Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  The U.S. ambassador Robert Oakley told embassy colleagues to tiptoe delicately. The CIA should continue to collaborate closely with ISI to defeat Najibullah in Afghanistan. At the same time Oakley hoped to shore up Bhutto as best he could against subterranean efforts by Pakistani intelligence to bring her down.4

  The unfinished Afghan jihad loomed as Benazir Bhutto’s first foreign policy challenge, her first attempt to establish authority over ISI on a major national security question. On March 6 she called a meeting in Islamabad of the interagency “Afghan cell” to discuss Hamid Gul’s proposal to attack Jalalabad. There were no Afghans in the room. Bhutto was so anxious about ISI that she invited Oakley to attend the meeting. Oakley had no guidance from Washington about how to conduct himself before Pakistan’s national security cabinet, but he went anyway.

  They debated several questions. Should Pakistan and perhaps the United States immediately recognize the ISI-arranged Afghan interim government or wait until it captured territory inside Afghanistan? Yaqub Khan, Bhutto’s foreign minister, thought the rebels needed to demonstrate they were “not just some Johnnies riding around Peshawar in Mercedes.” Should they encourage Afghan fighters to hurl themselves at heavily defended Jalalabad or go more slowly? Pakistani intelligence and the CIA had already developed a detailed military plan for attacking Jalalabad, and they wanted to move fast. ISI had assembled five thousand to seven thousand Afghan rebels near the city. They were being equipped for a conventional frontal military assault on its garrisons. This approach was much different from the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the anti-Soviet campaign. Yet Hamid Gul promised Bhutto that Jalalabad would fall to the rebels within a week if she was “prepared to allow for a certain degree of bloodshed.” The ISI chief’s eyes were “blazing with passion,” as Bhutto remembered it, and Gul spoke so forcefully that she thought Jalalabad would “fall in twenty-four hours, let alone in one week.” “There can be no ceasefire in a jihad against the Marxist unbeliever,” Gul declared. “War must go on until Darul Harb [house of war] is cleansed and becomes Darul Amn [house of peace]!” Oakley, too, was optimistic.5

  The CIA plunged in to help. Bearden’s case officers, Schroen’s case officers, and military officers from ISI’s Afghan bureau—often led by the committed Islamists Brigadier Janjua and Colonel Imam—met frequently in Rawalpindi and Peshawar. CIA officers unveiled a covert plan to cut off the main supply line between Kabul and Jalalabad. There was only one motor route between the two cities, the Sarobi Road, which ran for miles through a narrow chasm, crisscrossing flimsy bridges. The CIA had imported specially shaped conical explosive charges, designed like very large household flower pots, that could blow huge craters in the road.

  Pakistani intelligence summoned about a dozen commanders from the Sarobi area to a meeting at a safehouse in Peshawar. CIA officers spread out satellite photographs of the Sarobi Road on the floor. They all kneeled around the satellite images—bearded Afghans in draping turbans, CIA case officers in blue jeans, Pakistani intelligence officers in civilian salwars. They planned where to place the explosives and where to install machine gun nests for ambush attacks on Najibullah’s convoys.

  The Afghans could sense that the CIA’s bank window was open, and suddenly it seemed that every commander within a hundred miles of Jalalabad needed new Toyota double-cab trucks to accomplish his part of the attack. The CIA purchased several hundred trucks in Japan that winter, shipped them to Karachi, and rolled them up to Peshawar to support the Jalalabad assault.6

  The rebels had to run through Soviet-laid minefields as they approached fixed positions around Jalalabad. The Afghans were trained to send mules ahead of their soldiers to clear the fields. They would tie long wooden logs on ropes behind the mules and drive them into a minefield to set off the buried charges.

  “I know you don’t like this,” an Afghan commander explained to Gary Schroen as the Jalalabad battle began, “but it’s better than using people.”

  “Yes, but just don’t take any pictures,” Schroen advised. Nobody back in Washington “wants to see pictures of little donkeys blown up.”7

  The pictures they did see were worse. As the spring sun melted the snowy eastern passes, hundreds of Afghan boys and young men recruited from refugee camps for the glorious Jalalabad campaign poured off the rock ridges and fell before fusillades of machine gun fire from terrified government conscripts. Soviet-made bombers flown by the Afghan air force out of Kabul struck the attackers in open plains from high altitude. Dozens of Scud missiles fired by Soviet advisers, who had clandestinely stayed behind after the official Soviet withdrawal, rained in deafening fury onto mujahedin positions. The rebels pushed toward Jalalabad’s outskirts but stalled. Commanders squabbled over whose forces were supposed to be where. ISI officers participated in the assault but failed to unify and organize their Afghan attacking force. A week passed, and Jalalabad did not fall. Then two weeks, then three. “Fall it will,” Hamid Gul assured Bhutto’s civilian aides. Casualties mounted among the mujahedin. Ambulances from the Arab and international charities raced back and forth from Peshawar. By May their hand-scrawled lists of the dead and maimed numbered in the thousands. Still Jalalabad and its airport remained in Najibullah’s hands. Despite all the explosives and trucks shipped in, the CIA plan to shut off the Sarobi Road fizzled.

  In Kabul, Najibullah appeared before the international press, defiant and emboldened. His generals and his Soviet sponsors began to take heart: Perhaps a rebel triumph in Kabul was not inevitable after all. Gorbachev authorized massive subsidies to Najibullah that spring. From air bases in Uzbekistan the dying Soviet government ferried as much as $300 million per month in food and ammunition to Kabul on giant transport planes, at least twice the amount of aid being supplied by the CIA and Saudi intelligence to the mujahedin.8 One after another, enormous white Soviet Ilyushin-76 cargo jets, expelling starburst flares to distract heat-seeking Stinger missiles, circled like lumbering pterodactyls above the Kabul Valley, descending to the international airport or Bagram air base to its north. The flour, mortar shells, and Scud missiles they disgorged each day gradually buoyed the morale of Kabul’s conscripts and bolstered the staying power of Najibullah’s new tribal and ethnic militias.

  Frustrated, the CIA officers working from Peshawar recruited an Afghan Shiite commander in western Kabul, known for vicious urban guerrilla bombings, to step up sabotage operations in the capital. They supplied his Shiite commandos with Stingers to try to shoot down one of the Ilyushin cargo planes, hoping to send a message to the Soviets that they would pay a price for such extravagant aid to Najibullah. The team infiltrated a Stinger on the outskirts of the Kabul airport and fired at an Ilyushin as it took off, but one of the plane’s hot defensive flares caught the missile’s tracking system, and the shot missed. The rebels sent out a videotape of the failed attack. The CIA also recruited agents to drop boron carbide sludge into the gas tanks or oil casings of transport vehicles to disable them.9 But none of these operations put much of a dent in Najibullah’s supply lines. And still the garrisons at Jalalabad stood.

  The ISI bureaus in Peshawar and Quetta expanded propaganda operations against Najibullah. With CIA help they inserted anti-Najibullah commercials into bootleg videotapes of one of the Rambo movies, then greatly popular in Afghanistan, and they shipped the tapes across the border.10 Najibullah stepped up his own propaganda campaign. He filled radio and television airwaves with programs that demonized Hekmatyar and his fellow Islamists as devilish Neanderthals and Pakistani stooges who would tear Afghanistan away from its cultural moorings.

  What ordinary Afghans made of all the fear-mongering was difficult to say. Refugees poured out of Nangarhar province to escape the terrible fighting at Jalalabad, but as the stalemate continued that spring, most Afghan civilians and refugees sat still, many of them enduring a long and persistent misery. They waited for one side or the other to prevail so that they might go home.

  THE BLOODY DISASTER at Jalalabad only deepened Ed McWilli
ams’s conviction that the CIA and ISI were careening in the wrong direction. He could not understand why Oakley tolerated Bearden’s collaborations with Pakistani intelligence and its anti-American clients, especially Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. It appalled him that the United States was staking its policy that spring on the Afghan interim government, a feckless fiction, as McWilliams saw it, bought and paid for by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agents.

  In February the incoming Bush administration had renewed the legal authority for CIA covert action in Afghanistan. (Each new president had to reaffirm ongoing covert action programs under a fresh signature.) President Bush adjusted the official goals of U.S. policy. The Reaganera objective of Soviet withdrawal had been achieved. Under the revised finding, the most important purpose of continuing CIA covert action was to promote “self-determination” by the Afghan people. With its echoes from the American revolution, the phrase had been promoted by congressional conservatives who championed the mujahedin cause.11

  McWilliams concluded that achieving true Afghan “self-determination” would now require the CIA to break with Pakistani intelligence. Increasingly, he believed, it was ISI and its Islamist agenda—rather than communism—that posed the greatest obstacle to Afghan independence.

  Inside the Islamabad embassy, tensions deepened. The investigations of McWilliams’s drinking and sexual habits stalled—they turned up nothing—but a new inquiry opened about whether he had compromised classified data. With Oakley’s support, Bearden insisted that McWilliams be accompanied by CIA case officers on his diplomatic reporting trips to Peshawar and Quetta. McWilliams chafed; he was insulted, angry, and more determined than before to put his views across.

  Each cable to Washington now became a cause for gaming and intrigue in the embassy’s communications suite. Oakley would scribble dissenting comments on McWilliams’s drafts, and McWilliams would erase or ignore them and cable ahead on his own authority. McWilliams believed that Oakley had repressed a memo he wrote reporting the capture of Stinger missiles by Iran. On another occasion when he wandered by the cabling machine, he saw an outgoing high-level message from Oakley to Washington arguing that it was in America’s interest to accept a Pakistani sphere of influence in Afghanistan. Appalled, McWilliams quietly photocopied the cable and slipped it into his private files—more ammunition.12

  McWilliams’s criticisms of the CIA now extended beyond his earlier view that Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous American allies. By endorsing ISI’s puppet Afghan interim government, the United States had become involved in Afghan politics for the first time, and in doing so it had betrayed American principles and self-interest, McWilliams argued.

  Earlier, as Soviet troops prepared to leave Afghanistan, the United States had decided not to help Afghans negotiate a peaceful political transition because the CIA believed Najibullah would fall quickly. The CIA also feared that political talks would slow down the Soviet departure. McWilliams believed those arguments had now been overtaken by events. To prevent Pakistan from installing its anti-American clients in Kabul, to prevent further suffering by Afghan civilians, and to rebuild a stable and centrist politics in Afghanistan, the United States now had to ease off on its covert military strategy and begin to sponsor a broader political settlement, he argued.

  The Afghan interim government, a paper cabinet formed to occupy cities captured by ISI’s Islamists, “is the wrong vehicle to advance the entirely correct U.S. policy objective of achieving a genuinely representative Afghan government through Afghan self-determination,” McWilliams wrote that spring in a confidential cable sent through the State Department’s dissent channel. (The dissent channel was a special cable routing that permitted diplomats to express their personal views without having them edited by an embassy’s ambassador.) Many Afghans had now “called for an early political settlement to the war,” McWilliams wrote. Only a “relatively stable government will be able to address the massive problems of rehabilitation and refugee return in postwar Afghanistan.” A large pool of Afghan intellectuals living abroad “would be prepared to give their talent and credibility to a neutral administration which could serve as a bridge rising above the current stalemated military situation and the sterile dialogue of propaganda exchanges.” But the United States apparently intended to wait out the summer “fighting season” before considering such political talks. This decision “entails serious risks … [and] is not justifiable on either political or humanitarian grounds. We should press ahead now for a political settlement.”13

  As McWilliams’s cables circulated in Washington, and as gossip about his tense disagreements with Bearden and Oakley spread, his policy prescriptions attracted new converts. The State Department’s intelligence bureau privately endorsed McWilliams, citing in part the detailed evidence in his cables. British intelligence officers in Islamabad and London also weighed in on his behalf. After earlier backing the anti-Soviet jihad, they now wanted the CIA to move away from Hekmatyar and an ISI-led military solution. Military supplies to the mujahedin should continue, the British argued, and battlefield pressure on Najibullah’s government forces should be maintained, but the time had also come to work with the United Nations to develop a political compromise for Afghanistan. This might involve a neutral transitional government of Afghan intellectuals living in Europe and the United States, Kabul technocrats, Kandahar royalists, and politically astute rebel commanders such as Massoud.14

  The CIA remained adamant about its support for Pakistani intelligence, however. Bearden regarded McWilliams as little more than a nuisance. He took himself and his office much too seriously, Bearden felt. The State Department’s real policy on Afghanistan was made by Michael Armacost and others on the seventh floor at headquarters, where the most senior officials worked. Anyway, McWilliams, his midlevel supporters at State, and the British (who had lost two wars in Afghanistan, Bearden noted pointedly) made the mistake of believing that there was such a thing as a political Afghanistan, separate from Pakistan, “just because a few white guys drew a line in the sand” in northwestern British India a century earlier, as Bearden saw it. Still, the more State Department officials mouthed the McWilliams line, the more Langley argued the contrary. Interagency debates grew caustic as the CIA’s forecasts of a lightning rebel victory over Najibullah yielded to a grinding stalemate.15

  The agency’s operatives felt they had adjusted their approach in Afghanistan in many ways since the Soviets began to withdraw. They had responded to outside criticism by bypassing ISI and opening secret, direct lines with important Afghan commanders such as Massoud. They had directed CIA funding and logistical support toward massive humanitarian efforts on the Afghan border, to accompany the policy of military pressure. The problem with McWilliams, they told those with the proper clearances, was that he was cut out of the highly classified information channels that showed the full breadth of CIA covert policy. For instance, in May 1989, just as McWilliams was composing his most heated dissents, Gary Schroen had personally delivered a $900,000 lump sum payment to Massoud’s brother, Ahmed Zia, over and above Massoud’s $200,000 monthly stipend, to help fund a humanitarian reconstruction program in northern Afghanistan. Massoud passed through to the CIA photographs of road repair and irrigation projects under way, although the agency’s officers doubted that the projects shown had been directly stimulated by their funding. In any event, the CIA argued, their cash payment represented a fresh political initiative: Massoud would have the resources that summer to win civilian support for his militias and local councils, and to start rebuilding the Panjshir. McWilliams knew nothing of this secret money. Besides, McWilliams seemed reflexively anti-American in his analysis, some of the CIA officers said. They denounced as naïve the prescriptions for a political solution pushed by McWilliams, the British, and the State Department. No stable government could be constructed in Kabul without Pakistani support, they argued. None was likely in any case. Afghan rebels from all parties, whether Islamist or royalist, extremist or moderate,
were determined to finish their military jihad. That was what “self-determination” meant to them. Hekmatyar and the Muslim Brotherhood networks could be managed and contained.16

  Increasingly, Oakley felt caught in the middle. He tacked carefully between the two sides. The problem with McWilliams, Oakley believed, was that he was trying to reshape White House policy from the middle levels of the bureaucracy. This simply could not be done. The State Department and the CIA clearly disagreed now about Afghanistan, but this disagreement had to be resolved in Washington, by the president and his Cabinet, not inside the Islamabad embassy.

  James Baker, the Texas lawyer who had served as White House chief of staff and then treasury secretary during the Reagan administration, was the new secretary of state. He displayed little personal interest in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Oakley could see that Baker was not willing to challenge the CIA over Afghanistan policy. Unless he was willing to do so, all the Islamabad embassy could do was work with the current guidance, which put the CIA in a commanding position and kept the United States locked in its embrace with Pakistani intelligence.17

  McWilliams, meanwhile, had to go, Oakley felt. McWilliams had persistently angered the embassy’s three most powerful figures: Oakley, his deputy Beth Jones, and Bearden. An opportunity arrived that spring when members of Congress finally appointed a formal ambassadorial-level special envoy to the Afghan resistance, a pet project of Gordon Humphrey. McWilliams was too junior in the Foreign Service to be elevated to this new post, so the question arose as to whether he should become the new envoy’s deputy. Oakley stepped in and arranged for McWilliams to be transferred abruptly out of the Islamabad embassy and back to Washington. The first McWilliams knew of his transfer was a cable telling him that his “request for curtailment” of his tour of duty in Islamabad had been accepted—a request that McWilliams did not know he had made. Leaving only a few fingerprints, Oakley and Bearden had effectively fired him.