88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  The room was flooded with bright sunlight, streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. A peacock strutted on the lawn outside. Sitting alone, I looked up to see a slight and strikingly beautiful woman as she approached from my right. I recognized her immediately. Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, from a leading Pakistani family, was a well-known and eminent scholar, the former editor of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, and a former diplomat, having previously represented the government of Benazir Bhutto as ambassador to Washington. Now she had been designated by Musharraf to serve again as Pakistan’s envoy to the U.S. capital.

  She took a place beside me. She glanced knowingly when I told her my position; she obviously recognized who I was. “Well,” she said in a mellifluous voice, “you must be having an interesting time here.”

  She was dressed in traditional shalwar khameez, in complementary shades of pastel green, with an offsetting silk dupatta, or shawl, draped over her chest and back over her shoulders. Perfectly groomed, she seemed much younger than her long résumé would imply, but it was impossible to say by how much. She exuded an aura of competence and command, combined with an almost girlish curiosity and, disarmingly, a hint of mischievous fun.

  Suddenly she stopped. What was I doing here? I explained that Ambassador Milam and his political counselor, John Schmidt, were meeting with the Pakistani chief executive, and that I was cooling my heels in case I was called upon to address some issue or other. Her eyes widened in surprise for a moment, and then, as quickly, a veil of anger fell over them. We both realized at once that she was in an impossible position. She had been summoned to meet with General Musharraf immediately after his meeting with the American ambassador. She could not be included in the current meeting, as she had not presented her credentials in Washington, and so as yet had no official status. And yet here she was, sitting outside and therefore seeming pointedly excluded from the meeting. The exiting guests would understand the reasons for this, but still she would look slightly ridiculous, as though loitering outside a stage door she could not enter.

  Just then, a pudgy brigadier from Army Protocol wandered into the room. She was on her feet and at him in a flash, in a salvo of elegant but acidic Urdu. A serious mistake had been made at her expense, and someone was going to pay. The hapless fellow fell back three steps, wincing, and then turned and scampered down the hallway like a scalded dog. Her fury momentarily slaked, Lodhi turned on her heel and marched across the room to a low settee. She whirled and flung herself on the middle cushion. There was a long pause. “Shit,” she said.

  Now, as we leaned in the shadows against the forward bulkhead, Ambassador Lodhi was equally direct: She wanted to know what was going on, and she insisted that I must tell her. We were on a British Airways flight from London to Islamabad. I was returning from my consultations in Washington; she was traveling to Pakistan in advance of an expected visit by Christina Rocca, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

  The Pakistani foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, had recently visited Washington and had been “shellshocked,” she said, by the vehemence of U.S. views regarding Pakistani support for the Taliban. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you for eighteen months?” Lodhi had told him. Senior officials in Pakistan didn’t want to acknowledge the growing U.S. anger and apprehension. Her detractors, she charged, were quick to play the “gender card,” suggesting that as a woman, she was panicking. Now that Sattar had gotten an earful for himself, perhaps they’d begin to understand what was at stake.

  For months, in terms similar to those employed by Milam and me in our early 2000 conversation with President Musharraf, Lodhi had been warning Islamabad that the next attack by al-Qa’ida would generate a major response by the Americans, and that the consequences for Pakistan, as the most important defender and ally of the Taliban, would be severe. What, she wanted to know, was the chief of station telling General Mahmud, director-general of the ISI? So far as she could tell, Mahmud was “serene,” stating that he had no problems with CIA, based on “decades of good relations” between Langley and the vaunted Pakistani intelligence service.

  That last phrase, the one about “decades of good relations,” stung me. In fact, at my instigation, we had tried a new tack with Mahmud and his service following my failed February 2000 meeting with Musharraf. Our charm offensive had been keyed to General Mahmud’s visit to Washington a month later, and to George Tenet’s subsequent visit to Pakistan in June of that year. I had lavished as much favorable attention on Mahmud as I could.

  My idea, adopted readily by Director Tenet and Jim Pavitt, who had now risen to be the agency’s deputy director for operations, was that during the reciprocal visits by the two intelligence chiefs, we should distance ourselves from the rest of the U.S. government, and appeal for ISI help based on the long cooperative relationship between our services, of which our spectacularly successful joint effort during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s was the most prominent example. Our pitch was that effective intelligence cooperation against al-Qa’ida would get the favorable attention of the U.S. government, and perhaps lead to a wider thaw in relations. “Help us help you,” we said.

  During his March 2000 visit to Washington, in sharp counterpoint to his unpleasant contacts with the Department of State and the National Security Council, we treated Mahmud with warm respect and fêted him and his senior officers at clubby dinners in the countryside. Having learned that Mahmud had written a thesis at the Pakistan Army Command and Staff College on the battle of Gettysburg, I arranged a special tour and walked the entire battlefield with him and his staff, accompanied by an eminent Civil War historian from the U.S. Army War College.

  It appeared for a time that the “good cop” approach might work: during Tenet’s visit to Pakistan in June 2000, General Musharraf, in the presence of both Mahmud and myself, promised a vigorous program of counterterrorism cooperation, including establishment of a joint counterterrorism unit. But it was all for naught. As soon as Tenet’s plane cleared Pakistani airspace, Mahmud began assiduously to avoid me. When at length he agreed to meet with me in September 2000, he finally responded to my repeated appeals for concrete follow-up by saying, “What’s the next item on your agenda?”

  Now it appeared to me that not only was General Mahmud not following through on the Pakistani chief executive’s commitments, but that my moderate tone was perhaps leading him to believe—or at least to claim—that CIA’s message was different from what Pakistan was getting elsewhere in the U.S. government. This was both embarrassing and galling.

  Our message in Islamabad, I assured Lodhi, was the same as hers. General Mahmud wasn’t hearing it, I said, “because we don’t talk.”

  “That has to change,” she asserted. The United States and Pakistan must cooperate on Afghanistan, and so must the intelligence services.

  “Look,” I said. “The reason we can’t get there is that Pakistan won’t engage on the issue. If your government would level with us, and explain the national interests being served by your support of the Taliban, we could work with you to find an alternative means of addressing your problems and pursuing your interests. Pakistan seems convinced that the United States has ulterior, unstated goals in Afghanistan, and we can’t counter those concerns if they’re never expressed.”

  Lodhi agreed. “We’ve got to do something before Pakistan is blamed for the next al-Qa’ida attack. And violence in Afghanistan is affecting Pakistan as well; it must be eliminated at the source.”

  Time is of the essence, I stressed. Al-Qa’ida, we knew, was planning to strike us again. “It’s not a matter of if, but of when. Between us, we have to find a way to make them understand.” The ambassador had the haunted look of someone who could see the future when no one else in her government could. Her agenda and mine were certainly not identical, but they overlapped. My goal was to neutralize bin Laden and deny a platform to al-Qa’ida before they could launch another strike against U.S. interests; her goal was to avoid having Pakistan tak
e the blame if and when such a strike occurred. The key to realizing both our goals was Mahmud. If he could be induced to provide some effective cooperation against al-Qa’ida, whose operatives and facilitators were transiting Pakistan with impunity, it might help us disrupt the next attack, and it would change the prism through which Pakistan was seen in the U.S. government. Lodhi’s was clearly the only compelling voice of reason in the Pakistani government, but she was an outlier, with little internal support; I did not envy her position.

  “You must engage with Mahmud,” she insisted again. “Besides,” she added, with a sly smile, “he likes you.”

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  COUNTDOWN

  EARLY SEPTEMBER 2001

  MALEEHA LODHI HAD CLEARLY checked out. She was staring up at the ceiling, making little pretense of listening. Both she and I had heard this monologue many times before.

  In the West Wing of the White House, small increments of power and influence are measured in square feet of office space and proximity to the Oval Office. The space accorded Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, was relatively capacious, and included a small seating area and a conference table, set by a working fireplace. But her deputy Steve Hadley’s office, where we were sitting, could have been mistaken for a broom closet. The Pakistani ambassador was forced to sit upright and primly, lest her right knee touch my left. Seemingly oblivious of the uncomfortable setting and the evident lack of interest from two thirds of his audience, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed droned on with his usual precise diction, in a deep, sonorous voice. He was at his articulate but tiresomely pedantic best.

  Maddening as he was, I had long found Mahmud to be a fascinating character. In an army formed on the British model, he was the prototype of the British-style officer. From the bristling mustaches, to the ascot, to the ramrod-straight posture, to the swagger stick tucked under his right arm, he might have stepped out of a picture book of the early twentieth-century British-Indian Army. A classicist and an intellectual, his discourse was strewn with references to Clausewitz, Bertrand Russell, and Aristotle. In his telling, the Amu Darya River, which set the northern border of present-day Afghanistan, was the ancient Oxus; modern Istanbul was Constantinople, or Byzantium. And yet he startled me on one occasion by quoting, at length and by heart, the lyrics of a recent sentimental Western pop ballad.

  Mahmud was said to have rediscovered religion as he entered middle age, and he clearly wore both his personal piety and his pro-Taliban sympathies on his sleeve. In neither respect was he unusual. But among many, to me overwrought, foreign observers he represented something more. He was darkly reputed to be among the “closet Islamists” in Pakistan’s military leadership, holding religiously inspired political views and insidiously advocating a “jihadist” foreign policy.

  In any event, for all that he was an unabashed apologist for the Taliban, it was hard to imagine such an urbane and sophisticated man having much personal sympathy for a group of primitive obscurantists who brutally repressed women and refused to see them educated. His strikingly pretty young wife, whom I had met, was highly literate, sharp-tongued and opinionated. Mahmud had told me with some pride that he and his daughter, with whom he was obviously close, were reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time so that they could discuss it together.

  Given the strong ties between the Northern Alliance and India, Pakistan saw support for the Taliban as in its national interest, a view Mahmud clearly shared. But one could not reconcile the private man with his evident personal enthusiasm for the Taliban, which appeared to go well beyond considerations of Pakistani national interest, without assuming a large measure of social and cultural condescension toward Afghans, and what these benighted tribalists might legitimately aspire to. That, too, was consistent with his character.

  Now, having regaled Hadley with graphic stories of the obscene depredations of the Afghan warlords whom the Taliban had deposed, he went on to describe the impossible challenges they would face in trying to track down bin Laden on our behalf—in the unlikely event they ever agreed to do so. “The peaks of the Hindu Kush,” he intoned dramatically, “rise over 20,000 feet, and the valleys are so deep that the sun never penetrates.” Allowing for some poetic license, most of what Mahmud had to tell the deputy national security advisor, along with other senior officials around town, was true enough; and all of it was irrelevant.

  In a cable to headquarters in advance of Mahmud’s September 2001 visit, I had warned my senior leadership that “his mission is not engagement, but pacification.” At the time of my hushed late July conversation with Ambassador Lodhi on the flight to Islamabad, there had been yet a glimmer of hope. Now, a little more than a month later, I had concluded that so long as Mahmud was in place, there was no realistic prospect of gaining active Pakistani support either in attacking and disabling al-Qa’ida’s infrastructure in Pakistan, or for a prospective effort to drive a wedge between the Taliban and bin Laden in Afghanistan. We would have to proceed on our own, I said, and hope the Pakistanis would turn a “blind eye” to our cross-border efforts in the likely event they discovered them. Pakistani interference with us would be more easily avoided if we could convince them that we did not seek the downfall of the Taliban per se, but only to drive al-Qa’ida from its safehaven.

  Neither Mahmud nor anyone else in the Pakistani government seemed to have any brief for bin Laden or his Afghan Arabs. Logically speaking, and so long as it was kept quiet, there was no reason for them not to cooperate in a limited campaign against al-Qa’ida, and seemingly every reason to do so, if they hoped to rebuild their relations with the United States. In his final lunch at CIA Headquarters, Mahmud suggested that we bribe Afghan tribals to track down bin Laden. But he pointedly did not offer any assistance in the effort.

  As we rode together in the back of a chauffeured car up the George Washington Parkway toward the CIA Headquarters building for a final, unpleasant meeting with Cofer Black and CTC, I put the question to Mahmud directly: Given that bin Laden’s presence served no Pakistani national interest, why did he refuse to cooperate against the Saudi and his terrorist followers? There was a long silence. Was it because of the Pressler sanctions? I asked. Mahmud paused, and looked away. “Yes,” he said quietly. It was something I already knew, but his admission was nonetheless significant. The ISI chief had no interest in rebuilding relations with America; he was too busy nursing resentments over the past.

  Within Afghanistan, I wrote that August, our best intelligence indicated that ties between Mullah Omar and the Arabs were strengthening, while the animosity of Omar’s senior lieutenants toward the outsiders was growing. These opposing trends had not yet created a fissure in the leadership, and it was not yet clear which side would predominate. On August 27, I sent another message to headquarters, pressing again for an integrated U.S. policy to produce and exploit such a break in Taliban unity. Once again, I argued that if we were permitted to foment a tribal uprising in protest of the Arab presence in Afghanistan, we might sufficiently empower the anti-Arab elements in the Taliban Shura to force Omar to expel bin Laden.

  CIA, unable to reconcile the conflicting advice between CTC and myself, sent a draft covert action proposal to the NSC combining both our ideas: We should reinforce the Northern Alliance, it said, while simultaneously encouraging a tribal uprising in the south. The White House tabled the draft for further study.

  Lacking the new authorities we sought, my officers and I pressed forward aggressively with what authorities we had. In the second half of August, our southern tribal contacts distributed hundreds of “night letters”—propaganda sheets slid under doors or tossed over compound walls in the dark of night—in and around Kandahar, decrying bin Laden and the pernicious presence of Arab foreigners. We hoped they would convey the impression of a groundswell of popular opposition to al-Qa’ida.

  The September round of Washington meetings almost concluded, and just before departing once again for Pakistan, I met with Ambassad
or Lodhi over a private dinner in a restaurant overlooking the Potomac. Though neither of us said so, the sense of resignation was palpable. She could not move her government, and I could not move mine. In fact, there was little of substance for us to discuss.

  Mahmud planned to stay on in Washington for several days after my September 7 departure, so that he could make a reciprocal meeting with the chairmen of the two congressional intelligence oversight committees, whom he had hosted at a lavish outdoor dinner in Pakistan a few days before, on August 29. Their meeting was scheduled for September 11. That morning, as the general and Ambassador Lodhi sat in the Capitol with Representative Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, the group was suddenly approached by an aide who reported stunning news from New York. A television set was turned on, and all watched the scene of smoke rising from the twin towers, until the order came to evacuate the building. I was watching the identical scene from my office in Islamabad.

  As the two Pakistanis were driven west down Constitution Avenue, they suddenly saw a plume of smoke rise in the sky off to their left, in the direction of the Pentagon. Time was up. As some of us had feared, and to a greater extent than we could ever have imagined, life as we had known it was about to change.

  Part Three

  * * *

  THE FIRST AMERICAN-AFGHAN WAR

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  NON-NEGOTIABLE DEMANDS

  SEPTEMBER 15–16, 2001

  I WAS LYING ON MY back, staring up at the ceiling. It was well past midnight, but sleep was impossible. A thousand jumbled thoughts were competing feverishly in my mind. Suddenly it occurred to me: directly across the hall, in a similarly spare hotel bedroom, lay a stone killer whom I’d been threatening for several hours, however politely, with annihilation. Given the animation of our previous discussion, he was surely as wide awake as I was. I couldn’t be sure what sort of impulse control he possessed, but what I had seen from him so far was not reassuring. Outside, down the hall, I could hear the soft murmurings of a group of heavily armed Taliban guards keeping vigil. I was unarmed, and my only ally was an Iranian-American Dari translator in the next room, who might have weighed all of 120 pounds. The latch on the door was laughably flimsy. I got up from bed to push a heavy armchair up against it. That wouldn’t slow down an intruder very much, but at least I’d be assured of being awakened. The drop from my second-story window, I noted with perhaps undue optimism, didn’t look so bad.