88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (37 page)

Also in the immediate aftermath of Tarin Kowt, the ODA was informed of plans to add a fifteen-man SF battalion headquarters to their tiny eleven-man unit. This was an unprecedented departure from normal Special Forces doctrine, and certainly not welcomed by the ODA. It appeared the ultimate impetus for it came from Secretary Rumsfeld, who had been questioning for some time the prudence of leaving Special Forces units, which were being called upon to deal with cunning warlords in the field, under the command of mere captains. Greg
strongly advised against this change in CIA channels, indicating that a substantial increase in American personnel was neither logistically nor politically wise, given Karzai’s need to present a small but effective U.S. presence to his local constituency. Anything which suggested that the Afghans were an appendage to an American invasion force would entirely change the local psychology. Greg’s objections, when conveyed to the military via headquarters, apparently carried some weight: the fifteen-man contingent was reduced to three, led by one Lieutenant Colonel Fox, an SF battalion commander. He took over the role of “senior military advisor” to Karzai on the 26th. Greg, of course, would continue to handle intelligence and politics.

November 28 brought another round of telephonic political discussions between Hamid and the Taliban. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, known to be very close to Mullah Omar, called first. Would amnesty for his one-eyed leader be a possibility? Karzai replied that it might be, but that before any such action could be considered, Omar must first publicly break with the Arabs and turn over all foreign terrorists to the international community. This was strikingly close to the deal I had suggested to Mullah Osmani before the start of the war. Zaeef listened closely, and promised to convey the message to Omar.

In fact, the next call was from Osmani. The burly commander requested a cease-fire with both Karzai and Gul Agha, as well as a halt to the bombing of Kandahar. If the Northern Alliance would turn Kabul over to Karzai, he said, the Taliban would be willing to turn Kandahar over to him. This was an interesting gambit, particularly in light of our long-standing fears concerning the Pashtun reaction to the Northern Alliance’s seizure of the national capital. Karzai again indicated that he would consider amnesty for senior Taliban—though this time, showing his characteristic volubility, he declined to include Mullah Omar in the offer—provided they publicly broke with bin Laden’s Arabs. Once again, Osmani stated that he would convey the offer to his leader.

I had long marveled at the seemingly mystical hold which Mullah Omar seemed to exert over his followers, and which I had seen myself in the case of Osmani. From our intelligence, I knew it and could
describe it; but until recently I had never really understood it. Once again, it was Brigadier Suhail who enlightened me. Omar, he said, was a very singular Afghan. He had a strategic vision which those around him simply lacked. Through his piety and the sheer force of his will, he was able to command their respect. But far more than that, he was a master of psychological manipulation, at least in the context of Pashtun culture: he was able to sow a healthy measure of rivalry and distrust among his senior acolytes, while forging strong bonds of loyalty with each. He was the hub of the wheel. Key governors, military commanders, ministers, and members of the
Shura
all maintained their connection to the organization primarily through him, while frequently distrusting those around them. Here we were seeing it play out again. Key members of the Taliban leadership would reach out singly to Karzai, almost never acting in concert; they seemed incapable of reaching a group decision without reference to Omar.

On November 30, Karzai’s army began moving south in a thirty-five-vehicle convoy toward Khakrez. Late that night, after they had difficulty clearing a series of steep passes and one of their trucks had broken down, they decided to spend the night at the village of Petawek. They had finally passed into Kandahar Province. By any objective measure, theirs remained an almost laughably quixotic enterprise. Rather than the 1,500 militiamen Greg had projected they would need, they commanded at most 300, though these at least represented the best of those available. “Best” was a relative term; as Greg and Jimmy assessed the available forces, they concluded they could really count on just forty or so to stand and fight if they were to come under sustained attack by a large force. Together with Gul Agha’s band of perhaps 1,500, well to the south and east, they were preparing to converge on the capital of a still dangerous foe that greatly outnumbered them. And yet everything had changed. Somehow, improbably, they were riding a tide of history which would raise them up, while engulfing their enemies.

NOVEMBER 26, 2001

I
WAS SITTING ALONE
in my office, glancing up occasionally at the television in the corner, monitoring the ceremony taking place in the White House Rose Garden. I could see Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer standing by the podium. President Bush had just extolled the two women for their courage, faith, and perseverance, and now they were about to take turns to speak. My mind wandered off a bit. It must have been a day or so after the rescue that David Donohue had pulled me aside. “I want to tell you how impressed I am by your people. No one else could have done what Jim did.” It was high praise, particularly coming from David.

I looked up again at the screen. I can’t remember which of the two it was, but it seemed that in her enthusiasm one of the young evangelicals was going off script, and well over time. Never again, presumably, would she have such a platform to give witness to her faith. But one could see that there was little of calculation in what she was doing. Her demeanor bespoke the earnest naïveté which characterizes the saintly. Given the setting, it made for an interesting clash of cultures. Maybe it was my imagination, but the president was beginning to look a bit nervous, and there seemed to be an uncomfortable stirring among his aides on the periphery of the screen. I had had a bit of experience with presidential visits, and knew the extent to which the U.S. chief executive’s every waking minute was carefully choreographed. It was clearly time for this press event to be over, and for the president to be moving on to the next thing. But until this young woman decided to finish speaking, no one was going anywhere. She literally held them captive before the cameras. I smiled. This was ending perfectly.

NOVEMBER 28, 2001

T
HE THIN WHITE CONTRAILS
of an American B-52 bomber might otherwise have looked reassuring, arching in stark relief against an impossibly blue sky and tracing a path, no doubt, to Taliban or al-Qa’eda targets to the north and west. But viewed where we were at the Peiwar Kotal border post, in the shadow of the Safed Koh Mountains just south of Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary at Tora Bora, those contrails seemed menacing and unpredictable. We were standing before a half-demolished rough stone building with a mixed group of Frontier Corpsmen and tribal
Khassadars
, local police working under the authority of the Pakistani political agent. They pointed toward a pile of rocks and rubble several hundred meters up the road which had been the Taliban border post just seventy-two hours before. When the first American bombs started falling in the middle of the night, they said, no one had been much concerned: they had heard about the amazing accuracy of the U.S. airstrikes. The building where we were standing, one of three at the Pakistani post, would normally have housed a squad of sleeping
Khassadars
; as luck would have it, it was empty when the errant bomb struck. They were quite amiable about the whole thing. “No harm, no foul,” they seemed to say. Just then, an older
Khassadar
with a deeply lined face approached me with a shy smile. He meekly handed me a large, jagged piece of shrapnel, as though returning something I had misplaced.

By the last week in November, I was seeing reports from Afghanistan indicating that a significant number of bin Laden’s Arabs had sought
refuge on the high slopes of the Spin Ghar, or White Mountains—what the Pakistanis called the Safed Koh—just south of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. The sharp peaks of the Safed Koh run along a straight east-west axis, defining a portion of the Durand Line, the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The region of steep mountainsides and deep, plunging ravines on the northern, Afghan side of the peaks is called Tora Bora. It should not have been at all surprising that bin Laden and his men would seek refuge there: he was intimately familiar with the area, having operated from that place during the days of the anti-Soviet
jihad
. Comprising some of the most difficult terrain in all of Afghanistan, riddled with caves and tunnels where men and supplies can easily be hidden, it is one of the most ideal places imaginable for a beleaguered force to defend itself from ground attack.

It was also clear that if al-Qa’ida fighters were trapped and pursued in that area, their most likely avenues of escape would run southward, through the high passes of the Safed Koh, into the Pakistani Tribal Areas just beyond. I met with General Jafar on November 23 to inquire what could be done to interdict them if they tried. The tribal regions, formally called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, had been established during the 19th century as a buffer zone along the wild, hostile northwestern frontier of what was then British India. Divided administratively into tribal agencies, each was presided over by an appointed “Political Agent” who combined executive, legislative, and judicial responsibilities in one person, but who exercised his authorities strictly in accordance with local tribal norms and customs, referred to collectively as
Pushtunwali
. The provincial laws of the “settled areas” did not apply in these frontier badlands. After the creation of an independent Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistanis had maintained the same system virtually without change.

Security in the Tribal Areas was maintained by organized paramilitary units raised from the local tribes, but led by officers of the regular Pakistan Army. The most famous such unit was and is the Khyber Rifles. These units are referred to collectively as the Frontier Corps. The role of the Frontier Corps is to maintain rough order, mediating disputes among the tribes, and upholding the carefully exercised authority
of the political agents. The tribes are highly suspicious of the federal government, and jealously guard their independence. For the political agents, manipulation of tribal rivalries is at least as important as the threat of armed force in maintaining order and a rough equilibrium. In effect, the tribal agencies exist in a permanent state of armed truce, with the federal government of Pakistan treading carefully lest the tribes of a given area unite against it, forcing them to intervene with conventional forces in a fight in which fierce local militias hold important advantages. In many of the tribal agencies, virtually every boy above the age of twelve carries a rifle.

Aware of the tenuous state of security in the Tribal Areas and the limitations of the Frontier Corps, I was very concerned about what might happen if significant numbers of heavily armed Arabs came tumbling down from the high passes of the Safed Koh into Pakistan’s remote Kurram Agency, particularly as they were likely to find considerable sympathy among the local population. In these circumstances, it seemed to me, the best we could expect from the Frontier Corps was some sort of trip wire, and I had no idea whether they were postured even to do that. Would it be possible, I asked Jafar, to organize some sort of rapid-reaction border control force to deal with what threatened to become a serious emergency?

Jafar shared my concern at the prospect of seeing hundreds of Arabs, possibly including bin Laden himself, successfully escape into Pakistan. Under his leadership, ISI had been working with us hand-in-glove for two months to dismantle systematically the extensive support infrastructure that al-Qa’ida had built up in the settled areas. Sensitive about his country’s reputation, he was very much alive to the negative PR consequences for Pakistan if al-Qa’ida were to elude justice by gaining sanctuary there.

“Let’s make an inspection,” he suggested, “and see what can be done.” I didn’t need any coaxing. It was the one way we could see for ourselves the state of Pakistani border controls south of Tora Bora and make specific recommendations to strengthen them.

We set out early on November 28 in a Pak Army four-wheel-drive vehicle, with a driver and an orderly, soon joined by an armed escort. Jafar insisted that I travel in Pakistani dress, so as to keep a low profile.
Normally when Westerners are called upon to don ill-fitting folkloric clothing, they come away looking ridiculous, like Halloween refugees from a yard sale. I was having none of that. The best rule, it is said, is never—ever—to wear native dress. But if I were going to break that rule, I was at least going to be respectably kitted out, with a properly fitted
shalwar khameez
and a high-necked waistcoat. The one thing I neglected to bring was a proper winter-weight coat. Fortunately, Jafar anticipated the need, and covered for my oversight with a heavy parka.