Ghost Wars (36 page)

Tomsen planned to live in Washington and travel frequently to Pakistan until the mujahedin finally took Kabul. Then, he was told, he would be appointed as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He made his first trip to Islamabad just as McWilliams was being shown the embassy’s door.

In Peshawar and Quetta he traveled the same reporting trail as McWilliams had a year earlier, meeting with dozens of independent Afghan commanders and political activists, many of them openly hostile toward Pakistani intelligence and the CIA. He met Yahya and Ahmed Zia Massoud, Ahmed Shah’s brothers, and heard angry accounts of Hekmatyar’s campaign to massacre Massoud’s commanders in the north. He met with Abdul Haq, now openly critical of his former CIA partners. Haq leveled pointed complaints about how Pakistani intelligence favored Hekmatyar and other radical Islamists. From exiled Afghan intellectuals and moderate tribal leaders, including Hamid Karzai, then a young rebel political organizer, he heard impassioned pleadings for an American engagement with King Zahir Shah in Rome, still seen by many Pashtun refugees as a symbol of traditional Afghan unity. Tomsen cabled his first impressions back to Washington: The Afghans he met were bound by their hatred of Najibullah and other former communists clinging to power in Kabul, but they were equally wary of Islamist extremists such as Hekmatyar and were angry about interference in the war by Pakistani intelligence.
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When he returned to Washington, Tomsen’s reports reinforced doubts within the U.S. government about the CIA’s covert war. The catastrophe at Jalalabad had discredited ISI and its supporters in Langley somewhat, strengthening those at the State Department and in Congress who backed McWilliams’s analysis. The CIA was also under pressure from the mujahedin’s champions in Congress because of logistical problems that had crimped the weapons pipeline to Pakistan. In addition, the civil war now raging openly between Hekmatyar and Massoud raised questions about whether the rebels could ever unite to overthrow Najibullah. The mujahedin had not captured a single provincial capital since the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989 changed the Afghan war’s geopolitical context, making it plain that whatever danger Najibullah might represent in Kabul, he was not the vanguard of hegemonic global communism anymore. And McWilliams’s arguments about the dangers of Islamic radicalism had resonated in Washington. Within the State Department, tongues wagged about McWilliams’s involuntary transfer from the Islamabad embassy apparently because of his dissenting views. Was Afghan policy so sacrosanct that it had become a loyalty test? Or had the time come to reconsider the all-out drive for a military victory over Najibullah?

That autumn in Washington, meeting at the State Department, Tomsen led a new interagency Afghan working group through a secret review of U.S. policy. Thomas Twetten, then chief of the Near East Division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, attended for Langley. Richard Haas, from the National Security Council, participated in the sessions, as did delegates from the Pentagon and several sections of the State Department.
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An all-source intelligence analysis, classified Secret, had been produced as a backdrop to the policy debate. The document assessed all the internal government reporting about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan from the summer of 1988 to the summer of 1989. It laid out the splits among American analysts about whether Pakistani intelligence—with its close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood–linked Islamists—supported or conflicted with U.S. interests.
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Influenced by the McWilliams critique, members of the Afghan working group looked for a new policy direction. They were not prepared to give up completely on the CIA-led military track. The great majority of Afghans still sought Najibullah’s overthrow, by force if necessary, and U.S. policy still supported Afghan “self-determination.” Military force would also keep pressure on Gorbachev’s reforming government in Moscow, challenging Soviet hardliners in the military and the KGB who remained a threat to both Gorbachev and the United States, in the working group’s view. But after days of debate the members agreed that the time had come to introduce diplomatic negotiations into the mix. Ultimately, Tomsen finalized a secret new two-track policy, the first major change in the American approach to the Afghan war since the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The new policy still sought Najibullah’s ouster, but it also promoted a moderate, broad-based successor government.

On the first track of the new approach, the State Department would open political negotiations aimed at “sidelining the extremists,” meaning not only Najibullah but anti-American Islamists such as Hekmatyar and Sayyaf as well. American diplomats would begin talks at the United Nations with the Soviet Union, with Benazir Bhutto’s government, and with exiled King Zahir Shah about the possibility of a political settlement for Afghanistan. The State Department could now honestly argue that U.S. policy was no longer the captive of Hekmatyar or Pakistani intelligence.

At the same time the CIA would continue to press the covert war to increase rebel military pressure against Najibullah. The use of force might coerce Najibullah to leave office as part of a political settlement, or it might topple him directly. The CIA would continue its collaboration with Pakistani intelligence and would also bypass ISI channels by providing cash and weapons directly to Afghan commanders fighting in the field. Tomsen hoped to overtake the moribund, discredited Afghan interim government with a new commanders’
shura
to be organized with American help, made up of rebel military leaders such as Massoud, Abdul Haq, and Ismail Khan. By strengthening these field commanders, the Afghan working group believed, the United States could circumvent the Islamist theologians in Peshawar and their allies in ISI. The new policy pointed the United States away from the Islamist agendas of Pakistani and Saudi intelligence—at least on paper.
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TOMSEN FLEW TO Islamabad early in 1990 to announce the new approach to Pakistan’s government. Oakley arranged a meeting at the Pakistan foreign ministry. Milton Bearden had rotated back to Langley the previous summer; his successor as Islamabad station chief, known to his colleagues as Harry, attended for the CIA. Harry, a case officer from the old school, had a pleasant but unexpressive face, and he was very difficult to read. He was seen by his State Department colleagues as closed off, unusually secretive, and protective of CIA turf. Pakistani intelligence also sent a brigadier and a colonel to take notes. Tomsen had invited ISI in the hope that they would accept and implement his initiative. He described the secret new American policy in a formal presentation that lasted more than an hour. The Pakistanis expressed enthusiasm—especially the diplomats from Pakistan’s foreign ministry, led by Yaqub Khan, who had long advocated a round-table political settlement involving King Zahir Shah. Even the Pakistani intelligence officers said they were in favor.

Tomsen planned to fly on to Riyadh to make the same presentation in private to Prince Turki at the headquarters of Saudi intelligence, and from there he would go to Rome to open discussions with the aging exiled Afghan king. But it took only a few hours to learn that the chorus of support expressed at the foreign ministry had been misleading. After the presentation, Tomsen and Oakley were talking in the ambassador’s suite on the Islamabad embassy’s third floor when the CIA station chief walked in.

“Peter can’t go to Rome,” Harry announced. “It’s going to upset the offensive we have planned with ISI.” The chief explained that with another Afghan fighting season approaching, the CIA’s Islamabad station had been working that winter with Pakistani intelligence on a new military plan to bring down Najibullah. Rebel commanders around Afghanistan planned to launch simultaneous attacks on key Afghan cities and supply lines. The new offensive was poised and ready, and supplies were on the move. If word leaked out now that the United States was opening talks with King Zahir Shah, it would anger many of the Islamist mujahedin leaders in Peshawar who saw the king as a threat. The CIA chief also argued that Islamist mujahedin would not fight if they believed the king was “coming back.” Hekmatyar and other Islamist leaders would almost certainly block the carefully planned offensive. Tomsen was livid. This was exactly the point: The new political talks were
supposed
to isolate the Islamist leaders in Peshawar. But they discovered that Harry had already contacted the CIA’s Near East Division in Langley and that Thomas Twetten, the division chief, had already complained to Kimmitt at State, arguing that the opening to Zahir Shah should be delayed. Bureaucratically, Tomsen had been outflanked. “Why are you so pro-Zahir Shah?” Twetten asked Tomsen later.

Tomsen flew to Riyadh and met with Prince Turki to explain the new American policy—or, at least, the new State Department policy—but Rome was out for now. It was the beginning of another phase of intense struggle between State and the CIA, in many ways a continuation of the fight begun by McWilliams.
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What did it matter? At stake was the character of postwar, postcommunist Afghanistan. As Tomsen contemplated Afghanistan’s future, he sought a political model in the only peaceful, modernizing period in Afghan history: the decades between 1919 and 1973 when Zahir Shah’s weak but benign royal family governed from Kabul and a decentralized politics prevailed in the countryside, infused with Islamic faith and dominated by tribal or clan hierarchies. Tomsen believed the king’s rule had produced a slow movement toward modernization and democratic politics. It had delivered a national constitution in 1963 and parliamentary elections in 1965 and 1969. By appealing to Zahir Shah as a symbolic ruler, the State Department hoped to create space in Afghanistan for federal, traditional politics. After so many years of war, it obviously would not be possible to return to the old royalist order, but wartime commanders such as Massoud and Abdul Haq, whose families had roots in traditional political communities, might construct a relatively peaceful transition. The alternative—the international Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, enforced by Pakistani military power—promised only continuing war and instability, Tomsen and his allies at State believed. CIA analysts, on the other hand, tended to view Afghanistan pessimistically. They believed that peace was beyond reach anytime soon. Pakistani influence in Afghanistan looked inevitable to some CIA operatives—Islamabad was relatively strong, Kabul weak. There was no reason for the United States to oppose an expansion of Pakistani power into Afghanistan, they felt, notwithstanding the anti-American rhetoric of ISI’s jihadist clients.

Tomsen might possess an interagency policy document that committed the CIA to a new approach to the Afghan jihad, but he had yet to persuade CIA officers to embrace the policy. Some of them found Tomsen irritating; he had a habit, perhaps unconscious, of coughing up light laughter in the midst of serious conversation, including during solemn, tense interactions with key Afghan commanders or Pakistani generals. Some of the Afghans seemed to recoil at this, CIA officers observed. Tomsen sought to strengthen his position inside the embassy by building a partnership with Oakley, but the ambassador was an elusive ally, embracing the envoy and his views at some points but denouncing him disrespectfully in private at other times. More broadly, the CIA operated in Pakistan largely in secret and with great autonomy. The Islamabad station was connected to Langley with a separate communication system to which diplomats did not have access. In the station and at headquarters most CIA officers regarded Tomsen’s new policy as a naïve enterprise that was unlikely to succeed. They also saw it as an unwelcome distraction from the main business of finishing the covert war. As for postwar Afghan politics, the CIA’s Twetten felt that the Afghans “were going to have to sort it out themselves. . . . It might get really messy.” The United States should not get involved in picking political winners in Afghanistan or in negotiating a new government for the country. There was nobody capable of putting Afghanistan back together again, Twetten believed, including Massoud.
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Still, the CIA had a mission backed by a presidential finding: to support Afghan “self-determination,” however messy, through covert action and close collaboration with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence. The CIA’s Near East Division officers said they had no special sympathy for Hekmatyar or Sayyaf, but they remained deeply committed to a military solution in Afghanistan. They were going to finish the job.

A Pakistani military team traveled secretly to Washington to lay out an “action plan” for an early 1990 offensive. The plan would include support for a new conventional rebel army built around Hekmatyar’s Lashkar-I-Isar, or Army of Sacrifice. Pursuing its own agenda, Pakistani intelligence had built up this militia force, equipping it with artillery and transport, to compete with Massoud’s irregular army in the north.
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Hekmatyar’s army was becoming the most potent military wing of the ISI-backed Muslim Brotherhood networks based in Pakistan—a force that could operate in Afghanistan but also, increasingly, in Kashmir.

The CIA station in Islamabad helped that winter to coordinate broad attacks against Afghanistan’s major cities and roads. Some of the planning involved ISI, but the CIA also reached out through its secret unilateral network to build up key Afghan commanders, including Massoud. If dispersed rebel units—even some at war with one another, such as those loyal to Hekmatyar and Massoud—could be persuaded to hit Najibullah’s supply lines and cities at the same time, they might provide the last push needed to take Kabul. The CIA and Pakistani intelligence remained focused on the fall of Kabul, not on who would take power once Najibullah was gone.

Harry, Gary Schroen, and their case officers met repeatedly during that winter of 1989–1990 with officers in ISI’s Afghan bureau to plan the new offensive. Harry met face-to-face with Hekmatyar. The CIA organized supplies so that Hekmatyar’s forces could rocket the Bagram airport, north of Kabul, as the offensive began.
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