Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  The United States had arrived in Central Asia—the first Western army to penetrate the region since the Greek armies of Alexander the Great. Uzbekistan provided a base for multiple types of U.S. operations out of K2 and later allowed Germany to set up a resupply base at Termez, close to the border with Afghanistan. Tajikistan hosted French Mirage fighter bombers at Dushanbe Airport, which did not pull out until November 2005. Later, Kyrgyzstan was to provide bases for U.S. and Coalition forces and aircraft at Manas Air Base, outside Bishkek. After the war, Manas became a major hub for supplies to Western forces in Afghanistan. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided overflight facilities for U.S. aircraft. Turkmenistan balked at any other support except for facilitating humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. In Moscow, U.S. Army generals were given extensive briefings from Soviet-era commanders who had fought in Afghanistan.

  When Rumsfeld arrived in Tashkent on October 5, to acknowledge the deal formally, Karimov still wanted to camouflage it. He was bargaining for the maximum from the United States: immediate membership in NATO, $50 million in loans, and a defense treaty. He played hard to get, insisting that no attacks on Afghanistan would be carried out from Uzbek soil—even as U.S. fighter jets arrived at the K2 air base. He was still fearful of a reaction from the Taliban and the IMU, who had mustered some ten thousand troops to defend Mazar-e-Sharif and had threatened to retaliate against Uzbekistan if it dared joined the U.S.-led Coalition.

  Rumsfeld was opaque, saying only that “the two countries have met; the two countries have talked; the two countries . . . have worked out a series of arrangements that make sense from both our standpoints.”18 Finally, on October 12, both countries signed the formal agreement on the use of K2. It included a vague U.S. security guarantee for Uzbekistan, speaking of “the need to consult on an urgent basis about appropriate steps to address the situation in the event of a direct threat to the security or territorial integrity of Uzbekistan.” Karimov had fought hard to get the clause in so that he could show his people and Russia that he had not sold himself cheaply.19

  The United States paid Uzbekistan an initial $15 million, but by the end of 2002, Uzbekistan would receive $120 million in military equipment and training to the army, $55 million in credits, and another $82 million for the intelligence services—the same agencies that were to help the CIA render al Qaeda prisoners and torture Uzbek civilians.20 By mid-October, more than two thousand troops from the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division were at K2, ready to invade Afghanistan.

  The United States successfully forged an alliance of neighboring countries. It was much less successful in forging an anti-Taliban alliance among the Pashtuns inside Afghanistan. Pashtun attention was focused on Rome and the group of bickering exiles surrounding former king Zahir Shah, now eighty-five years old. To millions of Afghans, his name evoked memories of a golden past in the 1960s and 1970s, when Afghanistan was at peace—although the golden hues of that era were more myth than reality because the country had also been desperately poor. The exiles in Rome were consummate intriguers, incapable of uniting, and few had set foot in Afghanistan since the 1970s. Many of them thought the king was being manipulated by his son-in-law Gen. Abdul Wali and by his influential cousin Mahmood Ghazi.21

  Before 9/11, and after some prodding by the Clinton administration and the UN, Masud and the Northern Alliance had reached out to the Rome group. Both agreed to set up a joint council that would prepare to hold a Loya Jirga presided over by the former king. After 9/11, the United States tried to get the Rome group and the Northern Alliance to move toward greater coordination, and Richard Haass, heading the State Department’s Policy Planning Division, visited Rome to anoint the king’s new role.

  Whatever happened in Rome, the key to defeating the Taliban would be raising the standard of rebellion in the Pashtun belt. The ISI played all sides of the Pashtun equation, wooing prominent members of the Rome group, who detested working with the Northern Alliance, secretly contacting Pashtuns who were in the NA, while also trying to create an alternative Pashtun group in Peshawar that was anti-Taliban. This Peshawar Group was led by Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, a Sufi leader of some prominence whose party had fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Gailani hosted a conference with some seven hundred exiled Pashtuns living in Peshawar. Each participant received money and free meals (4000 rupees, or 65 dollars), leading to accusations that the ISI had manipulated the meeting. None of the participants volunteered to start fighting the Taliban.

  The CIA wanted to see the Peshawar group merge with moderate Taliban defectors—if the ISI could produce them—to form a new anti-Taliban Pashtun alliance. The most elusive chimera that the CIA pursued, with the encouragement of the ISI, was that “moderate” Taliban Pashtuns would rise to denounce Mullah Omar, hand over bin Laden to the Americans, and join a new coalition government in Kabul. Since 2000, the ISI’s Gen. Mehmood Ahmad had been holding out to the CIA the promise of a “Taliban lite,” but doing absolutely nothing to produce one. The idea took on a new life after 9/11, but there seemed to be no Taliban takers. In fact, the reality was that the ISI had no intention of splitting the Taliban, even if it had the power to do so. There were moderates among the Taliban earlier on, but the ISI had betrayed them to Mullah Omar long ago. Where the ISI succeeded was in manipulating the U.S. media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, convincing them that it was earnestly trying to create moderates among the Taliban.22

  The earlier Taliban moderates who were fed up with Mullah Omar’s unnatural alliance with bin Laden had been grouped around Mullah Rabbani, the head of the government in Kabul, who died of cancer in a Karachi hospital in April 2001. The moderates were now leaderless, and those from Rabbani’s group who had secretly talked to the UN or Western diplomats in Islamabad and who had complained about Mullah Omar were now too scared of the ISI to do so again. In reality, General Mehmood was not promoting moderates but trying to ferret them out so they could be exposed and betrayed to Mullah Omar once again. The threat of death hung over any Taliban leaders if they betrayed Mullah Omar or the ISI. It was a masterful double game that the ISI was to play with even greater dexterity after 9/11.

  Musharraf himself played the game adroitly, pretending several times that Pakistan was on the verge of producing moderates. “Extremism is not in every Taliban,” he said in the presence of Colin Powell just before the bombing campaign began. “I would not like to get into the details of who are moderates, but one knows for sure there are many moderate elements.”23 Powell appeared to buy Musharraf’s words, replying that “if you got rid of the regime there would still be those . . . willing to participate in the development of a new Afghanistan.” At the end of October, when Taliban foreign minister Mullah Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil arrived in Islamabad for secret talks with the ISI—again talks deliberately leaked to the U.S. media—Musharraf asked the Americans for a bombing pause because “there are some people who may be waiting to change sides.”24 The entire exercise was shadow-boxing by the ISI.

  Inside Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance was also deeply divided and buffeted by the conflicting claims of its newfound American advisers and its old supporters Iran, Russia, and India. General Fahim, the successor to Masud, was infuriated that the CIA had provided cash and weapons to each warlord individually rather than through him. The other warlords did not trust Fahim. He also proved incapable of keeping the Panjsheri Tajiks united. Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Panjsheri political leader who had been president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, now expected to return to Kabul as president, but many Panjsheris detested both him and Fahim. However, there was progress in Rome, where on October 1, the Rome group and the Northern Alliance established a Supreme Council of 120 members who planned to set up an interim government after the Taliban. The Taliban responded by arresting hundreds of Zahir Shah supporters inside Afghanistan.

  On September 21, Rumsfeld received from General Franks the first draft of a battle plan, Operation Enduring Freedom. On October 2, Bush approved the four-phase
plan that would lead to the defeat of the Taliban regime. There was no commitment to reconstruct Afghanistan.25 The United States would deploy four aircraft carrier battle groups comprising thirty-two naval vessels, forty thousand soldiers, and four hundred aircraft, although few soldiers would ever see Afghanistan. Britain would deploy some eighteen battleships, fifty aircraft, and twenty thousand troops. But the real work woud be done by the one hundred and fifteen CIA officers and three hundred U.S. Special Operations Forces personnel inside Afghanistan, working with NA leaders. After the liaison team Jawbreaker arrived in Panjsher, other joint CIA-Special Forces teams arrived at the side of Generals Dostum and Mohammed Atta (not the 9/11 hijacker of that name) in the north, Ismael Khan in the west, Karim Khalili in the Hazarajat (central Afghanistan), and eventually Hamid Karzai in the south.

  It was already becoming clear to some U.S. officials that a military victory alone would not be enough and that America’s allies in the region would be more helpful if they knew the United States was committed to rebuilding Afghanistan. Bush had all along rejected nation building. “We are not into nation building, we are focused on justice,” he said as late as September 26.26 Some State Department officials, however, urged Powell to defend nation building. “We are looking at a defining moment, if only we will grasp the opportunity to shape a post-Taliban Afghanistan,” a senior official told me at the time.27 Tony Blair also told Bush that the United States could not ignore the issue of political transition and how the next Afghan government would be formed.

  Powell ordered Richard Haass to organize a meeting with experts on post-Taliban Afghanistan. Those who gathered on September 24 included Tom Gouttierre, who ran the Center for Afghanistan Studies at Nebraska University; Arnold Schifferdecker, a U.S. diplomat who had been assigned to the UN Afghanistan mission; David Champagne, a former trainer of U.S. Special Operations personnel in Afghanistan’s culture and society; Barnett Rubin; Ashraf Ghani; and Daud Yakub, a young, dynamic Afghan who had worked with U.S. congressmen on Afghan initiatives and now ran the king’s office in Rome.

  The meeting ended with an overwhelming conclusion that the United States had to get involved in forming the next government but that the process should be carried out by the UN. “We owe it to the Afghans to stick around after the defeat of the Taliban,” said one participant. Another explained how the United States should help in “basic stabilization rather than bringing about a full democratic set-up.” Haass commented: “You mean nation building lite.” The epithet, related more to beer than to nation building, stuck. Haass recommended to Powell that the political transition be undertaken by the UN while the United States and its allies pursued an agenda of “nation building lite.”

  The meeting focused attention on the problem of the successor government in Kabul. On October 3, Kofi Annan reappointed Lakhdar Brahimi as his special representative to Afghanistan, and Vendrell as Brahimi’s deputy. Bush appointed James Dobbins, a veteran U.S. diplomat experienced in dealing with failed states such as Haiti and Yugoslavia, as the U.S. ambassador to the Afghan opposition. Dobbins and Brahimi knew each other well, having worked together in Haiti. John Negroponte took over as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. A week later Bush told the press that “it would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called ‘nation building’—I would call it the stabilization of a future government—after our military mission is complete.”28

  The neoconservatives gritted their teeth as just two weeks after Bush rejected nation building, he was now endorsing it. Powell tried to dampen enthusiasm, saying, “It isn’t a huge Marshall Plan kind of investment.”29 The key issue was what kind of armed force should occupy Kabul after the Taliban were driven out. Annan and Brahimi were strongly against a UN blue-helmet force, which would take months to set up. The United States preferred a force provided by “willing nations,” possibly led by Turkey. Brahimi and the French were initially in favor of an Afghan peacekeeping force drawn from all ethnic groups.

  Brahimi now summoned his group of “experts”—the same one he had formed in 1998 and which Francesc Vendrell had continued to work with. Over dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, Brahimi discussed what to do next. Those present included Barnett Rubin; Ashraf Ghani; Iqbal Reza, the chief of staff to Kofi Annan; Fatemeh Zia, an Iranian-American UN diplomat who would become Brahimi’s special assistant; and me. Brahimi asked Rubin and Ghani to start writing a draft document outlining how a political transition, security, and a peacekeeping force could be set up and managed. Rubin, Ghani, and a handful of UN officials became known as the UN Strategy Group for Afghanistan, and the document they prepared eventually became the basis for the UN Security Council resolution that empowered the UN to oversee the political transition in Kabul.

  Before leaving for the region to speak to Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, Brahimi went to Washington to see what ideas the Americans might have. Haass told him that “when Americans say ‘we’ have come to consult with you, it usually means we have already taken our decision and we have just come to inform you what it is.” But this time, Haass said, “I can assure you we have no idea of what to do or what needs to be done.” The White House was in a hurry to get the UN to come up with a workable strategy. Powell met Brahimi and told him, “Speed, speed, speed.” Brahimi replied, “Slowly, slowly, slowly,” emphasizing that negotiations to form a new government with the Afghans could not be rushed.30 When British foreign secretary Jack Straw also urged Brahimi to hurry up, Brahimi reminded Straw that to try, after two decades of war, to form a new government in Kabul overnight was “a totally crazy objective.”

  Inside Afghanistan millions of Afghans scared of U.S. bombs began a mass exodus from the cities to the countryside. Thousands of Afghans arrived on the borders of Pakistan and Iran desperate to be let in as refugees. UN agencies prepared for an expected outflow of 1.5 million Afghan refugees once the U.S. offensive began. The UN’s World Food Programme, which was already feeding some three million Afghans inside the country before 9/11, said it had only two to three weeks of food stocks left and no hope of sending more food into Afghanistan, as the Taliban had closed the border and UN staff had been withdrawn. “There are pre-famine conditions in some areas, people are eating grass and animal fodder,” WFP country director Khaled Mansur told me.

  At his heavily guarded home in Quetta, Hamid Karzai was meeting with dozens of tribal and clan leaders a day. Taliban officials would arrive secretly from southern Afghanistan to pledge their loyalty to him and the king. “Hundreds of Taliban are sending their families to Pakistan and are ready to defect the moment the king gives the call for a national uprising,” Karzai told me. The mayor of Kandahar and some judges had crossed over into Pakistan and contacted him as well.

  Pakistan had asked the Americans to delay any attack so they could talk to Mullah Omar. Two days of secret talks between Omar and an ISI delegation headed by General Ahmad in Kandahar failed to deliver any concession, save for Omar’s agreeing to call a meeting of Afghan ulema to decide the fate of bin Laden. It was a delaying tactic. Omar met with two more delegations from Pakistan. On September 28, Ahmad traveled to Kandahar for the last time, leading a delegation of hard-line ulema from the Deobandi sect, including Maulana Nizamuddin Shamzai, an extremist Karachi-based cleric who had been a mentor to Omar and bin Laden.

  Subsequently there were leaks to the CIA that General Ahmad had encouraged Omar to resist an American attack rather than give up bin Laden. Shamzai also told Omar to hold firm. The CIA, convinced now that Ahmad was playing a double game, informed Musharraf of what had happened. Meanwhile, the agency had opened up its own channel to the Taliban. In great secrecy, it had sent Robert Grenier, the Pakistan station chief, to Quetta to meet with Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani, the Taliban’s senior military commander. Grenier urged Usmani to persuade Omar to give up bin Laden, but there was no response. In a second meeting, on October 2, Grenier asked Usmani to desert Omar and help deliver the Saudi terrorist. However
, Usmani remained loyal to Omar.

  The ISI was playing an even larger double game. An ISI report sent to Musharraf predicted that the Taliban resistance would continue into the spring of 2002, that the United States’ reluctance to commit ground troops would deny itself a quick victory, and that Taliban fighters, now bolstered by thousands of al Qaeda and Pakistani militants, would hold firm for some time. When the Taliban eventually lost the cities, they would conduct a guerrilla war from the mountains. Musharraf, a firm believer in the ISI’s predictive capabilities, used the report to justify the ISI’s continued supplies of arms, ammunition, and fuel to the Taliban, in direct defiance of the UN resolution to cease all supplies to the Taliban and of his own promise to the Americans.

  ISI fuel tankers and trucks, covered in heavy tarpaulins, daily rumbled across the Khyber Pass and other border crossings into Afghanistan. At Chaman, in Balochistan, from where ISI trucks traveled to Kandahar, the crossing point was sealed off as customs officials waved the trucks through without checks. The trucks belonged to the National Logistics Cell, an army-owned trucking company that had ironically been set up with CIA funds in the 1980s to deliver arms to the Afghan Mujahedin fighting the Soviets. Thus, even as some ISI officers were helping U.S. officers locate Taliban targets for U.S. bombers, other ISI officers were pumping in fresh armaments to the Taliban. On the Afghan side of the border, NA intelligence operatives compiled lists of the arriving ISI trucks and handed them to the CIA.

  Musharraf had promised the Americans that all ISI operatives inside Afghanistan would be withdrawn before the U.S. bombing campaign began. However, dozens of operatives and soldiers from the Frontier Corps stayed inside, helping the Taliban prepare their defenses. “I assumed from the beginning of the conflict that ISI advisers were supporting the Taliban with expertise and material and, no doubt, sending a steady stream of intelligence back to Islamabad,” said CIA officer Gary Berntsen.31 Moreover, Ahmad allowed more ISI officers to go inside, including five senior officers who met with Mullah Omar at the end of September.32 “The ISI is an institution full of intelligence, but devoid of wisdom,” M. P. Bhandara, a seasoned Pakistani politician and businessman, told me at the time.