88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (11 page)

Sending my vacationing family ahead without me, I put off my annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod so that I could try to influence the options that would be put in front of the deputies. What I found at the NSC was more than discouraging. Attempting to explain to a senior staffer with specific responsibility for South Asia the idea of driving a wedge between the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, he asked: “You mean there’s a distinction between the two?”

Zalmay Khalilzad was the NSC’s newly appointed senior director for Southwest Asia and the Middle East, and he would be leading the discussion of policy options. An old Afghanistan hand and a genuine regional expert, I had first met him in the early 1990s, when he worked for Paul Wolfowitz at Defense. I would later come to know and admire him. He listened attentively to what I had to say, but on July 13, as I sat in the back row in the White House Situation Room as McLaughlin’s “second,” I could see that Zal was just all over the map. Rather than
advocating a systematic campaign to bring serious, sustained pressure to bear on the Taliban, as I had hoped, he presented a smorgasbord of disaggregated ideas. One proposal he particularly stressed was for creation of a “Radio Free Afghanistan.” I inwardly sighed. Rather than fomenting rebellion against them, we were proposing to persuade the Taliban with words—and the words of foreigners, at that. It was a long, quiet ride with McLaughlin back to Langley.

If there was a lack of clarity and consensus in downtown Washington, the same was true within CIA itself. CTC’s Cofer Black had had little to say at the morning meeting with Tenet, which after all had been my show, but I knew that thinking within the Counterterrorist Center was at cross-purposes with my own. I considered CTC an important institution in CIA, and a necessary one. It was the central institutional repository of knowledge concerning terrorist groups around the globe, and the only unit capable of efficiently coordinating and supporting their pursuit across the artificial lines by which the CIA’s geographic divisions divide up the world. As station chief, I depended on the center to provide many of the people and all of the funds I needed to support my operations in Afghanistan. Much later, I would actually have the privilege of leading the organization as its director, after it had expanded to several times its pre-9/11 size. But while they may have known a lot about terrorists, those in CTC often exhibited little understanding of the cultures, institutions, and social and political dynamics of the regions where those terrorists operated.

The senior ranks of CTC, I noted, were disproportionately populated with Africanists, as Cofer himself. Officers who grew up and spent their early careers in the relatively benign operating environment of sub-Saharan Africa tended to develop quickly, and to rack up the agent recruitment records that drive early promotions. As a result, the Africa Division consistently created rather more senior officers than its tiny management ranks could absorb. The Counterterrorist Center was a natural place to which they could migrate. I found the center’s lack of understanding of Afghanistan and Pakistan a trial, but a manageable one, at least for the moment.

Several of the senior CTC managers had become greatly enamored
of the head of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, the former
mujahideen
commander Ahmad Shah Masood. CTC had been sending senior emissaries to meet with him in his mountain redoubt of the Panjshir Valley, in Afghanistan’s far northeast, for perhaps a year and a half. Their hope was to win his cooperation in finding and capturing bin Laden. It may have been worth a try, but I knew this was a desperate pipe dream; although much too adept a politician to say so, Masood was far too busy defending what little territory remained in his hands from the Taliban onslaught to do much against bin Laden, ensconced as the Saudi was in the heart of Taliban-controlled real estate. If we wanted to get bin Laden, I was convinced, we were going to have to do it through the Pashtuns.

I shared CTC’s reverence for Masood, who was an accomplished military commander, a liberal-minded leader, and a true intellectual. For what it was worth, I supported the idea of maintaining close ties with him. But I was realistic about what he could actually do for us, which at that stage was little. I felt it was important for us to ensure, to the extent we could, that Masood and the Northern Alliance not be swept from the field, if for no other reason than to maintain them as a potential card to be played against the Taliban. But in addition to being in no position to capture bin Laden for us, they had neither the military absorptive capacity nor the tribal standing in the south and east of the country to be able to seriously pressure—let alone defeat—the Taliban. I favored giving them modest support; but too vigorous an effort would merely make the ongoing Afghan civil war more acute, further consolidate Pashtun support for the Taliban, and reinforce the latter’s need to maintain ties with its benefactors in al-Qa’ida. Completely throwing in our lot with Masood would have the opposite of the intended effect. The Taliban was a southern problem; the solution lay in the south. Nonetheless, when asked how to ratchet up pressure on the Taliban, CTC’s answer, again and again, was to reinforce the Northern Alliance.

Before leaving again for Islamabad in the waning days of July 2001, I had a lengthy meeting with the CTC leadership to try to bring them around to my views. I got nowhere: my friends in CTC found me, and my ideas, utterly unpersuasive.

JULY 29, 2001

T
HE CABIN WAS DARK,
the dishes had been cleared away, and there was little sound to compete with the low thrum of the aircraft engines. I was reclining in my seat, beginning to drop off to sleep, when I felt a subtle presence, like soft breathing, above my face. Thinking it was my imagination, I opened my eyes slightly, to find a dark-haired woman leaning over me.

“Are you awake?” she whispered. Slightly startled, I glanced around me. “Yes,” I breathed.

“We must speak,” she said. She inclined her head toward the forward end of the cabin. “Five minutes.”

I had first met Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi almost two years before, while waiting in a salon at the official Pakistani prime minister’s residence. General Musharraf’s overthrow of Prime Minister Sharif had taken place just a few weeks earlier. With no one else to occupy it, the general was using the ornate, Moorish-style mansion as a venue to receive guests while in Islamabad, away from his official residence at Army House.

The room was flooded with bright sunlight, streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. A peacock strutted on the lawn outside. Sitting alone, I looked up to see a slight and strikingly beautiful woman as she approached from my right. I recognized her immediately. Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, from a leading Pakistani family, was a well-known and eminent scholar, the former editor of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, and a former diplomat, having
previously represented the government of Benazir Bhutto as ambassador to Washington. Now she had been designated by Musharraf to serve again as Pakistan’s envoy to the U.S. capital.

She took a place beside me. She glanced knowingly when I told her my position; she obviously recognized who I was. “Well,” she said in a mellifluous voice, “
you
must be having an interesting time
here
.”

She was dressed in traditional
shalwar khameez
, in complementary shades of pastel green, with an offsetting silk
dupatta
, or shawl, draped over her chest and back over her shoulders. Perfectly groomed, she seemed much younger than her long résumé would imply, but it was impossible to say by how much. She exuded an aura of competence and command, combined with an almost girlish curiosity and, disarmingly, a hint of mischievous fun.

Suddenly she stopped. What was I doing here? I explained that Ambassador Milam and his political counselor, John Schmidt, were meeting with the Pakistani chief executive, and that I was cooling my heels in case I was called upon to address some issue or other. Her eyes widened in surprise for a moment, and then, as quickly, a veil of anger fell over them. We both realized at once that she was in an impossible position. She had been summoned to meet with General Musharraf immediately after his meeting with the American ambassador. She could not be included in the current meeting, as she had not presented her credentials in Washington, and so as yet had no official status. And yet here she was, sitting outside and therefore seeming pointedly excluded from the meeting. The exiting guests would understand the reasons for this, but still she would look slightly ridiculous, as though loitering outside a stage door she could not enter.

Just then, a pudgy brigadier from Army Protocol wandered into the room. She was on her feet and at him in a flash, in a salvo of elegant but acidic Urdu. A serious mistake had been made at her expense, and someone was going to pay. The hapless fellow fell back three steps, wincing, and then turned and scampered down the hallway like a scalded dog. Her fury momentarily slaked, Lodhi turned on her heel and marched across the room to a low settee. She whirled and flung herself on the middle cushion. There was a long pause. “Shit,” she said.

Now, as we leaned in the shadows against the forward bulkhead, Ambassador Lodhi was equally direct: She wanted to know what was going on, and she insisted that I must tell her. We were on a British Airways flight from London to Islamabad. I was returning from my consultations in Washington; she was traveling to Pakistan in advance of an expected visit by Christina Rocca, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

The Pakistani foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, had recently visited Washington and had been “shellshocked,” she said, by the vehemence of U.S. views regarding Pakistani support for the Taliban. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you for eighteen months?” Lodhi had told him. Senior officials in Pakistan didn’t want to acknowledge the growing U.S. anger and apprehension. Her detractors, she charged, were quick to play the “gender card,” suggesting that as a woman, she was panicking. Now that Sattar had gotten an earful for himself, perhaps they’d begin to understand what was at stake.

For months, in terms similar to those employed by Milam and me in our early 2000 conversation with President Musharraf, Lodhi had been warning Islamabad that the next attack by al-Qa’ida would generate a major response by the Americans, and that the consequences for Pakistan, as the most important defender and ally of the Taliban, would be severe. What, she wanted to know, was the chief of station telling General Mahmud, director-general of the ISI? So far as she could tell, Mahmud was “serene,” stating that he had no problems with CIA, based on “decades of good relations” between Langley and the vaunted Pakistani intelligence service.

That last phrase, the one about “decades of good relations,” stung me. In fact, at my instigation, we had tried a new tack with Mahmud and his service following my failed February 2000 meeting with Musharraf. Our charm offensive had been keyed to General Mahmud’s visit to Washington a month later, and to George Tenet’s subsequent visit to Pakistan in June of that year. I had lavished as much favorable attention on Mahmud as I could.

My idea, adopted readily by Director Tenet and Jim Pavitt, who had now risen to be the agency’s deputy director for operations, was that
during the reciprocal visits by the two intelligence chiefs, we should distance ourselves from the rest of the U.S. government, and appeal for ISI help based on the long cooperative relationship between our services, of which our spectacularly successful joint effort during the anti-Soviet
jihad
of the 1980s was the most prominent example. Our pitch was that effective intelligence cooperation against al-Qa’ida would get the favorable attention of the U.S. government, and perhaps lead to a wider thaw in relations. “Help us help you,” we said.

During his March 2000 visit to Washington, in sharp counterpoint to his unpleasant contacts with the Department of State and the National Security Council, we treated Mahmud with warm respect and fêted him and his senior officers at clubby dinners in the countryside. Having learned that Mahmud had written a thesis at the Pakistan Army Command and Staff College on the battle of Gettysburg, I arranged a special tour and walked the entire battlefield with him and his staff, accompanied by an eminent Civil War historian from the U.S. Army War College.

It appeared for a time that the “good cop” approach might work: during Tenet’s visit to Pakistan in June 2000, General Musharraf, in the presence of both Mahmud and myself, promised a vigorous program of counterterrorism cooperation, including establishment of a joint counterterrorism unit. But it was all for naught. As soon as Tenet’s plane cleared Pakistani airspace, Mahmud began assiduously to avoid me. When at length he agreed to meet with me in September 2000, he finally responded to my repeated appeals for concrete follow-up by saying, “What’s the next item on your agenda?”

Now it appeared to me that not only was General Mahmud not following through on the Pakistani chief executive’s commitments, but that my moderate tone was perhaps leading him to believe—or at least to claim—that CIA’s message was different from what Pakistan was getting elsewhere in the U.S. government. This was both embarrassing and galling.

Our message in Islamabad, I assured Lodhi, was the same as hers. General Mahmud wasn’t hearing it, I said, “because we don’t talk.”

“That has to change,” she asserted. The United States and Pakistan must cooperate on Afghanistan, and so must the intelligence services.

“Look,” I said. “The reason we can’t get there is that Pakistan won’t engage on the issue. If your government would level with us, and explain the national interests being served by your support of the Taliban, we could work with you to find an alternative means of addressing your problems and pursuing your interests. Pakistan seems convinced that the United States has ulterior, unstated goals in Afghanistan, and we can’t counter those concerns if they’re never expressed.”