by David Loyn
After a gap, the talks resumed again in August. Agha brought a letter purporting to come from Mullah Omar for Obama. He called on the U.S. president to make “tough choices” on reconciliation and to work to end the war.36
In September, it was America’s turn to downgrade their involvement in the talks, after a daylong Haqqani assault on the U.S. embassy. Skeptics threw out anchors to slow things down. Blanc saw that as an inconsistent response. He was in the embassy when it was under attack and said it was “extremely unpleasant,” but that did not mean they should stop the talks. “If the Taliban weren’t capable of threatening US interests then we wouldn’t bother to talk to them.” Blanc prevailed, they returned to the table, and by December, Clinton was confident that they would be able to announce the opening of the Taliban Doha office at an Afghan conference in Bonn on the tenth anniversary of the first Bonn conference. But Karzai had other ideas. He had been kept informed by Grossman and Blanc every step of the way, but now he told Clinton he never knew what had been going on. He pulled the rug from under the talks, demanding they should end unless the Afghan government was represented. Since the whole process was designed to promote an Afghan lead, they could hardly go on. In March 2012, the Taliban closed the process down for good in response to the shooting spree by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in the south, who murdered sixteen Afghan civilians in their homes.
THE OFFICE
The year 2012 was wasted for those who wanted a negotiated settlement. But toward the end of the year, Qatar suggested a different approach, a new way of choreographing the sequence of events with the same goal of direct talks between the Taliban and Afghan government. If they could secure a statement from the Taliban severing their links with international terrorism, then the Taliban could open their office, and that would be used as the venue for talks on the prisoner exchange and then direct talks with the Afghan government. Karzai was due to come to Washington in early January 2013 for what would turn out to be his last visit as president. During the trip, Blanc met the Afghan foreign minister, Zalmay Rassoul, and the national security adviser, Rangin Spanta, in Blair House and succeeded in getting their agreement to restart talks. He flew directly to Doha to engage the Qatari government as mediators.
This time around, there were no direct talks with the Taliban, as Qatar brokered the deal, securing what Blanc called a “more or less acceptable” statement from the Taliban distancing themselves from al-Qaeda along the way. The subsequent opening of the office with a fanfare, live on Al Jazeera, and all the trappings of a government-in-exile, with the devastating effect in Kabul witnessed by General Joe Dunford, was not what Qatar expected.
The flag and sign calling this the office of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” directly challenged the sovereignty of the Karzai government. The U.S. knew this was not acceptable. Even a nondescript office was a lot for the Afghan government to swallow. The U.S. had pulled out their negotiating team, but Rubin was in Doha. He had been working for four years to bring the U.S. and the Taliban this far and did not want to lose the talks process over a nameplate. The official embassy vehicles were all out of commission, so he persuaded an American diplomat to drive him to the Taliban office in his own car. When they arrived, Rubin marched up to the Qatari police and insisted they call someone to take down the nameplate and flag, meanwhile calling everyone he could on his mobile. He refused to leave for forty-five minutes, until someone came out of the building and unscrewed the nameplate. He took a picture with his phone to send to the U.S. embassy in Kabul and to TOLO TV, to make sure the Afghan government would see it.
AMERINE DIVERSION
By 2013, there were other attempts to secure the release of Bergdahl. Lieutenant General John Campbell, who would take over from Dunford as ISAF commander in August 2014, knew the inside track on efforts to find the missing soldier from his previous role as commanding general of the 101st Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. He also knew there was good intelligence showing Bergdahl was taken across the Pakistan border within three days of being captured.37 In early 2013, as the army G-3, deputy chief of staff for operations and plans, Campbell was in a position to order a fresh look. He asked Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine to see what he could do. Amerine was the commander of the Green Beret unit hit while supporting Hamid Karzai in his attempt to rally southern tribes against the Taliban after 9/11. He was an all-American hero who had been featured in a video game for an army recruiting campaign.
By 2013, twelve years into the long war, there were a lot of contractors running around Afghanistan and the frontier region of Afghanistan funded by different programs, with contacts who could be mined. Through them, Amerine believed that rather than the five-for-one deal, the Taliban would be prepared to release Bergdahl and other Western hostages in exchange for Haji Bashir Noorzai. He was a Kandahar tribal leader lured to the U.S. under false pretenses and imprisoned on drug charges in 2005—along with lurid headlines that he was Afghanistan’s Pablo Escobar. One of the richest landlords in Kandahar and leader of one of the most powerful and numerous tribes, Noorzai was a key backer of the Taliban from their emergence in 1994, seeing them as a Pashtun uprising against chaos. For him and other business leaders and power brokers in the south, the new movement provided a measure of stability to allow trade and commerce and stop the violence and banditry of the civil war years in the early 1990s.
Noorzai had also assisted the U.S. after the Soviet war, when he tracked down and returned Stinger surface-to-air missiles supplied to the mujahideen. And in 2002, after the Taliban collapse, he handed over fifteen truckloads of weapons, including antiaircraft guns, to U.S. forces. At the same time as this record of cooperation, there is little doubt that poppies and marijuana were grown in his fields, and he profited substantially from them. In 2004, he was lured to the U.S. by two Americans, “Mike” and “Brian,” who identified themselves as officials from the Pentagon and FBI.38 They told him they wanted to talk about terrorist financing and promised him safe passage to and from the U.S., but it was a sting. Soon after his arrival in New York, he was arrested by officials from the DEA and subsequently sentenced to life for drug trafficking.
Securing the release of a felon facing a life sentence was a complex maneuver, and Amerine faced skepticism across the administration. He had not done the exhaustive checks required to prove his contacts could deliver. He said the system never gave his plan a chance. “I didn’t think it would be very difficult to negotiate his release, but we had a bureaucracy that was incapable of doing it.”39 In February 2014, his team had a meeting with the Taliban canceled with no explanation.
He went to Republican congressman Duncan Hunter, since he wanted to report the obstruction he had faced, believed illegal ransom payments had been paid for an attempt to release Bergdahl that failed. He found himself facing a criminal investigation for contacting Hunter over the failures in the efforts to release Bergdahl. Citing whistleblower protection, he fought off the charges and was cleared, and forced a DOD investigation into whether a ransom was paid, which would be illegal “if their effort constituted material support to terrorism.”40 The DOD Office of Inspector General’s report did not substantiate the ransom claim but did find that the administration conveyed “misleading and obfuscatory” information about the case, so it was hard to reach a definitive verdict.41 Jason Amerine retired with honor and received a Legion of Merit medal.
THE DEAL
Toward the end of 2013, the Qataris came back to Blanc with a new suggestion: Why not just do the prisoner exchange as a single confidence-building measure, with the hope of building something out of it toward other talks? He put together a small team, and they requested a new proof-of-life video, which horrified those who saw it. Bergdahl’s condition had deteriorated markedly, spurring efforts to get him out. Since this deal did not involve a wider Afghan peace process but just a prisoner exchange between the Taliban and the U.S., Blanc did not inform the Afghan government. And he kept the loop of people in the U.S. system who knew
very small to prevent the process being sabotaged once again by leaks. The guarantor for the deal was the Qatar government, not the Taliban. The U.S. needed assurance that the Guantánamo Five would not immediately go back to the battlefield but would be monitored in Qatar.
In late May 2014, Blanc was in Qatar for what felt like another routine visit to negotiate the terms, when everything began to fall in place quickly. He stayed to close the deal. The last sticking point was that Qatar did not have a plane capable of the round trip to Guantánamo, and the Taliban did not want to fly in an American plane. As a compromise, Qatari government prosecutors were sent to Guantánamo to accompany the five back on an American C-17.
Then Blanc had the anxious wait for Bergdahl to be taken to the agreed pickup point. “That movement period was going to be one of the most dangerous for Bergdahl. We were always afraid that one of his guards was going to be unhappy with the order.” All the moving parts fitted into place as designed. The Guantánamo Five were waiting next to the tarmac. Less than half an hour after the news came that Bergdahl was safely in the Black Hawk, they were on their way to Qatar.
The moment of maximum opportunity to move on to a more comprehensive negotiation could not be grasped because the political stars were not aligned. Blanc returned to Washington hopeful that he could build something. He now had a definitive answer to the question he was always asked by skeptics—“How can you be sure the Doha group is authoritative?” But the Republican backlash against Obama for the prisoner swap blocked further negotiations, while the Taliban were cruising on empty, with no fuel for more talks. Their leader, Mullah Omar, was dead, although that would not be revealed for another year, and there were no instructions for the next stage of negotiations.
On balance, the deal was a good one for the Taliban. They had recovered five senior leaders and now had a known address in Doha even if it lacked a nameplate and a flag. But they were not rushing to open talks with Kabul, where the political elite were tearing chunks out of each other in a fierce dispute over the presidential election result that consumed the whole of 2014. Blanc concluded, “I just think it’s one of the many tragedies of the American adventure in Afghanistan that at this moment when we should have been able to get something going, the politics of all three parties fell apart.”
PHASE FIVE
2015–2021
ENDGAME
14
AFGHANISTAN’S WAR
Combat and war and transition, as you know, it’s a very complex thing.
For me, it’s not black and white.1
—General John F. Campbell
WHO DO I TRUST?
In a large, red-draped meeting room upstairs in the Arg, the heavy, overstuffed chairs with gilded arms looked gloomy as ever. Three weeks after Ashraf Ghani’s inauguration in September 2014, he was meeting the foreign media for the first time as president. A caricaturist for The New York Times, in Kabul to sketch the first democratic handover in the history of Afghanistan, grumbled a little about the cheap ballpoint issued by security, who had overzealously confiscated all writing equipment. He settled into one of the gilt-armed chairs and turned out some pretty good likenesses of the president.
We were a small group. I had one more year as the BBC correspondent, the last expatriate in a role that had been consistently staffed since the Russian war in the 1980s—the world had wearied of Afghanistan. Other news organizations were the same, cutting down staff. When the call came from the Arg, most of the few remaining resident foreign press were out of town, taking the first break possible after reporting the endless negotiations over creating a national unity government in the disputed election of 2014.
Ashraf Ghani is tall, lean, balding, with a close-trimmed beard, ready smile, and quick mind. He eats little after an operation for stomach cancer. He has an academic mindset, working eighteen-hour days, proud of absorbing large amounts of information. In that first briefing, he spoke of his influences and ambitions in government. He said he had learned from President Johnson, praising his capacity to build coalitions, in contrast to Eisenhower, who failed to cope with the fluid demands of political life. He was inspired by the ability of FDR to build a social consensus, as well as Lincoln’s political wisdom. In twentieth-century history, he saw plenty of negative examples of what not to do, but South Korea and Singapore were two models he admired. He cited post-Franco Spain in 1975, Chile in the 1990s, and more obscurely, Finland in 1921, as other models. He was a new breed of Afghan politician—with no baggage from the Soviet war or the civil war before the fall of the Taliban, returning after 9/11 on a one-way ticket. He abandoned American citizenship to run for office, and when he won in 2014, he brought new hope to a country weary of war and the politics of the warlords. He had spent time in the World Bank, and he literally wrote the manual for the challenges he now faced, Fixing Failed States.
The ideas flew in an uninterrupted stream as he talked in theoretical terms about the way software companies live on the edge of chaos to make change. He wanted to learn from that to combat the Taliban and other networks of insurgents. Since they were inherently unstable, there was no point in using tactics developed in stable systems against them. This echoed the ideas of McChrystal, during his time commanding Special Forces in the region.
But the difference was in turning words into action. In contrast to the restless disruptive innovation of McChrystal’s command, Ghani did not have the machinery available to put his plans into practice. Three weeks into the administration, he did not have the basics in place. There was, for example, no press officer for the president. This absence cut him off from the Afghan people and his international backers. Reporters faced a simple problem. Who did we call? I put the question to him at the end of the briefing. He said testily, “David, who do I trust? I don’t want someone to defame me,” as if there was literally no one in the country he could put confidence in.
One of his first decisions in government was to agree to the hanging of six men, five of them for a vicious gang rape of women returning from a picnic. There was widespread public demand for the executions but international disquiet over a trial that lasted less than a day. Ghani visited the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi jail, where the hangings took place, and the experience put reform of justice at the top of his priority list. He asked if I thought organizing a press office more important than sorting out the mess of Pul-e-Charkhi. It was an odd response—comparing two quite different functions. Without a media capability, the new president was making his job far harder. Smartphones are now widely held across Afghanistan, and Facebook is a universal tool of communication, alongside an impressive array of feisty and independent newspapers and TV and radio stations—one of the few real success stories of the post-Taliban period. Failing to harness the opportunities available felt like an unforced error, an own goal.
Ghani’s staff found it hard to work the levers of power. With no precedent for a nonviolent democratic handover in Afghanistan, there were no transition documents and little clarity over which jobs were political appointments. He was saddled against his will in a national unity government with the other leading election candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, as the “CEO”—a post that does not exist in the Afghan constitution. The compromise was forced on him by Secretary of State John Kerry in a dozen visits to Afghanistan over the summer to broker a dispute over the 2014 election.
The lack of media capacity meant that quite important reform announcements, such as the recovery of much of the stolen money from the collapsed Kabul Bank, drifted out with no impact. Who did he trust? This was Ghani’s Achilles’ heel, reducing his opportunity to make the changes he could see were necessary to reform Afghanistan.
DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
One of Ghani’s early decisions was to make all provincial governors acting positions, with the aim of methodically confirming them one by one. This fatally weakened their power to act, to arbitrate in disputes, and to appoint new staff. The governor of the restive eastern province of Nangarhar, Mullah Atta
ullah Ludin, was a popular reformer, but found his power undermined when his post became “acting.” Nangarhar Province took in the caves of Tora Bora, as well as the vital lifeline to Pakistan and the world through the Khyber Pass. Ludin was courageously acting against corruption and warlordism and had bulldozed illegal buildings in the provincial capital, Jalalabad, to settle a land dispute. This muscular approach against corruption required authority. He complained to Ghani, “I don’t have the capacity and the power to implement reforms that I am expected to by the people.” A deputation of worried elders from the province came to plead Ludin’s case, but Ghani was unmoved. Shorn of power by his acting status, the governor resigned, and a reformist successor left less than a year later for the same reason. Two years later, Nangarhar was one of the places where the Islamic State group first seized a foothold in Afghanistan.
Politics is the art of the possible, securing consent, winning arguments, and often deciding between the least worst of two bad options—as Bismarck put it, “the art of the second best.” Ashraf Ghani was not accustomed to the second best. Growing up, he was keen on individual sports—running, swimming, not team games. He may have had a theoretical understanding of the guile of LBJ and the wisdom of Lincoln, but lacked the political support to build an administration for a nation riven by decades of war.