said. “He understands all this better than anyone.”
Sending my vacationing family ahead without me, I put off my annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod so that I could try to influence the options that would be put in front of the deputies. What I found at the NSC was more than discouraging. Attempting to explain to a senior staffer with specific responsibility for South Asia the idea of driving a wedge between the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, he asked: “You mean there’s a distinction between the two?”
Zalmay Khalilzad was the NSC’s newly appointed senior director for Southwest Asia and the Middle East, and he would be leading the discussion of policy options. An old Afghanistan hand and a genuine regional expert, I had first met him in the early 1990s, when he worked for Paul Wolfowitz at Defense. I would later come to know and admire him. He listened attentively to what I had to say, but on July 13, as I sat in the back row in the White House Situation Room as McLaughlin’s “second,” I could see that Zal was just all over the map. Rather thanadvocating a systematic campaign to bring serious, sustained pressure to bear on the Taliban, as I had hoped, he presented a smorgasbord of disaggregated ideas. One proposal he particularly stressed was for creation of a “Radio Free Afghanistan.” I inwardly sighed. Rather than fomenting rebellion against them, we were proposing to persuade the Taliban with words—and the words of foreigners, at that. It was a long, quiet ride with McLaughlin back to Langley.
If there was a lack of clarity and consensus in downtown Washington, the same was true within CIA itself. CTC’s Cofer Black had had little to say at the morning meeting with Tenet, which after all had been my show, but I knew that thinking within the Counterterrorist Center was at cross-purposes with my own. I considered CTC an important institution in CIA, and a necessary one. It was the central institutional repository of knowledge concerning terrorist groups around the globe, and the only unit capable of efficiently coordinating and supporting their pursuit across the artificial lines by which the CIA’s geographic divisions divide up the world. As station chief, I depended on the center to provide many of the people and all of the funds I needed to support my operations in Afghanistan. Much later, I would actually have the privilege of leading the organization as its director, after it had expanded to several times its pre-9/11 size. But while they may have known a lot about terrorists, those in CTC often exhibited little understanding of the cultures, institutions, and social and political dynamics of the regions where those terrorists operated.
The senior ranks of CTC, I noted, were disproportionately populated with Africanists, as Cofer himself. Officers who grew up and spent their early careers in the relatively benign operating environment of sub-Saharan Africa tended to develop quickly, and to rack up the agent recruitment records that drive early promotions. As a result, the Africa Division consistently created rather more senior officers than its tiny management ranks could absorb. The Counterterrorist Center was a natural place to which they could migrate. I found the center’s lack of understanding of Afghanistan and Pakistan a trial, but a manageable one, at least for the moment.
Several of the senior CTC managers had become greatly enamoredof the head of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, the former mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Masood. CTC had been sending senior emissaries to meet with him in his mountain redoubt of the Panjshir Valley, in Afghanistan’s far northeast, for perhaps a year and a half. Their hope was to win his cooperation in finding and capturing bin Laden. It may have been worth a try, but I knew this was a desperate pipe dream; although much too adept a politician to say so, Masood was far too busy defending what little territory remained in his hands from the Taliban onslaught
Sending my vacationing family ahead without me, I put off my annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod so that I could try to influence the options that would be put in front of the deputies. What I found at the NSC was more than discouraging. Attempting to explain to a senior staffer with specific responsibility for South Asia the idea of driving a wedge between the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, he asked: “You mean there’s a distinction between the two?”
Zalmay Khalilzad was the NSC’s newly appointed senior director for Southwest Asia and the Middle East, and he would be leading the discussion of policy options. An old Afghanistan hand and a genuine regional expert, I had first met him in the early 1990s, when he worked for Paul Wolfowitz at Defense. I would later come to know and admire him. He listened attentively to what I had to say, but on July 13, as I sat in the back row in the White House Situation Room as McLaughlin’s “second,” I could see that Zal was just all over the map. Rather thanadvocating a systematic campaign to bring serious, sustained pressure to bear on the Taliban, as I had hoped, he presented a smorgasbord of disaggregated ideas. One proposal he particularly stressed was for creation of a “Radio Free Afghanistan.” I inwardly sighed. Rather than fomenting rebellion against them, we were proposing to persuade the Taliban with words—and the words of foreigners, at that. It was a long, quiet ride with McLaughlin back to Langley.
If there was a lack of clarity and consensus in downtown Washington, the same was true within CIA itself. CTC’s Cofer Black had had little to say at the morning meeting with Tenet, which after all had been my show, but I knew that thinking within the Counterterrorist Center was at cross-purposes with my own. I considered CTC an important institution in CIA, and a necessary one. It was the central institutional repository of knowledge concerning terrorist groups around the globe, and the only unit capable of efficiently coordinating and supporting their pursuit across the artificial lines by which the CIA’s geographic divisions divide up the world. As station chief, I depended on the center to provide many of the people and all of the funds I needed to support my operations in Afghanistan. Much later, I would actually have the privilege of leading the organization as its director, after it had expanded to several times its pre-9/11 size. But while they may have known a lot about terrorists, those in CTC often exhibited little understanding of the cultures, institutions, and social and political dynamics of the regions where those terrorists operated.
The senior ranks of CTC, I noted, were disproportionately populated with Africanists, as Cofer himself. Officers who grew up and spent their early careers in the relatively benign operating environment of sub-Saharan Africa tended to develop quickly, and to rack up the agent recruitment records that drive early promotions. As a result, the Africa Division consistently created rather more senior officers than its tiny management ranks could absorb. The Counterterrorist Center was a natural place to which they could migrate. I found the center’s lack of understanding of Afghanistan and Pakistan a trial, but a manageable one, at least for the moment.
Several of the senior CTC managers had become greatly enamoredof the head of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, the former mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Masood. CTC had been sending senior emissaries to meet with him in his mountain redoubt of the Panjshir Valley, in Afghanistan’s far northeast, for perhaps a year and a half. Their hope was to win his cooperation in finding and capturing bin Laden. It may have been worth a try, but I knew this was a desperate pipe dream; although much too adept a politician to say so, Masood was far too busy defending what little territory remained in his hands from the Taliban onslaught
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