88 days to Kandahar A CIA diary

Review by New York Times Review

AS AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR draws to a close, journalists and diplomats, spooks and soldiers keep turning out books attempting to explain what was lost and won over the last 14 years in Afghanistan. While none so far have synthesized the disparate worlds of American civilian policy, military action and Afghan realities, the latest entry, "88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary," by Robert L. Grenier, adds another on-the-ground view of how the early events actually unfolded. Grenier, who retired in 2006 after 27 years with the C.I.A., was the station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002, with practical responsibility for Taliban-dominated areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan during the crucial early months of the war. The book's title refers to the period between Sept. 11 and Dec. 7, when an anti-Taliban tribal leader named Hamid Karzai made a perilous return to Afghanistan to rally Pashtun opposition to the Taliban, which culminated in their surrender. Grenier's book is at least the fourth published memoir of a former C.I.A. officer containing long sections on the Afghan war, and what it chiefly offers are details of the role of both the C.I.A. and the Pakistanis in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan in the months after 9/11. With his ringside seat as the senior agency official stationed closest to Afghanistan, Grenier is able to describe meeting by meeting, sometimes phone call after phone call, how events unfolded. Hampering the account, however, is a sometimes brash and even self-congratulatory tone that raises questions about his reliability as a narrator. He begins with a call from the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, on Sept. 23, 2001, asking him which targets the Americans should bomb first. Grenier says he wrote an eight-page cable setting out how to prosecute the initial stages of the war, which was approved by President Bush. "I regard that cable as the best three hours of work I ever did in a 27-year career. The mere fact that a C.I.A. field officer was asked to write it, to say nothing of the fact that it was adopted as policy, is extraordinary," he says. But the cable is not reprinted here, and since much of Grenier's story is recounted through the device of "reconstructed dialogue," and no alternate views are presented, it is hard to determine the veracity of his claims. That said, Grenier was clearly a key player, and he gives a dramatic description of the nail-biting hours in October and early November 2001, when the agency tracked Karzai's progress in the company of anti-Taliban fighters as the enemy was closing in. Grenier says he realized the situation was dire when Karzai "ominously ... added another item to his long wish list: a small portable diesel generator and fuel, so that he could recharge his phone batteries while fleeing from the Taliban." The agency, which decided Karzai had the best chance of any tribal figure of fomenting an internal rebellion against the Taliban, saved his life and those of his senior aides in the midst of the fight by spiriting them from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The C.I.A. later reinserted Karzai into Afghanistan so that he could make his way to Kandahar and claim leadership of the country. While this has been reported elsewhere, it was Grenier who was in charge of the operation, so having his version on the record is especially valuable. (Also worth reading is "A Man and a Motorcycle," by Bette Dam, a Dutch journalist, who interviewed Karzai and painstakingly tracked down most of the Afghans who were with him for their take on the same events.) In Grenier's telling, he and a small group of paramilitary agents, along with his deputy, were the main actors. With little self-awareness, he describes how some of the worst features of America's legacy in Afghanistan took root, not least of them the practice of procuring local assistance from tribal leaders through large cash payments, which set a pattern for corrupt, money-for-loyalty dealings in the future. Grenier also puts on the record the C.I.A.'s habit of turning a blind eye to despotic warlords who were extorting payments from ordinary citizens. And so at one point he refers to the "good works" being done by a United States-backed warlord, who he admits was "imposing tolls on commercial truck traffic." What's more, he fails to mention that the man has been accused of flagrant corruption by American officials in Afghanistan as well as by local Afghan politicians. For Grenier, what was important was that the warlord was on America's side in going after Qaeda fighters. As the United States later learned, the winners from these corrupt practices were the Taliban, who successfully capitalized on popular antagonism toward such behavior. By offering services like courts and law enforcement that functioned without bribes, they began to rehabilitate their reputation and regain influence in large parts of the country. Those looking for insight into Pakistan's willingness to give the Taliban a safe haven and for America to tolerate it will find Grenier's account illuminating in its detailed description of the many pressures that country faces from its own extremists, as well as its sense of existential threat from India. Grenier emphasizes how much help the Americans got from the Pakistanis, including the right to use their bases and assistance from their intelligence agency. Still, such insights must be balanced against Grenier's self-satisfied tone, especially in the wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture and detentions carried out by the C.I.A. It is clear from Grenier's account that the agency was so confident in its early approach to Afghanistan that for some time it did not re-examine its operational premises. Grenier seems to conclude that whatever C.I.A. agents did - whether backing bad actors or using torture or wrongfully imprisoning detainees - was warranted. In defending, for example, the arrest and torture of one of the more notorious Qaeda members, Abu Zubaydah, who was captured on Grenier's watch, sent to a C.I.A. "black" prison in Thailand and waterboarded at least 83 times (according to an internal Justice Department memorandum), Grenier provides this sweeping justification: "In any individual case, the lives of hundreds or thousands of innocent people might be at stake." But, crucially, he offers no evidence to substantiate that torture - which he refers to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" - yielded lifesaving information. Grenier says that once Abu Zubaydah was caught, he was not involved in his interrogation. And he boasts of responsibility for shipping to Guantánamo Bay much of that prison's population in 2002, which eventually numbered in the hundreds. He never reveals any doubts about whether those who were bundled off to Guantánamo merited imprisonment. We now know that a number of detainees posed no threat and were released. Nor does he consider what else might be at stake in endorsing torture or secret prisons - like the tarnishing of America's reputation as an upholder of human rights. Grenier's most thoughtful analysis of what went wrong in Afghanistan is contained in the book's last 60 pages, which recount the years after he left his Pakistan post and became, among other things, the head of the agency's prestigious counter-terrorism center. Here he drops his self-justifying tone and becomes more reflective, perhaps in part because he is looking at government policy as a whole. "Our current abandonment of Afghanistan is the product of a ... colossal over-reach, from 2005 onwards," he writes. "In the process we overwhelmed a primitive country, with a largely illiterate population, a tiny agrarian economy, a tribal social structure and nascent national institutions. We triggered massive corruption through our profligacy; convinced a substantial number of Afghans that we were, in fact, occupiers and facilitated the resurgence of the Taliban." This is a bleak assessment not least because it comes from someone who was so intent on making the United States Afghan project a success that would endure far beyond his days in the field. ALISSA J. RUBIN is The Times's bureau chief in Paris. Previously, she covered Afghanistan, most recently from 2009 to 2013, when she was bureau chief in Kabul.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 1, 2015]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Grenier, former director of CIA's counterterrorism center and station chief in Islamabad, offers unparalleled insight into the American campaign in Afghanistan with a frank, even-handed assessment of the initial military effort to topple the Taliban. Casting himself as an intrepid defender of his agents, he expounds at length on the strategic concerns, bureaucratic squabbles, and conditions on the ground that shaped the conflict. Pakistan in particular comes out looking better than it does in most accounts. Grenier contends that Pakistani intelligence services were fully and capably committed to the fight against al-Qaeda, and that the rise of extremism in Pakistan since 9/11 has more to do with shortsighted American policy and Indian meddling than with official Pakistani complicity with terrorists. One question never addressed is how bin Laden could have survived for so long within a mile from the Pakistani Military Academy in Abbottabad: Grenier merely says, "Once safely in Pakistan, given even a modicum of support, he could have gone virtually anywhere undetected." Grenier does refer to himself in the third person, but by and large his tone is affable, and his conclusions-many of which run counter to conventional wisdom-are logical and amply demonstrated. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Islamabad Station Chief and Counterterrorism Center director Grenier explains the complicated events and circumstances surrounding the beginning of what would become the convoluted war in Afghanistan from his perspective as a covert agent in the Middle East from September 2001 through May 2002. In addition to an explanation of the forces at work during this period, the author includes two sections in which he describes the aftermath and far-reaching outcomes of his mission. Oscillating between tense diplomatic discussions (involving himself and warlords such as Gul Agha Sherzai) and gun battles, Grenier deftly describes the machinations at work that would someday lead to the conflict in Afghanistan. He pulls no punches in his summation of U.S. involvement in the area-there are actions he feels were necessary and successful, but he doesn't hesitate to label others as overreaching, obstructionist, and even botched. More fascinating again is the human element at work-the role of personalities and how the fate of nations can be dependent on the moods, attitudes, and dedication of a few. VERDICT This eye-opening account of how things really "work" in the Middle East and in modern war will appeal to general readers and those interested in political science, war memoirs, contemporary battle accounts, American history, Middle Eastern politics, and books about spies/covert operations. Highly Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]-Benjamin Brudner, Curry Coll. Lib., Milton, MA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Former CIA officer Grenier delivers an action-packed tale, rich in implication, of the post-9/11 race to unseat the Taliban and rout al-Qaida in Afghanistan.A field agent who "had a huge natural advantage over desk-bound, bookish analytic types" in having vast experience in both Central Asia and in the paramilitary operations of the CIA, the author was called on immediately after 9/11 to examine the internal politics of Afghanistan and help develop national policy (against, he notes, the CIA's brief "to inform policy, never to make it") on the brink of the American invasion of 2001. Grenier's recommendations were nuanced, allowing even the Taliban some face-saving means of separating from al-Qaida. Among his other tenets: The United States should avoid giving the appearance of taking sides in a civil war that had ethnic dimensions, and "the U.S. effort should always be in support of Afghans, rather than the other way around." The author's memoir of transforming from disaffected longhair into dedicated warrior sometimes reads like mere filler, but his critique of what became of that plan is devastating: As he notes, we have broken the china and are now in a rush to flee the shop, while carefully forged alliances are unraveling and supposed allies are casting their eyes in other directions for friends. He opens, darkly, with the hope that the lessons his narrative offers will be useful as we prepare for a third Afghan-American War, having narrowly won the first and botched the second. Apart from his taut, well-written account of action on the ground, its heroes mostly gnarly Special Forces troops and spooks, CIA watchers will be fascinated by Grenier's look at the twisted, surprisingly nasty politics within the intelligence community in the age of Bush/Cheney and their appointees, squabbling that makes Afghanistan look tame. A catalog of occasional victories and constant missteps that is eye-opening, illuminating and maddening. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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88 Days to Kandahar Chapter 1 THE PLAN SEPTEMBER 23, 2001 SUSPENDED IN THE HAZY netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, I gradually became aware of an irritating sound somewhere near my head. It took a few seconds to orient myself. I was in my bedroom, safe behind bolted steel doors. The sound was coming from the secure phone on the nightstand. The clock indicated I'd gone to bed just four hours before. "What in God's name do they want now?" I thought. I raised the receiver and managed a raspy "Hello." "Did I wake you up, son?" It was the unmistakable voice of George Tenet. I wasn't much in the habit of being awakened by the director, but what caught my attention was being called "son." George wasn't all that much older than me. "No, Mr. Director," I lied. "I was just getting up." "Listen, Bob," he began, after our encrypted phones had synched up. "We're meeting tomorrow morning at Camp David to discuss our war strategy for Afghanistan. "How should we begin?" he asked. "What targets should we hit? How do we sequence our actions? Defense is telling us that there are almost no military targets available." We can see from overhead reconnaissance, he added, that the Arab al-Qa'ida fighters, whom we called the "Afghan Arabs," had evacuated their camps. "Should we bomb empty camps?" These questions had been troubling me for the twelve days since September 11, while the situation in Afghanistan rapidly evolved. As the CIA station chief in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, for the past two years, I was responsible for all U.S. clandestine intelligence activities in both Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan--fully 90 percent of the country. For two years, it was my job to lead the men and women charged with ferreting out the region's secrets and penetrating its mysteries. I had devoted nearly every waking minute to understanding problems: the rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir; Pakistan's covert support to terrorist groups; its construction and proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles; the plans and intentions of Pakistan's military dictator, General Musharraf; and, most important, the terrorist enterprise of Osama bin Laden and its relations with the Taliban, the Afghan religious student movement that dominated the country and provided him with safehaven and support. Now, after 9/11, I knew that it would no longer be enough to report on problems. As the senior CIA officer on the scene, I would have to try to solve them. For a few days after 9/11, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had gone silent. The normal flow of secret message traffic had dwindled to a trickle. It was as though the American giant had been staggered. Then, in the days immediately preceding George's call, the giant had come back to life, and Langley was pummeling me with questions and demands. We were facing the imminent prospect of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. I had visions of large numbers of U.S. troops operating in a vast and difficult terrain, trying in vain to find and strike an evanescent enemy, with no defined targets and no clear long-term objectives. This seemed like a prescription for a Soviet-style Afghan disaster. Just a few days before, on September 19, one of my officers had gathered our first piece of "smoking gun" evidence of al-Qa'ida's responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Our best source on the Afghan Arabs--an agent who had been carefully vetted and whose information had been fully corroborated dozens of times--had attended a meeting of over 100 Arab fighters hosted by bin Laden near Jalalabad, in northeastern Afghanistan. Contradicting his previous public denials of responsibility for 9/11, in this private gathering Shaykh Osama had taken full and triumpant credit for the attacks. He exulted over what he said was an imminent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which would at last draw the Americans into open combat and surely lead to their defeat. I shared the desire to deal with bin Laden once and for all; but I also feared that if we acted carelessly, his prediction could prove accurate. As George was talking, my mind was focused on President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech three days before, on September 20. Speaking before the joint houses of Congress, with British prime minister Tony Blair in attendance, the president had laid the cornerstone of a conceptual framework to guide the way forward. The speech had been replete with demands and ultimatums for the Taliban: Turn over Osama bin Laden; close the terrorist training camps and subject them to international inspection; deliver all terrorist fighters associated with bin Laden to competent foreign authorities. Failure to do so, Bush said, would condemn the Taliban to share the terrorists' fate. Hidden in that hard message, however, was a ray of hope and the possibility of redemption. The president was drawing a line in the sands of time. As of 9/11, he was saying, the rules of the game had changed. Henceforth, nations and subnational groups who acted as sponsors of terrorism would be held to account. There was an implicit opportunity for erstwhile terrorist sponsors to reject terrorist tactics and those responsible for them. That opportunity was the message I thought we should extend to elements of the Taliban, and to all Afghans willing to break with the Taliban policies of the past. Reinforced by the international solidarity which had immediately manifested itself after 9/11, that positive message would guide our policy, and provide the justification and the rationale we would need as we took what would most likely be the tough military actions necessary to bring al-Qa'ida to heel and to deny it safehaven. "The President has set the policy for us in his speech," I said. "In effect, he has invited the Taliban to join the international coalition against terrorism. "We shouldn't think about this primarily in military terms. What's important is for us to focus on our political goals in Afghanistan. We can't permanently rule the country ourselves. Everything we do should be consistent with the long-term need to create a new political dispensation in Afghanistan, one willing to drive out the Arabs and to keep them out. Any military means we employ should be designed to serve and to reinforce our political objectives. "We begin with Mullah Omar. Our initial demands focus on him. If he refuses to change policy, to break with bin Laden, we hit him. That serves notice on the others in the Taliban leadership, who have never much liked bin Laden or the Arabs anyway. We extend the promise and the ultimatum to them, and if they refuse, we have the rationale to hit them too." George stopped me with questions. "Mr. Director," I said, "this isn't going to work. I need to write this all down clearly." "That's a good idea," he said. "It's 11:30 PM here, and I'm meeting the helicopter at 6:00 AM tomorrow for Camp David. I need to get some rest. Can you get something to me by 5:00 AM?" I told him I could. As I sat at my desk to write, it was as if I were merely transcribing something I could see plainly in my head. This was breaking all the rules. No one knew that better. Every CIA officer is taught that we are never to be "policy prescriptive." CIA's job is to inform policy, never to make it. I had just spent three years as chief of "the Farm," the Clandestine Service's equivalent of West Point for the Army and Parris Island for the Marines, where it was my job to make sure that the next generation of CIA officers knew its proper place in the world. And yet here I was, purposefully violating one of the cardinal rules I had spent a career upholding. There wasn't an approved format for the piece I was writing. I framed it as an "Aardwolf," CIA's code name for a chief of station field appraisal. Such appraisals, analytic pieces from senior CIA representatives abroad, are relatively rare, prepared only in response to watershed events. They get a lot of attention from high levels in the executive branch. I knew the senior reports officers at CIA Headquarters, who normally reviewed all incoming intelligence reports for conformity to format and adherence to the rules, would not be pleased when they saw a field appraisal specifically intended to prescribe policy. Their ranks traditionally dominated by women, the senior reports cadres were sometimes waggishly referred to, sotto voce, as "the Sisterhood." To me they were the Vestals, the guardians of the flame. But they wouldn't get a vote. They would see this chief of station field appraisal, but only after the fact: it was going directly to Tenet, outside normal channels, for his own use with the cabinet principals. I banged out the piece, eight pages, in three hours. By the time I was finished, all my senior guys were in the office, and I circulated the draft to them, made modifications based on their comments, and sent it on to the director's security staff with instructions to hand it to him as soon as he awakened. It would be days before I learned of its fate. George had reviewed it at five in the morning and had immediately sent copies to the full War Cabinet, who used it as the point of departure for their discussions, held without the president present, that Sunday morning. The principals presented their conclusions to the president in the White House Situation Room the following day and, after more discussion, the eight-page document was approved by President Bush as the conceptual template for the war effort. Tenet was directed to put me in touch with General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command (CENTCOM), and the senior combatant commander charged with leading the Afghan campaign, to make sure his war plan conformed. Later that week, at a meeting with a UK official in Islamabad, he told me that my report had been briefed to the British Cabinet. "You've got the silver pen!" he said. I regard that cable as the best three hours of work I ever did in a twenty-seven-year career. The mere fact that a CIA field officer was asked to write it, to say nothing of the fact that it was adopted as policy, is extraordinary. Despite its flaws, it anticipated many of the problems with which the United States and its allies are struggling now in Afghanistan, over a decade on, and it suggested remedies--some followed, some not; some effective, some not. Adopted at an early point when opinions were still malleable, it established many of the key assumptions that governed the conduct of the early campaign in Afghanistan-- sometimes, admittedly, to an extent more literal than was helpful. But those assumptions reflected the eternal verities of Afghanistan, as America has subsequently learned to its cost. Thirteen years have passed since 9/11. The improbably quick victory won by small numbers of CIA and Special Forces operatives allied with anti-Taliban dissidents in what we might call the First American-Afghan War has nearly faded from memory. Our "victory" proved short-lived. After a pause of perhaps three years, the United States again found itself at war with the Taliban in what we might call the Second American-Afghan War. Only this time, the comparatively modest objectives of the first war had been replaced with an over-ambitious set of millennial nation-building goals which Americans could not achieve and Afghans could not sustain. Many of the principles of my cable, which guided the American effort in the first war, had long been abandoned by the start of the second. The original plan postulated that while the United States should support the Northern Alliance--the collection of Afghan minorities who traditionally opposed the Taliban and were locked in a civil war with it--we should strictly avoid the perception that we were entering a civil war on their side. To do so would cause the restive and more numerous Pashtuns, from whom the Taliban was drawn, to coalesce firmly against us. Instead, any effort against the Taliban must include dissident Pashtun elements, beginning if possible within the Taliban itself. I asserted firm rules of conduct: America must keep its military footprint in Afghanistan small; it should eschew permanent bases; the U.S. effort should always be in support of Afghans, rather than the other way around; most important, the American quest to deny Afghan sanctuary to international terrorists should conform to the political culture of the country, rather than fall into the trap of trying to change it. The second war is coming to an end. There will be no victory in this war, illusory or otherwise. Having concluded, correctly, that the prospects for success in the terms it had originally defined are too remote, and the associated costs far too high, the Obama administration has decided to withdraw substantially from Afghanistan. This recalibration of the U.S. posture in South-Central Asia would be welcome if it were conducted in support of a viable and sustainable long-term American engagement in the region. Instead, the planned post-2014 American military posture in Afghanistan is merely a cover for what the U.S. government actually intends: the abandonment of Afghanistan. If America's problems in South-Central Asia were confined to Afghanistan itself, the situation would not be so dire. But the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its aftermath have unleashed forces within neighboring Pakistan that have further radicalized that country and undermined the political and social underpinnings of a nuclear-armed state of some 180 million people. America's obsession with Afghanistan has put our country's far more important interests in Pakistan in serious jeopardy. Now, having caused more harm than good by trying to do too much, we are set to compound our errors by doing too little. The challenges that confront us today are remarkably similar to those we faced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Afghanistan is again reverting to civil war, and the religiously inspired radicalism that provided an incubator for the 9/11 terrorists is, if anything, stronger in both Afghanistan and Pakistan than when we were attacked. As it has done before, America is trying to wash its hands of South-Central Asia. As before, that may not be so easy, and we may not be able to live with the consequences of our abandonment. For those who will be charged with future U.S. policy in the region, greater acquaintance with the history surrounding America's first direct military involvement in Afghanistan, and the reasoning that led to our initial successes there, might well usefully inform their--and our--judgments as we prepare for the possibility of yet another phase of our Afghan adventure. It is my hope that a grasp of the practical lessons learned by this writer and his colleagues in the First American-Afghan War, and an understanding of how our distraction from those lessons led to the failure of the Second, will yet prove to be of use as and when America and its allies are forced to embark upon a Third. Excerpted from 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary by Robert L. Grenier All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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