reading

Cast of Characters

AT THE C.I.A.

Frank Archibald, case officer, Kandahar, circa 2002; later Chief of Islamabad Station; C.I.A. liaison to Richard Holbrooke’s office at the Department of State, 2009–2010

Jonathan Bank, Chief of Islamabad Station, 2010

John Bennett, Chief of Islamabad Station, 2009; later Deputy Director of Operations

Cofer Black, Director of D.C.I.’s Counterterrorist Center, 1999–2002

Rich Blee, Chief of ALEC Station, 1999–2001; Chief of Kabul Station, 2002; Chief of Islamabad Station, 2004–2005

John Brennan, Director of Central Intelligence, 2013–2017

Michael D’Andrea, Director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, 2006–2015

Porter Goss, Director of Central Intelligence, 2004–2006

Robert Grenier, Islamabad Station Chief, 2001; Director of C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, 2004–2006

Michael Hayden, Director of Central Intelligence, 2006–2009

Michael Hurley, senior case officer, Kabul Station, 2002–2004

Stephen Kappes, case officer, Pakistan, 1980s; Deputy Director for Operations, 2004; Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, 2006–2010

Mark Kelton, Chief of Islamabad Station, 2011

Leon Panetta, Director of Central Intelligence, 2009–2011

David Petraeus, Director of Central Intelligence, 2011–2012

Jose Rodriguez, Director of C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, 2002–2004; Deputy Director of Operations, 2004; Director of National Clandestine Service, 2004–2008

Tony Schinella, senior military analyst; director of District Assessments project mapping the Afghan war, 2009–2016

George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, 1997–2004

Greg Vogle, Chief of Base, Peshawar, Pakistan, 2001; C.I.A. liaison to Hamid Karzai, November–December 2001; paramilitary officer, Kabul Station, 2002; Chief of Kabul Station, 2004–2006 and 2009–2010; Director of C.I.A. paramilitary operations, 2014–

Brian Glyn Williams, consultant on suicide bombings in Afghanistan, 2006–2007

Chris Wood, case officer, Pakistan, 1997–2001; case officer, Northern Alliance Liaison Team, autumn 2001; head of operations, Kabul Station, 2002; Chief of ALEC Station, circa 2003–2004; Afghan specialist at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2010; Chief of Kabul Station, 2011; Director of C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, 2015–2017

AT OTHER U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

Jeff Hayes, D.I.A. analyst on South Asia, assigned to National Security Council, 2009–2014

Peter Lavoy, National Intelligence Officer for South Asia, 2007–2008; Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, 2008–2011; Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, 2011–2014; Senior Director for South Asia, National Security Council, 2015–2016

Marc Sageman, former C.I.A. case officer, consultant to U.S. Army intelligence, 2010–2012; consultant to International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, 2012–2013

David Smith, Defense Intelligence Agency representative in Islamabad, 2001; senior Pakistan analyst at D.I.A. and the Pentagon until 2012

AT THE PENTAGON AND THE ARMED SERVICES

David Barno, U.S. and coalition commander in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. and coalition commander in Afghanistan, 2005–2007; U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, 2009–2011

Michael Flynn, International Security Assistance Force intelligence chief, 2009–2010

Timothy J. Hopper, platoon leader, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, Combined Task Force “Strike”

Darin Loftis, chief plans adviser for the International Security Assistance Force, in the AFPAK Hands program, 2011–2012

Stanley McChrystal, Commander of Joint Special Operations Command, 2003–2008; Director of the Joint Staff, 2008–2009; Commander of I.S.A.F. and U.S. Forces Afghanistan, 2009–2010

Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2007–2011

Barry Shapiro, deputy for the Office of the Defense Representative–Pakistan, 2002–2003 and 2005–2008

AT THE WHITE HOUSE

Tony Harriman, senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council, 2005–2007

Jim Jones, National Security Adviser, 2009–2010

Doug Lute, Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan (“War Czar”), 2007–2009; Special Assistant to the President and Senior Coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2009–2013; U.S. Ambassador to N.A.T.O., 2013–2017

Paul Miller, Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council, 2007–2009

AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT

Wendy Chamberlin, Ambassador to Pakistan, 2001–2002

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, 2009–2013

Ryan Crocker, Ambassador to Pakistan, 2004–2007; Ambassador to Afghanistan, 2011–2012

James Dobbins, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2013–2014

Robert Finn, Ambassador to Afghanistan, 2002–2003

Marc Grossman, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2011–2012

Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2009–2011

Zalmay Khalilzad, Ambassador to Afghanistan, 2003–2005

David Kilcullen, Special Adviser to the Secretary of State, 2005–2009

Cameron Munter, Ambassador to Pakistan, 2010–2012

Ronald Neumann, Ambassador to Afghanistan, 2005–2007

Anne Patterson, Ambassador to Pakistan, 2007–2010

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, 2005–2009

Barnett Rubin, Senior Adviser to the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2009–2013

Frank Ruggiero, senior deputy special representative and deputy assistant secretary of state for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2010–2012

IN PAKISTAN

Mahmud Ahmed, Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, 1999–2001

Benazir Bhutto, Leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, 1988–2007

Ehsan ul-Haq, Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, 2001–2004

Ashfaq Kayani, Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, 2004–2007; Chief of Army Staff, 2007–2013

Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan, 2001–2008

Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, 2008–2012

Nadeem Taj, Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, 2007–2008

Asif Zardari, President of Pakistan, 2008–2013

IN AFGHANISTAN

Abdullah Abdullah, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2001–2005; Chief Executive of Afghanistan, 2014–

Tayeb Agha, head of the Taliban political commission, 2009–2015

Engineer Arif, head of intelligence for the Northern Alliance, 1994–2001; head of the National Directorate of Security, 2001–2004

Abdul Rashid Dostum, Deputy Defense Minister, 2003; Vice President of Afghanistan, 2014–

Marshal Mohammed Fahim, Vice Chairman of the Interim Government, 2001–2002; Interim Vice President of Afghanistan, 2002–2004; Vice President of Afghanistan, 2009–2014

Ashraf Ghani, Minister of Finance, 2002–2004; President of Afghanistan, 2014–

Ibrahim Haqqani, representative for the Haqqani network, 2002–

Hamid Karzai, Chairman of the Interim Government, 2001–2002; Interim President of Afghanistan, 2002–2004; President of Afghanistan, 2004–2014

Ahmad Shah Massoud, Commander of the Northern Alliance, 1996–2001

Rahmatullah Nabil, head of the National Directorate of Security, 2010–2012 and 2013–2015

Amrullah Saleh, Intelligence Adviser for Ahmad Shah Massoud, 1997–2001; head of the National Directorate of Security, 2004–2007

Gul Agha Sherzai, Governor of Kandahar, 1992–1994 and 2001–2003; Governor of Nangarhar, 2005–2013

Introduction

In 1989, I moved to New Delhi for The Washington Post to become the newspaper’s South Asia correspondent. I was thirty years old and responsible for a phantasmagoria of news from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. For three years I hopped from capital to capital, and from one guerrilla war, coup d’état, and popular revolution to another. It was thrilling and affecting work.

In Afghanistan, the last units of the Soviet occupation forces had recently pulled out of the country. The war caused by the Soviet invasion had claimed an estimated one to two million Afghan lives, or up to 10 percent of the prewar population. Land mines and indiscriminate bombings maimed hundreds of thousands more. About five million Afghans became refugees. Soviet and Afghan Communists purposefully decimated the country’s educated elites, executing or exiling traditional leaders. By the time I turned up, this culling had left much of the field to radical preachers and armed opportunists.

In Kabul, the Soviets had left behind a few thousand K.G.B. officers and military advisers to prop up a regime led by Mohammad Najibullah, a physician turned secret police chief. Najibullah’s forces controlled the Afghan capital and an archipelago of cities. The countryside belonged to the mujaheddin, the anti-Communist rebels funded and armed by the C.I.A., as well as by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence. The war had settled into a grinding stalemate.

The Soviet troop withdrawal knocked the Afghan story off front pages and network broadcasts in the United States, but for the Post it remained a matter of running interest, not least because the C.I.A. was still smuggling guns and money to the rebels; the agency’s career officers and analysts were among our subscriber base in Washington. Like other correspondents in those years, I covered the Afghan war from both sides. I flew periodically to Kabul, to interview Najibullah and his aides, or to travel around the country with Afghan Communist generals. From Pakistan, I went over the border to see the Islamist rebels’ hold on the countryside. The work was generally safe, as correspondence from a medium-grade civil war goes. Yet during this period, Western reporters and humanitarian workers learned to be wary of the loose bands of Arab Islamist volunteers circulating among the Afghan mujaheddin. These international radicals sometimes staged roadside executions of nonbelievers they came across. We did not yet know them as Al Qaeda.

The C.I.A. subcontracted its aid to the Afghan rebels through Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I. By 1989, the service had grown into a powerful, corrosive force within Pakistan, a shadowy deep state that manipulated politics on behalf of the army and increasingly promoted armed groups of Islamists, including the Arab volunteers we had learned to approach cautiously. I.S.I. officers were not easy to meet, but not impossible to track down, either. I became somewhat obsessed with reporting on the underbelly of the Afghan conflict. I wrote for the Post about how the C.I.A. program to arm the rebels functioned, why its escalation had helped to defeat the Soviet occupation, and how, simultaneously, the C.I.A.’s covert action had empowered the more radical factions in the rebellion, largely at I.S.I.’s direction.

In December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. The political upheavals in Moscow and Central Asia rippled into Afghanistan. Soviet cash, food, and arms supplies to Najibullah’s government looked to be finished. This altered the civil war’s balance. By late April 1992, the fall of Kabul to the I.S.I.-backed Islamist rebels seemed imminent. I flew in. The mujaheddin flowed into the capital unopposed on a Saturday. Kabul’s wary residents had been governed for a decade by an officially secular regime. Hoping to avoid a bloodbath, they greeted the entering long-bearded rebels with flowers. Najibullah tried to flee but was arrested at the airport. His security forces took off their uniforms, abandoned their posts, and went home, trying to blend into the new order. The mujaheddin seemed uncertain initially about whether to trust their acceptance into Kabul. That first day of the takeover, I met a rebel straggler near the zoo. He said his name was Syed Munir. He was carrying an assault rifle. He turned in circles and insisted that anyone who wished to talk to him do so from a distance of ten feet. “Everyone is friendly,” he admitted. “But maybe some people want to take my gun.”

He was right to be wary. That night, a new round of war erupted among factions of the Afghan rebels. The fighting soon shredded Kabul, claimed thousands more innocent lives, and consigned Afghanistan to yet deeper poverty and international isolation. America, by now absorbed by victory in the Cold War and startling geopolitical changes such as the reunification of Germany, looked away.

I moved on as well, to London, to take up a position as an international investigative correspondent for the Post. I was stationed there on February 26, 1993, when a cabal of jihadists, some with ties to the Afghan war, detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding many others. My editors asked for an investigation into the networks of Islamist radicals and financiers that seemed to lie behind the World Trade Center attack. I worked on some of that project with another reporter, Steve LeVine. We heard about a wealthy Saudi exile in Sudan, Osama Bin Laden, who was reported to be funding some of the groups we were looking into. Steve flew to Khartoum to ask for an interview. Bin Laden’s bodyguards said he would not be available. After speaking with some of Bin Laden’s aides and many other supporters and members of the jihadi movement from London to the Balkans to the Middle East, we wrote, “Arguably, the best way to think about Bin Laden’s multistory Khartoum guest house is not as a centralized, string-pulling headquarters,” but as “one among many scattered centers of gravity where militant Islamic radicals may find haven, succor or support.” We still had not heard of Al Qaeda. Because of Bin Laden’s rising notoriety, the United States soon pressured Sudan to kick him out of Khartoum. He went to Afghanistan in the summer of 1996, declared war on the United States, and soon found shelter with the Taliban.

By 2001, I had become the Post’s managing editor in Washington. That spring, the paper carried coverage of the New York trial of jihadi conspirators who had participated in the terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998. The prosecutors introduced evidence of Bin Laden’s involvement in the terrorist plot, as well as his leadership of Al Qaeda, which was at last identified publicly. A defector testified in detail about how Al Qaeda worked and how Bin Laden and his aides doled out support to followers and allies. Yet the conventional wisdom in Washington held that the group was isolated in distant Afghanistan, and that it was most likely to continue to carry out attacks overseas—Al Qaeda was a serious nuisance, in other words, but not a major threat to American territory or security.

On the morning of September 11, I was at a desk in my home office in Maryland, typing notes for a book I was considering about genocide in Africa. I had CNN on mute on a small television to one side. When I saw the first reports about a plane that had smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in clear weather, I assumed it was a freak accident. I scrambled to collect my keys and work materials, to rush to the newsroom. I was just about out the door when my wife called out as she watched United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. We stared at the terrible scenes for some minutes. “Oh, this is Bin Laden,” it finally occurred to me to say. I drove downtown. Smoke rose from across the Potomac River, where American Airlines Flight 77 had struck the Pentagon.

Six weeks later, I went digging around in my garage, looking for old tape recordings of interviews with I.S.I. officers from the early 1990s. I found them. That discovery inaugurated research for the book that became Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. My intention was to provide Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis with a thorough, reliable history of the often-secret actions, debates, and policies that had led to Al Qaeda’s rise amid Afghanistan’s civil wars and finally to the September 11 attacks. I traveled back to Afghanistan and Pakistan to conduct some of the research. Ghost Wars came out in 2004.

At the time, Afghanistan and Pakistan appeared to be stable and relatively peaceful. During the next several years, the Taliban and Al Qaeda revived, plunging Afghan and Pakistani civilians into further violent misery and insecurity. It seemed evident that I.S.I. was, once again, interfering secretly in Afghanistan, exploiting the country’s fault lines, and that the U.S. government, including the C.I.A., was again unable to forestall an incubating disaster. The Bush administration and then the Obama administration gradually escalated America’s commitment to suppressing the Taliban and defeating Al Qaeda. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteered to serve in Afghanistan after 2001 as soldiers, diplomats, or aid workers. More than two thousand American soldiers died alongside hundreds of contractors. More than twenty thousand soldiers suffered injuries. Of the much greater number who returned safely, many carried questions about whether or why their service had been worthwhile and why the seemingly successful lightning-strike American-led war of late 2001 had failed to vanquish the Taliban and Al Qaeda for good.

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016 is intended to address those questions, as best as the evidence allows. It is a second volume of the journalistic history recounted in Ghost Wars, starting from where that volume ended, on September 10, 2001. The new book can easily be read independently, but it also seeks to deliver to readers of the first volume a recognizable extension of the subjects, narrative approaches, and investigations they encountered there.

Directorate S seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State. The book also seeks to connect American, Afghan, Pakistani, and international policy failures to the worldwide persistence of jihadi terrorism. It tries to provide a balanced, complete account of the most important secret operations, assumptions, debates, decisions, and diplomacy in Washington, Islamabad, and Kabul. Like Ghost Wars, this volume asks the reader to traverse much territory. To keep things moving, I have again tried to prioritize action, vivid characters, and original reporting, without sacrificing depth and context.

After 2008, the United States and N.A.T.O. allies fought a large-scale overt conventional war against the Taliban, and, in a secret annex campaign waged mostly by armed drones, against Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan. This campaign could be the subject of a book in and of itself (and has been the subject of a number of excellent ones, including Little America, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward; and The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti, which also provides a penetrating account of the C.I.A. during these years). In Directorate S, I have tried to offer new insights into that war, but not to recount it fully, concentrating instead on the less thoroughly treated trajectory of decision making at the C.I.A., the I.S.I., and the principal Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security. I have also had to consider how to absorb, but not regurgitate, the vast body of excellent journalism already produced by other reporters about Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001. I traveled repeatedly to both countries after 2005 while carrying out the research for what became Directorate S, but I cannot possibly match here the granular, on-the-ground correspondence and books by the many intrepid field reporters and resident researchers who have done so much to deepen public understanding of South Asia’s instability and political violence. I could not have written this volume without incorporating the insights and research of scores of other journalists and scholars, some of them colleagues and friends, including Ahmed Rashid, Peter Bergen, Dexter Filkins, Carlotta Gall, Anand Gopal, Felix Kuehn, Anatol Lieven, David Rohde, Owen Bennett-Jones, Sarah Chayes, Graeme Smith, Alex Strick van Linschoten, and Martine van Bijlert, as well as many others cited in the source notes. However, I have concentrated the narrative in Directorate S on my own reporting, and principally on the hundreds of interviews conducted for the book during the last decade, as well as new documentary evidence obtained from those sources. I have sought to ground my reliance on interviews and contemporaneous notes with secondary sources such as documents obtained from F.O.I.A. requests and the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

For many Americans and Europeans who have lived and worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after 2001, it is frustrating to hear discourse back home holding that Afghanistan and Pakistan are lands of “warring tribes” or “endless conflicts.” The historical record belies such clichés. Independent Afghanistan was impoverished but peaceful and stable, untroubled by radical international violence, for many decades of the twentieth century, prior to the Soviet invasion of 1979. Its several decades of civil war since that invasion have been fueled again and again by outside interference, primarily by Pakistan, but certainly including the United States and Europe, which have remade Afghanistan with billions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction aid while simultaneously contributing to its violence, corruption, and instability. And for all of Pakistan’s dysfunction, state-sponsored radicalism, and glaring economic inequality, it remains a modernizing nation with a vast, breathtakingly talented middle class and diaspora. If the army and I.S.I. did not misrule Pakistan, in alliance with corrupt political cronies, the country’s potential to lift up its own population and contribute positively to the international system might today rival India’s. The region’s “endless conflicts” are not innate to its history, forms of social organization, or cultures. They are the outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions. They reflect political maneuvering, hubristic assumptions, intelligence operations, secret diplomacy, and decision making at the highest levels in Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington that have often been unavailable to the Afghan, Pakistani, American, and international publics. This is the story of Directorate S.

ALSO BY STEVE COLL

Steve Coll

DIRECTORATE S

The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016

ALLEN LANE

Author’s Note

List of Maps