88 Days to Kandahar by Robert L. Grenier

Author:Robert L. Grenier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 28

* * *

A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

NOVEMBER 17, 2001

HEY, CHIEF.” THE COPS (Chief of Operations) was leaning through my doorway. “Jalil’s on the line. He sounds pretty excited.”

I hadn’t been sure if I’d ever hear from Mullah Jalil again. But given that he was calling me, I was not at all surprised that he was upset. I crossed the hall and took a moment to collect my thoughts before picking up the sat phone receiver.

“Haji Mullah, how are you?” I said breezily.

“They tried to kill me!” he wailed. “They bombed my house!”

I feigned shock and surprise. “What? Haji Mullah, this is terrible! This was not supposed to happen! Are you all right?” The bombs had fallen the night before, destroying the Foreign Office Guesthouse where Jalil made his residence, at a time when he would normally have been present. He had left home just two hours before the attack; when he returned in the early morning, he found the place in ruins.

The start of hostilities on October 7 had done nothing to discourage Mullah Jalil from continuing to speak with me. On the contrary, it gave him all the more reason to stay in touch, and to try to manipulate me or to seek my assistance in pursuit of his many schemes. If there were a common denominator in the little cleric’s constant machinations, it was that he hoped to find a way to end the war. To the extent that could be done on terms maximally favorable to the Taliban, so much the better; but he clearly wanted to find a solution to the conflict before it wrecked the movement. Within that overall framework, though, there was no telling how many different conspiracies he might be pursuing at any given time, or how far he might go in his pursuit of each. For my part, I was looking for instances where our tactical interests might overlap, or where gambits he was pursuing to his own ends might be twisted or exploited in ways the mullah did not intend.

To say that Jalil was highly conspiratorial was not to say that he was particularly schooled in deception; his motives were generally easy to trace. You could never trust what he said, of course, but there were many instances when it was to his advantage to tell the truth, and in any case it was always useful to measure what he was saying against what we knew from other, more reliable sources. My contact with him also provided me a means to pass useful messages to the Taliban leadership.

In one of our conversations near the outset of the war, Haji Mullah suggested to me what he hoped I would see as a useful operational ploy. If I were to send a doctor in my employ to Kandahar, he suggested, say from another Muslim country, senior Taliban leaders would bring their families to him for treatment, thus providing the physician—and therefore me—with a wonderful means of eliciting information. Jalil would gladly facilitate the process, and help install the doctor.

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