88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (17 page)

At that point, the screen went blank. We’d lost the satellite link. My senior communicator tried to reestablish it, to no avail. As no one called back, I could only assume they’d heard enough from me. But according to Bob Woodward’s later account of the event, Secretary Rumsfeld had taken exception to my suggestion of a pause in our bombing operations. It had struck an old nerve with him, suggesting the unilateral bombing pauses staged to encourage negotiations with the North during the Vietnam War, which in the minds of many had made us appear like weak supplicants to Hanoi. There would be no bombing pauses, he said. The two contexts could not have seemed more different to me. I might have tried to explain, but of course I would never know of Rumsfeld’s concerns. We are all products and, if we are not careful, victims of our experience. The secretary was famously experienced.

It was hard for me to tell whether this little exposition had gone well or not. The interpersonal dynamics viewed through the keyhole afforded by this teleconference suggested a lot of tension back there, but in the crush of events, no one, understandably, was briefing me on what was going on. I was generally left to guess what effect my input
was having in the interdepartmental wrangle taking place as Washington prepared to go to war in Afghanistan.

Apart from Secretary Rumsfeld’s curmudgeonly behavior, there had been another discordant note during the evening. At one point, Hank, the new head of CTC/SO, was explaining to the secretary about some of the Northern Alliance commanders, and mentioned that Isma’il Khan of Herat was a Tajik. Without thinking, I contradicted him, pointing out that although aligned with UIFSA and from an area with a substantial Tajik population, Isma’il Khan was himself a Pashtun. It was a blatantly stupid thing to do, publicly contradicting a colleague on a seemingly minor point in front of the most senior officials of the Defense Department. Extreme fatigue is my sole, inadequate defense. And my victim’s reaction only underscored for me the idiocy of what I’d done.

“Oh,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl. “I hadn’t realized that.” It would have been bad enough if I’d been right; but I was wrong. God only knows where I had gotten the notion that Isma’il Khan was a Pashtun, but like so many
jihad
-era commanders, he had faded into insignificance and obscurity during the Taliban years, and was only now beginning to come back into the political conversation. It may seem like a relatively small thing, and for someone else it might have been. I will simply never know to what extent, if any, this little
faux pas
would contribute to our subsequent difficulties. But it certainly didn’t help.

My past interactions with Hank had not been unpleasant, at least from my perspective. In fact, one might have thought he owed me a debt of gratitude. I had hosted him, as a mid-ranking CTC manager, during the previous year, and taken him on a tour of the Khyber Pass and some of the wilder spots in the North-West Frontier. Among these was Darra Adam Khel, an infamous village of expert gunsmiths who can produce counterfeit versions of virtually any firearm, from an AK-47 to a high-end Italian shotgun. While there, the ruling
malik
, or tribal elder, made a gift to both Hank and my son of innocent-looking fountain pens. When the nib of the pen was removed, however, it was revealed to be a firearm, from which a 22-caliber round could be fired at close range—the perfect assassination weapon.

As we attempted to board a return flight from Peshawar, Hank ill-advisedly placed the weapon in his carry-on luggage, perhaps thinking it was adequately disguised. It was immediately spotted by the young Pakistan Army trooper manning the X-ray machine, who demanded that Hank’s backpack be opened for inspection. This threatened to get ugly: a U.S. counterterrorism official caught smuggling an assassination weapon aboard a commercial aircraft overseas. The fact that we were bloodying the Pakistanis over the laxness of their counterterrorism policies was probably not going to help. Seeing that the culprit was an American official, and not wanting to take the burden of the impending unpleasantness entirely upon himself, the
jawan
(soldier) made a move to summon his superior. This, I knew, could rapidly escalate out of control. Hank had no immunity from prosecution. Praising the young fellow for his perspicacity, I explained the situation, noting that the pen had been a gift from the local tribes, and claiming that its recipient had no idea of its true nature. By all means, I suggested, the offending item was dangerous and should be confiscated, but perhaps it would be best for all of us if we simply left it at that. The young soldier glanced again at Hank’s official passport. After a moment’s hesitation, he agreed, much to my relief. I would have occasion to wonder if I’d acted too hastily.

OCTOBER 2, 2001

T
HE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE
two men could not have been greater. Mullah Osmani sat stolidly, his great bulk supported in an overstuffed chair to my left. In front of me, beaming and impish, sat little Mullah Jalil, perched on the edge of a high bed, his short legs dangling over the side. He was almost giddy with excitement, swinging his black Reeboks to and fro.

The diminutive deputy foreign minister had again been sent by Mullah Omar as an official note-taker for this, my second meeting with Osmani. By this time I was developing a genuine understanding of how Jalil operated. He had thrived in the Taliban system by making himself useful to as many people as possible, always managing to stay in the middle of the action, where he could manipulate the various players to his own ends. A meeting like this was what he lived for. Apart from serving as Mullah Omar’s eyes and ears, it was impossible to know how many overlapping agendas Jalil might be trying to serve on this day. What was clear to me, though, was that for me to have any chance of success in this meeting, Mullah Abdul Jalil Akhund must not be a part of it.

Events were hurtling forward. On September 20, the same day that President Bush delivered his ultimatum to the Taliban in his State of the Union address, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Clergy, numbering 700 scholars, had issued its conclusions. It had partially—but only partially—opened the door to an acceptable settlement by recommending that the Taliban government should seek bin Laden’s voluntary
departure from the country. This was as far as they would go, but it provided an opportunity to the Taliban leader, should he choose to seize it. A day later, on the 21st, Mullah Omar promptly slammed the door shut, stating that he would neither turn over bin Laden nor ask him to leave. If there were any ambiguity on that score, that same day Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, held a press conference in Islamabad designed to remove it.

General Mahmud of the ISI, beginning to despair, made one final effort on September 28, leading a group of eight Pakistani
Ulema
, well-known religious extremists all, to meet with Omar in what Mahmud himself described as an attempt to induce the Taliban to do the minimum necessary “to get the gun to swing away from their heads.” If there was nothing for the moment to be done about bin Laden, Mahmud suggested, perhaps the Taliban leader could agree to release the eight humanitarian workers from Shelter Now International, who had recently been arrested for Christian proselytizing; or perhaps he could hand over some of bin Laden’s lieutenants; or at least he could allow Americans to inspect the al-Qa’ida camps, to demonstrate that their occupants had fled. All suggestions were in vain.

As the alternatives to all-out war against the Taliban were being systematically foreclosed, I could sense that attitudes in Washington were hardening in tandem. Even a few days before, the tone had been quite different, at least at the White House. The president, who had not yet delivered his public ultimatum of the 20th, had reacted to George Tenet’s report of my September 15 meeting—and the implicit possibility of a shift in Taliban policy—with open interest.

“Fascinating,” he had said.

Similarly, when my war plan was approved by the president on September 24, he and the cabinet principals still held out the possibility of a continued role for the Taliban, provided its leaders agreed to break with Omar and meet U.S. demands. All, including Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, agreed that we should not hit the full Taliban leadership at the outset of our military operations, lest we discourage an intra-Taliban split.

Over a week later, though, in the face of Mullah Omar’s recalcitrance,
I could feel the political landscape shifting. Flying south from Islamabad on a 1980s-vintage twin-engine aircraft which General Mahmud had put at my disposal, peering through the early morning dust haze at the razor-edged mountain peaks of Baluchistan, the utter remoteness and desolation of the surroundings provided an apt metaphor for my situation. I was entering the wilderness. One could sense that in the past few days, as manifested in a dozen subtle ways, all American efforts were now vectoring inexorably toward war. You could see it in the attitudes on display during the teleconference with Secretary Rumsfeld the night before. It was no longer clear to me that Washington would accept any deal, even if an alternative Taliban leadership were prepared to offer one. Once the mental break is made, and war has been deemed inevitable, events take on their own momentum.

Someone with a greater sense of political self-preservation would have dropped this effort entirely. I had at least had sufficient good sense to get George Tenet’s prior verbal permission for this meeting, conveyed to me by the chief of the Near East and South Asia Division. In the process I had stressed that my main goal was to induce Osmani to break with Mullah Omar. At a minimum, I hoped to sow serious divisions within the Taliban leadership. I could not rule out greater success, however, and had to contemplate the possibility that Mullah Osmani and the rest of the Taliban
Shura
, the leadership council, would reject Mullah Omar, accept U.S. demands, and find a way to turn bin Laden and his fourteen most senior al-Qa’ida lieutenants over to us in a bid to retain power. That might have been a welcome development ten days before, but I had the sense it might be unwelcome now.

I knew that this mission, no matter how carefully pursued, would carry with it the taint of
negotiation
, the very idea of which had become anathema, from what I could divine of the current climate in Washington. The president himself had said that there could be no ambiguity—you were either with us or with the terrorists—and that his demands of the Taliban were not up for negotiation or discussion. As a practical matter, however, even finding the modalities to meet U.S. demands would require discussion, if not negotiation, and a refusal of all discussions would scuttle any chance of non-military success. However
remote the chance of a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, I felt, it should not be cast away lightly. I was haunted by the thought of the disasters that had befallen both the British and the Russians in Afghanistan, and I feared that a similar fate could befall us if we attempted to achieve a political objective using exclusively military means.

I was not concerned about exceeding my authority, per se; I essentially had none, and I knew it. I had no specific instructions, no approved talking points, little guidance other than what I might logically draw from the president’s September 20 speech and from the war plan approved a few days later. I had no mandate whatever, beyond the strictly operational one given me by George Tenet. But I saw that lack of guidance as a blessing. At that stage in my career, I had had comparatively little direct exposure to group foreign policy deliberations at the cabinet and subcabinet level, but I had seen enough to have little faith in them, at least on this topic and under the current circumstances. In the prevailing climate, I feared, a request for guidance would have elicited a series of narrow, sterile, and pugnacious ultimatums, which would inevitably elicit a similarly knee-jerk response from the Taliban.

No, I thought: Better to go without talking points. If I could come up with some formula to meet Washington’s demands in a way palatable to the Taliban, I could at least present Washington with a clear proposal to which they could respond as they chose. I would have done all I could. Nor was I concerned about reaching a political agreement I was not authorized to reach. I intended to make clear that I had no authority to agree to anything—only a willingness to try to find solutions, which competent authorities in Washington and Kandahar could then accept or reject.

However it might look, my country would lose nothing from what I might do. The worst that could happen would be that I would mislead Osmani and others in the Taliban leadership into thinking that if they broke with Omar and accepted American demands, the Americans would deal with them as a legitimate authority. If the Americans later refused to abide by such a tentative “agreement,” the damage to the Taliban’s leadership cohesion might already be irreversible, and we would gain great advantage as a result.

No, the United States was not going to lose anything by what I would do that day. The day’s only likely casualties would be my reputation and my career, for having had the temerity to elaborate, however tentatively, on the president’s stark ultimatum. No matter how remote the chances of success, though, I was not about to see America get bogged down in an endless and futile Afghan campaign, and then spend the rest of my life wondering whether, if only I had had sufficient moral courage, history might have been different. Against that dire possibility, the potential sacrifice of my career seemed a paltry price to pay.

The ISI had arranged for me and Tom to meet with the Afghans in a villa normally used as sleeping quarters by their own officers, located in the old British Cantonment area of Quetta. When we arrived, we could see that the villa was small and ill-suited to our needs. The only place where we could hold a meeting with even minimal privacy was in a bedroom. In the few minutes before Osmani’s expected arrival, Tom and I shifted the furniture around to make a small seating area around a low wood table. I arranged to have Osmani to my left and Tom to my right; I had no intention of making room for Jalil.