next Vietnam unless the American people stand up and stop all this nonsense. And as a soldier in the U.S. Army and just as an American person here, I find it as my duty and responsibility to let my people know exactly what the truth is behind this facade that is the Army and, uh, and to let them know the truth behind, you know, these wars that our governments just keep throwing us into.
Interspersed between his testimonies, the video cuts to snippets taken from American television of U.S. military veterans urging President Obama to de-escalate the war, including former Marine captain and State Department official Matthew Hoh, whose bold resignation letter had gone public a few months earlier. The Taliban had taken Hoh’s clip from a November 10, 2009, interview he did with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Earlier that day, anonymous news leaks, likely from the Pentagon itself, had suggested that Obama had already approved the surge that McChrystal wanted. Blitzer asked Hoh to address the president’s apparent decision, and to “look into that camera” and talk to Obama directly. Hoh took the direction:
Mr. President, I understand the domestic political concerns that you have. However, this is an opportunity to be a great leader, to recognize the challenges that we are facing and the fact that it’s a civil war. American combat troops are not defeating al-Qaeda by their presence in Afghanistan. All they are doing is just fighting people who are fighting us because we’re occupying them.
Hoh wasn’t surprised that the Taliban used him in the Bergdahl tape. Their messaging had been effective for many years, Hoh said, noting that the Taliban was broadcasting on Facebook, in English, years before social media became the central venue for foreign propaganda in the United States. Before the Christmas Day video ends, Bergdahl’s testimony grows more dogmatic—and more absurd. The split screens runs footage of burning MRAPs, dead ISAF soldiers, and video of IED attacks enhanced with postproduction death-porn touches: Humvees disappear from the road like ghosts, trucks explode, and alleged flying body parts are highlighted in red circles, like a slow-motion NFL replay, for easy home viewing.
As the video progresses, Bergdahl’s delivery improves. He grows more animated and adds hand gestures, his statements veer away from the demonstrable evidence of U.S. military prisons to the dubious claims that circulate on the streets of Kandahar and Peshawar. The real numbers of children killed by American forces are hidden, and once revealed will “have surpassed Hitler.” American bombs are disrupting Afghan fertility, leading to miscarriages, birth deformities, and babies forced to live “wretched lives as retarded children.” American power, in this telling, is transcendent—not just cruel, but an omnipotent power that compels Muslims to jihad. “We,” Bergdahl says, the Americans, “have forced them to strap large amounts of explosives to their precious bodies, to leave their homes and their children to kill us.”
The tape reaches peak implausibility when Bergdahl describes his own health and well-being. The split screen shows an American military interrogation. Soldiers hold a man’s head under water in a red plastic bucket, and we hear audio of his grunts, wretches, and screams. Cut to Bergdahl: “No, the mujahideen have not tortured me,” he says, his voice falling away on the final words. He says that he has a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving equipment, that he takes regular showers. Cut to Bergdahl sitting comfortably at a table covered with fruit and glass-bottled beverages. He wears a shalwar and a small red taqiyah cap, has a blue pen in his shirt pocket, and eats rice with a fork. He sips from a white cup and nods in exaggerated appreciation. “As far as chains, yeah I’m in chains. I’m chained to where I sleep . . . but it kinda comes with the area of being a prisoner of war.”
The chains, he said, “haven’t inhibited my movement in a huge way that causes my body to degrade.” Intelligence analysts only later realized he was trying to drop h
ints about his condition. He tells the world he is being treated according to the ethical codes of Pashtunwali. “I’m healthy and being taken care of as a guest in someone’s home.” He apologizes to his parents in a passing moment of candor that they said stuck with them for years. “That’s all we had to go on,” Jani said. The video ends with a statement by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid with a scrolling English translation:
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has demanded and still demands release of limited number of prisoners in exchange for this American prisoner, Bowe Robert Bergdahl. Unfortunately, the arrogant American rulers are not ready to take any step in this regard.
In the nine and a half months since the golden sparrow had flown into their hands, the Taliban had been reaching out through numerous channels to negotiate. Major Jeff Crapo fielded the first attempt from the village elders near Mest the day after Bergdahl was captured. That same day, Taliban commanders, including Sangeen himself, called journalists with their opening bid. In calls with CBS and Agence France-Presse, they said they spoke for Siraj Haqqani and Taliban leadership. “We would not mind a prisoner exchange in this case,” one commander said.
Those were the public tactics. Privately, also in the first weeks of the DUSTWUN, Haqqani delivered their first proof-of-life video on a cell phone SIM card, along with ransom demands to General Reeder, commander of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan. The captors wanted $19 million and twenty-five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for Bergdahl (less money but more prisoners than their offer for Rohde a few weeks earlier). Reeder didn’t respond. A few weeks later, motivated to make a deal, the Haqqanis followed up with a better offer: five million dollars and no prisoner exchange. More than most generals, Reeder had formed close relationships with a wide array of former Taliban officials, and one told him that Bergdahl was already in Miran Shah. Reeder passed the messages up his chain of command, to Flynn and McChrystal, where they promptly disappeared. He later told a journalist that he was surprised that none of his superiors acted on the information. Six months later, with the Christmas video, Haqqani tried again. As with each prior offer, the U.S. military did not respond.