American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan by Matt Farwell & Michael Ames

Author:Matt Farwell & Michael Ames
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2019-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

BOB’S WAR

Bob and Jani’s lives were now fully intertwined with the U.S. government’s fiasco in Afghanistan, their son’s fate to be determined by the same convoluted calculus that had led the White House to triple the size of the war while simultaneously planning its end. In the November 2010 NATO summit in Lisbon, Karzai and his ISAF backers agreed that Western troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014; the war had been put on a four-year schedule. In Idaho, Bob and Jani coped through prayer and counsel from their expanding network of Vietnam POWs, Afghanistan policy experts, former hostages, pastors, and for Bob, a tight crew of cyclists who joined him for weekly long-distance bike rides that doubled as foreign policy seminars. Five mornings a week, he put on his brown UPS uniform, a polite smile, and walked his deliveries through the glass doors on Main Street in Hailey, Idaho, all of them bearing the same yellow ribbon sticker framing his son’s smiling face and the message:

“CAPTURED IN AFGHANISTAN 6–30–09—PLEASE HELP FIND ME.”

The stickers had been sent by Keith Maupin, whose son Matt Maupin had also been an Army private when he was captured by insurgents north of Baghdad in April 2004. When Keith first called Bob and Jani in the summer of 2009, it had been more than a year since his son’s remains had been found in Iraq, marking the end of his own ordeal and a tenacious four-year lobbying campaign. Maupin told Bob that he would do whatever he could for them as they endured their similar nightmare. Over the course of five years, he printed about sixty thousand of the yellow-ribbon stickers that would become ubiquitous in Southern Idaho and in POW-MIA chapters nationwide.

The winter and spring of 2011 had led Bob to even greater doubts about U.S. capabilities in the FATA, and a deeper understanding of the power structures that blocked access to his son. “My theory was the U.S. (kind of) controlled the Pakistani military, the Pakistani military (kind of) controlled ISI, and ISI (kind of) managed the Haqqani Network,” Bob wrote years later. “(Kind of) simplistic, but more or less true.” On January 22, 2011, a front-page New York Times story by reporter Mark Mazzetti followed up on his earlier bombshell about Michael Furlong with a front-page exposé about Clarridge’s Eclipse Group and the ongoing struggle for intelligence dominance in Afghanistan. His story—“Former Spy with Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A.”—made it clear that the seventy-eight-year-old Clarridge was still capitalizing on chaos.

In describing Eclipse’s rogue network of pseudo-spies running amok on both sides of the Durand Line, Mazzetti’s story had again served the CIA’s strategic purposes. One week later, as if by karma, the CIA stumbled into its own flap.

Raymond Davis was a former Army Special Forces soldier turned CIA contractor when he shot and killed two men in Lahore in broad daylight. As an angry crowd circled the scene, he triggered an emergency signal to his CIA handlers, who,

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