The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

guy back there on the motorcycle who might want to kill you. Risk aversion had replaced the boldness and romanticism of the old guard. The DO had no bench to draw from when things heated up.

But ready or not, the CIA was thrown back into the game. Less than a month after the twin towers collapsed, the CIA, in tandem with the United States military, was in Afghanistan. Its mission this time was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his cohorts—and to neutralize and punish those who protected them.

To meet the immediate challenge, the agency began making badly needed changes. It brought in new officers from the military, cross-training them in the trade and craft of human intelligence and the languages needed, and tried to get them out to the field as soon as possible. The agency got off to a reasonable start, but the challenges in Afghanistan are far from squarely met. Afghanistan is an unforgiving land, a graveyard of empires, and it will be there that a reinvigorated CIA will pass or fail its most difficult test.

To observers unfamiliar with the martial history of the land between the Indus and the Oxus, America’s foray into Afghanistan—Operation Enduring Freedom—seemed to be a textbook example of how to mount an insurgency using indigenous forces. CIA officers, along with U.S. and allied special operations forces, moved quickly and quietly into Afghanistan, where they reestablished old contacts and linked up with the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban force that had shrewdly been cobbled together by the late Ahmed Shah Massoud. With U.S. airpower clearing the way, they raced to Kabul. In less than five weeks, the Taliban had been routed and the Afghan capital liberated—with more casualties among journalists covering the war than in the U.S. military in that first blitz. It wasn’t until November that American forces took their first casualty, CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann, killed during the revolt at Qala-i-Jangi prison fortress.

Enduring Freedom looked easy—maybe a little too easy, like the British march on Kabul in 1839 or the Soviet Christmas invasion in 1979. All three enterprises had a common thread—getting in was almost painless. Then Afghan history always kicks in. The British would founder and be forced into retreat in January 1842, three years after their fluid entry. They marched out of Kabul with a column of 16,500 souls, headed east to their garrison at Jalalabad, a distance of 110 miles. A single British officer made it to safety. Almost a century and a half later, the Soviets faced a similar fate. After a flawless invasion, the Red Army bogged down, and a decade later it limped home across the Oxus after giving up almost 15,000 dead. Their Afghan misadventure would also cost the Soviets an empire.

Now, in the second year of America’s Afghan enterprise, there is less talk of things being easy. The accounts of Operation Enduring Freedom and Leonid Shebarshin’s sobering analysis of Soviet operations in the Panjshir in 1984 have begun to sound hauntingly familiar: crisp military briefers giving cheerily optimistic but unconvincing accounts of a beaten enemy, of high enemy body counts, but again without the bodies. “How can thirteen hundred rebels carry off seventeen hundred of their dead—and their weapons?” Shebarshin naively asked the 40th Army briefing officer in Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Panjshir Valley in 1984. Those same questions have already been asked by journalists briefed on the battles of Tora Bora and Shah-i-Kot. And more are now asking how it is that those we have liberated seem to shell and rocket our troops with such regularity.

According to the premier historian on Afghanistan, the late Louis Dupree, four factors contributed to the British disasters in Afghanistan: having troops there in the first place; installing an unpopular emir on the Afghan throne; allowing “your” Afghans to mistreat other Afghans; and reducing the subsidies paid to the tribal chiefs. These fatal miscalculations, barely altered in form, were committed by the British in 1839 and again in 1878, and a century later by the Soviets. They are being committed today, and how we deal with them will determine the ultimate outcome of the American undertaking in Afghanistan.

The United States may not have placed a wildly unpopular emir on the throne—indeed, America’s choice for an Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, was the least objectionable of the possible candidates—but Afghan politics, always murky, is as much defined by the contenders to the throne as by the occupant. The real power in Kabul after the rout of the Taliban is not Hamid Karzai but Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the successor to the murdered Ahmad Shah Massoud. Fahim is a Tajik, a Panjshiri with a reputation for ruthlessness. He has, to be sure, violated Dupree’s third dictum by grossly mistreating other segments of the Afghan population, notably and most dangerously the majority Pashtuns. As each day passes, Fahim is increasingly viewed by the Pashtun population and some other ethnic groups as the unpopular emir America has placed on the throne. Finally, the continued failure of the United States and its allies to make good on the pledges of massive reconstruction assistance—more than $4 billion pledged but undelivered—amounts to the same as the reduction of tribute paid by the nineteenth-century British to the tribal chiefs. This failure of the United States and its allies to engage in nation building is behind much of the unrest in the provinces.

Afghanistan, a year into its “American era,” is troubled and dangerous, but it is not hopeless. The success or failure of the Afghan enterprise will depend in large measure on how the United States manages to build alliances with the inhabitants of all of Afghanistan, not just the Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley. The CIA will have to rekindle and nurture old relationships with the dominant Pashtuns of eastern Afghanistan and undertake measures to convince the broader population to take a stake in a new Afghanistan and join in its reconstruction. It is a daunting task and the learning curve is short. But failure