Free 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary by Robert L. Grenier

themselves as the “Afghan Arabs.”
    Bin Laden’s “declaration of war” on the United States later that year of 1996 still did not attract much attention in the West, but the events in East Africa of August 1998 changed all that. The truck bombs that were set off nearly simultaneously at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, were quickly traced to al-Qa’ida and bin Laden. Within weeks, the United States launched retaliatory cruise missile strikes against several of bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. These were largely symbolic—the U.S. government couldn’t very well do nothing after the East Africa attack—and they predictably failed to hit their principal target; nonetheless, the Clinton administration was adamant thereafter that something be done about bin Laden. It demanded that Mullah Omar and the Taliban turn him over to American justice; when the Taliban refused, the United States imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions, and convinced the United Nations to do the same.
    American ardor for justice in the case of bin Laden did not extend to taking many risks to see it come to pass. Sending in U.S. commandos to take out bin Laden was out of the question—never seriously considered—and would have been difficult in any case, as we lacked bases in the region from which to stage. More precisely targeted air or cruise missile strikes were a possibility, but dependent upon precise, real-time intelligence sufficient to avoid collateral casualties. That was difficult to come by in those pre–Predator drone days. On the few occasions when such intelligence was available, the administration decided that the risk of harming innocents was too high.
    American reluctance to take risks in pursuit of bin Laden did not make us shy about browbeating the Pakistanis to do so. Pakistan was one of only three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The fact that it was willing to treat with, let alone support, the hosts of our terrorist nemesis added amarked note of anger and outrage to the usual stiff, pious tut-tutting of our official communications with the Pakistani government.
    Under the circumstances, it was obvious that CIA was just going to have to come up with a way of dealing with bin Laden on its own. As I had seen so often in my career, faced with an intractable foreign policy problem and risky, unpalatable choices to deal with it, the default position of the U.S. government was to leave it to CIA to solve—preferably in a neat, tidy, and untraceable way. This, among many other things, would be my task in Islamabad: To arrest, or otherwise to neutralize, a man and an organization that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet had described publicly as the greatest current threat to U.S. national security. I was to do it with little or no help from the rest of my government, in the most obscure, primitive, remote, and war-torn country in the world, and without breaking a federal law that barred CIA from engaging in assassination. And oh, by the way, the sole potential ally to whom I might plausibly turn for effective help in this endeavor had been thoroughly and systematically alienated by my government as well. Apart from all that, my job would be easy. All the same, I couldn’t have been more pleased to take it. In the Clandestine Service, this is what we do. I had spent years preparing for a challenge such as this. For me, these were the best of times.
    It is said that in a typical three-year tour of overseas duty, the best that can be hoped for is two years of effective work: the first six months are spent figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing, and the last six months are spent seeking and then preparing for the next assignment. By December 1999, after I had been at post for six months, I could see that what we had been doing to date with regard to bin Laden and al-Qa’ida was not working, and was unlikely