88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary by Robert Grenier review – US’s Afghan war shambles laid bare

It is easy to forget that until he started criticising the Americans for bombing too many Afghan civilians and comparing them to “occupiers”, Hamid Karzai was Washington’s grateful servant. After all, US officials picked him to be Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban president, armed and financed him to launch an uprising against the mullahs after 9/11, helicoptered him away from imminent capture after one clumsy foray inside Afghanistan in mid-October, reinserted him a few weeks later to march on Kandahar successfully, and finally foisted him on the rest of the Afghan political class at the United Nations-sponsored conference in Bonn in December 2001 as the leader they could not afford to reject.

Robert Grenier’s fascinating book shows just how close the Karzai-US relationship was at that stage. As the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief in Islamabad, Grenier played a key part in what he calls (in a nod to the three Anglo-Afghan wars) the first American-Afghan war. It lasted 88 days, from 9/11 until the capture of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s compound in Kandahar. Much of Grenier’s time was spent trying to persuade tribal chieftains, often with cash, to rise up against the Taliban, or even – in the other hallowed CIA tradition – plotting with a senior Taliban commander to mount a palace coup against Omar. No other US official has yet chronicled this period so intimately, including detailed records of meetings and phone calls.

The story of Karzai’s floundering military campaign against the Taliban is particularly graphic. Grenier discloses how the future president was almost killed by US “friendly fire”, a fate later to befall dozens of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 5 December 2001, a US Special Forces ground controller, working with Karzai’s small contingent of armed men on the northern outskirts of Kandahar, made a mistake and called in a 2,000lb “smart bomb” on his own location. No Americans died but around 40 of Karzai’s Afghans were killed or wounded. Karzai was in a nearby building and escaped with minor cuts.

Thanks to details such as this Grenier adds considerable value to the historical record, even though his book is often marred by a know-all and self-justifying tone. Colleagues and several senior officials, including the then secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, are pilloried. Grenier admits to some errors of judgment; for example, he preferred Gul Agha Sherzai, who later re-emerged as Kandahar’s controversial governor, over Karzai as the best man to topple the Taliban. But overall he has little doubt that he always made the right calls in the arguments between various sectors of Washington’s bureaucratic machine.

He takes particular pride in the fact that, unlike most foreign-based CIA station chiefs who stick to spycraft and narrowly focused operations, he was trusted to make strategic policy recommendations. Twelve days after 9/11, George Tenet, the CIA director, asked him to produce a comprehensive plan for the “war on terror” that George Bush had just announced. Grenier calls the eight-page cable that he produced “the best three hours of work I ever did”. We know from Bob Woodward’s Bush at War that the president and the military top brass adapted their plans in line with the memo, so Grenier’s self-congratulation is no idle boast. His cable warned the Americans not to be too closely identified with or rely on the Tajik-led Northern Alliance who were fighting the Taliban near Kabul. This risked encuraging the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s majority ethnicity, in the southern and eastern provinces to coalesce behind the Taliban leadership against foreign invaders. It would be better to find and arm dissident Pashtuns, if possible within the Taliban. The US should play on Pashtun suspicions of the Arab jihadis, keep its footprint small and eschew permanent bases. - Read More at 88 Days to Kandahar:

88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary by Robert Grenier review – US's Afghan war shambles laid bare