‘88 Days to Kandahar:’ a former CIA station chief in Pakistan reflects on his career - Peter Finn

Robert L. Grenier’s “88 Days to Kandahar” is an admirably frank addition to the bookshelf. A CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, before and after 9/11, he has a sweeping story to tell, which he does in a sharp, straightforward style while pausing to let us in on the ad-hoc decision-making of the sometimes absurd world he inhabited.

His focus, as the title suggests, is largely on the immediate campaign to topple the Taliban, run down a scattering al-Qaeda and insert new Afghan leadership into the country: the “smooth, regal” and often prickly Hamid Karzai.

The centerpiece of the book, the evolution of the improvised, chaotic assault on southern Afghanistan by teams of CIA officers and Special Operations forces alongside hastily mustered Afghans, is vividly told. (The focus is on the Pashtuns, not the Northern Alliance nor the fall of Kabul.) But there is also a large measure of disappointment with U.S. mistakes in Afghanistan, those of a blundering colossus. “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,” he writes. Grenier, now retired, is not optimistic about Afghanistan after the U.S. drawdown and is bluntly angry about the lost lives that achieved so little.

When the towers fell, Grenier had two overlapping responsibilities: get the Pakistanis on board in the fight against al-Qaeda and gin up some kind of Afghan force to challenge the Taliban in its heartland. There is an almost comic element to some of the maneuvers of the fledgling Afghan fighters challenging the Taliban as they “raced pell-mell” across the landscape — and just as soon turning tail before being rescued by American airpower and the tactical stupidity of their opponents.

But Karzai and his forces, including the Americans who accompanied them, were, on several occasions, “minutes from annihilation” at the hands of the Taliban. In another near-miss, Karzai could have been killed when an American forward controller traveling with the Afghan leader accidentally called in a strike on his own position. Had Karzai perished in any of these incidents, it “would doubtless have convinced the southern Pashtuns of the futility of resistance to the Taliban.”

Grenier believes that continued, small-scale engagement with both Afghanistan and Pakistan is in the U.S. national interest but doubts that American leaders have the “wisdom and steadfastness” to sustain the effort. “We may think we are finished with Afghanistan,” he warns. “But Afghanistan may not be finished with us.”  Read More at Washington Post

'88 Days to Kandahar:' a former CIA station chief in Pakistan