Control “C”: the CIA and America’s covert wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Steve Coll, Penguin press, 784 pages
Twelve days after 9/11, on the night of September 23, 2001, the chief of the CIA station Islamabad, Robert Grenier, received a phone call from his boss, the Director of Central intelligence George Tenet. “Look, Bob,” tenet said, “we’re meeting tomorrow at camp David to discuss our war strategy in Afghanistan. How should we start? What do we got? How we sequence our actions?”
Grenier later wrote in his book, 88 days to Kandaharthat although he was surprised by the call he’d been thinking about the same questions—“thinking about them again and again,” as he later told me he was ready. President George W. Bush to the U.S. Congress just days before, Grenier said tenet was a good start: demand that the Governor of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar, bin Laden in the United States. If he refuses, the United States should launch a campaign to overthrow him. Grenier’s thought of a plan, but before going into its details with Tenet, he abruptly stopped talking. “Sir, he said, is not going to work. I need to write all this clear.” Tenet agreed.
Grenier began work, and for the next three hours he laid out the Battle for Afghanistan. Included in the paper was a detailed programme, As the Agency may deploy undercover teams to recruit bin Laden enemies of Afghanistan on the Northern Tajik and Uzbek tribes (uneasy coalition of ethnic militias operating as the “Northern Alliance”), supplied them with money and weapons, and use them in an offensive to oust the Taliban in Kabul. With the help of the United States that included the deployment of American special forces group (under the leadership of the CIA) in conjunction with the U.S. air force, representatives of the Northern Alliance (or rather, the United Islamic salvation front of Afghanistan) would start from his enclave of Panjshir valley in Afghanistan’s far North-East and recruiting the support of anti-Taliban forces on the way, collapse in Kabul.
Grenier gave eight-page draft document to his staff for analysis and then sent it to Tenet in Washington, which have passed through a parliamentary Committee (the second-in-command of each of the main bodies of national security), and then presented it to Bush. “I believe that the cable,” Grenier wrote, “as the best three hours work I’ve done in my twenty-seven years of his career.”
Three days after Tenet-Grenier telephone conversation held on 26 September, the CIA landed a secret task force in Afghanistan to recruit local allies in the hunt for bin Laden. Quick action was impressive, but then events slowed to a crawl. It was not until October 20 that the first team of US special forces linked to the anti-Taliban rebels, and it took another week for the U.S. units to land in force. But by early November, al-Qaeda and the Taliban the country is slipping away. November 13, fighters of the Northern Alliance captured Kabul. The Taliban was defeated, he was being badly mauled units fleeing to the South and East (the last Bastion in the South, which is 6 December), and in neighboring Pakistan, and what remains of “al-Qaeda” hiding in a series of cave complexes in the spin Ghar mountains of Eastern Afghanistan.
On almost any measure, the CIA-Led anti-al Qaeda and anti-Taliban offensive (operation called “enduring Freedom” by George Bush) marked a decisive victory in the war on terror. USA outlined a plan, have joined forces to accomplish it, and then saw its completion.
But the real Triumph came with problems. The first was that the advance was hampered by Washington hatreds that oppose the CIA surprisingly intractable American military and attacks Donald Rumsfeld, who questioned the leadership of George Tenet efforts. This bureaucratic squabbling, taking into account who was responsible for what (and who exactly was running the war in Afghanistan) remain the hallmark of American efforts in the Obama administration. The second problem was that in southern Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribes were only marginally included in the attempt, and they still mistrust their Northern non-Pashtun counterparts. Distrust, the CIA believed, almost certainly plants the seeds of endless tribal Afghan conflict, plunging the United States into supporting an unpopular government in Kabul. The third problem was in Pakistan, or the Pakistani inter-services intelligence Agency, ISI and ISI on “management “with”,” responsible for covertly supplying, training and arming the Islamist allies of Pakistan, including the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.
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The intractability of these variables, and in America, a 17-year effort (sometimes in nature, but often irresponsible) for their decision, based on Steve Coll in the control “C”, thick but readable account of America in Afghanistan accident. When the control “C” stands alone as a comprehensive exposition of the conflict in Afghanistan since 9/11, it’s actually follow from Ghost wars, Coll’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2004 narrative of America’s efforts to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan after the invasion in December 1979. Given the breadth of double handling of conflict and depth of his research, it is likely that these books will remain the standard exposure period for many years.
Although the focus of control with Pakistan and its shady intelligence services, each of the obstacles facing the U.S. in Afghanistan since the Taliban abandoned Kabul is in the details. These obstacles include America’s post-9/11 syndrome (attention deficit stem from “al-Qaeda” in Iraq is viewed in Washington as the Northern Alliance removed the Afghan capital), and deep-seated antipathy to the new Kabul government of Pakistan’s support for the southern tribe. Thus, after the United States overthrew the “al-Qaeda” and its supporters the Taliban, embarked on a program to strengthen the new government in Kabul, the anointing of Hamid Karzai as President of Afghanistan and promised billions to restore. And so, or so it seemed, everything was going as planned. The Taliban were defeated; al-Qaida on the run; the new anti-terrorist government in Kabul; and the United States signed the Pakistan as an accomplice. On 1 may 2003, Secretary of defense Rumsfeld announced the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan. The war was over. Won.
But of course, it is not.
Sat score provides a disturbing catalogue of blunders the United States after the defeat of the Taliban. Almost all of them are well known: Hamid Karzai, the consensus choice of the Grand Assembly (Loya Jirga) as the interim President of Afghanistan, was a weak leader. On the funds allocated for the postwar reconstruction of Afghanistan was inadequate for this task—“funny,” as one U.S. official put it. The American soldiers responsible for combating the return of the Taliban (and hunting “al-Qaeda” terrorist cells) was thinly and poorly deployed (and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, of secondary importance, the Pentagon). Timid efforts by the Taliban to involve the United States in political negotiations inconsiderately and rashly rejected. Allegations of prisoner abuse in U.S. detention facilities constantly undermines the legitimacy of the United States. American funds have been directed to Afghan ministries riddled with corrupt officials. The Afghan poppy production has increased, in spite of nervous effort to eradicate US. And the US action against terrorism turned out to be clumsy and cause avoidable civilian casualties, pushing Afghanistan to a resurgent anti-Kabul resistance.
More importantly, the support of Pakistan to the tireless efforts of America in Afghanistan was nothing but limitless. The reason for this was not only predictable, but was actually a side effect of the American victory. When the Northern Alliance and the US air force pushed what was left of the Taliban (along with the remnants of “al-Qaeda”) from Afghanistan, they pushed them into Pakistan, creating the conditions which call tells us, “is a growing discontent among the Pakistani generals, who will come to see their country growing violence as the price of American stupidity . . .” Simply put, for US, to seal the victory of operation enduring Freedom, he had to make sure that its effects will not result in one nation that can guarantee that his victory was, in fact, be strong. This did not happen. The result was that the Taliban was able to rebuild and re-equip their networks not only in Pakistan, but under the eyes of the IRS, but also in Afghanistan.
It can be otherwise. During a series of conversations about the American intervention in Afghanistan for several months immediately after 9/11, a number of current and former senior American officials said they believed that, given enough time, the Taliban could have handed over bin Laden to Americans, eliminating the need for a full-scale invasion. One of these officials was Milton Bearden, the famous CIA (his close friends refer to him as “uncle Miltie”), which, during his time as station chief in Pakistan, helped the CIA war against the Soviet Union in the mid 1980-ies.
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After 9/11, Bearden charge it Pakistan and Afghanistan networks in an attempt to convince the Taliban that the appeal of bin Laden by the Americans was a better option than the one they faced. All the time, Bearden continued senior U.S. officials know that he does, even when he tried the head their desire for war. Bearden told me that, although his efforts had not reached the perfection of his time in the Bush White house decided on a course of action, he believes that the United States has not fully explored all his options—or thought through the long-term consequences of their intervention. “I don’t know what would have happened, I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully, “but I think we have something to cling to in history. We had to see what would happen.” He notes that Alexander the Great “took one look at the mountains in Afghanistan and decided against it. He thought that his whole army can dive there, and he wasn’t going to risk it. So, you tell me if I’m wrong, but Alexander was no slouch, right?”
Not everyone agrees, of course. Raskolnikov: Robert Grenier, the first writer that began with the American war plan. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, he told me it was committed to its pledge to protect Osama bin Laden; he saw it as a blood oath that cannot be broken. In addition, says Grenier, “Omar to see themselves as a kind of world historical personality, the man, the axis of history will turn.” One of the results was that he believed that his fight against the Americans will be a landmark.
That said, Grenier believes that the invasion of USA in Afghanistan, and the mistakes that followed might at least have been suspended due to more diligently focus on the inherent divisions of Afghan society. “We [the CIA],” he told me a few months ago, “it was very known that in March of the Northern Alliance in Kabul is likely to create real problems in the South. We tried to slow it down for this reason. But events have overtaken us, and it’s just not possible. So Yes, things could be otherwise, but really we just don’t know.”
The value in the security Council in the management of “C” does not come from the elegant history is not known, but dawned the realization that Afghanistan is such a lock for which no key. There is no reason to believe that a different outcome would have followed, if other events do not have—for example, more staff, money, purposeful diplomacy, or a reliable and disciplined enemy to defeat and nation-building; or that our war and occupation that followed would have given the same results that we realized in, say, Japan after 1945. Real pride is not in what we have tried and failed, but we thought we could succeed. Afghanistan is just not the place.
There’s a term for this in the military, which found its first use in Iraq in 2009, when the US military command took it as evaluation of what could and could not be achieved. Instead of focusing on the fight against corruption, inefficiency, disunity and weak leadership, the focus shifted almost exclusively oppressive violence, to keep the doors open, even in Iraq, its factions fought for control over it. More importantly, the adoption of the phrase marked a refusal of the high expectations and an embrace of realism. The United States must make a business copy the Western democracy on the Euphrates. This goal, if reached at all, must be implemented by Iraqis.
Analyst Anthony Cordesman, one of the foremost military thinkers of America, took the phrase and applied in Afghanistan in 2012 in an essay he titled “time to focus on Afghan good enough.” His plan was just said, but the elegance is actually working: keep the Taliban out of Kabul and large cities which have preserved the Central and provincial governments even in the face of rampant corruption, and work to ensure the safety of a large number of Afghans. Cordesman, acknowledged that it was not the victory that the Americans had hoped for September 12. And it was hard to describe the result as even remotely passable or “good.” But it was much better than making goals that cannot be implemented or in the arms of the illusion that disappeared even captured. At the moment, at least, it should be “good enough”.
Mark Perry is a foreign policy analyst, contributing editor to the American conservative and author of the Pentagon wars.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
