by Steve Coll
Overall, the conversation proved desultory. Ibrahim did not seem very well briefed about what might be possible in negotiations with the United States. He rambled on about how the attempted car bombing at Times Square the previous spring had been an Al Qaeda operation.
After the meeting, Clinton rebuked Kayani for having Pasha in the room, for not clearing that decision in advance. The Pakistanis were puzzled; Pasha believed that he had made clear he would attend, and he did not understand why the Americans would choose to make an issue of it. Wounded and confused, Pasha and Kayani updated their grievances. They had been trying to do the Americans a favor. Yes, Ibrahim Haqqani was not a major commander, but Pasha’s plan was to hold two meetings with the family representative and then move to someone higher in the network. Why did there never seem to be room in Washington to give Pakistan the benefit of the doubt?4
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Obama shuffled his national security cabinet in the summer of 2011. Gates retired from the Pentagon. Obama asked Panetta to move there from the C.I.A. and he decided to appoint Petraeus to replace Panetta. The Obama administration had taken a beating in the 2010 midterm election. There were rumors that Petraeus, a registered Republican, might be induced to run for president in 2012. Petraeus had insisted forcefully to Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s influential first chief of staff, that he had no interest: “Look, get it through your head, I’m not going to run for office—mark my words.” He repeated this privately to anyone who asked him. Yet politics was an unpredictable business; the C.I.A.’s leadership was a glamorous position, and it offered a way to keep Petraeus inside the administration’s fold as the 2012 election arrived.5
Four-star military commanders had a mixed record as C.I.A. directors, certainly in the eyes of career agency employees. General Michael Hayden had been mostly successful, despite military airs that sometimes rankled at Langley. Career officers regarded Admiral Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s C.I.A. director, as a stiff-necked prisoner of military culture, an outsider who never connected. By the time a typical general or admiral had his third star pinned on, he had become accustomed to the military’s deferential protocols, red carpet travel, and entourages of bag carriers and communication aides. The C.I.A. was a flatter, quirkier organization—the agency was part university campus, part mad science lab, part undercover police force, part paranoid internal affairs department, and part militia. Petraeus had spent his entire adult life in military service, and he had spent the last decade as a highly political general, and as an international celebrity.
Soon after he arrived on the Seventh Floor, Petraeus issued instructions to the kitchen about his highly fastidious runner’s diet, heavy on shrimp and quinoa. He went on long bike rides on the weekends with his security detail, expecting his aides to keep him well hydrated. There were plenty of fitness fanatics at the C.I.A., but the cigar-chomping George Tenet or the wine connoisseur Leon Panetta were more of a piece with clandestine service habits of living. And there was not a civilian bureaucracy in Washington that did not relish taking down a leader who had airs. Still, the resentment of Petraeus was rarely more serious than eye rolling. For his part, Petraeus seemed thrilled to be at the C.I.A. He read into Special Access Program files that he previously knew little or nothing about even as a top Central Command general—clandestine operations in Iran, the Arab world, and elsewhere. At dinner with former Pentagon colleagues, he expressed the enthusiasm of a college student: “You wouldn’t believe all the things we are doing.”6
What Petraeus lacked in self-awareness he often made up for with political savvy. As a commanding general in Iraq, at Central Command, and in Afghanistan, he had become a master in what spin doctors called strategic engagement. He placed longtime allies from his Pentagon brain trust as fellows in Washington think tanks. He regularly accepted off-the-record lunch and dinner invitations from journalists, public policy scholars, and editorial boards. Petraeus intended to do less of this at the C.I.A., and to stay off the Sunday television talk shows, but one evening in August, the president of the Brookings Institution, Strobe Talbott, hosted a private dinner for Petraeus, to reintroduce the general as the country’s top spy. Talbott invited about fifteen newspaper columnists and think-tank types. Petraeus arrived a little late with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom Petraeus happened to be embarking on a secret affair. “She seems to think I’m worth a book,” he remarked. At the large table he invited each guest to ask him one question. He was candid about a few personalities but overall said little that he would not have testified to at a congressional hearing. He gave statistics purporting to document that N.A.T.O. was winning the Afghan war. He defended the C.I.A.’s drone program in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.7
Petraeus sought to disarm White House and State Department critics of the Counterterrorism Center’s drone operations. He assured Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, that he would never call him out or embarrass him during an interagency meeting, as Panetta had once done. Petraeus also assured Munter that the Counterterrorism Center would bring him into their targeting and decision-making process much earlier, to identify and resolve problems before they escalated into an interagency fight. Even if they did not always follow the ambassador’s advice, they would respect his role.
When Munter found himself back in Washington, he was surprised to receive an invitation to have lunch with Petraeus in the C.I.A. director’s dining room on the Seventh Floor.
An escort walked Munter past the museum space on the ground floor of Old Headquarters. The C.I.A.’s curators had installed a cheesy diorama of a paramilitary scene in Afghanistan, using wax figures to depict two C.I.A. officers and two Afghan guerrillas in Panjshiri hats. (A little later, the C.I.A. curators installed a display of the AK-47 rifle that had been in Bin Laden’s bedroom when he was killed.)
Upstairs, Munter found Mark Kelton, the Islamabad station chief with whom he had clashed repeatedly. Kelton had left Islamabad soon after the killing of Osama Bin Laden, suffering from an acute stomach illness that caused him to lose forty pounds. Some at the C.I.A. suspected, but could not prove, that I.S.I. had poisoned him. Kelton told colleagues that he did not know what to think; it might have been natural causes. He recovered fully.
Now Kelton stood by as Petraeus presented Munter with a service medal in recognition of his contributions to the country. It was vintage Petraeus—ceremony as influence.8
Career intelligence analysts at the C.I.A. and across the administration who were working on Afghanistan greeted the Petraeus era at Langley with particular anxiety. The analysts responsible for the annual secret National Intelligence Estimate about the progress of the Afghan war had earlier battled Petraeus, when he was commanding general at I.S.A.F., over what they regarded as his undue optimism. Since 2007, the annual N.I.E. had reached negative judgments about the Afghan war every single year. In late 2010, from Kabul, Petraeus had written an eight-page dissent letter arguing that the analysts were wrong and that he was executing his military campaign plan successfully. It was not unusual for commanding generals to see wars they ran more optimistically than professional intelligence analysts in Washington. While in command of the surge into Iraq, Petraeus had formally dissented from a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 for being too negative and for not including late-breaking data from the battlefield that he thought showed progress. He had also dissented the following year because he felt the intelligence community was too positive about the gains the forces he commanded had made in Iraq. Now, as the analysts prepared the 2011 N.I.E. on Afghanistan, which was to consider scenarios for the country until 2014, the analysts were again in conflict with Petraeus’s successors in the I.S.A.F. military command over how well things were going. The estimate’s authors were moving toward six key judgments, none of them encouraging. One was that the next group of political leaders to follow Karzai would be corrupt and unlikely to improve governance. Another was that the goal of establishing capable Afghan N
ational Security Forces at the scale America had planned might not be viable. The C.I.A.’s assessment was “highly skeptical” that the Afghan security forces could be as effective against the Taliban as I.S.A.F. commanders predicted, although they stopped short of predicting an outright collapse of the Afghan National Army.9
One resource for the 2011 N.I.E. was the C.I.A.’s District Assessments, the top secret color-coded maps of Afghanistan depicting areas of government control, Taliban control, and “local control.” These were still produced twice a year by Tony Schinella’s small group of career analysts. As of late 2011, they depicted an eroding stalemate with the Taliban. Petraeus criticized the C.I.A. maps, believing that they understated American military gains. He called the green zone of the Arghandab, where Art Kandarian’s brigade task force had paid such a heavy price in lives and limbs the previous year, “transformed.” The intelligence community did not give these gains enough credence, he argued.10
It was true that the Taliban had been cleared out of many of the grape and marijuana fields where the foot patrols of the 101st Airborne task force had slogged, and that Kandahar City was more secure. It was also true that the “ink spot” premise of the military campaign plan—to concentrate forces to defend major Afghan cities (except in Helmand, where they attacked the drug economy)—had successfully reinforced security in big population centers. Yet other important hypotheses of the military plan had not worked out. “Reintegration,” the idea that battered Taliban commanders would defect en masse to the Karzai government, had not materialized. Petraeus told colleagues that he had tried his best to replicate the “Sons of Iraq” success from the surge there, but they just did not have the resources. By 2011, only 5,400 ragged Taliban fighters had come into the reintegration program, by one I.S.A.F. estimate, and some of those seemed to be scammers looking for payoffs.11
That summer, Robert Williams, who would become Peter Lavoy’s successor as national intelligence officer for South Asia, traveled with U.S. Special Forces for three weeks in Helmand, Kandahar, and Uruzgan, conducting more than fifty interviews with Afghan leaders and civilians. He was leading Petraeus’s C.I.A. “Red Team” to provide counterintuitive or original analysis on hard problems. He wanted to understand the arc of history in Helmand, from King Zahir Shah in the 1960s to the present. The Afghans he met had very low expectations of any government, including the Taliban’s shadow government. New Afghan and foreign occupying regimes entered into their districts and villages from time to time, made extravagant promises, and then became exploitive, one after another, one decade after another. N.A.T.O. and its corrupt Afghan allies, in the form of predatory local police and governors, were only the latest example. In a village in southern Helmand, Williams met officers of a local police force that had recently apprehended a criminal. They told him they had handed the suspect to the Taliban, to be tried by one of the movement’s “shadow” religious courts, because they thought the outcome would be more just than if they sent him to the corruption-riddled district center. The civilians Williams interviewed were not really looking for good government—that seemed beyond imagining. They were fashioning least-bad choices within families, villages, and subtribes, to protect themselves from both the Karzai regime and Taliban-aligned predators. That often involved straddling the U.S.-Taliban war, with some sons enlisted in the Taliban militias and others on the government payroll. Williams heard sympathy for the Taliban’s ideology and respect for the movement’s swift if ruthless shadow courts. He heard accounts of the Taliban’s complaint system and anecdotes about abusive Taliban commanders who were sometimes removed after citizens protested. The Taliban were embedded. They were certainly not defeated.12
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Marc Grossman met Tayeb Agha in person for the first time late that summer, in Doha. By dispatching Grossman, the Americans signaled that they were ready to elevate the negotiations to a new level, as Mullah Mohammad Omar’s “Message” had urged. Grossman now experienced for himself the odd rhythm of talking to Tayeb Agha. Typically, at the negotiating sessions, the Qatari mediators first met separately with the American delegation and served tea. Then Tayeb Agha would arrive, typically wearing a white shalwar kameez, a traditional gown. They assembled in a meeting room to talk across a table for an hour or two. Tayeb Agha usually opened with a prepared statement. Discussion followed. The Qataris by now took copious notes, as did Tayeb Agha, as did American aides supporting Grossman. Later, they would all have a buffet dinner on the compound, mingling and having more informal chats.
Grossman began his first encounter with Tayeb Agha by introducing himself, a little about his career, and then laying out the Obama administration’s vision for Afghanistan. He talked about the calendar of major donor conferences and intergovernmental political discussions to support the Karzai government. “We hope the Taliban will be part of it,” he said. “Afghanistan will be better. If the Taliban make the right choices, they can be part of it.” He explained that he wanted to advance a sequence of confidence-building and negotiating steps that would create a path for the Taliban to join Afghanistan’s future.
Tayeb Agha replied, in essence, that he wasn’t very interested in all of these plans. The Taliban would not be at the intergovernmental meetings. They were not members of N.A.T.O. He spoke dismissively about Karzai. He turned the discussion quickly to his effort to win the releases of the five senior Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo. That continued to seem to be his principal objective. The Americans continued to prioritize finding a way toward an agreement on a political office for the Taliban. They went into more discussion about what the rules for such an office might be and how they would proceed, step by step.
Over dinner, and in subsequent meetings, Grossman tried to plumb Tayeb Agha’s motivations. He had read voluminous intelligence analysis about the envoy but now he tried to ask about his personal history, his family. “We have a job to do,” Grossman told him. “It seems to me that if we do our work less people will die. I want to understand if that is your motivation too.” Yet he found the answer elusive.
Remarks Tayeb Agha made fed a library of restricted Conflict Resolution Cell cables and memos. It was an eclectic, curious compendium of thoughts and positions. The Taliban envoy said the Afghans were naturally democratic and that the Taliban would win an election if the vote was truly free and fair. He also said, “We recognize the problems from the past, and we have to have qualified people within the government” when the Taliban returned to power. “We have to have good relationships with the outside world. We have to have better relationships with all the Afghan ethnicities,” not just Pashtuns.
“Our leadership in Pakistan sends their girls to school and even to university,” he remarked one time. “We recognize that this is important for families, and important for society.”
He was expansive about the possibilities for a political transition as the American forces withdrew. “We cannot afford to have another power vacuum, like what happened when the Soviets left,” he said, which had triggered a civil war. “Whatever agreement comes about, it’s going to have to be enforced and monitored,” so some kind of international peacekeeping force might be needed. “We need to have positive relations with the United States and with the international community because we tried governing once as an outcast and it didn’t work out very well.”
Whenever the subject of September 11 came up, Tayeb Agha reverted to a talking point. “We inherited these people,” he said, referring to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. “They had told us they were not going to do these kinds of attacks, and that they had nothing to do with September 11. We told you that we would investigate this and hold them accountable if needed, but that wasn’t good enough for you.” The Arabs were fellow Muslims; the Taliban couldn’t just disown them. About Pakistan, Tayeb Agha was openly disdainful. “Yes, we live there, but we are an independent movement, and we don’t respond to what Pakistan wants to do.”
At some sessions, Tayeb A
gha brought along an aide, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, a former deputy minister during the Islamic Emirate. Michael Steiner, the German diplomat, still appeared as well. At one session, the Americans listened with bemusement as Stanikzai uncorked an extemporaneous rant about how perfidious the Americans had been over the years, whereas Germany had always been a great and reliable friend of Afghanistan. To show appreciation, Steiner got up from one side of the table and sat down next to Stanikzai. Just then, the Taliban leader turned to the subject of the Second World War. He pointed out that Afghanistan had been a staunch ally of Adolf Hitler’s against America and Britain. Steiner froze, betraying as little dismay as possible. The Americans found the scene a little funny—of course, they didn’t associate Steiner with Nazism—but Steiner was shocked and embarrassed. These things happened from time to time to German diplomats and it was always hard to take.13
Grossman returned from his first direct engagement with Tayeb Agha convinced that the two sides were making progress. He told colleagues that he expected the Taliban to have their political office in Qatar opened within a few months.
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As the tenth anniversary of September 11 approached, the Haqqani network organized attack squads to strike directly at American targets in Afghanistan. On September 10, a truck bomb detonated at a N.A.T.O. base south of Kabul, killing five American soldiers and wounding more than six dozen; but for luck, the death toll could have been much higher. On September 13, a Haqqani squad infiltrated Kabul and struck the U.S. embassy with mortars and assault rifles. The battle went on for hours. No Americans were killed but five Afghan police died.