Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, the Taliban’s military leader for southern Afghanistan, sat stolidly, his great bulk supported in an overstuffed chair to my left. It was October 2, 2001, and events had been hurtling forward since the terrorist attacks of September 11. President George W. Bush had delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban in his State of the Union address on September 20: Hand over al-Qaeda’s leadership or share their fate. But the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had not yet begun, and I still saw a chance, however small, for a peaceful way out. That was why, as the CIA station chief in Islamabad responsible for both Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, I was having this meeting with a top Taliban official.
The day President Bush had delivered his ultimatum, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Clergy, a committee of 700 Islamic scholars that Taliban chief Mullah Omar had convened to advise him on the correct course to pursue toward Osama bin Laden, had partially opened the door to an acceptable settlement. The council had recommended that the Taliban government seek bin Laden’s voluntary departure from the country. A day later, on September 21, Mullah Omar slammed the door shut, stating that he would neither turn over bin Laden nor ask him to leave.
On September 28, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, Pakistan’s top spy as the director-general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), led a group of eight Pakistani Islamic scholars, well-known religious extremists all, to meet with Omar in one final, desperate attempt to induce the Taliban to, in Mahmud’s own words, “get the gun to swing away from their heads.” If there was nothing for the moment to be done about bin Laden, Mahmud suggested, perhaps the Taliban leader could agree to release eight humanitarian workers who had recently been arrested for Christian proselytizing in Afghanistan; or perhaps he could hand over some of bin Laden’s lieutenants; or at least he could allow Americans to inspect the al-Qaeda camps to demonstrate that their occupants had fled. All suggestions were in vain
As the alternatives to all-out war against the Taliban were being systematically foreclosed, I could sense that attitudes in Washington were hardening in tandem. Even a few days before, the tone had been quite different, at least at the White House. I had already had one meeting with Mullah Osmani, on September 15, and he had told me that the Taliban would not sacrifice its country for the sake of Osama bin Laden. He hadn’t made specific concessions, but I saw a clear opportunity; for his part, the president, who had not yet delivered his public ultimatum of the 20th, had reacted to CIA Director George Tenet’s report of my meeting—and the implicit possibility of a shift in the Taliban policy of sheltering bin Laden—with open interest.
“Fascinating,” he had said.
Similarly, in late September, the president and his cabinet principals still held out the possibility of a continued role for the Taliban in Afghanistan, provided its leaders agreed to break with Omar and meet U.S. demands. All, including National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, agreed that the United States should not hit the full Taliban leadership at the outset of its military operations, lest it discourage an intra-Taliban split.
Over a week later, though, in the face of Mullah Omar’s recalcitrance, I could feel the political landscape shifting. One could sense that all American efforts were now vectoring inexorably toward war. It was no longer clear to me that Washington would accept any deal, even if an alternative Taliban leadership were prepared to offer one. Once the mental break is made, and war has been deemed inevitable, events take on their own momentum.
I also knew that my mission to the Taliban, no matter how carefully pursued, would carry with it the taint of negotiation, which had become anathema from what I could divine of the current climate in Washington. The president himself had said that there could be no ambiguity—you were either with us or with the terrorists—and that his demands of the Taliban were not up for negotiation or discussion. As a practical matter, however, even finding ways for the Taliban to meet U.S. demands would require discussion, if not negotiation, and a refusal of all discussions would scuttle any chance of non-military success. In my own discussion with Mullah Osmani, I hoped at a minimum to sow serious divisions within the Taliban leadership.
I could not rule out greater success, however, and had to contemplate the possibility that the commander and the rest of the Taliban shura, the leadership council, would reject Mullah Omar, accept U.S. demands, and find a way to turn bin Laden and his 14 most senior al-Qaeda lieutenants over to us in a bid to retain power. However remote the chance of such a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, I felt, it should not be cast away lightly. I was haunted by the thought of the disasters that had befallen both the British and the Russians in Afghanistan, and I feared that a similar fate could befall us.
* * *
I was not concerned about exceeding my authority, per se; I essentially had none, and I knew it. I had no specific instructions, really no mandate whatsoever, beyond the verbal permission for the meeting that I had made sure to get from George Tenet. Actually, I saw that lack of guidance as a blessing. In the prevailing climate, I feared, a request for guidance would have elicited a series of narrow, sterile, and pugnacious ultimatums, which would inevitably elicit a similarly knee-jerk response from the Taliban. No, I thought: better to go without talking points. If I could come up with some formula to meet Washington’s demands in a way palatable to the Taliban, I could at least present Washington with a clear proposal to which they could respond as they chose.
However it might look, my country would lose nothing from what I was doing. The worst that could happen would be that I would mislead Osmani and others in the Taliban leadership into thinking that if they broke with Omar and accepted American demands, the Americans would deal with them as a legitimate authority. If the Americans later refused to abide by such a tentative “agreement,” the damage to the Taliban’s leadership cohesion might already be irreversible—which could only be to our advantage.
The ISI had arranged for me and my translator, whom I’ll call Tom, to meet with Osmani in a small villa in the Pakistani city of Quetta. There had been no way to avoid the Pakistanis’ playing host to the meeting, but I wanted to try to keep it secret, and it seemed likely that if they wanted to monitor us, they would have to use what we referred to in the business as a “quick-plant” transmitter. Having placed one or two of these myself, I looked under every piece of furniture, searching for the telltale signs; I found none. The most obvious and simple candidate was a small handheld radio buzzer used for summoning the tea boy. I had seen such devices in ISI facilities any number of times. I had no way of knowing whether it had been tampered with, but in a surfeit of caution I disassembled it, removed the battery, and muffled it in a drawer in the bathroom.
When at last Osmani made his entrance, our meeting soon settled into the formal, almost Victorian rhythm typical of meetings conducted with a translator. I would speak a paragraph at a time, and then wait as the translator conveyed what I’d said. The advantage of that pace is that you have ample time to formulate arguments while your words are being conveyed. When receiving the response, you can devote full attention to the speaker’s body language and expression, and wait for the words to arrive later. Such meetings thus often take on the deliberate cadence of a chess match.
This one started with a rapid exchange of moves. I began by pointing out that Mullah Omar had, in effect, declared himself an enemy of America by refusing to ask bin Laden to leave Afghanistan. “Will the rest of the Taliban join him as declared enemies of America?” I asked.
Osmani saw where this was going, and jumped ahead: “You won’t be able to replace the Taliban with oppositionists,” he told me.
“Look,” I countered, “only Afghans can make a permanent solution for Afghanistan. The United States will be able to chase the terrorists away, but without a responsible Afghan government, they can come back. If the Taliban is willing to be that government, this will be acceptable to us; but if not, war will inevitably come. … No one knows how it will turn out. All that is sure is that it will be a disaster for Afghanistan, and the end of the Taliban.”
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