The Great Game Is Back, and Afghanistan Is at the Center of It

 

October 22, 2021  

The Great Game Is Back, and Afghanistan Is at the Center of It

The United States should not disengage and simply leave the Afghan game to others. It needs to stay in this new Great Game, wherever it might lead.

by Milton Bearden

ON THE eve of Operation Enduring Freedom, the American invasion of Afghanistan, almost exactly twenty years ago, I published an essay in Foreign Affairs entitled “Graveyard of Empires,” launching a sobriquet for Afghanistan that has endured relentless repetition to this day. In it, I suggested that the United States should avoid employing some tactics in Afghanistan that might result in a broad civil war that would ultimately drive the United States to simply give up and leave. That is how it played out twenty years later, at the end of August 2021.

There has been ample commentary on the optics of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, most of it critically focused on the tragic events at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul—thirteen dead U.S. service members, over 170 Afghans killed, and desperate Afghans falling to their deaths from the wheel wells of departing U.S. transports. The chaotic U.S departure was a stark reminder that withdrawing foreign armies from Afghanistan has on occasion been an untidy affair.

In January 1842, British major general Sir William Elphinstone’s army, along with dependents and camp followers totaling over 16,000, departed Kabul for the British garrison at Jalalabad some ninety miles to the east. Despite having received guarantees of safe passage by their Afghan adversaries, after seven brutal days on the march, Elphinstone’s army had been completely wiped out by Afghan ambushes, snipers, and the brutal winter cold. The sole surviving British officer, Surgeon William Brydon, upon arriving wounded and dazed at the Jalalabad Garrison was asked about the location of Elphinstone’s army.

“I am the army,” he responded.

THE WITHDRAWAL of the Soviet Union’s 40th Army from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, was a tidy affair. Having signed an agreement the previous April in Geneva, the Soviets stuck to their withdrawal schedule for their 115,000 troops down to the last moment of the last day. It was a made-for-television production, with the commander of the 40th Army, Colonel General Boris Gromov, making his exit as the last Soviet officer to cross “Friendship Bridge” over the Oxus River into the Soviet Union. Three-quarters of the way across the bridge, the Soviet general leapt down from his tank, strode a few yards to meet his fourteen-year-old son, Maksim, who awkwardly presented his father with a bouquet of red carnations. The two Gromovs then marched the last fifty yards out of Afghanistan together, cameras rolling in a specially constructed pavilion on the Soviet side of the Oxus. Though the Soviets lost their Afghan war, Gromov would thereafter be referred to, oddly, as “the hero of Afghanistan.” It might also be noted that as the Soviets exited Afghanistan, they were not being pressed by a few hundred thousand panicky Afghans trying to catch a ride with them. The Mujaheddin, who had battled them for a brutal decade, and the Afghan people, for the most part, were happy to wave them goodbye.

The other great armies that have conquered and then withdrawn from Afghanistan over the millennia—Alexander the Great and the Mogul emperors Genghis Khan, Babur, and Tamerlane—all eventually gave up on Afghanistan, and left behind them little else but Greek coins and the DNA that still marks the faces of Afghans across the broad reaches of the Hindu Kush.

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan was anything but tidy, though it may not be properly assessed until after the partisan political debates on the end of the American adventure in Afghanistan have mercifully faded. The Biden administration inherited an agreement reached with the Taliban by its predecessor calling for a May 1, 2021, total withdrawal of all U.S. forces. The new administration extended that date to September 11, an adjustment the Taliban apparently accepted without deal-breaking complaint. The newly inaugurated Biden administration also inherited a small U.S. force in Afghanistan of about 2,500 troops, though that number surged to over 5,000 during the withdrawal. The last U.S. troops departed Kabul at 11:59 pm Kabul time on August 30, 2021.

During the two-week evacuation operation at HKIA, almost 125,000 persons were evacuated by air, including most of the Americans known to be in Afghanistan at the time. The Americans left behind continue to trickle out at the time of this writing, with fewer than 200 who may still wish to leave. The ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) terrorist attack at HKIA that killed thirteen American service members and over 170 Afghans, marred what was otherwise a remarkable military airlift operation; but even a clockwork air evacuation could not soften the hard fact that America was walking away from its longest war and that it had lost, at least as viewed by the Taliban and their neighbors in the region.

Much of the criticism of Biden’s evacuation operation at HKIA centers on claims that Bagram Air Base, about thirty miles north of Kabul, should not have been abandoned as early as it was and should have been used for the evacuation instead of HKIA. Such criticism ignores the fact that using Bagram for the evacuation would likely have required at least a full division of troops, or more, to secure both the airbase itself as well as the thirty-mile corridor from Kabul to Bagram. Moving 125,000 souls, Americans and Afghans, through that corridor, possibly under pressure from ISIS-K or Al Qaeda, would have required a major surge of U.S. forces back into Afghanistan. That was never a viable option for the Biden administration.

Biden’s critics also assailed the president for removing all the remaining troops, claiming that he could have left the residual force of 2,500 troops permanently in Afghanistan. After all, they asserted, the American force of 2,500 had not taken any casualties in over a year. That claim ignores the salient fact that the Taliban had inflicted no casualties on American troops because they were sticking to their part of the February 2020 agreement. Had we decided to break the agreement with the Taliban and keep that residual force in place permanently, casualties would most certainly have again begun to mount. The president would then have faced the choice of an even more chaotic withdrawal under Taliban pressure, or a surge of around 30,000 American troops back into Afghanistan. The imagery of either choice would have been a disaster.

As it was, the night vision shot of the last American officer to depart Afghanistan, Major General Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, was a haunting, and perhaps enduring, symbol of the American adventure in Afghanistan itself.

Forget China and Russia: This Is America’s REAL Enemy on the High Seas

Sadly, there will be no American “hero of Afghanistan.”

NOW, AFTER a twenty-year occupation, the United States and its NATO allies are gone, and Afghanistan is widely expected to revert to the bad old days. But what might that mean? Media coverage of the Taliban takeover of the entire country suggests an organized monolith is now in charge in the Islamic Emirate. Assessments of the makeup of the new interim government uniformly conclude that there is no Taliban 2.0; and that this new government is pretty much like the last one dispatched by Operation Enduring Freedom two decades ago. The appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as interim minister of interior has been seized upon as a signal of the harsh direction this new Taliban government will take. But is that the whole story?

Maybe not. As this new interim government so rapidly cobbled together evolves, it will face enormous challenges. With the bulk of Afghan financial reserves frozen—$10 billion held by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank—and access to lending institutions effectively blocked, with the exception of about $1 billion pledged in UN emergency assistance, the government of the Islamic Emirate is for practical purposes bankrupt. Even their local currency, the Afghani, is printed in England, and currently is not being imported into Afghanistan. Food and the other imports needed to support even the most meager civil society are in dwindling supply. So as the Taliban pulls together its interim government, it will have to take into consideration how its new government will be perceived by all potential donor nations, not just its former adversaries, the United States and its NATO allies.

At the same time, the Taliban leaders will have to keep an unsophisticated base of fighters from rising against them. The fact that the Taliban moved so uncharacteristically swiftly in forming this interim government suggests that they are trying to play for their two key audiences—their base now and the international community later. For now, the Taliban leaders seem to be playing it safe, watching their backs as they install an interim government and setting the stage for the changes they have likely already contemplated.

Their primary challenge will be to avoid angering the rank-and-file fighters who took them into Kabul. Thus, the current lineup is their victory team, whose appointments were designed to quell potential power struggles among the permanent players. Of particular interest will be the dynamics between what may be emerging as the Yaqoob and Haqqani wings of the movement and the government. Mohammad Yaqoob, the eldest son of the late Mullah Omar, has taken the defense portfolio—most likely, and inevitably, because of his blitzkrieg sweep across the entire country. The interior portfolio, taken by Sirajuddin Haqqani, may reflect the minimum he would accept among the national security ministries.

It is probable that a good deal of gaming went into these two appointments. Naming Sirajuddin Haqqani as interim interior minister suggests that he has won that key national security ministry as his power base. That is certainly possible; however, that appointment viewed from another perspective might suggest that Haqqani was deftly handed a poison pill, that he may have even been set up to fail. Haqqani will now have to prove himself capable of handling Kabul, the hardest nut to crack. Everything that goes wrong in the Afghan capital will be on him, and there are already signs that plenty can go wrong in the burgeoning city of some six million. In this regard, the Taliban announced in late September that a special commission has been established to deal with security in Kabul, with Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar as its chair. Moreover, among the Taliban, at least in the way they perceive themselves, purity of intent and selflessness are central to gaining the admiration and adoration of the ranks. In that respect, Haqqani simply cannot measure up.

Established by Sirajuddin’s father Jalaluddin, a major Mujaheddin commander who fought the Soviet occupation, the “Haqqani Network” has in recent years earned an enduring reputation as looters, drug dealers, and Al Qaeda affiliates. While Sirajuddin may be different, the vulnerability of his position and reputation will become increasingly apparent to the Taliban leadership. They are painfully aware that the appointment of Haqqani to the interior ministry has been critically viewed by literally every potential Western donor government; they also recognize that he is wanted by the FBI and that there is a $10 million U.S. State Department reward for information leading to his arrest. As the pressure of increasing isolation on the interim government mounts, sidelining Haqqani could well become a credible demonstration that they have broken with Al Qaeda and are intent on cleaning up their image. In the same vein, the appointment of Khalil Haqqani, Sirajuddin’s uncle, as minister of refugees carries with it the potential of being another setup, one for which there is some history. When Jalaluddin Haqqani fell out of favor with Mullah Mohammad Omar, he was appointed minister for refugees—a clear and stinging demotion. The ministry responsible for refugees under the Taliban government could well become the lightning rod for international focus on foreign troublemakers in Afghanistan, along the lines that Osama bin Laden was received following his expulsion from Sudan in 1996.

Mohammad Yaqoob, the eldest son of Taliban founder, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, is a rising figure in the movement. Though Mullah Omar reportedly died in 2013, his death was not formally announced until July 2015, at which time Yaqoob began his calculated move in the Taliban ranks. Though reportedly unwilling to accept the top position in the Taliban immediately following his father’s death, by 2016, at the age of twenty-six, he had taken charge of the Taliban military commission, at that time controlling almost half of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. Though considered by some observers to be a moderate, at least in the Taliban universe—he supported a negotiated settlement to the Afghan war—he nevertheless adroitly exploited the endgame weaknesses of the former government of Afghanistan and drove his blitzkrieg advances across the entire country. Yaqoob’s forces were the ones that took Kabul on August 15, two days after Afghan president Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, reportedly taking with him millions of U.S. dollars. While Yaqoob enjoys the support of Interim Prime Minister Mullah Hasan Akhund, Interim Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, and Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar, his rival, Sirajuddin Haqqani, seems to have emerged in the new interim government without a prominent circle of trust or protectors outside the Haqqani Network.

On the heels of the formation of the interim government, rumors immediately swirled about serious rifts between the political faction led by Baradar, who led the peace negotiations with the United States in Doha, Qatar, and the Haqqani Network. The growing rift centers on claims by the Baradar faction that peace in Afghanistan was secured through negotiations led by his team in Doha; that claim is disputed by Haqqani and his followers, who claim that peace was achieved by victory in the field, in particular by Haqqani fighters.

In mid-September, stories circulated that Baradar had been killed in a palace clash with the Haqqanis, though that rumor was quickly denied in a short video clip of Baradar posted by the Taliban’s political office in Qatar; and later in September he was pictured meeting in Kabul with representatives of the World Health Organization. Further evidence of the strength of the Baradar Doha team was its September 21 request to have its spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, address the UN General Assembly in New York. In the end, however, for the interim government to function, it will probably have to be represented by both wings, Haqqani and Yaqoob/Baradar. Otherwise, these rivalries will only intensify.

Compounding those rumors is the apparent fact that the movement’s supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, had not been seen in public since August 15. These early indicators of serious rivalries in the new Taliban government have led some Afghan analysts to conclude that they could lead to a return to the regional power bases, which have plagued Afghanistan throughout its modern history. Even the possibility of an Afghan civil war between rival Taliban factions has not been discounted by some analysts.

Though the suggestion that the new government of the Islamic Emirate represents a Taliban 2.0 remains contested, the Afghanistan they have seized is certainly Afghanistan 2.0 when compared to the country the last time they were in power. An entire generation of Afghans has been born and grown into young adulthood in a society that was, at the very least, influenced by an American presence. In the wake of our departure, we left behind hundreds of thousands of Afghans in whom we engendered some sense of belief in national and local government institutions created in our own democratic image, even if Potemkin villages with little thought given to their survivability in our absence. We left behind the hopes of a population whose percentage of university students over the last twenty years has grown from fewer than 30,000 in 2001, to approaching 200,000 today. We left behind the expectations of the women who have tripled their numbers in Afghan schools and who had their own Ministry of Women’s Affairs established in 2001. The Taliban shuttered that ministry on September 18, replacing it with their own Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, prompting a small, but well-noted demonstration by about two dozen Afghan women at the gates of the ministry the following day. As of this writing, the interim government continues to claim that it will form a more inclusive government, including women, at some unspecified future date.

We also left behind a “wired” Afghan population, whose access to the Internet rose from 0.01 percent of the population in 2002 to almost 15 percent today, and a connected Afghan population where mobile cellular subscriptions rose from 25,000 in 2002 to almost 22 million as the Taliban swept into Kabul. The Taliban themselves may be as wired and connected as the overall population of the Islamic Emirate. The broad and rapid dissemination of news in the country is already a nightmare for the new government, in particular for the new minister of interior, whose image is now broadly viewed as represented by Taliban enforcers beating women with sticks and horsewhips on the streets of Kabul.

While the traditional donor nations can take a wait-and-see position on any involvement with the interim government of the Islamic Emirate, neighboring countries may not enjoy the luxury of detachment. China, Pakistan, Russia, and Iran will not have the “decent interval” that the United States, the European Union, and NATO countries might seem to have. Afghanistan’s neighbors will have to deal with their problem neighbor now.

THOUGH IT has only a sliver of common border with Afghanistan at the end of the impossibly rugged Wakhan corridor, China nevertheless has the most at stake of perhaps all of Afghanistan’s neighbors. On September 10, China provided a modest aid package—$31 million in food grains, winter supplies, vaccines and medicine—in what was described in the Chinese media as “according to the needs of the Afghan people.” In connection with that aid package, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, called for the Taliban to sever ties with all terrorist groups, particularly those with the East Turkestan Islamic movement, a terrorist organization China accuses of attacks in China’s Xinjiang province. China’s embassy in Kabul has remained open since the Taliban took over the capital, a clear indication that China intends to protect its considerable interests in the country.

Prominent among those interests is the Mes Aynak copper mine located about twenty-five miles southeast of Kabul in Logar Province. The state-controlled China Metallurgical Group (MCC) secured a thirty-year lease on the Aynak copper mine in 2007, for $3 billion, a private investment that remains the largest in Afghanistan’s history. Some estimates hold that the mine contains over five million metric tons of copper, expected to be worth tens of billions of dollars.

The project, however, was plagued by difficulties from the onset. First, there were allegations that the former Afghan minister of mines accepted a huge bribe from MCC for the contract. Thereafter, as the project progressed into its initial phases, it was discovered that the Mes Aynak site was situated above an ancient, 3,000-year-old Buddhist settlement with the remains of over 400 Buddha statues, stupas, and a huge monastery complex. Archaeologists then discovered an older, bronze age site below the Buddhist level, including a 5,000-year-old copper smelter. As a result of those discoveries, very little actual progress was made in developing the Mes Aynak mine over the next dozen years.

It remains to be seen whether the Islamic Emirate will allow the Chinese to begin in earnest mining operations at Mes Aynak, but the mine remains an important element of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as well as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) from western China to the Arabian Sea, where roads and rail link up with the Chinese financed and built Gwadar Port in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Beyond Mes Aynak, China may be eyeing additional, major mineral deposits in Afghanistan, valued by the U.S. Department of Defense team that investigated Afghanistan’s mineral deposits at approximately $1 trillion in value. In addition to significant copper and iron ore deposits, Afghanistan is rich in lithium as well as rare earths. As China already produces almost 90 percent of the world’s rare earth oxides, metals, and alloys, the Chinese may intend to leave Afghan rare earth deposits in the ground for the time being, and thus continue to enjoy their own dominant position on the world market.

A related issue will be how China handles the delicate issue of Bagram Air Base. The Chinese will certainly view Bagram as a potential play in its growing projection of power beyond China’s shores. Any Chinese efforts to take over Bagram should be viewed within the context of their construction of a People’s Liberation Army Navy base at Djibouti in 2016, at an estimated cost of $590 million, as well as their ongoing construction of artificial islands to serve as military bases in the South China Sea. While the Taliban might well balk at a Chinese takeover of Bagram Air Base as a foreign military installation on Afghan soil, they might be less troubled with the concept of a commercial air transport hub as part of both the BRI and CPEC. A future shift from a purely commercial hub to a Chinese military installation at Bagram would be a relatively easy step.

WHILE SOME of Pakistan’s vital interests in Afghanistan coincide with those of China—CPEC and the BRI—Pakistan has always attempted to play a bigger hand in Afghanistan than the one it has actually been dealt. Pakistan has repeatedly been accused of having “created” the Taliban and, to a large degree, having control over them; but the truth may be far less dramatic. When I was personally involved in serving as CIA political agent and quartermaster to the Afghan Mujaheddin in their battle against the Soviet occupation, I dealt directly with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). On one occasion, I asked my ISI counterpart whether he could get a particular Mujaheddin commander to execute a specific operation; his answer was reflective of Pakistan’s overall influence with the Mujaheddin. He said, “I can usually get the Mujaheddin to do something they really want to do in the first place.” That comment probably applies as much today as it did over thirty years ago.

Following the Taliban victory on August 15, Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, congratulated the movement on having “broken the shackles of slavery;” and, during the second week of September, intelligence chiefs from the region, plus the United States and the United Kingdom, gathered in Islamabad for discussions on the way forward in Afghanistan. Director William J. Burns of the CIA reportedly visited Islamabad on September 9 for discussions with Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, and the director of Pakistan’s ISI, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed. Following those discussions, Pakistani officials reportedly met with the British MI6 chief. The intelligence chiefs of Iran, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan also gathered a few days later in Islamabad for urgent discussions on events in Afghanistan. Like it or not, Islamabad once again finds itself center stage in the Afghan affair, with the delicate task of dealing with the Afghan interests of a growing list of countries, both near and far.

Aside from the geopolitical pressure exerted on Pakistan by events in Afghanistan, the expected flood of refugees from Afghanistan into Pakistan will only magnify existing problems and sorely strain Pakistan’s resources. There were about two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan during the ten-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. They were not only gathered in Pakistan’s northwest but had infiltrated large numbers into Pakistan cities, in particular Karachi and Rawalpindi. Pakistan’s porous border with Afghanistan makes it virtually impossible to control such flows of refugees from either side.

THE GOVERNMENT of Iran is moving cautiously in its dealings with the new Taliban regime. While it may also be bracing for a flood of refugees reminiscent of the roughly a million Afghans who fled to Iran during the Soviet occupation, it is also trying to temper the coverage of the Taliban in the Iranian domestic press by discouraging the use of such provocative terms as “brutality, crime, atrocity” when reporting on events in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The Iranians, moreover, will be sensitive to the fate of their fellow Shia adherents in Afghanistan, particularly in Shia-dominant Bamiyan province, thousands of whom were slaughtered by the Sunni Taliban during their last reign in Afghanistan. Memories are also still fresh over the Taliban murder of eleven Iranian diplomats and an Iranian journalist in their consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan twenty-three years ago. The Iranians, nevertheless, have kept their embassy in Kabul open as well as their consulate in Herat in the west as they feel their way along in this new dynamic in the neighborhood.

FOLLOWING ITS 1979–89 occupation of Afghanistan, a disaster that set the Soviet Union on a trajectory of ultimate dissolution, Russia has always remained darkly in the background of developments in Afghanistan. In July 2020, a story broke accusing Russian military intelligence, the GRU, of paying bounties to the Taliban for killing American and allied troops in Afghanistan. The reports were vaguely sourced to Afghan anti-Taliban groups; and U.S. intelligence intercepts reportedly tracked GRU financial transfers to Taliban linked accounts, thus providing “confirmation,” though not enough, according to the New York Times reporting, that the National Security Agency would add its imprimatur to the initial report on the bounties. Most of the key U.S. national security players expressed outrage and a commitment to investigate the issue of Russian bounties on U.S. troops, but after a few weeks, the story just faded away.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have consistently reported Russia’s double-dealing in the conflict. Russia, on the one hand, appeared to support U.S. efforts to dislodge the Taliban by allowing U.S. military overflights of Russian territory to funnel supplies and American troops to Afghanistan, while on the other hand, they provided covert assistance, including cash and weapons to the Taliban insurgents. Despite all of Russia’s sub-rosa operations in Afghanistan, with the final departure of American troops from Afghanistan at the end of August, the Russians were no better off in the war-torn country than when they drove homeward across Friendship Bridge in 1989.

The Trump administration’s February 2020 agreement with the Taliban was not a complicated deal. In return for a complete withdrawal of all U.S. and allied forces from Afghanistan within fourteen months, the Taliban were to deny their territory as a safe haven to terrorists, to cease attacks on American and NATO troops, to start peace talks with the Afghan government, and to consider a ceasefire. The Taliban stuck to at least part of the agreement—U.S. troops suffered no casualties in the subsequent fourteen months until the terrorist attack at HKIA in August, which was not carried out by the Taliban. Peace talks with the Ghani government never got any traction, and both Al Qaeda and ISIS-K remained present and active in Afghanistan. But the story of Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda has a complicated history.

In 1991, after a break with the Saudi royal family over its support for the United States in the first Gulf War, Osama bin Laden pitched up in Sudan where he was tentatively welcomed on the proviso that he invest in Sudan’s agriculture or infrastructure projects. He did just that, investing a reported $50 million in agricultural projects. For the next four years, bin Laden lived a quiet life with his several wives outside Khartoum at a modest residence on the banks of the Blue Nile. Sudan at the time was under crippling U.S. sanctions and was also listed on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list. Eager for some relief from American sanctions, Khartoum dispatched a minister-of-state level official to meet with senior American State Department representatives in Rosslyn, Virginia, in March 1996. The United States demands of the Sudanese in return for some relief on the sanctions were clear. Foremost among them was, “get rid of Osama bin Laden!”

The Sudanese offered to keep bin Laden boxed in and under continuous surveillance in Sudan, an offer that was rejected by the American side. The Sudanese made a counteroffer to send bin Laden to Somalia. That offer was rejected, as well, and any suggestion of handing bin Laden over to the Saudis was quickly dismissed. The Saudis had no intention of allowing him back in the kingdom where he might become a north star for other troublemakers. Similarly, the American side turned down the Sudanese offer to hand bin Laden over to the United States, because at the time there was no U.S. crime for which bin Laden could be prosecuted. Ultimately, it was agreed that bin Laden would leave Sudan for Afghanistan. After all, it was apparently thought, what kind of trouble could he get in there?

Osama bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 1996, before the Taliban had taken full control of all of eastern Afghanistan, including Jalalabad. He was welcomed by the former Mujaheddin party leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a fluent Arabic speaker who studied at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. After the Taliban victory swept through the east, bin Laden remained their welcome guest. But there was one historical footnote—a few days before the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom in early October 2001, I was asked to call the office of then-Taliban foreign minister Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil. During that brief conversation, I received what seemed at the time a mysterious, almost coded message: “that man is no longer under our protection.” My interlocutor repeated that message twice more, asking each time if I understood the precise meaning. I said I did. I then telephoned the NSC official responsible for Afghan matters in the White House at that time and relayed to him the message I had received from the Taliban. I added my interpretation, “they are telling you that bin Laden is no longer under their protection. In Afghan culture, the meaning is clear: you know precisely where bin Laden is, just go get him, take him away, and let’s be done with this problem. We’ll just look the other way.” The response from the White House advisor was equally clear: “Well, that’s a good start.” They clearly had other plans.

Operation Enduring Freedom launched on October 7, 2001.

SO NOW we are back where it started in Afghanistan. There may be no rush by other than a few regional players to open formal diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime any time soon, though informal intelligence contacts between the Taliban and its neighbors may already be underway. There was also at least one reported contact between CIA director Burns with the Taliban leadership in Kabul. All of the relevant intelligence services seem to be engaged, either directly, or through the Pakistani ISI. These intelligence contacts should continue, as much can be accomplished quietly and out of the glare of headlines. The United States should not disengage and simply leave the Afghan game to others. It needs to stay in this new Great Game, wherever it might lead. And what better way than with the CIA, once again, handling the account.

Milton Bearden is a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for the National Interest. His highly decorated thirty-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency included service as chief of the Soviet and East European Division in the Directorate of Operations, and as head of the CIA’s covert support to the Mujaheddin fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. 

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