Kandahar — city and province in southern Afghanistan — threads through John Kiriakou’s accounts of al-Qaeda’s infrastructure, the hunt that followed 9/11, and the heroin economy.
Al-Qaeda’s Kandahar
Abu Zubaydah, in Kiriakou’s telling, founded and managed both of al-Qaeda’s training camps in southern Afghanistan — one in Kandahar province, the other in Helmand — along with the House of Martyrs safe house in Peshawar: the logistics man who smuggled recruits from Karachi to Kandahar to start their training.[1][2][3] The camps were created on his order, by his subordinates, once the fall of the pro-Soviet government and the arrival of a Taliban government left al-Qaeda free to do as it liked; when the hunt began the agency knew only that Zubaydah was somewhere in Afghanistan, probably in Kandahar.[4][5] The March 2002 raids that took Zubaydah also captured the commanders of both camps — the Kandahar camp and the Derunta camp — along with dozens of other men.[6][7] Among the camp’s foot soldiers Kiriakou describes: a non-Arabic-speaking Australian recruit handed a gun and told to stand guard at the Kandahar base — later shipped to Guantanamo and “tortured mercilessly.”[8]
The town too costly to bomb
Kiriakou cites Bill Clinton’s own words on the 1990s chance to kill bin Laden: “I nearly got him and could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar and killed 300 innocent people.”[9] He has also always believed the Taliban’s protection of bin Laden operated under the auspices of Pakistani intelligence.[10]
Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban and was the movement’s stronghold, which is why Kiriakou treats the destination of the 1990s hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814 as the significant fact about it: by landing there the hijackers believed they would get everything they asked for, because they were mujahideen among their own.[11][12] After the invasion the province became one of the working areas for the joint teams — CIA officers, military special forces and local hires — sent around Kandahar and Helmand to carry out operations in the south.[13]
The poppy study
As chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kiriakou ran a study on heroin poppies: the military flew him by helicopter first to Kandahar, then onward — almost all of the country’s heroin came from Helmand and Kandahar.[14][15] On a later trip his request was simple — “I want to go to Kandahar and Lashkar Gah and I want to go into the poppy fields” — and the answer was absolutely not.[16]
The fuller telling dates the trip to 2011 and supplies the numbers behind it: Afghanistan was then producing 93 per cent of the world’s heroin, having produced none of it under the Taliban government that preceded the invasion.[17][18][19] He flew from Dubai to Bagram with the Missouri National Guard, having cabled his requirements ahead, and was told at Bagram that Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were too dangerous.[19][20] It produced the only occasion in his career on which he pulled rank: a senior congressional investigator holds the rank of a brigadier general, and he told the officers that if he said they were going to Kandahar and Helmand, they were going to Kandahar and Helmand.[21][22][23]
They flew him, and made their feelings known en route with a spiralling descent of the kind used where Stinger missiles are a threat — there were none in the area, and Kiriakou’s reading is that they were trying to make him sick.[24][25] Kandahar itself turned out to be a day of meetings on the base with Afghan officials he describes as liars, criminals and narco-traffickers, after which they went on to the provincial reconstruction team at Lashkar Gah.[26]
The tribe rotation
Kandahar also anchors his standard example of a cultural mistake made from Washington. While he was still at the CIA the American military decided to fight Afghan corruption by barring men from serving in the police or army in their own area: a man from Herat would head the police force in Kandahar, a man from Kandahar would be posted to Jalalabad or the Tajik border. The effect, in his account, was that local residents refused to recognise an officer who was not of their family, tribe or district, and inter-tribal resentment deepened.[27][28]