by Steve Coll
Khalilzad then joined Karzai at the Arg Palace. Dostum had called Karzai to rant. Khalilzad listened as Dostum said, “We all thought Khalilzad was good, but he is the worst.” Khalilzad called him again. “You will cross a bridge from which there is no return,” Khalilzad said. Dostum slurred his words and seemed to be drunk. “It will be worse than Vietnam! It will be worse than Iraq!” he raged. Barno ordered a B-1 bomber to fly over Dostum’s house and break the sound barrier. After a few more threats, Dostum relented.17
The next target was Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat. After the C.I.A. had helped to return him to power in the province, Khan had seized control of customs revenue from Afghanistan’s border with Iran, restored a picaresque mini-emirate of marching bands and ceremonial palace patronage, and had then picked a fight with Amanullah Khan, a local Pashtun militia leader. Their skirmishes were the last straw, so far as Khalilzad was concerned. He asked General Barno to deploy helicopters to the American-controlled air base at Shindand, near Herat. They agreed it would be best to remove both Ismail Khan and Amanullah Khan. Khalilzad called Amanullah to tell him he was sending a C.I.A. plane and that he expected him to be on it. Khan cooperated. The ambassador then boarded a C-130 to Herat. Ismail Khan’s ceremonial dancers greeted him. At one of the palaces of the emir (Khan’s self-endowed title), Khalilzad asked to meet alone.
“I think the time has come for you to leave Herat,” he said. “President Karzai is thinking of you becoming a minister.”
“I would like to be minister of interior,” Khan replied quickly.
Khalilzad said he didn’t want to get into the details. Ismail Khan ended up as minister of water and energy.18
Karzai’s most powerful rival remained Marshal Mohammed Fahim, the heir to Massoud’s militias. Karzai’s strategy was to hold his rival close. Initially, he decided to invite Fahim onto his election ticket as first vice president, to help pull in the Tajik vote. As 2004 passed and the election neared, however, Karzai wondered if he had made a mistake. He debated replacing Fahim with a less powerful Panjshiri, Ahmad Zia Massoud, one of the deceased commander’s brothers, who had no armed following. General Barno opposed the idea. He worried that if Fahim was knocked off the ticket, he might stage a coup d’état.
Khalilzad was more sympathetic to Karzai’s thinking. Barno felt that Khalilzad “counseled Karzai fairly even-handedly” on whether to dump Fahim, but eventually, he “kind of put his foot down” in favor of taking the risk.
Barno now organized a plan to break the news to Fahim in a way that might deter him from striking back violently against the Arg Palace. Quietly, Barno’s command mobilized N.A.T.O. units with antitank weapons and stationed them in front of compounds holding Fahim’s armored units. “We were ready to prevent a coup from happening that day, very explicitly,” Barno said. In full uniform, Barno arrived at Fahim’s residence to tell him that he was off the ticket. The marshal was unhappy but accepting. He gave Barno an extemporaneous lecture on the United States Constitution.19
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It was not only Zalmay Khalilzad’s language and heritage that made him seem to Afghans like one of their own. He also had an entourage and kin network that looked familiar in the light of evolving post-Taliban Afghan politics. Khalilzad had at least two family members who held positions in the Karzai administration. A nephew, Wahid Monawar, served as an aide to Abdullah Abdullah, the minister of foreign affairs. Another relative held a diplomatic post. Like the Karzais, the Khalilzads straddled Afghanistan and America. Some of the ambassador’s relatives sought to mix politics and business to cash in on reconstruction contracts, just as the Karzais and other newly empowered Afghan families did.
Lawrence Longhi, an American businessman, first met Khaled Monawar, another nephew of Ambassador Khalilzad’s, at a tennis club in suburban New Jersey. Monawar worked there; Longhi was a member. A number of Khalilzad family members had settled around Livingston, New Jersey, including Zalmay’s mother and his brother David, an investment banker. Khaled Monawar was a student at Seton Hall University. He had a receding hairline and an open face that bore a notable resemblance to his uncle’s. After the September 11 attacks, he and Longhi talked about going into business together. From early on, Longhi regarded Zalmay Khalilzad as the “silent partner” in this enterprise. Khaled Monawar would ask him to set up meetings with U.S. government officials, “with contacts provided to him by his uncle.” Longhi said he visited the White House to meet Khalilzad and Monawar. For his part, Khalilzad said later that he had a “vague memory” of Longhi visiting him when he worked at the National Security Council, before he became ambassador, but he said there were no meetings after he was assigned to Kabul. His nephew told him that Longhi “was his friend and was interested in Afghanistan.” According to Khalilzad, he did not introduce Longhi “to anyone to get a contract or instruct anyone to give him a contract.”
Khaled Monawar’s ambition put Khalilzad in an awkward position. He could not ban his American relatives from going into business; they were free to do as they pleased. Yet Khalilzad knew enough about Afghan ways of business to fear that Monawar would use his connection to him to try to win business, even if Khalilzad did not want him to do so. As Khalilzad described it, Monawar “probably did try to trade on my name—but I never introduced him to anyone in the U.S. government or to help him get a contract. Never. When I heard that he was looking to do business in Afghanistan, I told my embassy assistant not to give anyone an appointment who was introduced by Khaled.”20
In January 2003, Longhi and Monawar incorporated Afgamco Inc. in Delaware and soon formed a partnership with Michael Baker Corporation, a Pittsburgh-headquartered engineering firm with experience in construction projects abroad. Longhi’s account is different from Khalilzad’s. According to him, there were three meetings with Zalmay Khalilzad before and after he became the Bush administration’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and at these sessions, “Discussions took place regarding the award of possible construction projects in Afghanistan and Iraq, including one to revitalize a quarry at the Kabul Airport,” as well as “pipeline . . . and a major water resources project,” according to a court document. At the meetings with Zalmay Khalilzad, however, “no confirmation was given” about specific contracts.21
The partners were not shy about advertising their connection to Zalmay Khalilzad when they presented their business plans. In the spring of 2003, Michael Baker developed a PowerPoint deck that included a slide titled “Who Is Afgamco?” One of the boxes underneath that question read “Mr. K Bush Admin. Afghan & Iraq.” In later months, while trying to determine where to send a particular business proposal, the parties exchanged e-mails. In some of these e-mails, the ambassador was referred to as “Mr. Big.”22
As the pursuit of U.S. government contracts went on, Longhi later complained, he was shut out of meetings and correspondence. He eventually sued Khaled Monawar because he believed he had been denied money he was entitled to. There is no evidence in the court documents that Khalilzad acted improperly. Still, the visibility of Khalilzad’s family members in the Karzai government and in seeking contracts created an obvious problem of appearances. When American diplomats scolded the Karzai family or Fahim Khan or Engineer Arif for cronyism, or when the Americans called such family-connected contracting deals “corruption,” the Afghans on the receiving end of such lectures had reason to cast a jaundiced eye.
ELEVEN
Ambassador vs. Ambassador
In 2003 and 2004, Afghans witnessed remarkable political events—the adoption of a new constitution, mobilization for a presidential election, planning for a new parliament. Yet there were signs of trouble. Periodic insurgent attacks caused about fifty American casualties each year. Hamid Karzai and Amrullah Saleh became united in the conviction that I.S.I. was back in action, covertly deploying the Taliban to destabilize their fledgling government before it could consolidate. Zalmay Khalilzad heard again and again from Karzai about the d
angers of I.S.I. He tried to intervene, despite resistance or indifference within the Bush administration.
Rich Blee had rotated to Pakistan as C.I.A. chief of station in Islamabad about the same time that Khalilzad arrived as ambassador. During 2004, Greg Vogle, the paramilitary officer who had traveled inside Afghanistan with Karzai, arrived as chief of Kabul Station. (He succeeded the officer who had opposed Engineer Arif’s removal.) Vogle worked with Khalilzad and Barno to shore up Karzai, taking advantage of the trusting relationship he enjoyed. In Blee, Vogle, and Khalilzad, the Bush administration had now sent forward three men with long and unsentimental experience of I.S.I.’s covert support for the Taliban, dating back to well before the September 11 attacks.
The Joint Special Operations Command first collected concrete evidence of an organized Taliban revival early in 2004. The movement’s Shura Council produced an internal circular or strategy document to coordinate a plan for revival of military operations. The document was the rough equivalent of the campaign plans American war commanders wrote to ensure that frontline colonels and majors had a common understanding of strategy.
Khalilzad and many of his aides who had access to intelligence reporting were fully convinced that Musharraf had approved a policy of quiet support for the Taliban’s comeback. Yet while they could point to circumstantial evidence—such as the fact that Taliban leaders were living openly in Pakistani cities, without harassment—they lacked hard proof of active Directorate S funding or training. Even so, Khalilzad believed it was obvious that the Pakistanis could do more to suppress the Taliban. In the Kabul embassy, the prevailing view was that “the Pakistanis were in complete and public denial,” as David Sedney, then the deputy chief of mission, put it. Pakistani counterparts repeatedly denied the very existence of the Quetta Shura, yet the United States “knew from intelligence that they were there. All the Afghans knew they were there. All the Pakistanis knew they were there, for that matter.” Still, in prolonged, face-to-face meetings, Pakistanis at the highest levels said otherwise.1
General Barno, who had access to all of the intelligence reporting, took a judicious position about Pakistani complicity. He never saw evidence “in any domain” indicating that the Pakistanis were “actively supporting” the Taliban’s comeback. He could see that they “basically tolerated the Taliban in the tribal areas” but it was also obvious that the Pakistanis’ “ability to control these areas was negligible.” There were long stretches of the Afghan-Pakistan border where the Pakistani military had no presence at all. Where border posts existed, they were often unoccupied or commanded by paramilitary Frontier Corps soldiers. These were locally recruited tribesmen who were often influenced by the same preachers who fired up the Taliban. American forces deployed near the Pakistan border could see clearly that Frontier Corps soldiers waved small Taliban units into Afghanistan, or ignored them. Yet given the weakness of Pakistani institutions, Barno and his military intelligence analysts at I.S.A.F. assessed, this was not decisive evidence of Pakistani state policy. They thought, “Well, these guys are probably cousins.”2
To Zalmay Khalilzad, the essential questions were Is a sanctuary being developed by the Taliban inside Pakistan and, if so, did this have Musharraf’s endorsement? He concluded that Pakistan’s “double game was undeniable.” The raw intelligence he relied upon included N.D.S. and C.I.A. agent reporting about training areas on Pakistani territory and Taliban graduation ceremonies where I.S.I. officers were reportedly present. Of course, particular agent reports could always be discounted as unreliable. Khalilzad credited the intelligence overall, however, and assumed Musharraf had to have endorsed such support. “Can this happen without his knowledge?” he asked. “Why is he doing it?”3
The U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, Nancy J. Powell, a career foreign service officer who had served half a dozen tours in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, argued that Khalilzad’s pressure campaign against Musharraf was misplaced. The struggle between the two ambassadors played out in what became known to participants as “the war of the No-Dis cables,” meaning cables not to be distributed through wide channels. They exchanged a stream of invective—some of it in cables, more of it in e-mails and direct phone conversations. Besides Powell, Khalilzad also sometimes got into it with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. The essential subject was whether the United States was being fooled by Pakistan. Powell’s superiors at State had instructed her before she departed for Islamabad not to get into cabling wars with the U.S. embassies in Kabul and India over I.S.I.’s conduct or other sources of controversy about Pakistan. But Khalilzad raised the temperature. In one cable, Powell felt that he had attempted to question her “loyalty and patriotism” simply because she had tried to describe Pakistan’s position of relative weakness in relation to the Taliban and the fact that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan “has never ever been controlled.” She argued that Khalilzad “had exaggerated Musharraf’s ability to control everything in Pakistan and everyone in it,” especially in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Khalilzad blamed her unfairly simply for reporting on Pakistan’s outlook, she believed. Yet she did have a cautious view of what the facts had established about Directorate S activity. To be sure, Powell felt, there were military officers “with mixed loyalties,” yet there was “never a clear connection between the government of Pakistan and support for those groups.” She did not regard Musharraf as especially trustworthy, but the United States had other interests in Pakistan—if they went hard after I.S.I., especially without great evidence, it would disrupt her embassy’s mission to try to work with Pakistan on controlling its nuclear weapons, reducing tensions with India over Kashmir, and supporting the country’s economic and social development.4
For his part, Khalilzad thought he understood why Pakistan might be preparing the Taliban for a return to Afghanistan. Musharraf and his high command had concluded that the United States would leave the region. They had good reason: As it became mired in Iraq, the Bush administration signaled openly that it wanted European countries to take the lead in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s generals assumed that without a U.S. military commitment, Afghanistan would fall apart again. Pakistani generals, including Musharraf, concluded, “They had better have some of their own horses.”5
Musharraf seemed to confirm as much in an interview years later. As president of Pakistan, he said he would ask American visitors, “Are you leaving a stable Afghanistan or not?” If not, “then I have to think of my own security. If you leave without that, I am thinking of 1989 or 1996,” two pivot points of civil war in Afghanistan. In both cases, I.S.I. backed Islamist Afghan factions aligned with Islamabad’s interests and opposed to India.6
In December 2003, Al Qaeda–linked Pakistani assassins rammed two car bombs into Musharraf’s convoy as he rode through Rawalpindi; he narrowly escaped death. It turned out that one of the suicide bombers was an I.S.I.-backed militant who had fought in Kashmir. A second bombing attempt by the same network followed in April. Musharraf fired an I.S.I. general in charge of the Kashmir cell of Directorate S and ordered Pakistani troops into South Waziristan to attack Al Qaeda and its local allies. He allowed C.I.A. officers and Special Forces to embed in Pakistani units and continued to cooperate with C.I.A. drone operations, including, for the first time, lethal strikes carried out against Taliban leaders in South Waziristan.
To President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, that Al Qaeda tried to kill Musharraf and that the Pakistan Army moved into Waziristan to retaliate seemed to make plain that Pakistan was on America’s side. It did not compute for them that Musharraf might be simultaneously at war with Al Qaeda and promoting the Taliban.
To try to resolve the dispute between the embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the National Security Council, ordered an intelligence review of the Taliban’s revival during 2003 and 2004. Yet the C.I.A. could not definitively resolve how the Taliban had constructed a sanctuary in
Pakistan or the role of I.S.I. Paid agents run by N.D.S. would report something along the lines of “Mullah Dadullah’s house is in the third street to the right off the main road in the old city of Quetta.” But there were not many fixed street addresses in Quetta. The C.I.A. ordered satellite photography of the city. C.I.A. officers from Islamabad Station also visited Quetta with I.S.I. escorts to try to obtain a sense of its warrens firsthand. Even so, when imagery analysts looked at photos or Predator video to try to confirm specific N.D.S. reporting about Taliban addresses, they could discern little. Or it would turn out that a reported address was actually a mosque where Taliban turned up from time to time. The C.I.A. proved unable to place reliable unilateral American agents in Quetta to nail down addresses of senior Taliban leaders. Fugitive hunting in hostile “denied areas” was one of the most challenging tasks case officers undertook. Definitive proof of I.S.I. activity in such a scenario required matching signals intelligence, overhead photography, and agent reporting on the ground. The C.I.A “never got the complete triangulation of information, SIGINT, and everything,” an official involved recalled. Quetta remained “a black hole.”7
Zalmay Khalilzad just didn’t believe Musharraf’s claims. In Washington for consultations, he made headlines during a talk at a think tank by declaring openly that Pakistan was providing sanctuary to the Taliban.
In the Oval Office, President Bush told Khalilzad, “Musharraf denies all of what you are saying.”
“Didn’t they deny, Mr. President, for years that they had a nuclear program?”8
Bush said he would call Musharraf and arrange for the ambassador to meet with him, to discuss the accusations directly.
Khalilzad flew to Islamabad. Beforehand, he sent Musharraf a gift, a crate of Afghan pomegranates. When they sat down, Musharraf thanked him, but added that he hated pomegranates—too many seeds. They talked extensively about Musharraf’s usual complaints about the Afghan government—too many Panjshiris in key security positions, too many Indian spies under diplomatic cover in Kabul and elsewhere.