Directorate S
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7. Interview with the official.
8. All quotations, interview with Khalilzad.
9. Ibid.
10. All quotations, interview with Porch. His books include The Conquest of Morocco (1983), The Conquest of the Sahara (1984), and The French Foreign Legion (1991).
11. All quotations, ibid. Cambridge University Press published Counterinsurgency in 2013.
12. Ibid.
13. All quotations, interview with McChrystal, except “We don’t know,” interview with Porch.
14. Interview with McChrystal.
15. All quotations, interview with Barno.
16. “We’re going to get Bin Laden”: Interview with Porch.
17. All quotations, interviews with McChrystal and Porch.
18. This account of the transition, and all quotations, come from interviews with several individuals involved, who asked not to be further identified.
19. Hassan Ghul: S.S.C.I. report, p. 371.
20. Interview with Musharraf.
21. Author’s interview with the participant.
22. Schofield, Inside the Pakistan Army, p. 144.
23. Interviews with the intelligence official, Musharraf, and other American and Pakistani officials involved.
24. Ibid.
25. Mazzetti, Rashid, and other journalists have chronicled Mohammad’s killing.
26. “These votes . . . to help”: The New York Times, November 5, 2004. “Made frequent reference . . . Nashville”: State Department cable, Kabul to Washington, November 24, 2005, WikiLeaks.
27. Interviews with Khalilzad, Khalid Farooqi of Hezb-i-Islami, the former Taliban officeholder Arsala Rahmani, and a second former Taliban officeholder involved.
28. Interview with Barno.
29. Interview with Miller.
Chapter Twelve: Digging a Hole in the Ocean
1. Interview with Afghan officials familiar with N.D.S. during this period.
2. Ibid. Kayani did not respond to a request for comment for this book. American officials involved with the efforts to promote cooperation between I.S.I. and N.D.S. confirmed the gist of this tetchy relationship. WikiLeaks cables document several efforts to promote cross-border intelligence sharing during this period and the mutual suspicions that hindered such work.
3. Interview with a senior Afghan official. Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan,” summarized and quoted briefly from the study.
4. All quotations, ibid.
5. Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan.”
6. Interview with Saleh. Karzai wrote in correspondence that he “can’t recall” the findings presented in Saleh’s paper.
7. Interview with Kilcullen.
8. Ibid.
9. Interviews with Kilcullen, as well as American and Pakistani military officers. At one point, the United States agreed to supply night-vision goggles to Pakistani forces in the F.A.T.A. but only if they signed the equipment out and returned it immediately after use, like library books. That compromise only deepened Pakistani resentment about how little they were trusted.
10. Interview with Art Keller, a C.I.A. case officer deployed to Pakistan at the time.
11. Ibid.
12. “Stirred up a hornet’s nest”: State Department cable, Islamabad to Washington, March 10, 2006, WikiLeaks. “Dave, I’m sitting on a powder keg”: Interview with Kilcullen. Crocker confirmed the conversation.
13. Interview with a Bush administration official.
14. Interview with Kilcullen.
15. Ibid.
16. “Remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,” March 2, 2006, New Delhi, http://2001-2009.state.gov/p/sca/rls/rm/2006/62426.htm.
17. “India Civil Nuclear Cooperation: Responding to Critics,” White House release, March 8, 2006, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/03/text/20060308-3.html.
18. Decoy convoy: Bush, Decision Points, p. 214. See also: State Department cable, Islamabad to Washington, March 29, 2006, WikiLeaks.
19. State Department cable, Islamabad to Washington, April 14, 2006, WikiLeaks.
20. See Clarke, ed., “The Afghan Papers: Committing Britain to War in Helmand, 2005–06,” Royal United Services Institute, December 8, 2011. For a thorough Canadian account, see Stein and Lang, The Unexpected War.
21. State Department cable, Kabul to Washington, January 11, 2006, WikiLeaks.
22. Interview with Lynch.
23. Akhundzada and opium: The New York Times, October 4, 2008. Helmand: Farrell and Giustozzi, “The Taliban at War,” pp. 845–71.
24. Ibid.
25. Hennessey, Kandak, p. 240.
26. Clarke, “The Afghan Papers,” p. 16. “We would be perfectly happy . . .”: BBC News, April 24, 2006.
27. Chandrasekaran, Little America, p. 48.
28. Clarke, “The Afghan Papers.”
29. Ibid.
30. Blatchford, Fifteen Days, p. 3.
31. Ibid., pp. 8–12.
32. Horn, No Lack of Courage, p. 35.
33. “To defeat . . . traditional areas”: Ibid., p. 27. “Charred pieces . . . insurgency here”: Smith, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now, p. 46.
34. Horn, No Lack of Courage, p. 27.
35. Bradley and Maurer, The Lions of Kandahar, pp. 101–2.
36. Horn, No Lack of Courage, p. 114.
37. State Department cable, Kabul to Washington, April 24, 2006, WikiLeaks.
38. State Department cable, Peshawar to Washington, September 6, 2006, WikiLeaks.
39. All quotations, State Department cable, Kabul to Washington, September 11, 2006.
40. Bush, Decision Points, p. 215. Rice, No Higher Honor, pp. 444–45.
41. Bush: Decision Points, p. 208. First deterioration in 2005, “I had a very good relationship . . . experienced later”: BBC Interview, October 3, 2013.
42. All quotations, author’s interviews with officials familiar with the events.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
Chapter Thirteen: Radicals
1. British security contacted I.S.I.: “Operation Overt: The Trans-Atlantic Airlines Liquid Bombs Plot,” draft chapter by Marc Sageman for his forthcoming book about terrorism cases in Britain. Sageman obtained extensive trial transcripts and other court materials from which his account is drawn. The author is deeply grateful to him for sharing these materials and citations. Rodriguez, Hard Measures, confirms aspects of the narrative constructed from trial testimony. Nic Robertson, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister added considerably to the record with their April 30, 2012, report for CNN about a written account by Rashid Rauf about his involvement in both the Underground bombings and the planes bombing conspiracy. The author also conducted interviews with British and American officials involved with the case. A C.I.A. drone reportedly killed Rauf in North Waziristan in November 2008. About 825,000 people of Pakistani origin in England circa 2006: “The Pakistani Muslim Community in England,” The Change Institute, Department for Communities and Local Government, March 2009, p. 6. “At least a quarter of a million people”: Ibid., p. 53.
2. Sageman, ibid., from trial transcripts.
3. Ibid.
4. Robertson, Cruickshank, and Lister, CNN report, 2012.
5. All quotations, Sageman from Ali’s trial testimony. At his trial, Ali admitted his involvement in the preparations but claimed the entire plot was merely to be a harmless demonstration, a kind of theater for political ends, and would not have taken lives. He was convicted and sentenced to at least forty years in prison.
6. All quotations from author’s interviews.
7. “Clandestine technical resources . . . too rashly”: Rodriguez, Hard Measures, pp. 6–7.
8. Ibid., pp. 3–7.
9. Author’s interviews.
10. Sageman, from court records.
11. “Compilation of Usama Bin Ladin Statements 1994–January 2004.”
12. The Guardian: www.theguardian.com/alqaida/page/0,12643,839823,00.html.
13. IntelCenter, “Al Qaeda Messaging Statistics.”
14. All translations from the Taliban Sources Project archive.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Waltz, Warrior Diplomat, p. 212.
20. This summary of how ALEC Station analysis evolved is from the author’s interviews with half a dozen U.S. intelligence and other officials familiar with its work.
21. “You might kill . . . invading Pakistan”: Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife, p. 116. Clandestine raid in early 2006: Interview with a senior military officer involved. Mazzetti, pp. 134–35, reported on a clandestine raid in January 2006 against an Al Qaeda compound in Damadola, in the Bajaur agency of the F.A.T.A., that was unannounced at the time. He is probably describing the same raid. The account here is also informed by interviews with former senior U.S. officials involved.
22. “Inroads”: Bergen, Manhunt, p. 90. Flora and coded messages: Author’s interviews. See also Bergen, ibid., p. 83. “When a bird could be heard chirping on one tape, a German ornithologist was called in to analyze the chirps. . . . None of the forensic work . . . ever yielded a useful lead,” Bergen writes.
23. Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar, p. 377. Interviews with former C.I.A. officials familiar with Goss’s experience.
24. “Among the very best . . . handful to manage”: Grenier, ibid., p. 379.
25. Ibid., pp. 379–80. Interview with Grenier.
26. Going unilateral as early as 2005: Interviews with senior British intelligence officers who worked with the C.I.A. Task Force Orange, analysts from military reserves, N.S.A. teams: Interview with a senior military officer involved. Predator drones going exclusively to Iraq circa 2005: Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar, p. 391. (It was not until Robert Gates became defense secretary in 2007 that drone production increased and the demands of the Iraq war began to ease somewhat.) Uzbek prisoner interrogation, map of Al Qaeda facilities in North Waziristan: Interview with the senior military officer.
27. All quotations, interviews with Hayden and colleagues of Hayden at the C.I.A.
28. “Old Yale . . .”: Author’s interview.
29. All quotations, ibid.
30. C.T.C.’s budget ran into the billions and was by far the largest organization at C.I.A.: Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar, p. 377. “Brilliant operational thinker . . . run at his speed”: Author’s interview.
31. All Hayden quotations: “A Conversation with Michael Hayden,” Council on Foreign Relations, September 7, 2007. Hayden’s thinking and approach: Interview with Hayden.
Chapter Fourteen: Suicide Detectives
1. All quotations are from interviews with Williams or unclassified materials from his study.
2. Williams recorded 149 suicide bombings in Afghanistan during 2006. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, cites 141, p. 236. Al Samood: Taliban Archives, January 6, 2006.
3. Williams, “Mullah Omar’s Missiles: A Field Report on Suicide Bombers in Afghanistan,” Middle East Policy Council, 2007. The translated quotations from Dadullah are from the Middle East Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series, June 2, 2006, No. 1180, as cited by Williams. In 2006, according to Williams’s figures, of the 149 suicide bombings in Afghanistan, 48 took place in Kandahar, where Dadullah Lang helped oversee the Taliban’s offensive against Canadian troops, and 24 took place in Khost, the Haqqani stronghold. The Pakistani journalist Syed Shahzad, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 2006, reported that Dadullah recruited suicide bombers from “Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, as well as Waziristan.” British Special Forces and N.A.T.O. aircraft located and killed Dadullah in Helmand in the summer of 2007. According to Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces found him by tracking one of Dadullah’s brothers after he was released from prison. See also Giustozzi: “Military Adaptation by the Taliban, 2002–2011,” in Farrell, Osinga, and Russel (eds.), Military Adaptation in Afghanistan, p. 254. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 265.
4. Interviews with Williams.
5. Ibid.
6. “We ought to take a look”: Interview with Tony Harriman, then codirector of the Afghan Inter-Agency Operations Group and senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council. Paul Miller, who joined the N.S.C. to work on Afghanistan in September 2007, also described the review’s essential findings in an interview.
7. Neumann, The Other War, p. 168.
8. Interview with Harriman. “We cannot win”: Neumann, The Other War, p. 145. “Pleased to find . . . do more”: Waltz, Warrior Diplomat, p. 194.
9. Neumann, The Other War, p. 145. “I have wondered in retrospect if we should have asked for more,” he wrote later. “Perhaps, after years of unsuccessfully pushing uphill for additional resources, we did not think as expansively as we should have. In any event, it is unlikely that we could have gotten more.” Ibid., p. 161. “Got pretty cranky”: Interview with Gastright. See also Bush, Decision Points, pp. 210–11, and Gates, Duty, p. 200. Ultimately, Gates raised the U.S. troop level in Afghanistan to 25,000 by the end of 2007 through the extension of a deployment by the Tenth Mountain Division, but he concluded that he could not do more because of Iraq. In his memoir, Bush describes ordering a troop increase to 31,000 but does not acknowledge that this level was not achieved until April 2008, about eighteen months after the initial decision.
10. Interview with Miller. William Wood, who succeeded Neumann as U.S. ambassador in Kabul during 2007, recalled in an interview a similar scale of total increase in security spending, classified and unclassified, during this period.
11. “President Bush Discusses Progress in Afghanistan, Global War on Terror,” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/02/20070215-1.html.
12. Gates, Duty, p. 197.
13. Interview with Williams.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Bajwa, Inside Waziristan, p. 51. His book, published in Pakistan, also contains photos of the facility.
17. Ibid., pp. 48–50.
18. All quotations, interview with Beg.
19. Interview with Zeboulon Taintor, a New York University psychiatrist who worked with suicide bomber recruits in Pakistan.
20. Interview with Williams.
21. All quotations, ibid. Between 2007 and 2010, the number of Taliban attacks using improvised explosives rose from just over 2,200 to more than 14,000. During the same period, the number of suicide bombings remained steady at just over 100 per year.
Chapter Fifteen: Plan Afghanistan
1. Rose by about a quarter: “National Drug Control Strategy.” It estimates that between 2002 and 2004, opium production increased from 3,400 metric tons to 4,200 tons. Just over 400,000 acres in 2006: “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2006.” Just over 90 percent of world supply: “Interagency Assessment of the Counternarcotics Program in Afghanistan.” More than three million Afghans: “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008.” $30 versus $500: Jon Lee Anderson, “The Taliban’s Opium War,” The New Yorker, July 9, 2007. Estimated export value, estimated farm gate value: “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008.”
2. Interview with Michael Braun.
3. Ibid.
4. Fearon, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?,” pp. 275–301.
5. Interview with Braun.
6. All quotations, interviews with Long and Wankel.
7. This summary of the intelligence debate is from interviews with multiple analysts and policy makers involved. The U.N.’s annual “Afghanistan Opium Survey” provides considerable detail in unclassified documents.
8. Interview with Long.
9. Bush and McNeill, all quotations: Interview with McNeill. Urgent cabinet
meeting: Thomas Schweich, “Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?,” The New York Times, July 27, 2008. More than $1 billion: “Afghanistan Drug Control.”
10. Interview with Walters.
11. State Department cable, Kabul to Washington, February 9, 2007, WikiLeaks. The discussion took place on January 28, the day after the “urgent cabinet meeting” on the Afghan opium problem described by Schweich.
12. Rice, No Higher Honor, p. 446. After initially granting an interview, Wood did not respond to multiple follow-up requests for comment.
13. Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul, pp. 18–19. 400,000 acres sprayed aerially in Colombia in 2006: The New York Times, May 14, 2015.
14. All quotations, interview with Schweich. Wood said in an interview that while he did advocate for aerial spraying, “I was speculating” and carrying out White House policy.
15. Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul, and author’s interviews with Cowper-Coles.
16. “National Drug Control Strategy.” Karzai: Meet the Press, September 25, 2006.
17. Task Force 333: Peters, Seeds of Terror, p. 120. Also, interview with a senior British national security official involved in the drug policy debates. MI6 frustrations: Interviews with two former British intelligence officers involved.
18. E.P.A. assessment: www2.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate. Kakar quotations: Interview with Wankel.
19. “A much more agricultural”: Interview with Wankel. Before the cabinet: Neumann, The Other War, p. 148. This cabinet meeting took place before Wood arrived in Kabul, but the Afghan cabinet’s position never changed. Neumann wrote, “I had never seen the cabinet so eloquent, outspoken, and firm in their views.”
20. “This is the most popular chemical”: Interview with Wood.
21. “Taliban propaganda would profit”: Neumann, The Other War. Karzai’s attitude: Interviews with Cowper-Coles, Long. Exchange between Karzai and Massoud: Correspondence from Zubair Massoud, a spokesman and son of Ahmad Zia.
22. Interview with Braun.
23. Interview with Schweich, who later held political office in Missouri. In 2015, at the age of fifty-four, he committed suicide.
24. “The question is why”: State Department cable, Kabul to Washington, September 8, 2007. “Whether they had any evidence”: Kabul to Washington, January 10, 2006.