Robert L. Grenier’s ‘88 Days to Kandahar’ - nytimes

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.  Read More at Robert L. Grenier’s ‘88 Days to Kandahar’

Robert L. Grenier's '88 Days to Kandahar' - NYTimes.com