by Steve Coll
Rich Blee’s successor as Kabul station chief, who took charge in the summer of 2002, oversaw the construction of a new C.I.A. prison on the ten-acre grounds of a former brick factory north of Kabul, which became known as the “Salt Pit.” It opened in September. The windows “were blacked out and detainees were kept in total darkness,” investigators with access to classified C.I.A. cables from this period reported. “The guards monitored detainees using headlamps and loud music was played constantly. . . . While in their cells, detainees were shackled to the wall and given buckets for human waste.”26
The new station chief’s tour proved to be a disaster, in the estimation of some senior colleagues. He stopped counseling Karzai on the grounds that the interim leader was irrelevant compared with the warlords. He assigned a junior officer on his first assignment overseas to supervise the agency’s prison. That junior officer’s career was off to a troubled start. He “has issues with judgment and maturity [and his] potential behavior in the field is also worrisome,” a supervisor wrote. In November, Bruce Jessen, the former S.E.R.E. psychologist, visited Afghanistan and assisted the inexperienced C.I.A. warden in an interrogation of an Afghan suspected of extremism named Gul Rahman. The prisoner endured two days of “sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment,” according to a C.I.A. cable. Jessen later admitted to slapping Rahman once, to assess his reactions, but denied that he had been involved in more abusive action. He blamed the professional C.I.A. officer and his guards at the prison facility for using unauthorized rough techniques. A few days after Jessen departed, noting that Rahman was being held in “deplorable conditions,” the junior C.I.A. warden, who has never been formally identified, ordered Gul Rahman shackled in a position that left him on a cold concrete floor in only a sweatshirt. The Afghan died overnight, probably of hypothermia.27
After that death, Jose Rodriguez directed the Counterterrorist Center’s renditions group to take charge of the Detention and Interrogation Program. As Senate investigators later pointed out, however, “many of the same individuals within the C.I.A. . . . remained key figures” in the program and “received no reprimand or sanction for Rahman’s death.”28
In Virginia, the targeting analysts at ALEC Station, including several of the analysts whose warnings had been overlooked before September 11, urged the use of harsh techniques on Al Qaeda suspects. They pressed colleagues in cables, attended interrogations in person, and urged harsh measures even when C.I.A. wardens felt it had become inhumane or useless to continue. The analysts at ALEC appear to have exercised an unusual kind of moral influence on the interrogation program at the C.I.A. Having issued warnings before September 11, they now insisted again, with higher credibility, that anyone who opposed their willingness to brutalize Al Qaeda detainees for insight into the next attack could wind up with blood on their hands.29
The effect of harsh interrogations on Afghanistan’s post-Taliban environment received hardly any formal analysis. In fact, by late 2002 and early 2003, the C.I.A.’s senior leaders, including those at the Counterterrorist Center, had stopped paying much attention to Afghanistan at all. That winter, C.I.A. inspector general John Helgerson, a career analyst who regarded the detention and interrogation program as unsound, opened an investigation that would play a significant role in documenting the program’s abuses and setting the stage for its eventual demise. Tenet told Helgerson he was “not very familiar” with what the C.I.A. was doing in Afghanistan or with “medium value” prisoners in general, a category assigned to many Afghan detainees. General Counsel Scott Muller said he had “no idea who is responsible” for the Salt Pit’s detention site. Jose Rodriguez told Helgerson he did not focus on it because he had “other higher priorities.” Yet the Senate’s investigation later found that at least several dozen of the C.I.A. prisoners subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques experienced them in Afghanistan.30
The same harsh C.I.A. interrogation practices could be applied to agency prisoners held at Kandahar and the Omega firebases along the Pakistan border. In early December 2002, immediately after Gul Rahman’s death, George Tenet sent a formal message to all C.I.A. stations and bases: “When C.I.A. officers are involved in interrogation of a detainee, the conduct of such interrogation should not encompass any physiological aspects. For example, direct physical contact, unusual mental duress, unusual physical restraints or deliberate environmental deprivation beyond those reasonably required to ensure the safety and security of our officers and to prevent the escape of the detainee without prior and specific headquarters advice.” Yet even after this order, C.I.A. officers could strip a prisoner naked, keep him in a stress position for seventy-two hours, and douse him with cold water repeatedly without prior approval, if such approval was not “feasible.” In practice, such abuse continued without significant review.
At Asadabad, the C.I.A.’s David Passaro had every reason to believe that his aggression toward Abdul Wali was consistent with agency norms in Kabul. Passaro would have passed through Bagram and seen how detention operated there. In Afghanistan, an atmosphere of impunity and neglect evolved during 2003. That year, Kabul Station acknowledged in a cable to headquarters, “We have made the unsettling discovery that we are holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little.” The majority of these detainees “have not been debriefed for months and, in some cases for over a year.”31
Certainly, Passaro showed no qualms about allowing military guards and an Afghan interpreter to observe him as he pummeled Abdul Wali. Steven Jones, the career officer who supervised Passaro, sanctioned sleep deprivation, at a minimum. On the evening after Abdul Wali was pucked, Jones wrote to his wife, “Our prisoner remains uncooperative, but we didn’t let him sleep last night. We think it will take about four days before he wears down and starts to talk.”32
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After the beating he endured the first night, Abdul Wali gestured to his military guards, urging them to use their shotgun or pistols to kill him. Instead, on Passaro’s instructions, the guards kept the prisoner in the “Iron Cross” position—knees bent halfway, back against the wall, arms out. They instructed Abdul Wali through an interpreter that whenever he was ready to talk about what he really knew about the rocketing of the firebase, he should say “Dave Dave Dave” to summon his interrogator.33
Sergeant Kevin Gatten was on duty on the night of June 20. When he came on shift, he said later, Abdul Wali had “been 24 hours with no sleep, no food, little water, no breaks.” He had “some marks” on him from the beatings and “he was acting delirious, knocking his head up against the wall, talking to his shoes.” He gripped his abdomen, apparently in pain.
After Gatten arrived, Abdul Wali called out, through the interpreter, “Dave Dave Dave.”
“Are you sure you want him to come down?” the guards asked.34
Passaro drove up in a truck a little later, his lights on, in violation of the base’s nighttime security protocols. Gatten was annoyed—it was typical of C.I.A. to disregard discipline the military tried to enforce on their shared base. Passaro climbed out holding a plastic cup of what smelled like bourbon or scotch. (Under General Order No. 1, the U.S. military banned alcohol for American troops in Afghanistan. The C.I.A. allowed booze on forward bases. At Asadabad, the agency kept beer, bourbon, and scotch.) “Hold this,” Passaro said as he gave his drink to one of the sergeants. He gestured for Gatten to follow him into Abdul Wali’s cell.
Passaro resumed his questioning. Who gave you your orders? Where are the weapons caches?
“I don’t know,” Abdul Wali answered repeatedly.35
Whenever he professed ignorance, Passaro turned off his flashlight. Gatten couldn’t see in the blackness but he could hear smacks, “like a body being hit,” and then Abdul Wali “groaning, crying . . . just making painful sounds.”
“Why are you hitting me?” Abdul Wali asked at one point.
“Don�
�t be saying or doing anything,” Passaro answered. “You don’t know if I’m hitting you.” (The prisoner had a bag over his head.) “It could be my guard hitting you. It could be anybody.” This upset Gatten further, since, as he said later, “I wasn’t hitting him.”
The questioning and beating went on for about ninety minutes. Then Passaro walked out.
“Keep him stressed,” he instructed. “Make sure he doesn’t sleep.”36
Gatten returned to duty the next day, June 21. Abdul Wali now “looked like he had just gotten into a fight. . . . His face was covered in bruises. He had bruises on his hands. He was staggering. The guy couldn’t move. [He] just kept talking—not to us, just talking to himself, to the wall, to his shoes.”37
Steven Jones, the C.I.A. base chief, was in the office when one of the men watching Abdul Wali turned up to say that Jones should take a look at the prisoner. Jones found Abdul Wali lying on his side, groaning. “He looked white in color and obviously was in distress,” Jones recalled. The base medics put him on oxygen and intravenous fluids. But Abdul Wali died an hour later.
Major Mark Miller, the base’s Army commander, arrived soon after. He was “very angry,” as Jones put it.38 That afternoon they summoned Governor Akbar and his son Hyder back to the firebase. They sat on the floor of a meeting room.
“Unfortunately, we have some bad news,” Miller began. “Unfortunately, Abdul Wali passed away.”
The governor shook his head. “That’s no good,” he said in English.
Passaro described Abdul Wali’s interrogation. He told the Afghans the prisoner had been fed PowerBars and had not been harmed. However, Passaro continued, the prisoner had sometimes tried to break out of his shackles and hit his head against the wall.39
The Afghans inspected the body. Miller explained that his military superiors wanted to perform an autopsy. The governor insisted this would only compound the crisis because, “to people in Kunar, an autopsy will merely serve as proof that the Americans are torturers.”
After some effort, Governor Akbar persuaded the Americans not to touch Abdul Wali further. The prisoner’s family arrived to receive his corpse. The Americans gave them about $2,000 for their loss.40
TEN
Mr. Big
By 2003, it was evident to many Afghans in Kabul that the Bush administration had turned its attention to Iraq and had handed the day-to-day management of their country’s recovery to their native son, Zalmay Khalilzad, the unlikely Republican operative. In the White House, Khalilzad was seen as an immigrant success story and a regional specialist. In Kabul, he was also understood as the product of his family and ethnic history. His father came from the east of the country, from a tribe of the Gilzai federation, the less aristocratic of the two principal Pashtun tribal groupings. He had only an elementary-school education and worked as a midlevel clerk for the provincial finance department in Mazar-i-Sharif. Zalmay was his eldest son. Around 1965, the family moved to Kabul. In high school, Zalmay entered the American Field Service exchange program, by which Afghan teenagers studied at an American high school for a year while living with a local family. He flew off to New York and rode across America in a bus, struggling to make himself understood with his limited English, marveling at wonders: massive highway bridges, ubiquitous electricity, the prevalence of television. In Modesto he joined the Pera family of Ceres, California, in a region of the Central Valley known for the Gallo family’s winery business.1
Later Khalilzad enrolled at the American University of Beirut, under a U.S. Agency for International Development program designed to educate future leaders. At the University of Chicago, he earned a doctoral degree under Albert Wohlstetter, the influential nuclear war strategist who also mentored Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who would become prominent neoconservatives. During the Reagan administration, Khalilzad worked at the Pentagon on nuclear war planning. After a few years he moved to the State Department to work on the Afghan war as well as Iran and Iraq. By now a committed Republican, Khalilzad spent the Clinton years in academia, business consulting, and think tanks.
In December 2000, after the United States Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney appointed him head of the transition team at the Pentagon. But Khalilzad and Donald Rumsfeld didn’t get along. Condoleezza Rice found a refuge for him at the National Security Council. After September 11, Khalilzad joined the Bonn negotiations that created the Karzai government as part of a broader plan of elections and the rewriting of the Afghan constitution. During 2002, he flew in and out of Kabul as a White House special envoy, to the chagrin of Ambassador Robert Finn, the Turkish linguist, who could not hope to compete with Khalilzad’s influence among Afghan politicians or with his White House connections. Yet initially, Khalilzad’s influence on post-Taliban Afghanistan was constrained. His N.S.C. portfolio also included Iraq and Iran, which distracted him. The key issues in American policy toward Afghanistan—troop levels, reconstruction, outreach to possible Taliban defectors, burden sharing with European allies—appeared to be settled by Rumsfeld’s forceful advocacy of minimalism. Rumsfeld continued to believe that “we did not go there to try to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan.” Such a goal “would have amounted to a fool’s errand.” His skepticism won Bush’s endorsement. Their convictions explained the parsimonious budgets and authorities Finn and David Sedney struggled with at the dusty, paraffin-fueled U.S. embassy in Kabul during 2002.2
By 2003, the political consequences of minimalism looked more and more disturbing. As Afghans wrote a new constitution that would bring presidential elections at the end of the following year, Hamid Karzai remained weak, certainly in comparison with Fahim, Dostum, Sherzai, Ismail Khan, and other strongmen backed by the C.I.A. during the Taliban’s overthrow. Karzai was only an interim leader at the Arg Palace—the “chairman” of a provisional administration—sharing rooms and influence with Zahir Shah upstairs, receiving ministers more powerful than he was. As minister of defense, Fahim controlled the Northern Alliance’s well-armed militias, including the incipient Afghan National Army. It wasn’t at all clear that Fahim or other generals would follow Karzai’s orders if he issued them. Dostum, Sherzai, and Ismail Khan operated their own regional militias and maintained independent liaisons with the C.I.A. President Bush favored Karzai’s continuation in office. Yet how could Karzai run for and mobilize votes for the presidency from such a position?
In late April 2003, Rumsfeld flew into the capital and met Karzai on a Sunday in his office at the Arg Palace. Karzai said he needed U.S. bombers and Special Forces to force the strongmen around him to disarm their militias before any election. “Just hit them, and they’ll all fall into line” was the essence of Karzai’s message.
Rumsfeld said he was not about to do that, but he did promise to think about the dilemmas Karzai outlined.
When he returned to the Pentagon, Rumsfeld initiated a new planning exercise about Afghanistan. Around the same time, Bush asked to see Zalmay Khalilzad at the White House. Khalilzad had just lost a power struggle within the administration over how to manage Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. Khalilzad favored turning authority over to Iraqi politicians, on an interim basis, as they wrote a new constitution, as had been done in Afghanistan. Bush decided instead to impose an American occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority, a decision that left Khalilzad “sad and angry.” As a salve, Bush now asked him to become the next U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Khalilzad hesitated but soon agreed.
The Pentagon’s new planning offered Khalilzad a means to develop a more ambitious U.S. policy for Afghanistan, one that might commit to strengthening Afghan institutions. The scale of the Coalition Provisional Authority and related reconstruction projects planned for Iraq in 2003—in the tens of billions of dollars—belied all previous declarations by Rumsfeld and Bush that they eschewed nation building. Surely there could now be spared a billion or two more for Afghanistan,
from which the September 11 attacks had actually originated. Afghanistan was also a vastly more impoverished country than lower-middle-income Iraq. Despite returning refugees, a relative peace, and some reconstruction work, Afghanistan remained among the three or four poorest countries in the world in 2003, alongside Somalia and Chad.
With help from Rumsfeld’s policy staff, Khalilzad built out a classified thirty-slide PowerPoint deck titled “Accelerating Success.” He sold the plan to the White House and the Pentagon during May and June. It was the administration’s first formal program to invest purposefully in the Afghan state. The draft proposed speeding the buildup of the Afghan National Army; breaking Fahim’s grip on the Ministry of Defense, to broaden the army’s ethnic and geographical base; and reforming the National Directorate of Security, to diversify its ethnic makeup and make it more professional.
The plan also contemplated the use of American arms to challenge Karzai’s warlord rivals. Since the Taliban’s fall, Rumsfeld had refused to allow American forces to fight for Karzai or any other Afghan leader in “green-on-green,” or intramural, conflicts. Now he relented, if tentatively. Khalilzad assured him and the cabinet that the warlords could be brought into peaceful politics primarily through pressure and negotiations, with only occasional shows of American force.