by Steve Coll
At C.I.A. headquarters early that winter, the C.I.A.’s longtime South Asia hand Gary Schroen sat at a desk with a legal pad and a calculator and drew up an outline for funding the Afghan service, which he hoped to work through with Engineer Arif. He modeled the prospective service on the SAVAK, the shah’s intelligence service before the Iranian Revolution, which Schroen had studied. In February, Schroen flew to Kabul. He was dismayed to learn that Arif wanted to move temporarily with his family to Washington, D.C., to seek medical attention. Arif had developed a sciatic nerve problem. He said his wife also needed counseling to work through the lingering effects of her traumatic experiences during the Soviet war. (His wife’s father had been killed by the Soviets; as a teenager, she had then taken a position on the household staff of a Russian officer, shot him in revenge and fled, according to what Arif told the C.I.A.) Schroen agreed to support Arif; after all, the Panjshiris had gone to great lengths to accommodate the C.I.A. at the agency’s hour of need in the autumn of 2001.
Arif and his family moved into a safe house in the Washington area. Schroen arranged medical appointments. Weeks passed and still Arif was in no hurry to return to Kabul. He was trying to run Afghan intelligence with a fax machine from his C.I.A. guesthouse. One rumor was that Arif might be reluctant to return because he had fallen under suspicion among some Panjshiris because of Massoud’s assassination. Arif had cleared the Al Qaeda assassins for their “interview” with the commander, and then he had left the room before the suicide bombing took place. In fact, there was no sound basis for the suspicion, but as Arif put it, Massoud’s death “had a negative psychological effect on the people and the leadership of the United Front.” For his part, Schroen could understand why such suspicions might arise but he could not see why Arif would have any motive to collaborate in Massoud’s death. Arif had been loyal to Massoud for years. In any event, whatever his reasons for remaining in the United States, after two months, Arif at last returned to Kabul. The suspicions about him subsided. “Everyone knew Arif was not a killer,” as one of his Panjshiri colleagues put it.15
The larger question was what sort of intelligence and security service the C.I.A. would build in Afghanistan. N.D.S. had roots tracing to the nineteenth century. As the Afghan state grew more centralized, Kabul’s kings built intelligence networks in villages and provincial capitals to ensure that the palace had early warning about political threats. These networks reported to a security bureau in the palace. The Soviet occupation converted this into K.H.A.D., a monstrosity constructed in the K.G.B.’s image and a feared instrument of political and social control. K.H.A.D. had 150,000 or more Afghans on its payroll at its peak, including paramilitaries. It had provincial offices and numbered directorates. The directorate names changed from time to time, but at the height of the Soviet era, Directorate 1 ran external operations, Directorate 5 was in charge of counterterrorism, Directorate 6 ran counterintelligence, and Directorate 7 was in charge of monitoring universities, madrassas, and political elites for their loyalty to the state.
When Engineer Arif ran N.D.S. in the early 1990s, he kept on some K.H.A.D. veterans. When the Taliban took power, they renamed the service and brought in former Communists from a different faction. This was the C.I.A.’s inheritance: a workforce of opaque subgroups that had operated torture chambers and prisons, intimidated citizens across the land, and owed its professional culture mainly to the K.G.B.16
The budget Engineer Arif worked with initially was about $15 million annually, and although this could support hundreds of intelligence officers and even more support staff, it was far short of what would be required to attempt to create a national police force or an F.B.I. equivalent for Afghanistan. In any event, that lay well beyond the ambitions of Bush administration policy that winter. The C.I.A.’s mission was Al Qaeda.17
Langley’s hesitancy to fund N.D.S. aggressively only grew as C.I.A. officers noticed that the funds they did provide did not seem to be producing the kinds of results they would have expected, while Arif seemed to be living beyond the means of a civil servant. Arif said that any accusation of personal corruption was “unfair,” but if the concern was organizational corruption within N.D.S., “there were some problems because of the war situation and [the] lack of control over N.D.S. personnel outside Kabul.” Eventually, Arif would occupy an expansive compound in the Panjshir, a Kabul home, and a high-rise apartment in the United Arab Emirates.18
It was simpler for the C.I.A. to work directly with the individuals they knew and trusted best—Amrullah Saleh, Asadullah Khalid, and Hamid Karzai. Arif also accommodated the agency at first. Among his assignments, Saleh ran counterintelligence at N.D.S. as well as liaisons with foreign spy services. Arif named Khalid the head of Directorate 5, in charge of counterterrorism. “We wanted to rescue Afghanistan from the darkness, to take this country that had been imprisoned and free it, place it inside the normal international community,” an Afghan official involved recalled. “But we did not control this change: It was controlled by the United States.”19
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Operation Anaconda, commanded by Major General Hagenbeck, opened on March 2. It would be the largest U.S. military operation since the Gulf War of early 1991, as well as the highest-altitude battle ever fought by a sizable U.S. force. In Not a Good Day to Die, the journalist Sean Naylor provides an independent-minded, well-sourced account of the operation. Special Forces, C.I.A. officers, and an Afghan militia loyal to Zia Lodin attempted the main attack across the valley floor but withdrew after an American Spectre gunship mistakenly shot up Lodin’s men. Bombing and intrepid fighting at close quarters by American and allied forces killed dozens and perhaps hundreds of Al Qaeda holed up on high ridges. (Greg Vogle fought with Afghan militiamen and later received the C.I.A.’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor for battlefield valor, after he rallied Afghans who had been left behind back into the fight.) But Anaconda witnessed failures of planning and execution, the product of the fractured lines of command.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had imposed a hard cap on the number of American soldiers allowed on the ground in Afghanistan. The total deployment would average 5,200 through the summer of 2002.20 The great majority of those forces were immobile at the bases at Bagram and Kandahar. Even the roving target-hunting special operators were stretched thin, given the vast length of the Afghan-Pakistan border and the size of the remnant Al Qaeda force thought to have moved there. Britain, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Poland, New Zealand, Canada, and other allies had sent Special Forces units to Afghanistan, but organizing them to fight Al Qaeda required a unified command that did not exist. There were two Special Forces task forces—one headquartered in Uzbekistan, a second in Kandahar—that operated independently. Hagenbeck putatively commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan—yet he did not control the special operators. And the general did not have his full headquarters or division with him. The command design was a prescription for error.
The Tenth Mountain Division had originally been deployed to provide security at a transit base in Uzbekistan; its units were “not properly trained, manned or equipped” for the battle they were ordered to fight, a Naval War College assessment later found. The absence of a “fully functioning intelligence cell” made errors “inevitable.”21 According to Hagenbeck, there were several important intelligence failures. They expected Al Qaeda forces to retreat under fire, as they had at Tora Bora; instead, they fought to the death and summoned reinforcements. There were about three hundred more Al Qaeda volunteers in the valley than anticipated. There were four times as many caves as forecast, meaning the enemy had ample places to shelter. Central Command prohibited American forces from using artillery in Afghanistan at this time, for fear of civilian casualties that would evoke memories of brutal Soviet tactics. That meant close air support would be essential to protect soldiers if they were ambushed or encountered heavier Al Qaeda forces than expected. Yet the commander of the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia
, whose planes would provide that close air support, did not even learn of Operation Anaconda until five days before the scheduled launch. The blocking forces attempting to squeeze the enemy encountered much heavier Al Qaeda resistance on the ridges than had been expected. In the end U.S. forces suffered eight dead and about eighty wounded in four days of heavy fighting. That was a light toll compared with many past American battles. But it was more than half the number of dead suffered in all of Operation Enduring Freedom the previous fall. One death was especially shocking: Neil Roberts, a Navy SEAL, fell out of a helicopter as it attempted to land under fire. Roberts lay abandoned on the snow as Al Qaeda surrounded him. He fired back but was either captured and executed or killed in the firefight.
It remains difficult to assess Operation Anaconda’s outcome because of uncertainty about how many Al Qaeda fighters were in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, how many were killed, and how many escaped to Pakistan. American generals estimated the number of Al Qaeda dead to be “as high as 800 publicly and over a thousand in private,” Naylor reported. “However, they offered no evidence to back up their claims.” Soldiers found only a small number of enemy corpses in the valley after the battle. “Some of this can be explained by good guerrilla tactics—no irregular army leaves its dead in the field of battle if it can help it,” Naylor assessed. “But it is hard to imagine 600 or 700 bodies being spirited out of the Shah-i-Kot without anyone noticing.” Naylor concluded that the best estimate was in the range of 150 to 300 Al Qaeda killed. That would imply that “at least as many” foreign fighters escaped to Pakistan. Hagenbeck insisted that a higher estimate was correct, that bombing obliterated many Al Qaeda dead.22 What is certain is that a substantial influx of hard-core Uzbek fighters migrated to South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, during this period. There they would embed in a sanctuary at least as formidable as Taliban-ruled Afghanistan had ever been. And they would add to the infusion of hard-core guerrillas flushed by American forces into Pakistan, for its army and I.S.I. to manage.
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David Sedney flew into Kabul on a United Nations flight from Islamabad on March 8, as Operation Anaconda concluded. He was a former truck driver and factory worker who graduated from Princeton University, earned a law degree, and became a career State Department diplomat, now in his fifties, who had served in Central Asia and had volunteered for Afghanistan after September 11. He had been selected to serve as the Kabul embassy’s number two, under Robert Finn, a scholar of Turkish literature, who would arrive to become ambassador later that month. The U.S. embassy compound, shuttered in early 1989, looked after by an Afghan gardener and a few watchmen, offered a time capsule of the late Cold War. It was situated on the edge of Wazir Akbar Khan, the wealthy neighborhood in north Kabul named for a nineteenth-century king. Dusty Volkswagens left in the embassy garage still had gas in the tanks and, in a testament to German engineering, started up and ran. Packets of old spaghetti and canned vegetables remained on the commissary shelves, welcome cuisine for expatriates sickened by local bacteria. During the civil war of the 1990s, the State Department had helped its Afghan watchmen build a concrete bunker to live in, fifteen feet underground, with six rooms and a bathroom. Sedney was now assigned a bed in that bunker. The chancery building was designed for about twenty-five people to work in but now accommodated about four hundred, including a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit guard force—not the typical, specialized Marine embassy guards, but a field combat unit. Diplomats slept on cots set up around the walls of the main conference room and held meetings there by day.23
They visited Karzai and his ministers frequently at the nearby Arg Palace. The palace had been constructed in the early twentieth century. The compound contained several buildings, lawns, courtyards, and tiled pools. Karzai lived in a residence to one side that was stuffed with heavy furniture and velvet curtains. He worked in the main palace. Beyond the front door a carved staircase ascended to a large reception room. The Taliban had defaced the staircase by whittling away decorative images of fish and horses.
The big room at the top of the stairs was swathed in marble. The palace had been the scene of bloody assassinations during the Communist period. Karzai and his aides remarked regularly on its ghosts. Karzai held formal meetings in the office earlier used by kings and presidents. He also maintained a more informal reception room. There was a fireplace, a desk, and bookshelves. The furniture was necessarily improvised. There were two chairs at one side so that Karzai could sit to the left of a principal guest and talk. A small sofa and other chairs allowed ministers to crowd in. There they sat day after day discussing how to rebuild the country.
The Bush administration’s initial plans for reconstruction in Afghanistan were designed to avoid burdensome American leadership. The assumption was that the United Nations would carry out what humanitarian and state-building projects international governments chose to fund. In January, the administration agreed to a plan under which the United States would train a new Afghan National Army, Germany would build up the police, Italy would rebuild a justice system, and Great Britain would work on counternarcotics. “None of these countries had the capacity, designated budget funds, or political commitment to do that work,” David Sedney discovered upon arrival.24
In February 2002, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget proposed to allocate only $151 million for all assistance to Afghanistan for the fiscal year beginning the following October, including only $1 million for training the new Afghan National Army—“laughable,” as Dov Zakheim, a Bush appointee then at the Pentagon, put it. President Bush told a private meeting of House Republicans, “We are not fielding a nation-building military. We are a fighting military. We need to define the mission clearly.” The administration had spent $4.5 billion on the 2001 war in Afghanistan, including $390 million just to replace a bomber, a tanker, two helicopters, and two unmanned aerial vehicles that crashed during operations. Yet the administration would not propose to spend even 10 percent of the war’s cost on Afghanistan’s recovery or to secure the peace with new Afghan forces. “You get what you pay for,” Robert Finn observed later, “and we paid for war.”25
In the upper-middle levels of the State Department and the Pentagon, there were some who had lived through the C.I.A.’s covert action program against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and the abandonment of Afghanistan to civil war in the 1990s. They regretted America’s inconstancy. David Champagne, an Army analyst who had served in Afghanistan for the Peace Corps, and Barnett Rubin, a political scientist who specialized in the region, briefed Bush administration officials soon after the Taliban’s fall. They emphasized the need to invest in reconstruction. When National Security Council staff objected, Champagne replied, “We did this to the Afghan people.” He surveyed the meeting participants, locking eyes with several of them. “Nearly everyone here was involved. . . . We have a responsibility to assure that this never happens again.”
“This is not serious,” the State Department official coordinating Afghan aid wrote in an e-mail to colleagues when he saw the proposed budget figure that winter. Only State Department protests and congressional intervention forced the Bush administration to increase the reconstruction and humanitarian aid budget in 2002, to just under $1 billion. It was still probably about $500 million short of what was required initially, in the separate estimations of Zakheim and Finn. The tight-fistedness “reflected not only the administration’s preoccupation with Iraq but its seeming loss of interest in following through on support for the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” Zakheim concluded. “The Administration squandered an opportunity to manage a post-conflict environment properly.”26
That left Sedney and Finn, working long hours in their U.S. embassy squat in Kabul, to pursue “what in retrospect were pathetic attempts to help the Afghans set up a government,” as Sedney put it. “There was no human capacity. There was no physical infrastructure. . . . We would have these media ce
remonies to give a grant of thirty-five thousand dollars to new ministers to help start up their ministries, in which there was no paper, nothing. It makes me angry to think about it—thirty-five thousand dollars!”
Ministers appointed to the interim government worked and lived at the Hotel Intercontinental, a relic of the relative prosperity of the 1960s that commanded a view from a bluff in Karte Parwan. It had no telephones, no running water, no electricity, and no heat. Yet among the Afghans arriving from exile that winter “there was optimism that the U.S. could eliminate the Taliban once and for all and protect our country from Pakistan,” as Sharif Fayez, one of the new cabinet members, put it. “There was incredible faith in their power to bring peace.”
At Kabul University, the library’s collection of 175,000 books, 3,500 manuscripts, and 2,500 rare books was gone, except for some books in Russian. There were no roofs, windowpanes, or pipes; the materials had been stripped out and sold in Pakistan in desperation. A few treasures had been hidden away from the Taliban and the looters. At the Arg Palace, staff discovered some 21,000 objects of Bactrian gold, dating to the time of Christ, stored in a hidden vault, safely protected from the Soviet-era war and the Taliban. Surviving family members of old royal retainers turned up from time to time with silver or gold decorative objects that had been hidden away in private homes.27
Hanging over the whole threadbare enterprise was the fear that the interim government’s vice chairman and minister of defense, Fahim Khan, might be planning to murder its chairman, Hamid Karzai. Fahim had consolidated power within the Northern Alliance in the months since Massoud’s death and he now commanded the most guns. He had no obvious incentive to assassinate Karzai but there was loose talk around Kabul that he might nonetheless order a hit, to claim Kabul for the Panjshiris he led.