by David Loyn
Grenier was swimming against the tide. Hank Crumpton, who headed the CIA Counterterrorism Center, thought he had a bad case of “clientitis,” and Rumsfeld was contemptuous. A pause in the bombing reminded him of Vietnam.19 But Grenier succeeded in the early days in limiting U.S. bombing to air defenses and Taliban “political” targets, mainly the homes of senior leaders. This felt like a halfhearted way to go to war and conceded too much to Pakistan. Momentum and constant disruption are essential features of successful military campaigns. The cautious approach risked losing the advantage of early wins and disheartening defectors from the Taliban.
The Jawbreaker team faced daily questions by Fahim over when the bombing of the Taliban front line north of Kabul would begin. His forces were skeptical, wondering if this airpower was really as good as they said. If there was no willingness to employ conventional U.S. troops, Fahim was the only show in town. He had been given a lot of money, winning him prestige and bolstering his position; now was not the time to have reservations. Schroen’s tactical air operators had clearly mapped the GPS coordinates of the Taliban front lines. Three weeks after the bombing began, things were about to change.
On a cold night at the end of October, Fahim arrived in a decades-old Mercedes to a remote corner of the Dushanbe airport in neighboring Tajikistan and climbed the side steps into the belly of a C-17. Waiting for him was General Franks himself, who wanted to meet America’s new ally. Fahim circled the main northern towns—Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, and Taloqan—with a gold mechanical pencil, then drew arrows south toward the Bagram front line, to lay out his priorities. They bartered over money, with Franks storming outside at one point, smoking a cigarette in the dark under the plane, after Fahim demanded $7 million a month. They settled on $5 million to take the north. Franks was left wondering, “I didn’t know whether we had traded a horse or bought a carpet.”20
The other leaders in the north were also familiar players from the jihadi years, who had fought against each other in the early 1990s in shifting alliances after the fall of the Soviet-backed government. They included the Tajiks Atta Muhammad Nur and Ismail Khan, the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, and Pashtun Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Along with the Jawbreaker team, small groups of Green Berets, A-Teams, attached themselves to each of the militia leaders to coordinate the battle.
Dostum and Nur quickly broke Taliban front lines at Mazar-e-Sharif, the key northern town and gateway to Central Asia, backed by A-Team tactical air operators spotting targets on the ground. Dostum’s troops were mounted on horseback, and the battle had the unique pairing of a cavalry charge backed by close air support—the oldest and newest forms of warfare on one battlefield. Precision bombing meant there was not much fighting on the ground. Franks was exuberant. “These Green Berets used maneuver and air power,” he wrote, “to destroy an army the Soviets had failed to dislodge with more than a half million men.”21
This wholly misunderstood the context. Most of the commanders now backed by the Green Berets were “the army the Soviets had failed to dislodge” in the 1980s, apart from Dostum, who had been the main commander of the north for the Soviet-backed Afghan forces. As for the Taliban—they did not exist when the Soviets were in Afghanistan.
A more important lesson from the Soviet years that should have dampened early exuberance was that winning tactical engagements was never a problem in Afghanistan, especially with airpower. Holding ground was far harder, as America and its allies were to discover after the stunning early victories. With the Taliban defeated, submerged rivalries came to the surface. Nur reached the center of Mazar first, staking his claim as the main commander of the north, diminishing Dostum’s capacity and limiting him to an area outside the city. Dostum retreated to his traditional fortress at Shebargan in the northwest. Their rivalry weakened the chance of stabilizing the country.
Despite the support for the Northern Alliance forces in the battle for the north, there were reservations about allowing them to enter Kabul. Fahim knew this when he traded with Franks in the C-17 meeting in Dushanbe. Looking him in the eye, he said, “We will not enter Kabul until you give permission.”22 It was enough to change the calculation, and despite Grenier’s reservations, a relentless bombardment of Taliban front lines at the beginning of November left the capital defenseless.
THE WAR IN THE SOUTH: OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2001
The Islamabad CIA chief, Grenier, believed the new leadership of Afghanistan would emerge from the millions of Afghan refugees living and meeting in the camps and markets of frontier towns. He resurrected and financed a number of former Pashtun warlords in the east and south, who were “pleased to reestablish contact with the CIA after a lapse of some ten years.”23 The policy of standing up former warlords may have been pragmatic, but with more American boots on the ground, such unpalatable choices would not have needed to have been made. Grenier justified supporting one notorious drug dealer in the southwest by saying, “We could not afford to be too selective.”24 These areas would be the hardest to stabilize in the long war that was to come.
The risks were real. A highly popular Pashtun tribal leader, Abdul Haq, tried to rally opposition forces in his home region in the east of Afghanistan. He had cut a deal with a prominent faction of the Taliban who wanted the return of the Afghan king. But he was opposed by the ISI, whose influence meant he had no American backing. He was seized by the Taliban and shot.
Two men eyed their chances in southern Afghanistan. Even before Haq was killed, the braver of the two, Hamid Karzai, wearing nondescript local clothing, made a hazardous journey on the back of a motorbike, crossing Taliban-controlled territory into the mountains in Uruzgan, a province to the west of the main southern city, Kandahar.25 He rallied some support, but the going was tough. At one point, he and his small band of followers were sleeping in goat sheds, and walking, as he had no transport. He had one U.S. weapons drop. But as the Taliban closed in, the CIA swooped down in a helicopter to take him back to safety in Pakistan. He soon returned to Afghanistan, this time with support from the CIA and an A-Team of Green Berets commanded by Captain Jason Amerine, who brought in air strikes against several large, determined Taliban attacks as the convoy of Karzai supporters grew until it was a traveling circus of four-wheel drives, tractor trailers, “jingle trucks” trailing lines of colored foil, with some followers riding alongside on donkeys.26
Karzai was little known then, but would soon become internationally recognizable with an astrakhan hat covering his bald head, neat silver beard, and green-striped tribal cloak across his shoulders, signifying he was a revered elder—garb he wore by chance on arrival in Kabul and never altered. He is shrewd, courteous, with a quick wit, beautiful command of English, and a love of poetry from his education in India. He has a deep knowledge and connection with tribal politics and family links—the invisible thread binding Afghanistan. He was a Popalzai, the ruling clan of Afghanistan in the past, and his father had been a senator. He was well known to foreign diplomats in Pakistan, and was a frequent visitor to the U.S. embassy before 9/11.
The other man waiting on the frontier with pretentions to power was Gul Agha Sherzai, the former governor of Kandahar, who persuaded the CIA and many journalists that he was the true voice of anti-Taliban opposition in the south. With American funding, he staked his claim through the then new soft power weapon of the sat phone to broadcast to the world, and crucially through the BBC Pashto service, then the main news outlet in Afghanistan. Anyone whose understanding of Afghanistan did not begin on September 11, 2001, would know that he was one of the warlords whose excesses were most responsible for provoking the rise of the Taliban in the first place.
Sherzai, a giant, brutish Jabba the Hutt look-alike who calls himself Bulldozer, could not be more different in manner and background to the courtly Karzai. His father bred and trained fighting dogs—a popular pastime in rural Afghanistan. I once went to see him with a German journalist, and he enthusiastically told her what an admirer he was of Adolf Hitler. The Taliban’s first majo
r victory when they emerged from the dust of the countryside in 1994 was to force Sherzai out from his corrupt brutal hold on Kandahar, and they won the backing of local businesses and many tribal leaders for this action alone.
Grenier had already been funding Sherzai for a year before 9/11,27 but his enthusiasm was not shared by the CIA’s counterterrorist center. Seeing an opportunity to build up his credibility when Franks came to Islamabad to meet tribal leaders, Grenier wanted Sherzai and another potential leader dressed for the part. “Turbans. Make damned sure they’re wearing turbans,” he said.28 He should have worried more about Sherzai’s acceptability to southern Pashtuns and ability to govern than what he wore.
In the middle of November, two weeks after meeting Franks, armed and financed by the CIA, Sherzai was heading toward Kandahar from the east, while Karzai came in from the north. Both were supported by U.S. Green Berets. American bombers made short work of what little resistance Sherzai met on the way before he reached the airport on the road to the east of Kandahar, now in the hands of the largest conventional U.S. force on the ground in Afghanistan, Marine Task Force 58, commanded by Brigadier General Jim Mattis (later commander of CENTCOM and secretary of defense).
As American airpower changed the balance in the south, hundreds of Taliban fighters defected, joining Karzai or Sherzai. And there was talk of a more formal surrender of Kandahar itself. Another potential leader of the south, Mullah Naqib, at some risk to his life, was negotiating with the senior Taliban leadership, trying to persuade them to order a surrender in return for immunity from prosecution and a promise to withdraw from politics. Naqib was a hero of the war against the Soviet Union, with deeper connections as a tribal leader than Sherzai, and the two had contested the control of Kandahar before, in the early 1990s before the emergence of the Taliban. Naqib was an old-fashioned Afghan power broker who had consented to the Taliban while they were in power and was trusted by Karzai as an intermediary. But in 2001, the power brokers were the U.S., who had no interest in negotiating terms with the Taliban.
ONE DAY IN DECEMBER
December 5, 2001, was the day that decided the future course of Afghanistan. Karzai was named the interim leader of post-Taliban Afghanistan by a swiftly convened international conference in Bonn, Germany. It brought together the Northern Alliance and a number of groups of Afghan exiles, including one representing the former king Muhammad Zahir Shah.29 The leaders of the U.S. delegation, Jim Dobbins and Zalmay Khalilzad, were keen to deliver Karzai as leader, but it took tough talking, mostly in exhausting sessions that went on through the night, as the Afghan delegates were fasting during the daytime for Ramadan. The Northern Alliance delegation staked their claim as the people actually doing the most fighting and only agreed to support Karzai in return for their hold on three key ministries—Defence, Interior, and Foreign Affairs. After overnight talks, delegates were called in at dawn on December 5, and Karzai’s voice on a poor sat phone connection from southern Afghanistan came through a loudspeaker in the conference hall to thank them for agreeing to make him interim leader.
Karzai’s appointment was almost cut short less than an hour later. A targeting error caused by a system reset on a battery change brought a two-thousand-pound American JDAM bomb, designed to penetrate caves, onto his position.30 Three of Amerine’s special operators were killed and twenty injured. Many of Karzai’s Afghan supporters died. Amerine was injured, and his swift departure from the battlefield weakened Karzai’s cause with the Americans on the ground, as the replacement team had not established the same bond with him. His face cut by flying glass, it was little wonder that Karzai became skeptical of the claims of accuracy of American airpower. This would be the biggest source of friction during his years as president.
Later that same morning, Karzai met a Taliban delegation brought by Mullah Naqib to discuss the surrender of Kandahar. After several hours of talks, a deal was done—and district by district across the province of Kandahar, Taliban fighters came over to Naqib, named by Karzai as the new governor. Recognizing that Karzai’s forces were ill provisioned, the Taliban delegation sent 2,500 naan—the flatbread that is the staple diet of Afghanistan. The Taliban group included Tayyib Agha, who ten years later would be the Taliban negotiator in their first face-to-face talks with the U.S. But in 2001, the U.S. was not in the mood to negotiate. When rumors of a potential deal reached Washington, Rumsfeld said his cooperation with the anti-Taliban opposition “would clearly take a turn south” if Taliban leaders were let off without facing justice.31 The Taliban heard him, and so did the American backers of Sherzai.
Karzai called Sherzai and ordered him to stay outside the city of Kandahar, appointing him director of the airport. Sherzai insulted him, shouting down the phone, “I don’t take orders from Hamid Karzai. I don’t know Hamid Karzai … Kandahar is mine,” telling the media that Karzai’s negotiator Naqib was a Taliban sympathizer. Amid isolated fighting between his and Naqib’s troops across the city, he seized the governor’s palace. Karzai had to be restrained by the new commander of his Special Forces support team, Lieutenant Colonel David Fox, from sending his troops to take him on, Fox telling him, “You are on the verge of starting a civil war.”32
Sherzai’s media campaign had worked. He was framed by American reporters as the rightful inheritor, while Naqib was described as “relatively obscure.”33 One of the better reporters to arrive in Kandahar in that first wave, Sarah Chayes, wanted to report the complexity but was told by her editor at NPR just to send color on Mullah Omar’s house. The story had to be binary. America had won, and their allies were good, while the Taliban and anyone who wanted to negotiate with them was bad.34
This misunderstood and misrepresented the nature of Afghan warfare, where local allegiances change frequently. Battles are fought not between armies in uniform but to win tribal influence and support. The Taliban was not a sealed unit but an idea that emerged in reaction to banditry in the early 1990s, and Taliban fighters and commanders could easily change sides. “The Americans were such amateurs,” said Akrem Khakrezwal, who would become the Kandahar police chief. “Anyone Sherzai or his interpreter told them was a Talib, they would take it on faith, and act on the accusation.”35
Naqib, who had tried to make peace and was named by the internationally approved head of state as governor of Kandahar, now called his son to tell him to run away, as their house was likely to be bombed by the U.S. military.36 This was not about combating international terrorism—the reason for the war. It was using U.S. air strikes to settle scores between rival warlords. The nature of what happened was not well understood in Washington. As late as 2017, the congressional research service wrote that when the Taliban fled in 2001, Kandahar was left “under Pashtun tribal law,” a curious description of the CIA-backed imposition of a notorious warlord.37
In 2002, McChrystal had three British officers in his team in the hangar at Bagram, among them Colonel Nick Carter, who would later have several senior command roles in Afghanistan, before becoming head of British forces as chief of the defence staff. Carter said it was a mistake to believe Sherzai. “He made us flatten a whole load of people he wanted to get rid of. He claimed they were all Taliban and we believed him. And the upshot of that is that we drove people into the arms of the insurgency.”38 For Carter, this was one of the most important lessons of the Afghan war: “If you get involved in campaigns like these, you really do need to have some insight and understanding.”
The main focus for Sherzai, where he named his enemies and demanded air support against them, was Mullah Naqib’s home base in the fertile Arghandab Valley west of Kandahar, which became one of the hardest areas to secure in the years of fighting that followed, as tribes targeted by the Americans on the word of Gul Agha Sherzai sent their sons to join the insurgency. “My suspicion,” said Carter, “was that some of those who purported to be Taliban would have been easier to govern with than Gul Agha.”
STABILIZATION LITE
Karzai did not remain in Kand
ahar, flying to Kabul in an American helicopter. He was greeted at the airport by Fahim, who asked, “Where are your troops?” since no self-respecting leader would arrive without them. Karzai replied disarmingly, “You are my troops.” Karzai had a complicated relationship with the 1980s warlords like Fahim. He had been deputy foreign minister to the unstable mujahideen government in Kabul in the early 1990s, until he resigned after a dispute with Fahim and others.39 When the Taliban emerged, he was close to them, and his name was put forward as an ambassador, but that never materialized. He fell out with the Taliban in 1999 after his father was shot dead by two Taliban fighters in Quetta, Pakistan. The former mujahideen leaders mistrusted him and thought he was too close to America.
Fahim had inevitably ignored the promise he made not to enter Kabul, seizing military bases across the city. Wais Barmak, who later became interior minister, was the local head of the UN and effectively handed over the city to the Northern Alliance after the Taliban fled. He saw that Fahim’s troops knew exactly where to go—their occupation was clearly planned.40 What was not noticed by the small international presence at the time was that Fahim’s militias took large areas of land and property for themselves, including the large military training ground at Sherpur, which they designated prime building land in the center of town, close to one of the most desirable residential areas, and parceled into plots, which were quickly covered with giant garish houses. Their power grab severely complicated the chances of Afghan reconstruction, and in particular weakened the potential for foreign-educated Afghans to play a role in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Jim Dobbins, the veteran diplomat President Bush appointed as his special representative for Afghanistan, came straight from Bonn with a small advance diplomatic team, who camped in the U.S. embassy. The American flag, lowered when the embassy was closed in 1989, was found locked in a vault, with a message written by marine sergeant James M. Blake to those he knew would return. “For those of you yet to enter Kabul, it could mean a lot to you.”41 It was raised again in a simple, moving ceremony.