Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  At the D.I.A., Dave Smith ran Pakistan analysis for several years before retiring. After the secret Taliban negotiations collapsed, President Obama appointed Doug Lute as the United States ambassador to N.A.T.O., where he served until the end of Obama’s time in office. Jeff Hayes left Lute’s staff to return to D.I.A. Successively, Jeff Eggers and then Peter Lavoy followed Lute at the National Security Council, as Barack Obama’s principal specialists on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lavoy remained in that role until the administration’s end, then joined ExxonMobil as an adviser about Asia. Frank Ruggiero ran government relations in Washington for BAE Systems, a British defense company.

  At the State Department, Anne Patterson became the U.S. ambassador to Egypt and then assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. Cameron Munter left government and became chief executive of the EastWest Institute. Marc Grossman returned to business consulting; Barnett Rubin returned to his position at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. Marc Sageman returned to writing about terrorism and served as an expert witness at several terrorism trials.

  In addition to consulting and publishing a memoir, Stan McChrystal taught at Yale. David Petraeus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information and joined a large private equity firm in New York. Mike Mullen joined the board of directors of General Motors. Michael Flynn stunned some former colleagues by joining Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency as an outspoken national security adviser; at the Republican Party convention in Cleveland, he stood onstage and joined the delegates in “Lock her up” chants directed at Hillary Clinton. Trump then named him national security adviser in his new administration; he was soon fired after allegations surfaced that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with Russian officials. General John Allen joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign and spoke at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

  Hamid Karzai lived for the most part in a Kabul compound behind high walls, near the presidential palace, received visitors, and was continually rumored to be meddling in Afghan politics. He gave interviews criticizing the United States for undermining Afghan sovereignty and insisted, as ever, that there would be no war in Afghanistan if not for Pakistan and I.S.I. “We are victims,” he said.11

  When the Taliban finally admitted that Mullah Omar was dead, Tayeb Agha resigned as Omar’s supposed negotiator, to avoid “expected future disputes,” as he put it. He continued to spend time in Qatar. An array of other Taliban leaders joined fitful peace discussions organized by Pakistan after 2014; they made no progress.12

  For the Panjshiri commanders and aides who huddled in the garden of a hospital in Tajikistan in September 2001, debating how to manage the news of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud’s assassination, the decade and a half following September 11 was transforming and, for many in the Panjshiri leadership, enriching. Nearly all of Massoud’s aides held cabinet or parliamentary offices during the Karzai years, at one time or another.

  After he left N.D.S., Amrullah Saleh organized a grassroots movement focused on youth and nationalism; he became active on Twitter. In 2017, he returned to government, to oversee reforms of the Afghan security services. President Ghani appointed Engineer Arif as governor of Panjshir Province. Marshal Fahim died of a heart attack on March 9, 2014, at the age of fifty-seven. His family and followers erected a grand marble tomb on a barren hillside on the road from Kabul to Panjshir; it is visible from miles away, resembling the memorial of a Mogul emperor. The wealth Fahim and his family accumulated after 2001 was visible, too, in his hometown, Omarz, where he left behind, beside the Panjshir River, a magnificent compound resembling a palace.

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  The entrance to the Panjshir Valley, near Jabal Saraj, suggests an illustration from a Tolkien novel. The turquoise mountain waters of the Panjshir River, foaming white, roar through a steep and narrow rock gorge toward the Shomali Plains below. The sheer walls and boulders at the valley’s mouth create natural gates and barriers that would be difficult for even a heavily armored convoy to breach. Beyond this stone barricade the valley is narrow and protected by high steep walls for several miles. On the eve of September 11, this constituted the front line for Massoud and his holdout Panjshiri forces, one of the last redoubts against full Taliban control of Afghanistan. Almost sixteen years later, Panjshir was again preparing its defenses. As Ghani and Abdullah struggled to govern, as N.A.T.O. governments and voters questioned the cost and trajectory of aid to Afghanistan, it was hard to avoid the possibility that the Afghan war might be cycling back toward where it began before the American intervention following September 11.

  The Panjshir looks again to be a defiant redoubt against the Taliban, alongside Hazara areas in the country’s central mountains and some other regions of the north. After the Taliban’s insurgency revived in 2005, the movement’s commanders have occasionally tried to raid the Panjshir Valley, whether for revenge or glory or sport, even though the valley’s population is ethnically homogenous and unified in its hostility toward the Taliban and its allies. No Taliban commander or suicide bomber has made it more than a few kilometers up the road from Jabal Saraj before achieving martyrdom.

  The Panjshiris’ participation in the American-led victory over the Taliban in 2001 has brought the valley many economic rewards, even if corruption and theft by Massoud’s lieutenants have diluted the benefits for ordinary farmers and shopkeepers. The main road running north from Jabal Saraj through the valley toward Tajikistan is asphalted and in fine repair. There are new schools and supermarkets groaning with grapes and melons. The Panjshiris’ position as an inner circle of American allies, capable under arms, for the most part reliable under pressure, created many business opportunities in security contracting, transportation contracting, and logistics during the surges of American troops into the country. New stone houses and farms line the river today, ringed by barbed wire, constructed by the valley families that benefited from war and reconstruction.

  Yet the Panjshir’s political and military leadership has fragmented since 2001. The successor to Massoud elected in the hospital garden, Marshal Fahim, is gone. None of Massoud’s other former lieutenants can command widespread authority, including Abdullah, who is increasingly dismissed by Panjshiri colleagues as a self-interested opportunist. The ideal of Panjshiri solidarity is held together in large measure by a ghostly symbolic image: Massoud’s mournful face, which remains ubiquitous in Kabul and the valley, in blown-up photographs and posters taped onto the windshields of Corollas and armored Land Cruisers, plastered on billboards and in market windows, and at virtually every checkpoint or bridge. The persistence and mobilizing power of Massoud’s memory is impressive, yet there is a threadbare quality about his hold on Panjshiri loyalties. Fifteen years after his death, a massive shrine on a mountain hilltop outside his hometown of Bazarak remains unfinished, a testament to flawed leadership and corruption among his followers. The more time goes on, the more evident it becomes that the public cult of the valley’s martyred hero remains essential because of the absence of credible living leadership. There are contenders for next-generation political-military command of the Panjshir, in Massoud’s tradition, should the war require a return to guerrilla fighting. Amrullah Saleh is one credible possibility. In recent years Saleh has built a whitewashed home by the rushing water of the Panjshir, just below Massoud’s unfinished shrine. He can look up at his mentor’s tomb from his front porch.

  Another possibility is Ahmad Shah Massoud’s only male heir. Devoted to the anti-Soviet war, Massoud married relatively late, in 1988, to the daughter of a Panjshiri commander whose family had lived near his own in the valley for perhaps a century. Massoud’s wife delivered a son, Ahmad, in the year following their union. They had five more children together, all daughters. During the early and mid-1990s, including a few dark years after the Taliban took Kabul, Ahmad lived with his mother in Bazarak, in the heart of the Panjshir Valley. The boy served tea in his fat
her’s radio room and slept in a small room with all of his sisters and the occasional caregiver. As the only boy in a famous commander’s family, Ahmad received a lot of attention. When the war became rougher, by 1998, when Taliban jets occasionally bombed Panjshir, Massoud shifted his family to Tajikistan and Iran. Ahmad was just twelve years old when Al Qaeda assassinated his father in September 2001.13

  His mother and uncles groomed him for succession. After high school, he considered attending West Point, but decided instead on Sandhurst, the British military academy, where he could combine military training with university study at King’s College in London, which is well known for its war studies department. Ahmad wrote a thesis about whether the Taliban were better understood as a criminal network than an ethnonationalist or ideological movement. (He concluded they were criminals.) He stayed on at City University to earn a master’s degree before returning to Afghanistan in 2016.

  Ahmad Massoud was now twenty-seven years old. In Kabul, he met a senior C.I.A. officer that summer. The officer told him, “We made two mistakes. We should have listened to your father’s warnings about Al Qaeda. And we should never have let you go to Sandhurst,” instead of West Point or an American university. Ahmad’s plan was to work at the philanthropic Massoud Foundation for a while and travel the country, to build up his public profile before considering an entry into Afghan politics. There are already efforts under way to raise his visibility. On the main road from Kabul to Panjshir, in Charkah, the capital of Parwan Province, supporters have mounted a large billboard depicting Ahmad’s photograph alongside his father’s. LOOKING AT YOU MAKES US REMEMBER OUR BELOVED ONE, it says.14

  In September 2016, a few days before the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death, Ahmad Massoud rode in a Land Cruiser to the valley, to visit with supporters and family. On a day bathed in bright sunshine, he met a visitor in Bazarak, on a friend’s open porch beside Panjshir River rapids. Ahmad wore a trimmed beard and a pressed, embroidered gown. He is self-possessed, a strong speaker, with a Roman chin and nose; his resemblance to his father is unmistakable. Yet he does not exude great interest in warfare. He learned leadership and military tactics at Sandhurst but also discovered that he hates horses. He has allergies and struggles with an ankle that he once fractured playing soccer. His intention is not to try to live up to his father’s reputation as a genius at war, which would be a formidable task, but to convert his father’s influence to improve next-generation democratic politics in Afghanistan. “The main thing is that I want to forget about the past,” he said. “I want to be part of a generation of peacemakers.”

  Yet his father’s followers seek out Ahmad as their general against the revived Taliban. When the northern city of Kunduz fell briefly to the Taliban, in the late summer of 2015, the incursion set off a panic in the province and in Kabul. Ahmad was still studying in London. His cell phone rang daily as Kunduz residents pleaded for him to come home. “What’s your plan?” they asked. “What’s your goal? We respected your father. We will follow you.”

  Ahmad’s mother also called him. “Ahmad, what are you doing?” she asked. “I don’t care about your studies. I expect you to be on the front lines of Kunduz!”

  He paused to reflect on these expectations. “This was my own mother,” he noted.

  He had an out, as it happened—his passport was with British immigration when the Kunduz crisis erupted, and by the time it was returned to him, the government had retaken the city. But this was just a temporary reprieve.

  “I don’t want a bubble just around myself,” Ahmad went on, beside the river. “I want this generation to carry the message and the vision of my father. When my father was there, he was minister of defense,” he continued, referring to Ahmad Shah Massoud’s position in the mujaheddin government, before the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. “He had an army and a network of commanders. I don’t have any of those things. You can’t say that to people who are suffering, however.”

  Afghanistan remained at war. The Taliban remained a vicious enemy, and there were new threats to Panjshir and the country now, such as the Islamic State. He was Commander Massoud’s only son, educated at Sandhurst. “Next time,” he asked, “what am I going to do when the people knock on my door?”15

  Cofer Black (left) and Rich Blee in January 2002 in eastern Afghanistan on Al Qaeda counterterrorist operations.

  From left: Lieutenant General Tariq Majid, Pakistani chief of general staff; Colonel Dave Smith; and Major General Asif Akhtar, director general (external) Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate in April 2005, at the centennial celebration of the Pakistan Army Command and Staff College in Quetta, Pakistan.

  Wendy Chamberlin, U.S. ambassador to Pakistan on September 11, 2001, in May 2003.

  Head of Pakistani intelligence lieutenant general Mahmud Ahmed on Pakistan’s Independence Day in August 2000.

  Hamid Karzai, then-chairman of Afghanistan’s interim government, with General Abdur Rashid Dostum, then-deputy defense minister, at the Arg Palace in Kabul in December 2001.

  Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office in September 2006.

  Amrullah Saleh in Berlin in 2011.

  Former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad in Kabul on October 2011.

  Deputy C.I.A. director Stephen Kappes at C.I.A. headquarters in February 2009.

  Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, in Islamabad in July 2011.

  U.S. secretary of state John Kerry and Pakistani chief of army staff general Ashfaq Kayani in Brussels, Belgium, on April 24, 2013, after a trilateral meeting with Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

  Peter Lavoy working in the national airborne operations center while traveling to the Asia-Pacific in October 2011 with then-secretary of defense Leon Panetta.

  A Canadian soldier on patrol in a field of marijuana plants in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in June 2011.

  Then-first lieutenant Timothy Hopper near COP Stout, in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley, in spring 2011.

  U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Afghan president Hamid Karzai in a meeting at the Arg Palace in Kabul in October 2011.

  From left: President Barack Obama, “war czar” Lieutenant General Doug Lute, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon in the Situation Room in March 2011.

  Richard Holbrooke (left) and Barnett Rubin at the Arg Palace in Kabul in January 2011.

  Darin and Holly Loftis with their daughters, Alison and Camille, in 2008.

  Marc Sageman in Afghanistan in 2012.

  Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, in Bazarak, Afghanistan, in September 2016.

  A framed picture of Ahmad Shah Massoud in Bazarak, Afghanistan, in September 2016.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am greatly indebted to the many scores of people in the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan who agreed to interviews and provided much other assistance during the decade that I conducted research for what became this book. I tried as best as I could to capture with equal empathy the perspectives of decision makers in the three main governments whose antagonisms and confusions drive the book’s narrative. Inevitably, I understood the American system best, but I am especially grateful for the long hours offered by Pakistani and Afghan intelligence officers, military officers, cabinet officials, politicians, religious scholars, guerrilla leaders, and many others in those two countries. They did their best to straighten me out but none of my sources or researchers should be judged accountable for errors or misjudgments in the text; I am solely responsible.

  In addition to Christina Satkowski and Elizabeth Barber, I owe great thanks to Mustafa Hameed and Derek Kravitz for their interviews, travel, and documentary research.

  In Afghanistan, Habib Zahori and Muhib Habibi were intrepid reporting partners. Massoud Khalili was an indisp
ensable friend. Martine van Blijert was a reliable reality check each time I traveled to Afghanistan, and the research she and her team at the Afghanistan Analysts Network produced was rich and independent. I am very grateful as well to Sarah Chayes for her hospitality in Kandahar.