Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  The C.I.A. had identified individuals in the Taliban leadership who claimed to disagree with Mullah Mohammad Omar’s policy of providing sanctuary to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda because harboring terrorists deprived the Taliban government—formally known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—of international recognition and aid.

  Bob Grenier was the Islamabad station chief, in charge of the C.I.A.’s efforts from Pakistan to split the Taliban and somehow capture or kill Bin Laden. Grenier was a wiry, fit Dartmouth alumnus then in his late forties. He was a forceful, clear writer who had studied professional management philosophies as he rose as a case officer into the Senior Intelligence Service. After a long career, Grenier found the C.I.A. could be “arrogant, insular and parochial,” and while he “enthusiastically shared that culture,” he was also “wary of it.” He assessed himself as a “contrarian.”19 Grenier had wide field experience but he had arrived in Islamabad in 1999 after holding supervisory office roles in Virginia for the previous five years. The September 11 attacks thrust Grenier into sudden prominence on the Seventh Floor as an adviser to Tenet and the White House on critical questions about which the Bush administration had scant expertise.

  For example: Could the I.S.I. be trusted for anything, and if so, what? To what extent should the United States accommodate Pakistan’s demands as the war in Afghanistan unfolded? Could the Taliban be split or otherwise persuaded to betray Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, or should they be regarded as a unified enemy to be attacked without mercy or compromise?

  Grenier maintained channels to Taliban leaders. In January 2001, at a U.S. embassy reception, he had met Mullah Abdul Jalil Akhund, the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister. Grenier had suggested they stay in touch and had provided Jalil with an Immarsat satellite telephone. They spoke regularly.20

  After the attacks on New York and Washington, Grenier called Jalil and suggested they meet in Quetta. Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, commander of the Taliban’s Southern Zone, accompanied Jalil. Osmani said he had Mullah Mohammad Omar’s permission to parley with the C.I.A., to develop proposals that might break the impasse over Al Qaeda. They talked for hours, exchanging threats and proposals. Grenier suggested the Taliban could stand aside while U.S. forces snatched Bin Laden. Grenier had no authority to make such a deal, but he was trying to develop a plan that could be presented to the White House as an option. The United States needed some kind of Pashtun strategy—an uprising, a deal with Mullah Mohammad Omar, some intervention closer to the heart of the Taliban–Al Qaeda nexus than working with Ahmad Shah Massoud’s surviving commanders in the Northern Alliance was ever going to provide. The most Grenier could extract, however, was an assertion that the Taliban “would not risk the destruction of their nation for the sake of one man.”

  —

  Mahmud Ahmed returned from Washington on September 15. He had used his time to lobby the C.I.A.’s leadership for one last chance to persuade Mullah Mohammad Omar to betray Al Qaeda. In Bob Grenier the I.S.I. chief now had an ally. They met as soon as Mahmud landed in Islamabad.

  Grenier provided “a lengthy, arm-waving, account” of his discussions with the Taliban in Quetta. Here was the sort of opening I.S.I. had been hoping for, to preserve the Taliban without alienating the United States. Mahmud said he would fly to Kandahar on the 17th to negotiate directly with Mullah Omar.21

  No American accompanied Mahmud, who provided nearly identical debriefings separately to Grenier and Dave Smith during the days after he returned to Islamabad on the night of the 17th.

  He said his talks with Mullah Omar lasted four hours. They were well acquainted with each other. To Mahmud, Pakistan’s core interests, managed through I.S.I., included the promotion of a peaceful Afghanistan and the reduction of poppy cultivation and heroin trafficking, which Omar had delivered. The Taliban controlled all of the country except a few pockets in the north, and drug production had been reduced. They had a basis for mutual confidence, in Mahmud’s view.

  Omar had sat on a large rectangular sofa at his pine-shrouded home on Kandahar’s outskirts, with his legs pulled up and crossed beneath him. As they spoke, Omar picked at his toes. Mahmud relayed the main elements of America’s position: Bin Laden had to be brought to justice or expelled. The same was true of fifteen to twenty other Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. The Taliban had to close all Al Qaeda camps. Mullah Mohammad Omar “might have two to three days” to consider surrendering Bin Laden.

  They had a detailed discussion about the possibility of Bin Laden’s expulsion. Omar said he could not hand over Bin Laden to any non-Muslim authority, as Mahmud, as a Muslim, well knew.

  The I.S.I. chief tried a lawyerly argument. Prayer is an absolute obligation on Muslims, he pointed out, which cannot be avoided even on one’s deathbed. Mullah Omar agreed.

  “But what if a snake approaches while you are in the midst of prayers?” the I.S.I. chief asked.

  “You abandon your prayers and deal with the danger first and then resume your prayers,” Mullah Omar answered.

  “Don’t you see this giant anaconda approaching Afghanistan?” Mahmud asked. He meant the United States. “As emir of 25 million Afghans, is your oath of hospitality to Osama more sacrosanct than protection of your people?”22

  Mullah Mohammad Omar thought for a while and then remarked that an assembly of religious scholars was to gather in Kabul the next day, and that the I.S.I. chief should discuss the question with them. Mahmud did go to Kabul. The assembly issued a statement to the effect that Bin Laden was free to leave Afghanistan of his own free will. Mahmud considered it a momentous concession, but it barely registered in Washington.

  To Smith and Grenier, Mahmud reported that Omar had said the current crisis represented “the will of God,” and as for Bin Laden, “only his death or mine” relieved Mullah Omar of the obligation to protect a Muslim guest. That sounded like the end of negotiation, but Mahmud insisted that there was still reason to be optimistic:

  “The United States has to give engagement with the Taliban a chance,” Mahmud pleaded to Dave Smith. “The use of force should be an absolute last result. . . . Maybe he has used me, but I’m happy to be used if it will avert a greater tragedy.”

  The I.S.I. chief added, “I’m not a sleuth or a super spy. I’m a soldier and I will fulfill the commitment made by the president,” meaning Musharraf’s promise to side ultimately with the United States, if it came to that.23

  On September 20, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, before a television audience estimated at eighty million. His national security cabinet and speechwriters had deliberated for nine days about how to frame the coming war. Bush named Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden as responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. The president explained that Al Qaeda enjoyed sanctuary in Afghanistan through its alliance with the Taliban.

  “We condemn the Taliban regime,” Bush said. “It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.”

  He continued, “Tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: Deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land. . . . Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and hand over every terrorist and every person in their support structure to appropriate authorities. Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating. These demands are not open to negotiations or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They must hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”

  It was highly unlikely that Mullah Mohammad Omar could meet these conditions in a matter of days, even if he wished to do so. Al Qaeda’s brigades in Afghanistan were made up of determined fighters who would be no easy match for Taliban forces.

 
On September 24, Mahmud rode to the American embassy to meet with Chamberlin, Smith, and a visiting Pentagon team that had come to plan for the war. They gathered in a conference room in the chancery basement that had shelves of books about Pakistan. Mahmud spoke forcefully and emotionally.

  “The Taliban are on the side of good and against terrorism,” he declared. “You need the help of the Afghan people while U.S. forces are assembling. I beg you—I implore you—not to fire a shot in anger. It will set us all back many years. Don’t let the blood rush to your head.”

  Mullah Mohammad Omar is frightened, Mahmud continued. “Reasoning with them to get rid of terrorism will be better than the use of brute force,” he said. If the Taliban were destroyed, Afghanistan would revert to rule by warlords, he predicted. “We will not flinch from a military effort,” Mahmud promised. “But a strike will produce thousands of frustrated young Muslim men. It will be an incubator of anger that will explode two or three years from now.”

  He mentioned Sun Tzu’s aphorism about how the supreme art of war involved learning to win without firing a shot. Mahmud added, “Whatever decision you take, Pakistan will stand behind you.”

  “The most important sentence you spoke was the last one,” Chamberlin answered. “The time for negotiating is over.”24

  —

  The best-known I.S.I. operator in the Afghan units of Directorate S was a Special Services Group career officer named Colonel Sultan Amir Tarar, whose nom de guerre was Colonel Imam. He had collaborated closely with C.I.A. officers during the anti-Soviet war. He redirected his services to the Taliban after the Americans quit Afghanistan. Tarar was a tall man who kept a long graying beard and professed a deep religious faith. He was also a raconteur who enjoyed talking about the glory days of killing Soviet forces. He openly admitted that he had worked with Bin Laden during the 1980s. He found the Al Qaeda founder “rather like a prince, very humble.”25

  By 2001, Tarar served as Pakistan’s consul general in Herat, Afghanistan, supporting the Taliban. He left Afghanistan early in October as the American bombing campaign neared. On his way home, Tarar ran into Grenier, the Islamabad station chief. They shared a flight to Islamabad on an I.S.I. plane. Tarar wore a Taliban-style turban of the sort Bin Laden often wore and spoke “excellent and colorful English.” Tarar presented Grenier with a Special Services Group pin as a memento. The C.I.A. station chief found Tarar to be “marvelous company.” He did not hold out any hope that they could work together on Bin Laden, but he was familiar with I.S.I. officers who hated American policy but got on well with American counterparts.26

  Once back in Islamabad, Colonel Imam sought an appointment with the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, an old friend and war comrade of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s. Zaeef received the I.S.I. veteran at the Taliban’s embassy.

  After they exchanged greetings, Imam started to cry. Tears ran down his face and his white beard and he could not speak. When he finally composed himself, he said, “Almighty Allah might have decided what is to take place in Afghanistan, but Pakistan is to blame. How much cruelty it has done to its neighbor! And how much more will come!” The colonel laid the blame on Musharraf. He started to cry again. He said he would never be able to repent for what Musharraf had done by aligning himself with the Americans. He would suffer not only in this world but in the next.27

  This was I.S.I. in microcosm: an institution well practiced at manipulating the C.I.A. and the Taliban simultaneously.

  —

  From the very first days after September 11, the United States adopted an ambiguous policy toward I.S.I. that would haunt its ambitions in South Asia for years to come. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” George W. Bush had declared. It was an emotionally satisfying position, but was it realistic? Bush’s doctrine might be applied easily enough to the Taliban, a ragtag force that eschewed modern technology and had no air defenses or air force of significance. But how should it be applied to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, highly nationalistic country of 150 million? Hadn’t Pakistan “harbored” the Taliban, and didn’t its desperate effort to prevent the movement’s destruction signal that Pakistan’s interests might not be aligned with those of the United States as war in Afghanistan unfolded? Bush’s national security cabinet included experts on Russia, missile defense, military modernization, and the Middle East. It included nobody who knew Afghanistan well, however. Powell and Armitage had worked closely with Pakistan’s military during the 1990–1991 Gulf War to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a war in which Pakistan had participated as an American ally. Powell respected Pakistan’s army and was sympathetic to Musharraf’s pleadings. President Bush, for his part, concluded that by turning on the Taliban, however ambivalently, Musharraf was taking large domestic and political risks on behalf of the United States. He therefore deserved support and understanding.

  There were pragmatic reasons for the Bush administration’s restraint that September and October. The most important purpose of American military action in Afghanistan would be to assault Al Qaeda’s leaders and guerrillas, to disrupt any additional terrorist plots against the United States that the group might have under way. Bin Laden’s strongholds lay mainly in Afghanistan’s south and in its eastern mountains. The seaports and air bases Musharraf offered the United States would make a war in Afghanistan much easier to fight than if the United States relied on more distant India (which had also offered basing support). Al Qaeda was the main enemy, and there would be time later to reconsider I.S.I.’s role in destabilizing the region. A shocked world had rallied to America’s cause against Bin Laden. The war was coming. Don’t let the blood rush to your head, Mahmud Ahmed had advised, self-interestedly. It was too late.

  FOUR

  Risk Management

  Mullah Mohammad Omar spent his boyhood in Afghanistan’s destitute Uruzgan Province, raised by an uncle who was an itinerant religious teacher. (His father died when he was very young and his mother married the father’s brother.) He belonged to the Hotak tribe, a marginalized clan with little purchase on southern Afghanistan’s power or resources. The farthest Omar ever traveled was Pakistan. Apart from Koranic studies, he had no formal education. He possessed a “rural mind,” as one of his more widely traveled Taliban colleagues put it, “cut off, religiously and politically.” After the Soviet invasion, as a teenager, he joined a group of insurgents he knew from Kandahar’s madrassas and preaching networks. They fought in the irrigated desert west of Kandahar city, around Maiwand District. One day on the battlefield, the Russians pushed forward and Omar and his comrade Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef could see them from their trenches. The area was covered with corpses. The Russians lobbed in shells. Shrapnel struck Omar in the face and wounded his right eye.

  That night, the Afghan comrades held “a marvelous party,” in Zaeef’s description, and Omar, his face bandaged, sang a ghazal, or traditional poem:

  My illness is untreatable, oh, my flower-like friend

  My life is difficult without you, my flower-like friend 1

  Omar never regained the use of his eye. After the war he retired to a home without electricity near a mud-walled mosque in Sangesar, close to the battlefield where he had been wounded. He took four wives, raised many children, preached, and studied Islam. As Afghanistan collapsed into civil war after the Soviet withdrawal, criminals, predators, and warlords ruled Kandahar, extorting citizens and truckers at a maze of checkpoints, or kidnapping boys into sexual slavery. Omar’s wartime comrades decided to challenge the abusers. They required a leader; a committee arrived one evening at his home. The members explained to him they had picked him. Zaeef watched as Omar hesitated, seeming to think before saying anything. It was one of his habits. Finally, Omar said that he agreed with what the committee proposed. Something needed to be done.2

  As he created the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with support from the I.S.I. and S
audi Arabia, Omar surrounded himself with religious advisers and military commanders almost uniformly educated in rural Pashtun villages and madrassas. Searching for a purity of life partly drawn from village norms, and following religious instruction to imagine life as it prevailed in the seventh century, during the Prophet’s lifetime, they evolved or invented a public Islam whose specific rules had an otherworldly character. An official Taliban gazette published a week before the September 11 attacks clarified the following list of items formally banned in the Islamic Emirate: “The pig itself; pork; pig fat; objects made of human hair; natural human hair; dish antennas; sets for cinematography and sound recording projectors; sets for microphotography, in case it is used in the cinema; all instruments which themselves produce music, such as the piano, the harmonium, the flute, the tabla, the tanbour, the sarangi; billiard tables and their accessories; chess boards; carom boards; playing cards; masks; any alcoholic beverage; all audio cassettes, video cassettes, computers and television which include sex and music; centipedes; lobsters (a kind of sea animal); nail polish; firecrackers; fireworks (for children); all kinds of cinematographic films, even though they may be sent abroad; all statues of animate beings in general; all sewing catalogues which have photos of animate beings; published tableaus (photos); Christmas cards; greeting cards bearing images of living things; neckties; bows (the thing which strengthens the necktie); necktie pins.”3

  Omar was an unusually tall man. He could be reticent and refused to meet most non-Muslim visitors. He sometimes cited his dreams in explaining his decisions. He saw his earthly life as a fate he did not control fully and he referred continually to God’s will. Bashir Noorzai, an opium smuggler from Mullah Mohammad Omar’s home district who supplied money and arms to the Taliban during the Islamic Emirate, believed that his leader “had one characteristic: He was very stubborn. . . . His attitude was that he knew better than anyone else. Now, power also makes one ‘knowledgeable.’” He was an ardent Islamic rule enforcer yet he was not an ascetic zealot. He listened to Pashto folk songs on cassette tape. Apart from his exceptional height and his commitment to wars of resistance against non-Muslim invaders, Omar had little in common with Osama Bin Laden, who had grown up privileged and exposed to cosmopolitanism in booming Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Omar was a few years younger than Bin Laden. He had not invited the Saudi to Afghanistan. Bin Laden initially entered Afghan territory not controlled by the Taliban in a chartered jet, carrying cash and a following of fighters. Mullah Mohammad Omar received him in Kandahar and gradually forged an alliance. The Taliban needed Al Qaeda’s shock troops against the Northern Alliance. Omar also accepted Bin Laden’s financial largesse to improve Kandahar. Yet there were tensions between them, over Bin Laden’s provocative media interviews and the terrorist attacks Al Qaeda carried out abroad, which brought the Taliban under tightening diplomatic, economic, and travel sanctions.4