88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  I did not then, and do not now have any problem with Senator McCain’s views concerning interrogation. My problem with him, perhaps ironically, was a moral one. His legislation could have directly addressed the matter of CIA, as well as military interrogations. Rather than publicly clash with the administration, he chose not to. Instead, he tried to achieve the same result indirectly by putting the troops—my troops—at legal risk. I did not consider that a highly principled stand. Nor was the senator entirely consistent. Around this time, McCain was asked in an interview how he would deal with a classic conundrum: There is a nuclear bomb set to go off somewhere in the United States, and we have a limited amount of time to learn its whereabouts from a terrorist in our custody. What do we do?

  “You do what you have to do,” he said.

  * * *

  In January 2006, the Tiger Team continued its deliberations. I made clear, again, that we would not continue interrogations as though nothing had happened, but that we would adapt to the new post-McCain reality. A Principals’ Committee meeting was scheduled for CIA to report on its strategy. I and my staff drew up a set of briefing slides, and I met on January 13 with Rodriguez and Goss to discuss them. In the brief I stated that though loss of the enhanced techniques would make our program less effective, we could still continue to question terrorist suspects, limiting our interrogation to those techniques specified in the Army Field Manual. Both Goss and Rodriguez dismissed the brief out of hand.

  “Without the EITs, we can’t continue the program,” Goss said. “We’re out of the interrogation business.” Rodriguez strongly agreed. I thought they were both being irresponsible and childish. Yes, we had to protect our people and make sure we were on the right side of the law, but we still owed it to the country to do what we could with what we had. We hadn’t had to use EITs on a majority of our detainees, and the most powerful interrogation weapon we had, still, was our ability to bring knowledge to bear. No one could do that as well as we could. Instead, these two wanted to pick up their marbles and go home. That sort of posturing might sound good in the safe confines of one’s own conference room, but I knew it wouldn’t travel well. When I protested again, they cut me off.

  “Change the briefing,” Goss said. I would accompany him to the Principals’ Committee, and I would make the presentation to the cabinet secretaries.

  Returning to my office, I dutifully made Goss’s changes, but did not want to be associated with them. I called Pat Murray, Goss’s chief of staff. “Look,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about this. The ideas in this briefing are the Director’s. He feels strongly about them. He would be far more effective in presenting them than I would.”

  “The Director wants you to deliver the brief,” he said.

  There was nothing for it, as the British would say, but to brass it out. Early on in the presentation, I came to the critical line. Summoning all the confidence I didn’t feel, I said, “And so, CIA will have to end its interrogation program . . .” I tried to move quickly on to the next slide, but Secretary Rice, who had been listening with growing impatience, cut me off.

  “Wait just a minute,” she said. Looking balefully at Goss, she continued: “This isn’t the meeting I thought I was coming to.” She then went on to verbally eviscerate him, in effect telling him that he should come back with a responsible plan. He didn’t have much to say for the rest of the meeting.

  As we gathered our papers to leave, Steve Cambone, who had accompanied Secretary Rumsfeld, leaned over to me, shaking his head at the debacle. He fully understood my position; he’d no doubt been in similar situations, carrying water for his principal. “I felt for you,” he said softly.

  It was a fitting cap to an extremely frustrating year. And yet I took some satisfaction in the fact that, somehow, I was still standing. In the latter months of 2005, rumors of my imminent demise had ebbed and flowed. Rodriguez had tried to ease me out gracefully, even offering through his chief of staff to give me a highly prestigious European posting typically reserved as a retirement tour for former chiefs of the Clandestine Service. I turned it down. There were still things I wanted to finish at CTC. If Jose wanted to get rid of me, I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

  A big part of that unfinished business was to finalize the strategic plan for the center, which would require directorate-level support. I knew the newly styled “Director of the National Clandestine Service” would never accept it if it came only from me, so I organized a command briefing, with all my senior lieutenants gathered around, many of whom had worked previously for Jose, and let them take turns arguing for the reforms that mattered most to them. It worked. Rodriguez wouldn’t say no to them. He approved the full strategic plan, though he had transparently little enthusiasm for it. He had only two questions: In light of our reorganization of the center, where would the former head of Alec Station, a favorite of his, end up? Pointing to a box in the new organigram, I explained that the reorganization amounted to a promotion for her. His second question: “When are you going to get bin Laden?”

  Winston Churchill once said that “Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.” For months on end, I had awoken each day feeling like I was the last man standing on the roof of the Alamo, alone and surrounded. It was exciting. Survive long enough in that position, and you begin to think you can do so indefinitely. But on February 3, 2006, I got the summons to the seventh floor. I was pensive as I rode down alone in the elevator afterwards. This was definitely a new and different feeling. I’d never been fired before. Still, I had to smile at Jose’s last words to me: “We’ll have to figure out what we’re going to say to people.”

  “Why not the truth?” I thought.

  It was a Friday afternoon. We had planned a dance party at our home for that Saturday night to celebrate Paula’s birthday. I didn’t say a word to her until Sunday, so as not to put a damper on the festivities. That night I went to the office, as usual, and composed a message to the CTC workforce. I explained that the D/NCS had lost confidence in my leadership, and that I was being dismissed. I thanked them for all they’d done to combat our enemies and to make us better, and asked their assistance to ensure a smooth transition to my successor, whoever that might turn out to be. The following morning, I made the announcement personally to my senior staff, and then released the general notice via e-mail.

  I treated my last week as director of CTC as a victory lap. I visited each of the units in the center, delivering at least a dozen speeches in a five-day period. I was warmly received, and presented with lots of plaques and mementos. I was gratified by the many supportive messages from inside and outside CIA. That week was the most fun I’d had since before 9/11.

  In the weeks that followed, I pondered my next move. I received a couple of fairly attractive offers for intelligence community jobs outside CIA. One friend memorably suggested that my position was like that of an imperial legate who had fallen out of favor with Caesar. Such leaders, he said, would typically go off to govern some distant province, and wait for a change in power that would permit them to return to Rome.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I’d been done a favor. I’d been in CIA for twenty-seven years, and it had been a great run. I had served at the heart of the greatest national security challenges of my generation. I’d seen and done nearly everything I’d wanted. Given the seductiveness of our work, I had feared that I would never be able to detach from it, that I would wake up one day on the far side of sixty-five never having done anything else. Because of my years of service and the number of years spent overseas, I qualified for early retirement. I’d just been handed a golden opportunity to see what else life had to offer. I decided to take it.

  There was also something else at work. The two great foreign policy challenges of my career had been Iraq and Afghanistan. I felt that we had failed utterly in Iraq, and that I shared the blame. I believed that as a government, perhaps as a nation, we had been unworthy. Not to be too dramatic or
maudlin about it, I felt we had not been equal to the role that history had given us to play.

  I still hoped that Afghanistan would be different. The one, the only job that might have lured me to come back into government would be a field assignment in Afghanistan. Given my seniority and my family circumstances, though, I knew that was just not a realistic possibility. Now it would be up to others. I retired in June 2006.

  By then, the signs of a concerted Taliban comeback were no longer subtle. The terrorist/insurgent methods of the Iraq War—car bombs, improvised explosive devices, and suicide bombers—had migrated to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they had been unknown just a few years before. The levels of violence and terror, with the Taliban targeting individuals associated with the government or foreign forces, were rising appreciably. The Bush administration responded with increased spending and the incremental addition of troops.

  Far from questioning the political model of a highly centralized state, the administration reinforced it. Warlords and militias would still be resisted. The emphasis would be on developing a strong national army and police force. Although once chary of nation building, the Bush administration now embraced it. If lack of development was contributing to the Taliban’s rise, the United States would increase funding for infrastructure. If want of fair and impartial courts was driving rural Afghans to the Taliban, judges would be trained and the Ministry of Justice reinforced. If narcotics cultivation was generating funds for the insurgency, poppy eradication would be stepped up. The effort was mostly top-down, piecemeal, ill-coordinated. At no point did the Bush administration ever articulate a set of strategic objectives for Afghanistan, or a coherent plan for how they would be achieved.

  That would change, nominally, in the Obama administration. After campaigning on the accusation that the Bush administration had ignored and underresourced the “good war” in Afghanistan in favor of the “bad war” in Iraq, the newly elected Obama set out to demonstrate a clean break with the past. At first, the break was more apparent than real. The new administration’s plan for Afghanistan, formally rolled out in March 2009, was ambitious. Al-Qa’ida, the president said, would be disrupted, dismantled, and defeated, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and to ensure against a future safehaven, the Taliban insurgency, too, would be defeated outright. The Afghan National Army would be made a capable fighting force some 134,000 strong—much larger than any future Afghan government would conceivably have the means to support—and the Afghan National Police would be increased to some 82,000. While waiting for the Afghan Army to show up, the U.S. military would take the fight to the Taliban in the highly contested areas in the south and east of the country. Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine was the rule of the day; its role in the relative stabilization of Iraq during the “surge” of 2007–08 having been largely misunderstood, it was believed that the same “population-centric” approach would produce benign results in Afghanistan.

  At the same time, Obama announced that foreign assistance to the Afghan economy would be increased, and the government made capable of delivering basic services, to undermine support for the Taliban. With American help, Afghanistan would crack down on corruption, eliminate narcotics, and establish full gender equality for women and girls. And although the president gave a nod to those advocating a locally based, bottom-up approach to rebuilding Afghanistan, it was clear that the main thrust of the U.S. effort would still be top-down, through the same hopelessly inept, corrupt, and unaccountable central government which had helped bring the situation to the current pass. If the goals Obama was pursuing and the methods he was employing were not so distinguishable from those pursued by Bush, the president stressed that the difference this time was that they would be pursued systematically, with adequate resources, and with a commitment sufficient to accomplish the goal.

  The president’s “commitment,” in fact, would not survive his exposure to the price tag associated with it. In the summer of 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, the former JSOC commander, now newly named as the overall chief of American and international forces in Afghanistan, embarked on a thorough “commander’s review” of the situation. Having been away from the fight in Afghanistan for two years, he was shocked at just how badly the war was going. According to some accounts, he believed that reversing the momentum of the Taliban would require an additional 60,000 U.S. troops; in the end, he requested 40,000. Rhetoric aside, this was not what the president was counting on, particularly when he had already dispatched an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan in the first days of his administration. The conflict, the president concluded, would require a complete rethink.

  The thrust of President Obama’s second Afghan strategy speech, delivered at West Point on December 1, 2009, could not have been more different from the one he had delivered nine months earlier. There would be no “open-ended” escalation in Afghanistan, he said. Nor would America take on a nation-building project there “of up to a decade.” No goals would be set beyond those needed to secure core U.S. interests, and those that could be achieved at “reasonable cost.” There was no more talk of defeating the Taliban. Instead, the goal would be to arrest their momentum and deny their ability to overthrow the Kabul government. All of this was sensible enough, and if the announcement of these objectives had been accompanied by a far more modest, sustainable strategy to achieve them, Obama would have been on solid ground.

  But the president’s speech was an exercise in misdirection, and the military failed to grasp it. Obama was signaling a strategic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but would not say so in as many words. The warfighters had target fixation, convinced that a COIN strategy could still succeed, if only they were given more troops. Obama, apparently more seized with politics than with substance, did not want his shift in favor of far more modest goals in Afghanistan to seem like a product of failure. So he did two completely incompatible things. He partially acceded to the military by agreeing to a “surge” of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to drive the Taliban from areas under their control, but demanded that the surge only last eighteen months. By July 2011, he said, U.S. forces would begin to depart Afghanistan. The leaders of the uniformed military had to know that a year and a half would not be enough to achieve success, but they convinced themselves that the troop withdrawal would be “conditions-based.” They were wrong. The civilian leadership made clear that once begun, the troop withdrawal would be inexorable. Obama, more disposed than most politicians to believe that his words were indistinguishable from facts, sought to reconcile the incoherence at the heart of his policy by asserting that the plan to create a huge Afghan army, never realistic or sustainable in the first place, could in fact be accelerated even further, so that Afghans could consolidate the anticipated gains to be made by U.S. troops.

  The whole enterprise, in my view, was criminal: Hundreds of U.S. servicemen lost their lives, their limbs, or suffered debilitating head injuries to IEDs while on patrol in Kandahar and Helmand, taking territory that their superiors should have known could never be held by Afghan forces. COIN, as practiced in southern and eastern Afghanistan, was doomed to failure from the outset: it demanded greater local knowledge and cultural understanding on the part of very junior officers operating at their own discretion than could be expected of conventional forces. More fundamentally, a genuine counterinsurgency campaign cannot be won by a proxy army. Had the Americans in Afghanistan been like the French in Algeria—that is, if they had considered Afghanistan theirs, and intended to stay—our COIN strategy might at least have had some coherence and a plausible rationale. In fact, it had little. Predictably, once U.S. forces had cleared an area of the Taliban, installing Afghan “government in a box,” in Stan McChrystal’s infelicitous phrase, would not prove feasible.

  As part of an accompanying “civilian surge,” U.S. experts tried to reform a recalcitrant Afghan bureaucracy, ignoring the fact that a structure built to facilitate corruption was unlikely to be reformed from the margins. They threw huge quantities of money
at high-profile and often unsustainable infrastructure projects in an attempt to demonstrate progress. I sat bemused at dinner parties where old State Department and military colleagues debated the relative merits of their initiatives. What struck me most was how seldom Afghans figured in these discussions. Afghans had become an afterthought or an annoyance. It was as if the Americans had concluded that the fate of Afghanistan was far too important to allow Afghans a hand in it. The principles of the plan that had guided us during the First American-Afghan War and the lessons we had learned from that time had been progressively, and by now completely, forgotten.

  From the outset, the Obama administration had pointed out with pride that theirs was an integrated, regional policy, falling under the purview of Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. India would by rights have been included as well, had the Indians not taken such umbrage at being associated with the other two. With the war in Afghanistan going so badly, the need for an “integrated regional approach” took on a special meaning, and special urgency: Pakistan came under unrelenting pressure to find and arrest the Taliban leadership sheltering on its soil, and particularly to stop homegrown Pakistani militants’ use of the Tribal Areas—especially North Waziristan—as a base for attacks on NATO and Afghan forces.