by Steve Coll
After conducting close surveillance and building a case file, Prado’s team would develop options for taking the targeted individuals off the street. One option would be to turn the file over to local police, if it seemed likely they would make an arrest. Another option might be nonlethal C.I.A. dirty tricks, such as planting bomb-making material in a target’s trunk and then tipping off the local police anonymously. Prado also recommended that they develop the capacity to assassinate the target. Black approved Prado’s plan, withholding final judgment about what to do if a target was fully documented and involved in violence. That fall, Prado and Jose Rodriguez, an old colleague from the Latin America division, who had recently joined C.T.C. as “chief operating officer,” briefed the concept in the White House Situation Room. Rodriguez had no prior experience with Al Qaeda but he was a well-known figure in the Senior Intelligence Service, a hard-liner willing to back risky operations. The C.I.A. officers flashed photos of two potential targets, Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian in Germany who the C.I.A. believed was culpable for planning September 11, and Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Vice President Cheney approved the program, which Prado would lead until 2004. (It took some effort for Prado to persuade Black to let him back on the streets; he was now in the Senior Intelligence Service, the equivalent of ambassador or general. He had started as a GS-7, at a pay scale comparable to a truck driver’s.) Most of the targets Prado’s unit watched and documented were suspected Al Qaeda types, but C.T.C.’s Hezbollah unit also nominated a few candidates for investigation. In the end, the C.I.A.’s leadership declined to order any targets killed, but what other actions might have been taken remains unclear. This was a need-to-know campaign. Only the more seasoned among them reflected at the time that immunity from public scrutiny would not last long.31
George W. Bush “knew the war would bring death and sorrow,” but he took comfort from his conviction that “we were acting out of necessity and self-defense, not revenge.” On the front lines, inevitably, there was blood in the mouth. C.I.A. officers had not fought on such a violent battlefield as Afghanistan’s since the 1980s. The agency had not planned assassinations since the early 1970s. Hank Crumpton, the agency’s war commander, worked from day to day that fall “in a barely bounded rage.” He felt “a burning need for retribution rooted in a sense of shameful violation.”32
FIVE
Catastrophic Success
Pervez Musharraf forced I.S.I. director-general Mahmud Ahmed to retire about two hours before the American war began. He did not explain his decision. As to the way ahead, Musharraf told the Americans what they wanted to hear: He was going to “clean up” I.S.I. He appointed Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq as his new spy chief. Haq was a clean-shaven Pashtun air defense officer in the Musharraf mold—a professional soldier and nationalist who gave off a rogue’s air. He stood about five feet eight inches tall and wore dapper Western suits. His baritone voice carried British inflections. He had previously served as director-general of military intelligence and most recently as commander of the XI Corps, headquartered in Peshawar. In meetings with American counterparts that autumn, Haq denounced India and pleaded that Pakistan had little influence over the Taliban. As to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, he emphasized, “It’s in Pakistan’s interest to resolve the present situation quickly.”1
The Bush administration had demanded that Pakistan prevent its citizens from traveling to Afghanistan to fight against the United States, but it was clear by mid-October that more than ten thousand Pakistanis had gone across anyway. Ehsan ul-Haq denied in meetings with Dave Smith that anything like “thousands” of Pakistanis had joined the war. He made it clear that Pakistan would turn over all Arabs and other foreign radicals to the United States, but that it would absolutely not cooperate in the capture of Pakistani citizens. There were “maybe hundreds” of Pakistani volunteers fighting with the Taliban in any event, Haq estimated. Smith noted in silence that the I.S.I. chief was off by a few decimal points.2
Dave Smith continued to ride to I.S.I. headquarters as often as the service would have him. One of his objectives was to probe what Musharraf meant about his supposed reform campaign inside I.S.I. The Americans wanted Haq and Musharraf to come clean about the presence of its officers and agents on the battlefield in Afghanistan, so the Pentagon could understand more precisely what it was up against. How many Pakistani officers were there embedded with the Taliban? What was the Taliban order of battle?
Engineer Arif and Amrullah Saleh of the Northern Alliance’s intelligence wing reported that hundreds of disguised Pakistani military officers had maneuvered and fought with Taliban and Al Qaeda units before September 11. European and United Nations intelligence officers working out of Kabul never found evidence of that scale of direct Pakistani participation. They typically encountered two to four I.S.I. advisers in plain dress when they met Taliban units. The Europeans estimated that I.S.I. advisers inside Afghanistan numbered about one hundred. Mahmud Ahmed insisted that I.S.I. never had so many officers inside Afghanistan.3
That autumn, Javed Alam, the two-star general in charge of I.S.I.’s Directorate of Analysis, told Smith that there had only ever been nine I.S.I. officers working inside Afghanistan. These officers had withdrawn, he added. Smith did not believe the number had been so low, but there was no way to document a precise figure. Neither American nor Afghan forces captured Pakistan Army officers on the battlefield that fall, at least none they could identify as such.
To avoid additional scrutiny, Smith later learned, I.S.I. moved its covert action cell supporting the Taliban out of the service’s Islamabad headquarters to an army camp at Ojhri, near Rawalpindi. From the evidence available it seems most likely that I.S.I. did pull back many of its officers from Afghanistan during the American bombardment but kept its support for the Taliban viable. There were ample munitions depots inside Afghanistan for all combatants, the legacy of more than two decades of covert and overt war.
Javed Alam told Smith that most of the Pakistani volunteers who had swarmed into Afghanistan to fight against America had traveled from Southern Punjab, an area of the Pakistani heartland that was home to growing numbers of radical Islamists. “Most of them died,” he said, without evident remorse. “They got their just deserts.”
Alam and his analysts presented scenario forecasts of where the American invasion might leave Afghanistan. If the United States toppled the Taliban and departed quickly, it would leave chaos, as during the early 1990s, Alam predicted. Alternatively, the Bush administration could enable “de facto partition” of Afghanistan between north and south. In that case, a follow-on American military presence “would have to be sizeable, two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers,” and would need to transition “from peacekeeping to peace enforcement.” As it turned out, in the longer run, the general was not far off, not least because of I.S.I.’s continuing support for the Taliban.4
In early November, Pakistan mounted one last diplomatic effort to rescue the Taliban from destruction, this time with assistance from Saudi Arabia. Ehsan ul-Haq flew secretly to Washington with Prince Saud al Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister. They carried a four-page letter from Musharraf to President Bush that proposed another effort to resolve the Afghan conflict through negotiations with Taliban leaders willing to cooperate against Al Qaeda.
British prime minister Tony Blair encouraged their initiative, according to Pakistani officials involved, and volunteered to raise Musharraf’s concerns privately with Bush. Blair arrived in Washington on November 7. But when Haq and his Saudi escorts landed soon after, Blair relayed bad news: There was no hope for negotiation, so far as the Bush administration was concerned. The war would go on until the Taliban surrendered unconditionally or were annihilated.5
—
C.I.A. frontline officers divided into factions on the I.S.I. question that fall. Some sympathized with Pakistan’s position, recognizing that the country had legitima
te interests in Afghanistan’s future. Others regarded I.S.I.’s maneuvering as unacceptable. This played out primarily as a fierce conflict between senior officers at the Counterterrorist Center working with the Northern Alliance and Bob Grenier, station chief in Pakistan. Grenier lamented “the aggressive philistinism of C.T.C.” The conflict had a personal edge—the men involved were Senior Intelligence Service peers, and they felt free to write and speak sharply to and about one another. They belonged to a generation of clandestine service officers who had grown up in a C.I.A. little constrained by human resources department norms about collegiality or inclusivity. Yet at the heart of their conflict was a genuine dilemma of war strategy. Should the Bush administration encourage the Panjshiri vanguard of the Northern Alliance to seize Kabul, or should it defer to Pakistan’s position that it was necessary to delay Kabul’s fall so that a more Pashtun-influenced post-Taliban political settlement in Afghanistan could be fashioned, one more aligned with Pakistan’s goals?6
Grenier “felt strongly that a seizure of Kabul by the Tajiks and Uzbeks would make an eventual political settlement with the Pashtuns far more difficult.” This was Musharraf’s position and that of I.S.I. Colin Powell held the same outlook. Richard Armitage and George Tenet were also sympathetic to Grenier’s analysis. Tenet thought it was not an either-or question: Let all the options play out. His logic was: The enemy is Al Qaeda; we need Pakistan’s army and I.S.I. to dismantle Al Qaeda; and Pakistan’s stability and interests are at least as important to the United States as Afghanistan’s recovery from Taliban rule. Tenet had met regularly with I.S.I. before September 11 and seemed never to have encountered an intelligence liaison relationship he didn’t value. For the C.I.A., keeping I.S.I. on side offered the opportunity to recruit agents from the service’s ranks who might be well informed about Al Qaeda and allied militants. The Counterterrorist Center assumed that if anyone was likely to have a line on the whereabouts of Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and other targeted leaders, it would be officers inside I.S.I.’s Directorate S. They had to stay close to the service in order to identify, assess, and recruit I.S.I. informers.7
More broadly, this line of thinking went, Pakistan might be an imperfect ally, but it had more than five times Afghanistan’s population, nuclear weapons, Middle Eastern networks, and a history of alliance with the United States. Because the objective of the war was to destroy Al Qaeda, not to manage post-Taliban Afghan politics as a neo-imperial power, surely the United States could afford to take account of Pakistan’s interests.
This outlook did require credulity about I.S.I.’s potential as a good-enough partner in postwar Afghanistan, notwithstanding the service’s long record as an incubator and enabler of extremism. In one top secret cable, Grenier wrote, as a C.I.A. colleague later summarized his argument, the “new, more moderate leadership” at I.S.I. under Ehsan ul-Haq was now motivated to “cooperate fully with the C.I.A. in the war on terrorism.” Moreover, I.S.I. had “years of experience in dealing with the Afghan situation and were already working hard to build a broad ethnic ‘Afghan Government in Exile’ in Peshawar.” The Bush administration “should work closely with the Pakistanis on that effort, concentrate on the south, and go slowly with our bombing.” Grenier recommended: “This should be primarily a political struggle rather than a military one.” Grenier was worried that if the United States came in wholeheartedly on the side of the Northern Alliance that that would only cause Pashtuns to coalesce around the Taliban. He also feared the Northern Alliance militias would carry out a bloodbath in Kabul, which would have the same effect. They were having enough trouble generating a Pashtun uprising against the Taliban and Al Qaeda as it was.8
Grenier knew he had crawled out on a limb by making these arguments—his views put him firmly at odds with the newly powerful Counterterrorist Center. Hank Crumpton and other C.T.C. officers dismissed him as “Taliban Bob.” Grenier had “taken the side of” I.S.I., but Crumpton and his colleagues “knew that I.S.I. was not the answer.” Grenier was “suffering from a case of clientitis,” meaning that he had lost his ability to separate his own thinking from that of his partners in the Pakistan Army. Yet Grenier’s position remained influential throughout October. Tenet initially overruled C.T.C.’s objections in order “to give the Pakistanis some time to address the southern question,” meaning the establishment of a Pashtun-influenced force that could emerge as an alternative to the Taliban. Tenet and his chief of staff, John Brennan, were impressed by the sophistication of Grenier’s arguments; while pursuing a policy of “all options” they thought his case deserved some time.9
Forward in the Panjshir Valley, Gary Schroen, who had served three tours in Islamabad since the late 1970s, argued the Northern Alliance cause. The key to victory was in the north, he believed, yet Grenier “was loudly beating what I thought of as the Pakistani drum song.” Grenier was sitting in a comfortable office in Islamabad (which Schroen had previously occupied), with all the technology needed to send in articulate cables to the Bush cabinet, while Schroen was working in primitive conditions with an old computer that took floppy disks; he was struggling to get his points across. Grenier’s position was “a blueprint for failure and political confusion,” Schroen concluded. “This push to allow the Pakistanis back into the Afghan game was disturbing and a real mistake. They had their own specific agenda for the country and it did not track with anything the U.S. government would want to see emerge there in the post-Taliban period.”
Massoud’s intelligence aides and generals knew about the debate within the C.I.A. and the Bush cabinet and pushed Schroen to resolve it in their favor. They would pursue their own war aims, regardless of where the Americans came down. Schroen and Chris Wood fumed as the weeks passed and Grenier’s arguments seemed to influence Central Command’s targeting decisions. The U.S. Air Force bombed and provided close air support for Northern Alliance commanders who sought to seize the northern cities Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz. The fall of those cities to the Northern Alliance presented no political complications, as the majority of the local population was non-Pashtun. Yet the bombing of Taliban positions defending Kabul seemed tepid by comparison. The first night of the air war, it was raining around Kabul. In the Panjshir, Schroen and his colleagues sat on a balcony and watched lights flash in the distance. There were only a few. They blamed the weather, but soon discovered that in fact it was a policy edict from Washington. The Bush administration did not actually wish to break the Taliban and Al Qaeda lines blocking the Northern Alliance from taking Kabul. “This is all the U.S. Air Force can do?” Massoud’s lieutenants asked their C.I.A. liaisons. “We’ll have to be here forever.”10
—
The Taliban imposed a night curfew inside Kabul but otherwise tried to keep up appearances. Taliban bureaucrats went to work at their ministries as usual. Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press, who had been traveling in and out of Afghanistan for almost two decades, arrived in the capital late in October and found residents paying their electricity bills at the telecommunications ministry even though the ministry itself had no power. Food supplies dwindled. Mullah Mohammad Omar remained in hiding around Kandahar, but his lieutenants to the north, inside Kabul, could see by the second week of November that if they held out too long they might become trapped. If that happened, they could be slaughtered and imprisoned in large numbers.
Just after nightfall on November 12, in Wazir Akbar Khan, a dozen or so Taliban leaders gathered to discuss a strategic retreat. They decided by consensus to withdraw right away to Wardak Province and to move from there toward Kandahar. Convoys of vehicles roared through the night, evacuating to the south and east, into the Pashtun heartland. Amrullah Saleh and Engineer Arif picked up the Taliban’s radio traffic. They knew that a withdrawal had started. Yet the Panjshiris remained under pressure from the United States to hold back.
On November 13, when the Taliban appeared to have evacuated almost completely from Kabul, C.I.A. headqua
rters instructed an officer in Panjshir to meet with the Northern Alliance. The officer announced, “There is still concern back in Washington that there will be a wave of revenge killings by your forces if they move into Kabul.” He cautioned, “The Pakistanis continue to complain to Washington about what will happen if the Northern Alliance takes Kabul.”
The alliance’s commanders assured the C.I.A. that there would be no brutality. They added that they were “going to Kabul no matter what your N.S.C. decides.”11
The C.I.A. went with them—three officers packed into a sport utility vehicle carrying satellite phones and semiautomatic rifles. On November 14, around 6:00 p.m., they rolled past the shuttered American embassy building, abandoned since early 1989. They soon reached the Ariana Hotel, in the heart of downtown, which Engineer Arif had agreed the C.I.A. could rent as a base of operations. That night, Kabul Station informally reopened after a hiatus of just under thirteen years. The Panjshiris controlled Afghanistan’s capital. Musharraf and I.S.I. had failed to stop them.
—
Back in the 1980s, during the anti-Soviet war, Hamid Karzai was a university student and organizer, the privileged scion of an influential family in Kandahar of the Popalzai tribe. His father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, had sat in the Afghan parliament before the Communist takeover. Hamid studied politics at Himachal Pradesh University in India before moving to Peshawar, in 1983, to work as an aide to Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, one of the Afghan resistance’s more moderate but less influential leaders. Karzai served as a foreign policy adviser, humanitarian aid organizer, and press contact. He was known as a snappy dresser and a well-liked participant in Peshawar’s expatriate social scene, which was enlivened by Australian aid workers, Scandinavian nurses, British spies, I.S.I. watchers, unreliable journalists, and mysterious drifters, all of them energized by a liberation war and the smoky atmospherics of a Cold War Casablanca.