The Longest War (13 page)

More successful was the CIA effort to support the rise of an obscure Afghan
dissident by the name of Hamid Karzai. Karzai, a Pashtun in his early forties then living in Pakistan, was from a distinguished tribe that had supplied
a number of Afghanistan’s monarchs
. He had become
a bitter enemy
of the Taliban following his father’s assassination in Quetta in 1999, a hit almost certainly ordered by Taliban leaders, who eliminated Pashtuns who threatened their monopoly on power.

Grenier explained the American thinking behind backing Karzai: “
Those people
who we encouraged to go inside Afghanistan essentially were going to be going on their own. They would need to demonstrate that they in fact had tribal support, and then we would attempt to reinforce them. That was the strategy.”

On October 8, a day after the first American bombing raids in Afghanistan, Karzai and three comrades, wrapped under heavy turbans to disguise themselves, rode on motorbikes
over the border
into Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan, a sparsely populated region of deserts punctuated by rocky hills. Karzai had been plotting against the Taliban for years, and although he knew that riding into their home turf was quite risky, he was also confident he could recruit to his cause Pashtuns who were fed up with the incompetence and strictures of the religious warriors.

Once inside southern Afghanistan, Karzai led some fifty supporters on foot to an area where they could link up with an airdrop of American supplies, which he had requested in an earlier satellite phone call to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. A CIA officer there told Karzai, “
Tell your people to light fires
; that’s the only way we can find [you] out in the mountains.” The supplies dropped into the mountains on October 30 included
food and weapons
, which Karzai used to sustain his growing band—now 150 men—who were already fighting off Taliban attacks. Under increasing pressure from the Taliban, Karzai urgently requested the Agency that he be airlifted to Pakistan. A CIA officer named “Greg” arranged for a helicopter to extract Karzai out of Afghanistan on November 5.

Eleven days later Karzai
returned to Afghanistan
, to Uruzgan province some eighty miles to the north of Kandahar. This time Karzai was also accompanied by a twelve-man Special Forces team and half a dozen CIA officers.

Tarin Kowt, the provincial capital of Uruzgan, is a dusty one-horse town around which would swirl one of the most crucial battles of the war against the Taliban. Captain Jason Amerine, the leader of the U.S. Special Forces team embedded with Karzai, explains the American mission in Tarin Kowt: “We
were going to build
a Pashtun guerrilla army effectively from scratch under Karzai’s command, seize the town of Tarin Kowt in order to gain control of Uruzgan, and then we would build a larger Pashtun army and seize Kandahar as a final coup-de-grace against the Taliban. It all really hinged on Karzai’s belief that the Pashtun were ready to rise up against the Taliban leadership.”

On November 16, the people of Tarin Kowt did rise up against the Taliban and chased them out. A day later Karzai headed into the town in a twenty-vehicle convoy and set up shop in the governor’s mansion, a modest two-story building surrounded by well-irrigated fields. Arriving around midnight, he met with local Pashtun tribal leaders, who welcomed him and told him with some trepidation that there was a column of some one hundred vehicles approaching from Kandahar
containing up to five hundred Taliban
, who would reach the town by the next day intent on taking it back.

Hearing this news, Captain Amerine
excused himself
from Karzai and his group of supporters, who were breaking their fast as Ramadan had just begun. Amerine started to plan how to repel the much larger Taliban force, while his combat controller sent out an urgent warning to Navy and Air Force aircraft in the area that they would be needed shortly. Amerine gathered as many of Karzai’s guerrillas as he could. His plan was to stake out some higher ground with those guerrillas outside of Tarin Kowt and call in airstrikes from there onto the fast-approaching Taliban convoy.

The hundred-vehicle convoy sent to retake Tarin Kowt for the Taliban was Mullah Omar’s last real shot at hanging on to power. Vahid Mojdeh, a Taliban foreign ministry official, recalled that Mullah Omar was now constantly on the move around Kandahar because of the American bombing campaign. “
The intense bombardment
made the situation very difficult for Mullah Omar. He was forced to spend his nights in open spaces or places where he had not been seen before.”

Around two hours after Amerine was first alerted to the approaching Taliban column, Navy F-18 fighters spotted a group of around ten four-wheel drives and started bombing them. Three hours later, at 5
A.M
., the larger convoy of dozens of Taliban vehicles came into view. Heavily outnumbered, Karzai’s group of Afghan guerrillas took flight and sped back to Tarin Kowt, followed by Captain Amerine and his Special Forces team. Back in Tarin Kowt, Amerine told Karzai, “
The Taliban are coming
, there are a lot of them. These [Afghan] fighters we are with don’t understand our capabilities; they kind of ran. I need to take these vehicles and get out there and keep doing
what I’m doing.” Amerine drove back outside the town at around 7
A.M
. to direct deadly accurate bombing runs on the approaching Taliban convoy. Three hours later the battle was over and what remained of the convoy was in full retreat.

Hank Crumpton, who was running the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan, recalls that this was a decisive battle because Karzai was the only man who could unify the country’s fractious ethnic factions: “
Karzai was the linchpin
between north and south. The Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Hazara, they all respected Karzai. They knew that he understood the concept of a nation-state.” But the importance of the Tarin Kowt battle was not well understood at the time because the vast majority of the international media covering the war were concentrated in the north of the country and focusing on
the fall of Kabul
five days earlier.

Following the news of the debacle at Tarin Kowt, Mullah Omar finally abandoned Kandahar, the city he had controlled absolutely for the past seven years. Overtures to Karzai about surrendering started coming in from Taliban commanders. But taking no chances over the next two weeks, Karzai started
gathering the large force
necessary for what seemed likely to be a major battle for Kandahar.

Half a world away, in Washington, D.C., Ambassador
James Dobbins
, a veteran diplomat on the verge of retirement whose Waspy manner belied that he had successfully taken on some of America’s most difficult peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo, had recently been tapped by the Bush administration to be its new envoy to Afghanistan. Less than a week after Kabul fell, Dobbins flew into Afghanistan with Dr. Abdullah, a leader of the Northern Alliance, on a white cargo plane with no markings, chartered by the CIA.

As they were flying to Kabul, Dr. Abdullah told Dobbins that Karzai would be an acceptable choice to lead Afghanistan for the largely Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups that made up the Northern Alliance. A few days earlier, Ehsan ul-Haq, the new head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, which had played a critical role in the rise of the largely Pashtun Taliban, had also told Dobbins that Karzai would be acceptable to his government. If Pakistan and the Northern Alliance, long bitter enemies, could agree on Karzai as the next leader of Afghanistan, Dobbins knew that brokering a deal for him to run the new Afghan government would have a good chance of succeeding.

On November 27, in the former West German capital of Bonn, the
various Afghan factions
gathered for the opening of a United Nations conference to choose an interim government and its new leader. Dobbins headed the American delegation, which met frequently with
Iranian officials
, who were the first to push for democratic elections in Afghanistan. One day a senior Iranian diplomat was chatting with Dobbins over a breakfast of coffee and croissants and mentioned to him that there was a serious gap in the draft of the document that would later become the Bonn declaration: “It really doesn’t make any mention of elections or democracy. Don’t you think the Afghans should be pledging themselves to hold elections and build a democracy?” Dobbins recalls that “
this was before the Bush administration
had discovered democratization as its panacea for the region, so I didn’t have any instructions on this subject, but it seemed a harmless suggestion, so I said, ‘Yeah, that seems like a good idea.’”

Fasting for Ramadan and freezing in the bitter Afghan winter, Karzai addressed the delegates in Bonn by
satellite phone
from Tarin Kowt. Karzai remembers: “I was sitting with some of the poorest members of the Afghan community at that time when I was making the speech.
I wasn
’t aware of the significance of it, nor were the people sitting around me.” Karzai’s dramatic call from the battlefields of southern Afghanistan to the delegates at the Bonn conference helped to seal his nomination to be the leader of the interim administration, which would run the country until nationwide elections could be held.

Early in the morning of November 28, Lieutenant Colonel David Fox, the highest-ranking American officer on the ground in southern Afghanistan, arrived in Tarin Kowt and met with Karzai to
urge him to start moving
on Kandahar to increase the pressure on the Taliban leadership to surrender. Two days later Karzai assembled a large convoy of vehicles and headed south toward Kandahar.

Karzai arrived just outside Kandahar on December 5 to begin the discussions of the terms of the Taliban surrender agreement. The following day, around 9
A.M
., Karzai was talking with a local tribal chief when suddenly there was an enormous bang and the doors and windows of the building he was in blew out. “Greg,” the CIA officer who had earlier arranged for Karzai to be pulled out to Pakistan, threw himself over the Afghan leader. It seemed likely the attack had been launched by the Taliban or al-Qaeda. A U.S. investigation later determined that the cause of the explosion was a two-thousand-pound
American bomb that had
fallen two kilometers short
of its intended target, instead landing on Karzai and his security detail. Captain Amerine, who had grown close to Karzai in the weeks that he had protected him, was wounded in the leg and evacuated. Three other American Special Forces soldiers were killed.

Karzai was rushed away from the scene of the bombing and a nurse attended to minor wounds on his face. After having his wounds dressed, Karzai received an excited call from Lyse Doucet, a BBC correspondent and old friend, who told him that the delegates at the Bonn conference had chosen him to become the new leader of Afghanistan. Doucet told Karzai, “Hamid, we just got the news that you are being chosen as the chairman of the interim administration.” Karzai
recalls saying, “OK,”
but not being able to concentrate on much besides the evacuation of the dead and wounded lying around the site of the bomb’s impact. A few minutes later he received another call, informing him that the Taliban ministers of defense and interior were on their way to see him to deliver their surrender.

In the space of three hours Karzai had survived a massive American bomb, had taken the surrender of the Taliban over the phone, and had received the news that he was the new leader of his country. It was a portent of the survivor skills that would serve him well over the next decade.

On December 7, after accepting the formal surrender of the Taliban, Karzai rolled into Kandahar at the head of a convoy of
more than two hundred vehicles
. Many of them sported the new black, red, and green flag of Afghanistan.

So let me be a martyr
.
Dwelling in a high mountain pass
Among a band of knights who,
United in devotion to God,
Descend to face armies.

—poem by Osama bin Laden

A
s Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders quickly decamped to
Jalalabad
, in eastern Afghanistan. Fifty miles from the border with Pakistan, it is a compact city surrounded by lush fruit groves and gardens fragrant with jasmine and roses. Al-Qaeda’s leader knew the city well, having first settled there in May 1996, after his expulsion from his previous base, in Sudan. During the late 1990s, bin Laden maintained a compound in a suburb of Jalalabad, which consisted of dozens of rooms spread out over more than an acre, a place that could house hundreds of people. Across the road was another large al-Qaeda compound. Neighbors knew to keep away and not ask too many questions.

It was quite predictable that bin Laden would eventually retreat to Jalalabad and from there to the neighboring mountainous redoubt of Tora Bora. In 1987 he had built a road to allow the movement of his Arab fighters from the
Pakistani border through the Tora Bora mountains down to Jalalabad, which was then occupied by the Soviets. It took the Saudi militant
more than six months to build
the road, which only four-wheel-drive vehicles could navigate. But the half year that bin Laden spent pushing the road through the Tora Bora passes would provide knowledge that he would put to good use almost a decade and a half later when he fled there, since he knew every ridge and track intimately.