Having concluded that the covert action campaign against bin Laden in which we were still actively engaged was most unlikely to succeed, there seemed little reason to spend precious presidential briefing time making false promises or lame excuses—especially as it was a legacy of the previous administration. Add to all that our growing conviction that bin Laden’s entry into paradise would not solve our larger problem with al-Qa’ida, and one can understand why I chose to focus my remarks elsewhere.
But in explaining to the president and his national security team how we had successfully widened the aperture on our intelligence gathering in Afghanistan to include the Taliban, there was a far more significant point that I had declined to make to the president: I and my station were preparing a tribal war against the Taliban in the south. We couldn’t launch it, of course, until we had presidential permission in the form of a new finding, but the fact was that we had taken our program against the Taliban of the past year and a half a big step further in the most recent six months.
We had begun to reach out, usually through trusted intermediaries, to a host of former Pashtun commanders who had been prominent during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. Almost none of these commanders had fared well since the rise of the Taliban. Although some were fighting now under the Taliban flag in the civil war against the Northern Alliance, they were clearly not trusted by their clerical masters. Most had been sidelined, disarmed by the Taliban, and left to sulk, either in their home tribal areas or in exile across the border in Pakistan.
Some of these commanders refused to meet with us. Some, currently cooperating with the Taliban, agreed to communicate only through trusted intermediaries, for fear their dalliance would be discovered and severely punished. A Pakistani-based warlord serving then as the Taliban minister for tribal affairs, Jalaluddin Haqqani, demanded we pay him the equivalent of $80,000 just for the privilege of meeting. (His financial demands went unmet.) Many others, however, were pleased to reestablish contact with CIA after a lapse of some ten years, even if a few were resentful at having been ignored by us for so long. For these individuals, we had high hopes.
Although some of the former commanders were potentially valuable in the short term as intelligence reporting sources, our main purpose in contacting them was, ultimately, to foment an armed rebellion against the Taliban. I could not mention any of this to the president because it would have appeared that I was attempting to bypass my chain of command to lobby for a change in U.S. policy—something CIA was never supposed to do. Findings were supposed to come from the president to the CIA, not the other way around. In practice, the process was much more fluid, but this did not seem like the time to be getting out ahead of my leadership—at least not in their full view. I was confident that if we could set the groundwork sufficiently to provide some promise of success, such a presidential directive would come to us eventually, but it wasn’t going to be sought that day, and certainly not by me. In the meantime, though, I was determined to do everything possible to get internal CIA support for my ideas, and to be prepared for the day when the hoped-for presidential order might come.
JULY 2001
The cramped apartment was a mess of luggage and tired, jet-lagged bodies. Paula, Doug, and I had just arrived in Rosslyn, Virginia, from Pakistan on R&R leave when the phone rang. “Can’t be for us,” I thought. “No one knows we’re here.”
The woman’s voice on the other end of the line was coolly efficient. “Mr. Grenier,” she said. “Director Tenet would like to see you in his office tomorrow at 7:30 AM.”
“Gosh, they’re good,” I thought.
As I strode the next morning into the director’s office, a number of others were gathering as well: John Moseman, Tenet’s chief of staff; Deputy Director John McLaughlin; Cofer Black, the director of the Counterterrorist Center, the famous CTC; and John Rizzo, the acting general counsel. George was fussing behind his desk, and looked up briefly to wave me over to the long conference table. As he took his place at its head, he dropped a large pile of papers in front of him.
I was thunderstruck. The stack comprised a long series of cables I had sent to headquarters, some dating back to the previous year; they traced the evolution of my thinking on how we could take the fight to the Taliban. Long passages had been highlighted and annotated in the margins in George’s hand.
In these messages I had laid out the possibilities suggested by our intelligence. In fact, those opportunities had multiplied in the four months since my briefing of President Bush the previous March. Significant areas under Taliban control were starting to become restive, as patience with draconian clerical rule was wearing thin. Mullah Omar’s enforcement of a ban on opium poppy cultivation had not helped him in this regard, denying thousands of Afghan farmers the ability to produce the most lucrative crop available to them.
In particular, there was growing dissatisfaction within the Taliban itself with bin Laden and his Arabs, who had become a veritable state within a state. They did as they liked, and went where they wished, never bothering to inform their hosts, let alone seek their permission. The Arab al-Qa’ida leadership did not trust the Taliban, whom they considered primitives, and made no pretense about it. As bin Laden constantly moved about the country, his bodyguards would never reveal his travel plans in advance to the Taliban security guards who accompanied them everywhere, keeping the Afghans always on the periphery, a mere outer layer of security.
While al-Qa’ida’s financial subventions to the Taliban and the skilled fighters in the Arab 555 Brigade were valued, neither the Arabs themselves nor their money were seen as an unambiguous blessing. Arab fighters serving on the front lines of Afghanistan’s civil war mirrored the arrogance and religious prejudices of bin Laden’s immediate entourage, and the economic dislocations brought about by the Arabs’ money, particularly in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar City, were creating serious problems for leading members of the movement. Senior Taliban officials were being priced out of the prime real estate being bought up by bin Laden’s people. Even Mullah Omar himself was leery of the Saudi’s transparent attempts to curry independent favor with governors, commanders, and other senior Taliban officials through his lavish gifts, and sternly warned bin Laden in a letter that all financial assistance to the Taliban should be channeled through him.
Omar, we knew, was not about to break with bin Laden: he shared the Saudi’s messianic vision of global jihad. Mullah Omar’s formal title was Amir ul-Mumineen, “Commander of the Faithful,” and for him this was not just an honorific. Although bin Laden’s relationship with Omar was complicated, he was adept at flattering his Afghan benefactor and playing on his pretensions as a world historical figure. The concerns of Omar’s key lieutenants, however, were closer to home. Many would have been glad to see the Afghan Arabs go. In a Pashtun, a streak of extreme xenophobia is never far from the surface, and among many in the Taliban leadership, their Arab irritation had rubbed that vein raw. Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, “Mullah Osmani”—the Taliban’s Southern Zone commander and the number two in the movement to Omar himself—was particularly opposed to bin Laden’s presence, and had been vocal about it, as our agents were reporting.
My idea was that if we could capitalize, through liberal application of money, on the restiveness of a number of the significant Pashtun tribal leaders with whom my station was in touch, and if we could tie their limited armed insurrections to popular resentment of the Afghan Arabs, we would at least get the serious attention of the Taliban leadership, which might conclude that hosting the Arabs and bin Laden was more trouble than it was worth. I certainly did not think that my tribal rebellion—if we could pull it off—would ever succeed in actually toppling the Taliban outright. My hope was that genuine concern over the viability of their rule in the Pashtun homeland would exacerbate tensions among Omar’s senior lieutenants over the Arab presence, and that this, in combination with certain positive inducements we could make, might just convince Mullah Omar to find a pretext to break with bi
n Laden and the rest of his problematic Arab guests.
As the Taliban, and particularly Mullah Jallil, had made clear to us, there were significant things they wanted: in particular, they craved international recognition as a legitimate government. They very much wanted to take over Afghanistan’s empty seat at the United Nations. Having pacified most of Afghanistan, some, at least, in the leadership—witness Jalil’s dalliance with Akbar—wanted to get out from under international sanctions to pursue business opportunities.
My thought was that if we could arrive at the right combination of pressures and inducements, we might create a situation where the Taliban shura, or leadership council, could persuade or compel Omar to break with bin Laden and force him and his al-Qa’ida followers to flee to locations where we and our allies could hunt them down more easily. That was the theory.
In the spring of 2001, shortly after the March presidential briefing at CIA Headquarters, I laid out my thinking for Ambassador Milam. We agreed that as I pursued the right to employ new sticks against the Taliban, he would take on the task of acquiring corresponding carrots. He paralleled the efforts I was making in CIA channels with an ultra-secret “Nodis”—for “No Dissemination”—cable of his own, alluding obliquely to what I was doing, and seeking support for rewards that could be offered to the Taliban in return for bin Laden’s expulsion.
The ambassador’s efforts were met with cold silence. No one in the State Department would say why in print, but we soon learned their reasoning through visiting officials. “Look,” one said to me, displaying the exquisite if sometimes craven feel for political self-preservation that had so frustrated me during my year in their building, “anything even suggesting leniency toward the Taliban is a political loser.” The Taliban had a rather serious PR problem in the United States, to say the least. Their vicious, bloody-minded repression of women, in particular, was winning them no friends in America. Mavis Leno, wife of the famous comic and talk-show host, was appearing on national television accompanied by women in burqas, the traditional head-to-toe covering imposed on women in Taliban-controlled areas, highlighting the injustices of clerical rule in Afghanistan. It was hard not to empathize with their cause, but we were putting ourselves in a situation with the Taliban where we could no longer take yes for an answer regarding bin Laden. In the meantime, televising burqas in the United States was not having much effect in Afghan villages.
As I laid all this out for the director in his office, he peppered me with questions and took notes. Much had changed since March at the Washington end, as well. Where new covert action against the Taliban had not even been on the agenda in the early spring, it was very much on the agenda now. A growing pattern of intelligence from around the world, both human and technical, had convinced Tenet and the CIA leadership that a major attack by al-Qa’ida was not only certain but imminent. In a series of meetings with Condoleezza Rice, Tenet and Cofer Black had convinced the administration that the United States should go on the attack. But there was no consensus as to how that should be done.
Deputy Director McLaughlin noted that there would be a Deputies’ Committee meeting at the White House in a few days’ time to discuss the issue. The Deputies’ Committee was the second-highest body in the national security system; their job was to vet ideas and make proposals for consideration by the cabinet-level Principals’ Committee. “Take Bob with you,” George said. “He understands all this better than anyone.”
Sending my vacationing family ahead without me, I put off my annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod so that I could try to influence the options that would be put in front of the deputies. What I found at the NSC was more than discouraging. Attempting to explain to a senior staffer with specific responsibility for South Asia the idea of driving a wedge between the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, he asked: “You mean there’s a distinction between the two?”
Zalmay Khalilzad was the NSC’s newly appointed senior director for Southwest Asia and the Middle East, and he would be leading the discussion of policy options. An old Afghanistan hand and a genuine regional expert, I had first met him in the early 1990s, when he worked for Paul Wolfowitz at Defense. I would later come to know and admire him. He listened attentively to what I had to say, but on July 13, as I sat in the back row in the White House Situation Room as McLaughlin’s “second,” I could see that Zal was just all over the map. Rather than advocating a systematic campaign to bring serious, sustained pressure to bear on the Taliban, as I had hoped, he presented a smorgasbord of disaggregated ideas. One proposal he particularly stressed was for creation of a “Radio Free Afghanistan.” I inwardly sighed. Rather than fomenting rebellion against them, we were proposing to persuade the Taliban with words—and the words of foreigners, at that. It was a long, quiet ride with McLaughlin back to Langley.
If there was a lack of clarity and consensus in downtown Washington, the same was true within CIA itself. CTC’s Cofer Black had had little to say at the morning meeting with Tenet, which after all had been my show, but I knew that thinking within the Counterterrorist Center was at cross-purposes with my own. I considered CTC an important institution in CIA, and a necessary one. It was the central institutional repository of knowledge concerning terrorist groups around the globe, and the only unit capable of efficiently coordinating and supporting their pursuit across the artificial lines by which the CIA’s geographic divisions divide up the world. As station chief, I depended on the center to provide many of the people and all of the funds I needed to support my operations in Afghanistan. Much later, I would actually have the privilege of leading the organization as its director, after it had expanded to several times its pre-9/11 size. But while they may have known a lot about terrorists, those in CTC often exhibited little understanding of the cultures, institutions, and social and political dynamics of the regions where those terrorists operated.
The senior ranks of CTC, I noted, were disproportionately populated with Africanists, as Cofer himself. Officers who grew up and spent their early careers in the relatively benign operating environment of sub-Saharan Africa tended to develop quickly, and to rack up the agent recruitment records that drive early promotions. As a result, the Africa Division consistently created rather more senior officers than its tiny management ranks could absorb. The Counterterrorist Center was a natural place to which they could migrate. I found the center’s lack of understanding of Afghanistan and Pakistan a trial, but a manageable one, at least for the moment.
Several of the senior CTC managers had become greatly enamored of the head of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, the former mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Masood. CTC had been sending senior emissaries to meet with him in his mountain redoubt of the Panjshir Valley, in Afghanistan’s far northeast, for perhaps a year and a half. Their hope was to win his cooperation in finding and capturing bin Laden. It may have been worth a try, but I knew this was a desperate pipe dream; although much too adept a politician to say so, Masood was far too busy defending what little territory remained in his hands from the Taliban onslaught to do much against bin Laden, ensconced as the Saudi was in the heart of Taliban-controlled real estate. If we wanted to get bin Laden, I was convinced, we were going to have to do it through the Pashtuns.
I shared CTC’s reverence for Masood, who was an accomplished military commander, a liberal-minded leader, and a true intellectual. For what it was worth, I supported the idea of maintaining close ties with him. But I was realistic about what he could actually do for us, which at that stage was little. I felt it was important for us to ensure, to the extent we could, that Masood and the Northern Alliance not be swept from the field, if for no other reason than to maintain them as a potential card to be played against the Taliban. But in addition to being in no position to capture bin Laden for us, they had neither the military absorptive capacity nor the tribal standing in the south and east of the country to be able to seriously pressure—let alone defeat—the Taliban. I favored giving them modest support; but too vigorous an effort would merely mak
e the ongoing Afghan civil war more acute, further consolidate Pashtun support for the Taliban, and reinforce the latter’s need to maintain ties with its benefactors in al-Qa’ida. Completely throwing in our lot with Masood would have the opposite of the intended effect. The Taliban was a southern problem; the solution lay in the south. Nonetheless, when asked how to ratchet up pressure on the Taliban, CTC’s answer, again and again, was to reinforce the Northern Alliance.
Before leaving again for Islamabad in the waning days of July 2001, I had a lengthy meeting with the CTC leadership to try to bring them around to my views. I got nowhere: my friends in CTC found me, and my ideas, utterly unpersuasive.
Chapter 7
* * *
THE OUTLIER
JULY 29, 2001
THE CABIN WAS DARK, the dishes had been cleared away, and there was little sound to compete with the low thrum of the aircraft engines. I was reclining in my seat, beginning to drop off to sleep, when I felt a subtle presence, like soft breathing, above my face. Thinking it was my imagination, I opened my eyes slightly, to find a dark-haired woman leaning over me.
“Are you awake?” she whispered. Slightly startled, I glanced around me. “Yes,” I breathed.
“We must speak,” she said. She inclined her head toward the forward end of the cabin. “Five minutes.”
I had first met Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi almost two years before, while waiting in a salon at the official Pakistani prime minister’s residence. General Musharraf’s overthrow of Prime Minister Sharif had taken place just a few weeks earlier. With no one else to occupy it, the general was using the ornate, Moorish-style mansion as a venue to receive guests while in Islamabad, away from his official residence at Army House.
88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Page 8