Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (32 page)

“That’s why the Special Forces guys call it ‘mowing the grass,’” Matthew Hoh, who resigned his foreign-service position in Afghanistan in protest at the futility of the war, told me. “They know that the dead leaders will just be replaced.”

A marine officer who served two tours in the lethally dangerous neighborhood of Sangin, in northern Helmand Province, gave me a powerful analogy during a long discussion on the drawbacks of high-value targeting. “Insurgencies are like a starfish,” he said thoughtfully. “You cut off one of the legs of a starfish and within weeks it can regrow and become more resilient and be smarter about defending itself. I saw multiple Taliban commanders come in and out. The turnover rate was cyclic. So even if I kill one, it only took two weeks before the next guy came in. They didn’t miss a beat. You replace one guy, chances are the guy that’s coming in is more lethal, has less restraint and is more apt to make a name for himself and go above and beyond than if you had just left the first guy in there.

“The commander down here [Sangin] when I first got there had been around for years. He had become one of the water-walkers among the Taliban community, very popular amongst the people. We picked him off in an air strike with a group of ten on the other side of the Helmand River one day, standing around with their AK-47s planning their next operation. There was a good three-week period where nothing happened. It was eerie. But then we started to see some outside influence, maybe from Pakistan. The new commander was either taken from a different region and put in here, or a younger guy who was promoted and brought up to speed, he was more aggressive more radical, more ready to prove himself worthy. The amount of pressure plate IEDs [which go off when anyone steps on them] increased exponentially, to where little kids started to hit them. He wasn’t even letting the population know where they were, and while that was good for us because I could leverage the population that this young immature commander was more deadly to them than he was to me, it showed me that targeting these leaders made the problem ten times worse overall.”

My friend, a remarkable officer who actually managed to suppress the Taliban in his particular area by the end of his first tour in 2012, thought that making the enemy even more vicious and unpleasant than they already were was ultimately unproductive. But strange rumors, based on off-the-record conversations with military officers and Special Forces officers out in the field, were circulating that making the Taliban
even more cruel
might actually be official policy. If so, it certainly succeeded. By 2011 the Taliban were deploying eight-year-old children as involuntary suicide bombers, while in May 2014, a small group of young Taliban gunmen stormed a Kabul hotel and executed nine people in the restaurant. Three of the victims were children, including a two-year-old, shot in the face.

Among COIN (counterinsurgency) theoreticians, then ascendant in the U.S. Army, the rise of the young commanders was seen as a positive development. “That’s a win for us,” John Nagl, a former army officer and the coauthor of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency manual, told me. “We want to see younger commanders take over. They have less experience, they’re more inclined to mess up.” In fact, young men such as Khalid Amin, who had declared “we all want to die,” had a great deal of experience despite their tender years, having never known any life but war. Nor did it require a great deal of expertise to construct a $10 pressure-plate IED.

It is possible, however, that there was indeed an underlying Machiavellian element to the targeted-killing strategy: actually to encourage the already cruel Taliban to become even more vicious and barbaric. The rationale, so Special Operations officers would explain in discreet off-the-record conversations, was based on the success of the Iraq surge. The key development of that operation had been the pivot of the Sunni population, or at least their tribal leaders, from insurgency to support of the occupation forces, a development attributed to the adoption of COIN as a doctrine, not to mention the strategic genius of those who had introduced it. Hugely important in inducing the Sunnis’ change of heart, along with wads of cash handed to tribal leaders, had been their revulsion at the arrogance and cruelty of al-Qaeda in the areas where it had come to dominate, such as attempts in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad in 2006–2007 to force each family to give up a son as an al-Qaeda recruit or the shooting of barbers for giving un-Islamic haircuts, not to mention cutting off the fingers of smokers.

The triumph of the surge, which put a welcome gloss on the overall disaster of the invasion and occupation, was still very fresh in the minds of the U.S. national security establishment, particularly the army, when attention began shifting to Afghanistan in 2008. If the increased unpopularity of al-Qaeda had led to its defeat in Iraq, so, the thinking reportedly went, what was needed in Afghanistan was a really unpopular, “radicalized” Taliban, to be generated by killing off the (slightly) more moderate field commanders. Thereby afflicted, the population would, hopefully, rally to the Americans, or at least to the government of Hamid Karzai. In other words, eliminating Taliban leaders and other supposedly key individuals across the length and breadth of Afghanistan was not merely mindless slaughter but an
effects-based operation
.

Colonel Gian Gentile, the Iraq combat veteran and former West Point history professor known for his pungent critiques of COIN and its practitioners, thought that the scheme, of which he had no personal knowledge, sounded “like the typical pop sociological/anthropological nonsense and over thinking that many army officers have gotten themselves into. It also might indicate a rabid belief that the Iraq Surge could be made to work in Afghanistan along with its techniques and methods. “It just shows you,” he lamented to me in an email, “how far off the deep end the American army has gone.”

Dr. Peter Lavoy is one of the little-known but dependable officials who keep the wheels of the U.S. national security machine in motion. Deemed an expert in such recondite subjects as the use of biological and nuclear weapons and asymmetric warfare, he rose steadily through the ranks of intelligence and into the wider realm of policy making. By 2008 he was national intelligence officer for South Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and as such was delegated to brief NATO allies on the U.S. intelligence assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan, which he described as “bleak,” according to the record of his November 25 address that year, classified “Secret” but subsequently released by Wikileaks.

The Taliban, said Lavoy, were making significant gains. Attacks were up 40 percent in a year, largely thanks to the failure of the Afghan government to deliver any services to the rural population while the Taliban were “mediating local disputes … offering the population at least an elementary level of access to justice.” In conclusion, he told the NATO meeting, “[T]he international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban in 2009
in order to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies
(author’s emphasis). This will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.”

Many greet the notion that U.S. policy makers and commanders would have been capable of thinking through second-order effects in this fashion with unbridled skepticism. Matthew Hoh, the state department official who gave up his career in protest of the Afghan war, told me that he had indeed heard about this plan but not until
after
targeted killing had the effect of radicalizing the Taliban. “I simply doubt our ability to be that prescient and competent,” he told me. “I haven’t seen it in other situations and I don’t see it here. I think this is, by and large, people and agencies trying to take credit for an unintended consequence.”

An officer serving in Afghanistan in 2014 had much the same reaction. “I don’t think that it was (or currently is) a ‘strategy’ across the board,” he wrote me. “I have yet to see one of those out here. No part of my ‘welcome aboard’ to Afghanistan included a history/analysis of the area … to include sources of instability and power players. At no time was I told ‘the strategy is to isolate X, while infiltrating Y and containing Z.’ Is that an effects-based strategy? Only if the effect you want is to generate chaos.”

But generating chaos can be a hard habit to break.

12

DRONES, BABY, DRONES!

The Richard M. Helms Award dinner, held annually at a major Washington hotel, is among the highlights of the intelligence community’s social calendar. Hosted by the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, the event raises and distributes money to aid families of officers killed in action, whose sacrifice is commemorated in the rows of stars carved into the wall of the foyer at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The venue for the 2011 event, held on March 30, was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City, and as usual it attracted hundreds of intelligence luminaries, current and former. Joining them were senior executives of various defense corporations—Lockheed, SAIC, Booz Allen, General Atomics, and others—who had generously sponsored tables at the event.

There was much to celebrate. President Barack Obama, who had run a quasi-antiwar liberal campaign for the White House, had embraced the assassination program and had decreed, “the CIA gets what it wants.” Intelligence budgets were maintaining the steep upward curve that had started in 2001, and while all agencies were benefiting, none had done as well as the CIA. At just under $15 billion, the agency’s budget had climbed by 56 percent just since 2004.

Decades earlier, Richard Helms, the CIA director for whom the event was named, would customarily refer to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as “those bastards.” Such disdain for commerce in the world of spooks was now long gone, as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the Grand Ballroom that evening. The executives, many of whom had passed through the revolving door from government service, were there to rub shoulders with old friends and current partners. “It was totally garish,” one attendee told me afterward. “It seemed like every arms manufacturer in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business, right and left.”

In the decade since 9/11, the CIA had been regularly blighted by scandal—revelations of torture, renditions, secret “black site” prisons, bogus intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq, ignored signs of the impending 9/11 attacks—but such unwholesome realities found no echo in this comradely gathering. Even George Tenet, the CIA director who had presided over all of the aforementioned scandals, was greeted with heartfelt affection by erstwhile colleagues as he, along with almost every other living former CIA director, stood to be introduced by Master of Ceremonies John McLaughlin, a former deputy director himself deeply complicit in the Iraq fiasco. Each, with the exception of Stansfield Turner (still bitterly resented for downsizing the agency post-Vietnam), received ringing applause, but none more than the night’s honoree, former CIA director and then-current secretary of defense Robert M. Gates.

Although Gates had left the CIA eighteen years before, he was very much the father figure of the institution and a mentor to the intelligence chieftains, active and retired, who cheered him so fervently that night at the Ritz-Carlton. He had climbed through the ranks of the national security bureaucracy with a ruthless determination all too evident to those around him. Ray McGovern, his supervisor in his first agency post, as an analyst with the intelligence directorate’s soviet foreign policy branch, recalls writing in an efficiency report that the young man’s “evident and all-consuming ambition is a disruptive influence in the branch.” There had come a brief check on his rise to power when his involvement in the Iran-Contra imbroglio cratered an initial attempt to win confirmation as CIA director, but success came a few years later, in 1991, despite vehement protests from former colleagues over his persistent willingness to sacrifice analytic objectivity to the political convenience of his masters.

Gates’ successful 1991 confirmation as CIA chief owed much, so colleagues assessed, to diligent work behind the scenes on the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff director, George Tenet. In 1993, Tenet moved on to be director for intelligence programs on the Clinton White House national security staff, in which capacity he came to know and esteem John Brennan, a midlevel and hitherto undistinguished CIA analyst assigned to brief White House staffers. Tenet liked Brennan so much that when he himself moved to the CIA as deputy director in 1995, he had the briefer appointed station chief in Riyadh, an important position normally reserved for someone with actual operational experience. In this sensitive post Brennan worked tirelessly to avoid irritating his Saudi hosts, showing reluctance, for example, to press them for Osama bin Laden’s biographical details when asked to do so by the bin Laden unit back at headquarters.

Brennan returned to Washington in 1999 under Tenet’s patronage, initially as his chief of staff and then as CIA executive director, and by 2003 he had transitioned to the burgeoning field of intelligence fusion bureaucracy. The notion that the way to avert miscommunication between intelligence bureaucracies was to create yet more layers of bureaucracy was popular in Washington in the aftermath of 9/11. One concrete expression of this trend was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, known as T-TIC and then renamed the National Counterterrorism Center a year later. Brennan was the first head of T-TIC, distinguishing himself in catering to the abiding paranoia of the times. On one occasion, notorious within the community, he circulated an urgent report that al-Qaeda was encrypting targeting information for terrorist attacks in the broadcasts of the al-Jazeera TV network, thereby generating an “orange” alert and the cancellation of dozens of international flights. The initiative was greeted with malicious amusement over at the CIA’s own Counterterrorism Center, whose chief at the time, José Rodríguez, later opined that Brennan had been trying to build up his profile with higher authority. “Brennan was a major factor in keeping [the al-Jazeera/al-Qaeda story] alive. We thought it was ridiculous,” he told a reporter. “My own view is he saw this, he took this, as a way to have relevance, to take something to the White House.” Tellingly, an Obama White House spokesman later excused Brennan’s behavior on the grounds that though he had circulated the report, he hadn’t believed it himself.