by Ronan Farrow
That the United States shunned negotiation with the Taliban in favor of military action in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was little surprise. To suggest diplomacy over force in dealing with the regime that harbored the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack was akin politically to proposing a national program of cannibalism in public schools. But that recalcitrance continued long after the Taliban had been thwarted on the battlefield. There was never a concerted effort to embed military gains in a larger strategic context, and, for years, there was no political space to acknowledge what had become obvious: that the total defeat and elimination of the Taliban was not possible and that, barring that, peace would only come through diplomacy.
Instead, in the weeks after the terrorists plunged hijacked planes into America’s centers of power and its consciousness, the debate over how to respond took place almost entirely within the military and intelligence community. There were those, like the CIA station chief in Islamabad at the time, who wanted to continue to work solely through the United States’ military alliance with Pakistan, using the Pakistanis to pressure the Taliban regime they had for years supported to surrender Osama bin Laden. Others, back in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Washington, had a simpler suggestion: give American guns to anyone who could fight the Taliban. Before any coherent policy could be developed across the US government, that latter faction began quietly executing its proposal. And “anyone who could fight the Taliban” meant the warlords and brigands of the Northern Alliance.
Robin Raphel, who had fought long and hard for negotiation with the Taliban, despaired at the choice. “We didn’t need to be fighting [the Taliban] . . . they realized who we were and the power that we had. They wanted to go home. And we wouldn’t have it . . . we were the tough guys, right?” She rolled her eyes. “And we rode in with the Northern Alliance on donkeys . . . it was such nonsense. Sorry, but it was.”
In December, 2001, the United Nations led a halfhearted attempt to build a new Afghan government, culminating in talks in Bonn, Germany. The Taliban—the vanquished party and an indispensable part of any sustainable political settlement—was absent from the talks. The conference was instead dominated by the Northern Alliance fighters the Americans had chosen to rely on in their initial military offensives. For the diplomats who had pushed for dialogue, it was an elementary failure. “I said from the beginning, that they”—the Taliban—“should’ve been at Bonn,” Raphel later told me. “That was our biggest mistake.” Barnett Rubin, who was part of the UN team that organized the talks and had a desk near mine in Holbrooke’s State Department offices, often told me that exclusion had far-reaching repercussions. “The Bonn Agreement did make Afghan government and politics more inclusive, but it could not overcome US counterterrorism policy, which dictated the exclusion of the Taliban,” he later wrote.
Immediately after the talks concluded, Taliban leaders even reached out to newly installed Afghan interim president Hamid Karzai to offer a truce in exchange for amnesty—an offer that was immediately overruled by Donald Rumsfeld and the Americans. Taliban leaders who swore fealty to the new central government and returned to their villages were hunted down and captured, often by Northern Alliance warlords.
These new foot soldiers in America’s war on terror made for an unpleasant rogue’s gallery. Abdul Sayyaf, a former mentor to Osama bin Laden, had helped establish the training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan that formed the bedrock of modern Islamist terrorism and was behind a bloody massacre of Shiite Hazaras during the struggle for Kabul after the Cold War. Burhanuddin Rabbani’s forces, working with Sayyaf’s, were accused of slaughtering the elderly, children, even dogs during that siege. Mohammad Mohaqiq and his men were implicated in murders, rapes, and systematic looting in the months after 9/11. His militias’ trademark: kidnapping young girls and forcing them into marriage. Atta Mohammed Noor’s militias were behind a campaign of looting and rapes targeting ethnic Pashtuns in the same period. And then there was Atta’s rival in countless bloody skirmishes: Abdul Rashid Dostum.
WHEN AND HOW Dostum started working with the Americans was a matter of some dispute. Hank Crumpton, the CIA official who, as head of the agency’s newly formed Special Activities Division, oversaw the initial response to September 11, later told me that the agency had been developing its relationship with the warlord for some time before 9/11, working through an Uzbek-fluent agent named Dave Tyson. Dostum insisted that Tyson only got in touch after the attacks. What’s not disputed is that a CIA team came, and then a unit of Green Berets from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, code-named “595.” It was a peculiar union. “Dust kind of settles. And out of the dust comes the sand people,” Team Sergeant Paul Evans recalled. “[Y]ou see a man with an AK who’s dressed just like your enemy, and you’ve gotta walk over to him and basically ask him, ‘Hey, how ya doing?’ and you have no idea whether he’s gonna put out his hand or shoot you.” One of those “sand people” was General Dostum. “General Dostum and his advanced security party come ridin’ up,” said Captain Mark Nutsch. “He jumps down off the horse and—”
“Hell the horse was still moving and he jumps off! He’s like ‘heyyyy,’ ” interjected Chief Warrant Officer Bob Pennington, making an expansive gesture.
“—General Dostum agreed to take my team members and I up to his forward command post,” Nutsch went on. “So we would mount horses for the first time in combat.”
An Air Force controller who joined several days later to coordinate strikes from Lockheed AC-130 gunships and asked to be identified only by his first name, Bart, said the effect was like a time machine. “You’re like, ‘What year am I in?!’ You just got off a twenty-first-century helicopter, sophisticated avionics and everything else on it, and now we’ve gone back in time.” He and the other Americans rode horses while supplies were strapped to donkeys led by Afghans. They slept in a series of frozen mountain caves, with only candles and flashlights to cut through the pitch black, so far from any city lights. “When you rode a horse through the mountains, the stars felt like they were right there in your face,” Bart went on. “You were riding into the stars. It was something else.” Most of all, he remembered Dostum’s stature, both in his literal physical size, and in terms of the reverence he commanded. “Ohhh, he was the man,” he told me. “He was the leader. . . . Those Northern Alliance guys would set his tent up and he would have these pillow beds in there. . . . They carried those on donkey for him. . . . He was laying in comfort. We were laying in a ditch.”
The Americans air-dropped supplies, chief among them hundreds of guns. Not the sophisticated weaponry carried by the Americans, but aging Russian Kalashnikovs. Cash came, but, Dostum sniffed, less than he needed. He was most offended when the Americans air-dropped food for his horses and the bags turned out to contain chaff. It was theoretically edible for livestock, but his horses refused to touch it. “United States is such a great country,” Dostum said, chuckling. “Such a great people, but why is it so hard for them to give money?”
There were more consequential challenges born of working with the warlords. Bart and the other Americans pulled watches to make sure they were always guarding their own. And there were headaches back at Langley. “David [Tyson, the CIA operative] was with Dostum but we also had Atta [Mohammed Noor] and one of the challenges we had was keeping those guys from killing each other,” conceded Hank Crumpton wearily. “These guys are warriors. They’ve been killing people all their lives, in one of the worst places on the planet.” Still, most of the Americans were won over. “He had almost a boyish charm to him,” Crumpton said of Dostum. “Had a good sense of humor which I know masked a pretty ruthless capability. But I honestly enjoyed the conversation with him.” Mostly, he said, he felt thankful “for his partnership and for his leadership and what he and Atta and others accomplished on the battlefield.”
WHAT THEY ACCOMPLISHED on the battlefield was, in immediate, tactical terms, an overwhelming success. Bombing began in October, and over the course of
November, the Northern Alliance warlords routed the Taliban from Mazar-i-Sharif, in Afghanistan’s north, and then Kabul, and then Kunduz in the northeast, where the Taliban surrendered after a twelve-day siege. With each success came more prisoners of war. Some of these men were hardened fighters who had traveled from Pakistan and the Gulf States to join Osama bin Laden. But many others were ordinary Afghan men and boys; foot soldiers for a regime that had medieval values but little interest in the global jihad of the Saudi rich-kid zealot it safeguarded. In late November, General Dostum and the Americans in Nutsch’s unit toppled Kunduz, a last redoubt for thousands of Taliban fighters. As many as 3,500 surrendered peacefully, by one US military estimate. The full count of prisoners was rumored to be twice that.
The detainees were peeled off into separate groups. According to Bart, the Air Force controller, some were taken to a black site, “another location which I can’t talk about.” The vast majority were taken west by Dostum’s forces. Some were sent directly from a surrender point in the desert outside Kunduz to the prison at Dostum’s headquarters in Sheberghan. Others were sent to a different prison, a nineteenth-century fortress called Qala-i-Jangi, to be interrogated by the Americans. Qala-i-Jangi’s high, muddied battlements had overlooked centuries of conflicts involving occupying forces, from the British to the Soviets. It was about to become the site of America’s first casualty in the new war on terror.
The prisoners at the fort rose up in a spectacular ambush, overpowering their American interrogators and killing one CIA agent, Mike Spann. A bloody three-day siege followed. Dostum, who had been at Kunduz, returned along with Mark Nutsch and the other members of Team 595 to find an apocalyptic tableau of twisted metal and shredded bodies. “The bodies. . . . ” Dostum recalled, shaking his head. “They couldn’t recognize who was my soldier, who was al-Qaeda, who was Taliban.” Both the Americans and the Northern Alliance fighters were shaken by the loss of life and bitterly angry at the Taliban prisoners. “I was crying for my horses,” Dostum went on, his voice breaking. Later, when Red Cross workers discovered one of those horses alive, “I was just crying from happiness. . . . And I ordered my people to take him right away to the hospital for treatment.” He named the horse K’okcha, or blueish, and eventually took to riding it in battle himself. For the Americans, the first US casualty of the new war made for “a very painful realization [of] the price we paid for going very fast with very few people on the ground,” said Crumpton, the CIA official. “Also it opens up a question of who has responsibility for prisoners of war.” That question was tested almost immediately, as Dostum’s men loaded the survivors from Qala-i-Jangi into trucks and transported them west again, to join the rest of the prisoners in Sheberghan.
By January 2002, questions about the fate of these detainees were bleeding across Afghanistan’s borders and into international headlines. When Jennifer Leaning and John Heffernan arrived that month, even the Red Cross—generally a vault about anything they’ve witnessed to maintain impartiality and access to prisoners in need—seemed to be raising flags. “Go north,” a Red Cross lawyer in Kabul urged them. Leaning pressed her: “You mean the prisoners from Kunduz?” The lawyer nodded. “That was all we got, but it was enough,” recalled Heffernan. The investigators made their way to the prison, a squat fort with peeling white paint on its clay brick walls and rusted metal bars securing its windows. International visitors had not, thus far, been welcome at the site. One early attempt to gain access by the Red Cross was barred by two American military officers, according to multiple accounts given to Leaning and Heffernan. But they were able to build rapport with a warden who was troubled by what he was witnessing inside the prison’s weather-beaten walls and quietly let them in.
They quickly found confirmation of the rumors they had already heard. Through Pakistani translators, prisoners told anguished stories of starvation, overcrowding, and a mounting death toll. They pleaded for food, water, and medical attention. But Leaning and Heffernan noticed something else: the numbers didn’t add up. “The number of people held in the prison at Sheberghan was not the number of people we heard were captured in Kunduz,” she told me. “As many as seven to eight thousand had supposedly been captured. We saw perhaps three thousand being held. The question was, ‘Where are the rest?.’ ” It was that question that led the investigators to the Dasht-i-Leili desert the next day, and to the corpses, possibly thousands.
What happened to the missing prisoners? How did these men and boys end up in such a tomb, in such a place? And, a question no one inside the US government wanted to touch for more than a decade after: What did Americans on the ground know and see as the earth was moved and the grave was filled with body after body? We made a deal with Dostum for the territory he could take for us, for the blood he could spill of enemies we shared. What was the price? What did we give up when we shook his hand? How did all the talk of smaller footprints and partner forces hold up against a femur sticking out of the dirt? These were familiar ethical quandaries in America’s national-security-sensitive alliances. But, like the smell in the desert, they had become unusually hard to ignore here.
IN THE YEARS AFTER the investigators discovered the grave in the desert, the alliances with warlords reshaped Afghanistan. Anti-Soviet mujahedeen fighters armed by the Americans, who had turned into Northern Alliance commanders armed by the Americans, finally turned into governors and ministers installed by the Americans—or at least with their tacit assent and minimal grumbling. Atta Mohammed Noor, as governor of Balkh province, handed out parcels of land to loyalists and grew fabulously wealthy taking cuts of the province’s customs revenue. His militias were implicated in sundry thuggery from murder to kidnapping to extortion. Ismael Khan, who became governor of Herat and then minister of water and energy, was accused of harassing ethnic Pashtuns and withholding provincial revenue from the government. A commander named Mir Alam became chief of police in the Baghlan province and developed a reputation for his spectacular corruption and support for drug mafias. A 2006 US embassy cable concluded that Alam and another commander “continued to act as mujahedin commanders rather than professional police officers . . . abus[ing] their positions of authority to engage in a broad range of criminal activity, including extortion, bribery and drug trafficking.” The governor of Nangahar province, Gul Agha Sherzai, wreaked similar havoc there—from murder, to drug trafficking, to corruption benefiting his tribe.
And then there was General Dostum, who served as deputy defense minister before eventually becoming vice president. Robert Finn, the first US ambassador in Kabul after 9/11, struggled with the warlords, especially Dostum and Atta, who were frequently at each other’s throats. It made for a stark parable: the two warlords were sitting on oil reserves that had produced hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues during the Soviet era and could easily have been exploited for Afghan reconstruction better, and earlier. “I tried to talk Dostum and Atta into becoming rich people. . . . ” Finn recalled. “But they’d rather kill each other over cows.” So it went with opportunities to rebuild Afghanistan.
Many of these men had been paid by the Americans for decades. Some traded tattered fatigues for slick suits as they grew rich off of drug deals, but most continued to behave as they always had: as warlords. Only now, they were warlords ruling with the imprimatur of a central government backed by the United States, and a steady stream of lucrative international contracts to skim from. Finn came to believe the warlords were at the heart of many of Afghanistan’s broader problems. “Ministries were initially handed out to different warlords and they started running them as their fiefdoms, so that was a problem,” he told me.
But the warlords were hard to shake, in some cases because of their tenacious grip on local power structures, and in some cases because there had never been a serious effort to empower alternatives. Often, the choice the Americans were left with was rule by warlord or complete chaos. Atta, for instance, led one of the most stable provinces in the country—pushing him out was the last th
ing on the minds of the Americans. “I think we should have worked ourselves away from them,” Finn reflected years later. “I understand what happened. We went in and said, ‘Okay who can we get to help us?’ . . . but that doesn’t mean you stick with them forever. I think we have stuck with them too long. Once they’re there it’s difficult to get rid of them.”
The United States’ inability to reshape its relationships in Afghanistan—to forge a new set of bonds with civilian politicians who might counterbalance the entrenched culture of warlordism—reflected a deeper ill. America’s objectives in Afghanistan had turned from conquest to development. But the diplomatic muscle had atrophied. The consequences of shuttered embassies and a withered Foreign Service around the world had come to a head in America’s most important war: there weren’t enough diplomats, and those in service didn’t have the resources or the experience needed to tackle Afghanistan. “There wasn’t the background of experience,” Finn said. “Diplomats were all there for a very short period, so they learn anew every year. The people that were there over time”—people like Dostum and the other warlords—“they know how to use the Americans. They know exactly what to say and what the Americans would want them to say.”