Ghost Wars (80 page)

Some State Department officials and some analysts at the CIA still believed—despite little supporting evidence—that the Taliban might voluntarily turn bin Laden over for trial in exchange for diplomatic recognition and relief from economic sanctions. Pressure from Karzai and other dissident Pashtuns might encourage the Taliban to compromise, but otherwise it was not something the State Department sought to encourage. Albright, Tom Pickering, and Rick Inderfurth declared publicly again and again that the United States would not take sides in the Afghan war.

State Department intelligence analysts did report during the first half of 1999 that resistance to the Taliban was growing. Still, “We believe there is no military solution to this conflict,” Inderfurth said. “The United States supports no individual Afghan faction but maintains contacts with all to further progress toward a peaceful settlement.”
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At interagency meetings CIA officials had raised the possibility of a new American alliance with Massoud, possibly involving covert arms supplies. But outside of the CIA, the Clinton administration remained deeply skeptical about the commander and his northern warlord allies. At an ambassadors’ meeting in Washington in May, Albright canvassed her envoys to Pakistan and Central Asia: What did they think about a new tilt toward Massoud? Milam was adamantly opposed. Arms supplies to Massoud would only deepen the war and kill more innocent Afghans, he and his colleagues at the Islamabad embassy firmly believed. Massoud could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield. He was bottled up in the north and losing ground.
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The influential Pickering argued that no Afghan policy could succeed if it did not involve the Pashtuns in the south. If the U.S. tilted toward Massoud in the north, it would only exacerbate Afghanistan’s ethnic divisions—and in a quixotic military cause.
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Other State and White House officials recalled the horrible violence against civilians in Kabul during the mid-1990s while Massoud was defense minister and pointed to persistent reports that he relied on drug trafficking. He was not a worthy ally of the United States, they argued.

MASSOUD TOLD HIS AIDES he was confident that the Taliban would wither. They would overextend themselves, and opposition among Pashtuns would gradually rise.
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Twice Massoud spoke by satellite telephone to Mullah Omar. As his aides listened, Massoud told the Taliban leader that history clearly showed Afghanistan could never be ruled by one faction, that the country could only be governed by a coalition. But the only history Omar had ever read was in the Koran, and he refused to compromise.

Massoud persisted. He dispatched his intelligence aide, Amrullah Saleh, to Switzerland to meet secretly with Taliban representatives. They also held back-channel talks in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But the Taliban were buoyed by their support from ISI, Saudi, and other Persian Gulf donors. “They were very arrogant,” recalled one of Massoud’s aides.

Still, Massoud counseled patience. His strategy in 1999, recalled his brother Ahmed Wali, was similar to what it had been a decade earlier, when Soviet troops withdrew: He planned to outlast and eventually outmaneuver Pakistani intelligence. Eventually, Massoud said, the United States would recognize that the Taliban was its enemy.When that happened, he would be ready to receive American help. Meanwhile, through the Stinger missile recovery program and occasional meetings with CIA officers at safehouses in Tajikistan and in the Panjshir, Massoud kept his lines to Langley open.

At the State Department, Pickering and Inderfurth evolved a more nuanced policy toward Massoud by the summer of 1999. They still strongly opposed American arms supplies, but they privately made clear to Russia and Iran that the United States had no objections to the covert arms
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countries supplied Massoud. They defended this policy by saying they did not want to see the Northern Alliance completely overrun. If Massoud’s forces were expelled from Afghanistan, that would leave the Taliban triumphantly unchallenged—and less willing than ever to negotiate.
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Inderfurth traveled to Tashkent that July for multiparty peace talks with Afghan leaders sponsored by the United Nations. Massoud also decided to attend. Inderfurth’s opening statement offered olive branches to every group, including the Taliban. The conference’s “Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan” was a testament to muddled policy and dead-end negotiations. Its preamble expressed “profound concern” about the status of Afghan minorities and women and then declared that the signatories were “deeply distressed” about drug trafficking and, thirdly, were “also concerned” about terrorism. Pakistan and Iran pledged to end arms shipments to their favored Afghan militias, pledges they did not intend to keep, as the United States well understood.
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On the night the talks broke up, Inderfurth met with Massoud and his aides in a side room of the behemoth Soviet-era hall where the conference had been held. Massoud swept in wearing pressed khaki robes and a wool cap, radiating “charisma and presence,” as Inderfurth recalled it. As the American envoy reviewed diplomatic issues, Massoud seemed bored, but when Inderfurth asked about the war, Massoud lit up and leaned forward to describe his defenses and plans.
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Inderfurth asked if Massoud needed military equipment to undertake his summer operations. Massoud demurred. His aides said later they did not request weapons because they knew the Clinton administration had ruled out such supplies. Also, Russia, Iran, and India “were finding themselves comfortable providing us means to counter the Taliban because there was no objection from the U.S. on shipment of arms,” one of Massoud’s aides recalled.

Massoud expressed disappointment about U.S. indifference to Afghanistan, as Inderfurth recalled it. Massoud’s aides remember him as more than disappointed. He liked Inderfurth better than some other U.S. diplomats, they said, but Massoud saw American policy as profoundly misguided, and he could not understand why it was so slow to change. At the Tashkent sessions the Americans kept talking about the Taliban and the Northern Alliance as two equally culpable “warring factions.” This seemed outrageous to Massoud. It showed expediency and a loss of perspective in American foreign policy, he thought. As the Taliban became more powerful, even the United States moved to appease them, Massoud believed.
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Massoud tried to inventory for Inderfurth the massacres of civilians carried out by Taliban and al Qaeda forces. Summoning an argument designed to resonate in Washington, he described the Taliban as among the world’s most egregious human rights violators, a regime that systematically repressed women and Shiite minorities. “We said, ‘The United States is the only major power in this world pursuing a policy basically oriented on human rights. Let us see the reality,’ ” recalled a senior Massoud aide who was present. Massoud sought to convince Inderfurth that the Taliban were beginning to weaken, his aide recalled. Now was the time for the United States to pressure Pakistan to cut off aid to the Taliban, Massoud argued.

Inderfurth and Pickering believed they were pushing Pakistan as hard as they could, yet they had limited leverage in Islamabad. Counterterrorism officials such as the State Department’s Michael Sheehan argued in internal memos during this period that State could push harder by placing terrorism at the very top of the American agenda. But State’s brain trust—Albright, Pickering, and Strobe Talbott—felt that the United States could not afford to take such a narrow approach. America had other compelling interests: nuclear weapons, Kashmir, and the stability of Pakistani society. The support flowing to the Taliban from the Pakistani army and ISI had to be challenged in this broader context of American concerns, State’s leadership insisted. Clinton agreed. The United States had a full agenda with Pakistan—the threat of war with India, nuclear weapons, terrorism, democracy, Kashmir—and all of it was important, Clinton believed.
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A decade before, it had been the State Department’s Peter Tomsen, among others, who pushed a reluctant CIA to move closer to Ahmed Shah Massoud and away from Pakistani intelligence. Now the bureaucratic chairs had been reversed. It was State Department diplomats, along with some officers at the CIA, who resisted calls for a closer alliance with Massoud during 1999. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser and political gatekeeper on foreign policy, endorsed their view. There were isolated, individual advocates for a new alliance with Massoud at State, the White House, and in Congress, but it was mainly at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center—especially in the bin Laden unit—that Massoud had the most ardent believers.

Whatever the doubts about his independent outlook, whatever the fears about his drug trafficking, the CIA’s Manson Family knew one thing for certain: Ahmed Shah Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.

COFER BLACK INITIATED paperwork and approvals with Richard Clarke’s White House counterterrorism office late that summer. Black said he wanted to send a CIA team, led by his new bin Laden unit chief, inside Afghanistan to meet with Massoud and his lieutenants, in order to reenergize Massoud’s efforts against bin Laden. This would be the fifth CIA mission to the Panjshir since the autumn of 1997, code-named JAWBREAKER-5. The mission’s goal was to establish a renewed counterterrorism liaison. The CIA would offer to train, equip, and expand Massoud’s existing intelligence service based in the Panjshir Valley and help it operate as widely and securely as possible in Afghan cities and provinces. The agency would offer Massoud more cash, more secure communications, listening devices, and other nonlethal spy gear.
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Black and his bin Laden unit hoped to establish with Massoud a robust program of intelligence exchange, concentrating on the daily mystery of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Tenet and his colleagues overseeing technical collection moved a satellite to obtain better coverage of Afghanistan, and the National Security Agency developed intercept equipment for use inside the country. The bin Laden unit hoped Massoud would enhance these technical approaches on the ground. In his war against the Taliban and its allies, Massoud often maneuvered in battle against bin Laden’s Arab brigade, Pakistani volunteers, and Chechen irregulars. Ultimately the CIA hoped Massoud would order his militia to capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and either kill him or hand him over to the United States.

The new CIA program would eventually complement commando training in Uzbekistan and Pakistan as well as continuing work with the longer-established tribal tracking team in southern Afghanistan, Black explained. The Counterterrorist Center hoped to surround al Qaeda militias with trained, equipped forces drawn from local populations. Then it would seek to locate bin Laden or his lieutenants and maneuver them into a trap.

Given the doubts about Massoud inside the Clinton administration, the Panjshir missions faced close legal and policy review. “It was all CIA initiated,” recalled a senior White House official. The Counterterrorist Center needed approval to make its small cash payments to Massoud on each trip. “Well, how small is small?” the White House official asked. A few hundred thousand dollars, the CIA replied. Clarke and Berger assented.
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The intelligence policy and legal offices at the National Security Council drafted formal, binding policy guidance for the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. Black got involved; he wanted everything written down clearly so there would be no recriminations later if CIA gear or cash was misused by Massoud. “Put it down in ‘Special English’ so people can understand,” Black would say sardonically to his colleagues. He wanted his men to be able to hold copies of the White House legal authorities in their hands when they met with Massoud and his intelligence aides in the Panjshir. He wanted the CIA officers to be able to literally read out their White House guidance in clear terms that were easy to translate. There would be no improvisation, Black said. The Counterterrorist Center chief occasionally cited the English king Henry II’s famous attempt in 1170 to commission the assassination of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, by asking an ambiguous question. Henry II had asked open-endedly: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Black ranted sarcastically to his colleagues: The CIA is not in the “rid me of this priest” business anymore. He wanted presidential orders that were specific and exacting. “You’ve got to spell it out,” he told the White House.
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Massoud was at war with the Taliban. The United States declared a policy of strict neutrality in that war. The White House also wanted to ensure that the CIA’s counterterrorism mission to the Panjshir Valley did not become some kind of Trojan horse strategy for a rogue CIA effort to boost Massoud’s strength and capability in his battles against the Taliban. Clinton said he was prepared to work with Massoud on intelligence operations, despite his record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance. The Pentagon and intelligence community both provided analysis to Clinton, as he recalled it years later, arguing that Massoud was receiving all the weapons he could handle from other suppliers, and that in any event he would never be able to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul. This certainly was Shelton’s consistent view from the Pentagon. At Langley, the CIA was divided on the question. After absorbing the briefs, Clinton made clear that he was not prepared to have the United States join the Afghan war on Massoud’s side, against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Clinton hand-wrote changes to a February 1999 authorizing memo to emphasize that Massoud’s men could only use lethal force against bin Laden in self-defense. The National Security Council approved written guidance to authorize intelligence cooperation with Massoud, while making clear that the CIA could provide no assistance that would “fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield.”
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