The New Spymasters (34 page)

In the moments after a blast, everything is silent. Shock numbs pain and you go temporarily deaf. A fog of smoke and dust obscures everything. Then, all of a sudden, you can see again, and then a bit later you can hear again, and feel again.

On the road into Kaiwan, the white Corolla lay upside down by the road. Its four occupants were crawling out, staggering on to their feet. The other three cars stopped and people started looking for cover. In this first strike, no one died.

In the military, the people who desperately run for cover out of damaged buildings or blown-up cars are known as ‘squirters'.
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On the screens at Bagram, little figures could be seen moving by the vehicles. The pilots were told to engage again.

The F-16s dropped another bomb. This time it struck the Corolla dead centre. The second strike killed seven people, including a young student and his brother, a teacher. ‘The vehicle was burning,' remembered Ihsannullah. ‘The flames were three metres high … the ground was covered with body parts and blood.'
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The Ant was injured but still alive.

At that moment, two Apache helicopters – until then hovering unseen on the horizon – swept into attack. While one circled and kept watch, the other came raking down the line of the convoy, blasting the survivors with its cannon. At that point the Ant and one other fell dead. Another person was mortally wounded. It was a cruel business, but unless you mopped up the stragglers, said soldiers, there was a chance you would miss the main target.

Local police had arrived at the scene soon after the attack. Someone recorded a video. One person could be heard shouting, ‘Get them out of here. Come on, people! Lift him, lift him. Get him off the ground!' Another shouted, ‘They hit an election convoy! These poor people.'
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News of the strike quickly reached local journalists and Afghan officials. The governor of Takhar Province, Abdul Jabbar Taqwa, told a local radio station that foreign forces had bombed the entourage of a candidate in the parliamentary elections and that ten election workers had been killed. ‘Without any coordination, without informing provisional authorities, they attacked, on their own, civilian people who were in a campaign convoy,' he said.
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The official headquarters of foreign troops in Afghanistan was then a base in central Kabul run by American-led NATO. The phones began ringing there in the press office as journalists asked for comment. Staff worried that they were handling yet another incident of civilian casualties. US officers called their contacts over at the secretive Task Force 535, which also operated independently of NATO. What should be stated publicly? The response was silence. A statement was being prepared.

In the hours that followed the strike, signallers from the US military's Electronic Warfare branch were, as usual, eavesdropping on the Taliban's network of radios and mobile phones. Eventually they passed word to the Task Force. The Taliban were talking to contacts and warning that a senior commander had been killed. ‘Mohamed Amin is dead,' had said one militant. The US officer who commanded the mission could now inform his men: Mission Accomplished. And NATO was now permitted to issue a statement announcing that ‘coalition forces' had conducted a ‘precision air strike' on a senior member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a militant group operating in the north of the country that the US believed to be linked to both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This leader was also ‘assessed to be deputy shadow governor for Takhar Province', a reference to the Taliban's network of parallel leaders that mirrored those officially appointed by the Afghan government. The statement continued: ‘Intelligence tracked the insurgents traveling in a sedan on a series of remote roads in Rustaq District … initial reflections indicate eight to 12 insurgents were killed or injured in the strike, including a Taliban commander. Multiple passengers of the vehicle were positively identified carrying weapons.'
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In Takhar Province, NATO's version of events was immediately challenged. The most prominent among the dead was someone who, as far as every local person was concerned, could hardly be a Taliban or IMU leader. The man nicknamed the Ant was a 45-year-old public figure named Zabet Amanullah, whose history was well known. In the past, he had been in the Taliban movement. But after the attacks of 9/11, he had surrendered and been allowed to move to Pakistan. In 2008 he had returned and had been living openly in Kabul since then. Now that his nephew Abdul Wahid Khorassani was standing for election in Takhar, Amanullah had made his first trip back to the province for years to campaign for him. The Taliban had urged an election boycott and their members adamantly did not stand for or support candidates in the election. So it did not seem likely that Amanullah was a Taliban leader.

That evening, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates happened to be in Afghanistan and he held a press conference with the country's president, Hamid Karzai. When that day's attack was mentioned, the president spoke bitterly. ‘Pro-democracy people should be distinguished from those who fight against democracy,' he said. Gates responded, ‘This is the first I have heard that civilians have been killed and we will look into that.'
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But, ten days later, NATO issued a new statement reiterating that the right target had been struck, even though civilian casualties ‘could not be ruled out'.
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NATO also confirmed media reports that the target's name was ‘Muhammad Amin'. This caused new confusion. Was this some kind of code name for Zabet Amanullah? Either Amin was another man among those in the convoy who died in the air strike or, if the US was to be believed, the Ant was a Taliban leader with two identities – in effect a double agent.

As was often the case, NATO's comments on the Takhar air strike emphasized the difference between how Afghans viewed their country and how it looked to foreign eyes. Even Afghan officials who dealt with NATO and welcomed its presence in the country often concluded that, for all its high-tech wizardry, America's spy machinery was rotten. Every day there were more raids and more strikes against the enemy. Sometimes, for propaganda reasons, it had suited President Karzai and others to criticize American air strikes, even when the Afghan government privately knew that the victims were probably Taliban fighters. But at other times, when it was obvious to them that the US was using bad intelligence to kill the wrong people, they were furious. The death of Amanullah epitomized those errors.

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Intelligence about the enemy's plans and disposition and about the zone of combat has always been essential to soldiers. But it took on an even greater importance in the war against the Taliban. This had begun in 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban's regime. By the mid-2000s, the Taliban had regrouped. By the time of the Takhar strike nearly 100,000 American military personnel were deployed to the country, along with 40,000 other NATO-led foreign troops (including 9,000 Britons). This was more than the Soviet Army had there in the 1980s.
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By the end of 2010, over 2,200 troops in the US-led coalition had been killed.

The conflict in Afghanistan was what the military call an unconventional, or asymmetric, war: Afghan government and coalition forces in uniform were fighting a Taliban that acted as irregular rebels, dressing as non-combatants, living secretly among the population, adopting guerrilla tactics of surprise ambushes and avoiding conventional battle. In military-speak, this was a classic insurgency. And although, historically, rebels tended to win such conflicts, the only known way of defeating them was by making use of super-precise intelligence. A successful counterinsurgency strategy was based as much on trying to separate and protect the population from the insurgents as it was on fighting them. For this to happen, intelligence was needed on who should be protected (friendly or neutral people) and who should be targeted (the enemy). This was hard because to foreign eyes they all looked alike and often lived together.

Intelligence for NATO's campaign came from the military's own intelligence specialists – whether from intelligence officers working in frontline battalions or specialized military cadres, like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) or the National Security Agency (NSA). They were assisted by deployments from the civilian secret services, primarily the CIA or SIS. These agencies handled particularly sensitive sources or specifically political agents, as well as dealing with Afghan spy agencies and conducting their own covert operations.

As the violence intensified, both diplomats and secret service operatives based in Kabul faced increasing threats to their lives and, bound by strict health and safety rules, they were often restricted from going out and making their own contacts. What intelligence they did get from spies was mostly second-hand, the product of their liaising with and mentoring of local security forces. These included, as previously described, the various semi-private paramilitary groups the CIA ran directly, as well as Afghanistan's own security service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). ‘Even if we had people who had learned to speak like locals, we would never have looked like them,' said one British intelligence officer. ‘There was a limit to what we could have done ourselves.' The NDS had many faults (it sometimes tortured its prisoners, for instance), ‘but it had a network of sources nationwide. We could never have competed with that.'

The trouble with having few spies of their own was that Western agencies were always vulnerable to being used to settle local feuds. It was common, for instance, for Afghans to relay tip-offs from someone in one clan that someone in another was linked to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Many of Amanullah's friends wondered if the Americans had been fed information by a particular local politician who, historically, had been a major rival of Amanullah's family.

Intelligence agencies were also aware of an inbuilt Afghan suspicion of foreigners or outsiders. Before British and other NATO troops began deploying in large numbers in southern Afghanistan in 2006, and got drawn into heavy fighting, SIS operatives had reconnoitred the area with Britain's elite Special Air Service (SAS). The mission reported that at the time no insurgency existed but, given the population's hatred of armed foreigners, there would be one if the army engaged.

This specific warning was ignored, and so was the implication that basic intelligence about the instincts and allegiances of ordinary people in the countryside was at least as important as specific intelligence about who was a Taliban fighter or leader and where he was hiding (whether that was obtained using a spy or a radio intercept).

One NATO intelligence chief, then Major General Michael Flynn, had revisited this weakness in early 2010 when he wrote that intelligence officers had focused so much effort on insurgent groups that ‘the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade'. US intelligence officers and analysts were ‘ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers'.
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The gap Flynn had identified was human intelligence, but it was not the sort of high-level secret intelligence that could come only from a top spy. Rather, it was the sort of cultural understanding that ordinary dialogue with local people might have brought about.

Military officers sometimes complained that their partners in the civilian intelligence agencies had become too ill-equipped and too bureaucratic to operate in a war zone. One former Western commander described offering an SIS officer a trip on a helicopter the next day to meet locals in a recently captured town. ‘Sorry, I'm not sure I can get the business case through London by then,' the intelligence officer told him. This response seemed to sum up multiple problems.

But as I witnessed while covering the war as a journalist and spending many days with frontline troops and commanders, over the years of Afghan engagement, intelligence gradually improved; the British and American armies devoted huge efforts to becoming more sensitive to the local human environment. But it was never enough and the improvements were from a very low base. For example, barely three dozen people in the entire British Army in the mid-2000s could speak fluent Pashto, the language of southern Afghanistan. They may have tried, but the military was not equipped to gather the intelligence it needed. And the realization of their deficiencies here came too late. While some intelligence officers would write off this kind of missing intelligence as ‘low-level atmospherics' beyond their responsibilities, its absence was one of the reasons why the military campaign went wrong. The US and NATO had frequently blundered into one valley or another in cooperation with deeply unpopular warlords or corrupt government officials who were linked to a particular tribe. That had only antagonized other tribes and strengthened the Taliban's hand.

While this wider picture about the terrain of battle was, at least at first, far too neglected, US intelligence agencies worked hard on helping their military develop its aggressive and innovative manhunt for top enemy commanders: people like, as the military believed, Amanullah. The object of what was called the ‘kill/capture campaign' was to pummel the enemy by assassinating or capturing its leadership. The targets were to be identified and located by both spies and other human sources, as well as with data from video surveillance and the interception and tracking of phones and radios. As described above, all relevant information was combined in the ‘fusion centre', which was designed to make different agencies work together effectively. First assembled at Balad airbase, north of Baghdad, the centres used makeshift buildings laid out as spokes around a central hub. At Balad, some began to call it the Death Star, and the name stuck as the same operation was moved to Afghanistan. The system had been pioneered in Iraq by a US Special Forces general, Stanley McChrystal. He had then been commander of the secretive Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), which directed the activities of America's elite Special Forces, the Navy Seals and Delta Force, supported by the Ranger Battalion and working also with Britain's SAS and its Special Boat Service (SBS). McChrystal's idea was to pull together almost every conceivable intelligence tool available to the US and focus on cracking a single objective. Its most successful implementation was in finding, locating and then killing the bloodthirsty al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Task Force 535 was just the latest cover name for JSOC's forward headquarters and operations in Afghanistan.