“My ADD can’t tolerate it.”
“The director wants my take on how it’s going.”
“We must be doing a terrible job.”
“Finger-pointing isn’t my style. I’m trying to help. But I promise you this about Duto: If he thinks you guys are in trouble and that the problems could come back at him, he’ll make sure he’s insulated. If that means ending your career in the ugliest possible way, he will. So if there’s an issue, it’s talk to me now or talk to somebody else later. Maybe under oath.”
The speech left plenty of questions unanswered, but it seemed to satisfy Yergin. “First off, understand the strategic situation’s a mess. We’re playing Whac-A-Mole here. First we had our guys in the east, and the south went to hell. Now we’ve moved everybody south, and the east is going to hell. And by the way, the south isn’t great either. This quote-unquote government we’re working with, it’s beyond corrupt. Everything’s for sale. You want to be a cop? That’s a bribe. Five to ten grand, depending on the district.”
“Ten thousand Afghanis?” That was four hundred dollars.
“Ten thousand American dollars. To become a
“That seems crazy.”
“You have to remember, this country has African-level poverty. Average income is six hundred dollars a year. Total economy, maybe twenty billion. We come in, we’re spending a hundred billion a year. Think about that. Five times the Afghan GDP. And the locals make sure they get their share.”
“How so?”
“Three main buckets. The military spends billions on base construction, supply convoys, local guards. Second, we fund reconstruction projects, roads, dams, schools, et cetera. Third, we give direct subsidies to the Afghan government to pay for their army, police, judges, toilet paper for all I know. Combine the buckets, probably close to twenty billion.”
“The money we funnel in is equal to the rest of their economy put together.”
“Correct. So the Afghans, they can keep living on two dollars a day, or they can get onto our gravy train. If they have to pay bribes to do it, they will. And lots of this money sneaks back into the Taliban’s pockets. The contractors we hire to deliver fuel, they bribe the Taliban not to attack them.”
“We’re paying for both sides of the war.”
“More or less.”
“You don’t sound optimistic.”
“It is what it is.”
“What would you do if you were in charge?”
“I’d pull out. But barring that, I don’t have a good answer.”
“So the war’s a mess,” Wells said. “What about the station? Marburg knocked you guys down for a while.”
“Knocked us down? Marburg lit us on fire and threw us off a cliff. Seeing those coffins at Bagram was as bad as watching my parents get buried. Nine dead. And it was so avoidable. Marci and Manny wanted al-Zawahiri so bad they didn’t pat Marburg down. Basic blocking and tackling. Not that we talk about it.”
“Because of Peter?”
Yergin’s eyebrows lifted so high they nearly fused with his widow’s peak. “I didn’t say that. But yes. Hard to believe, but our deputy chief doesn’t want to hear about how his wife got herself and his brother killed. And since then, you know the history.”
“The outlines, sure.”
“Jim Wultse turned out to be a grade-A boozer. I remember walking into his office once around noon, seeing him spike his coffee. Nice silver flask, had a dragon inscribed on it. His hand shook when he saw me, and whatever he was pouring wound up on his desk. He looked down like, ‘Sweet manna of heaven, I’ve lost you.’ If I wasn’t there, I swear he would have started licking the wood.”
“That bad?”
“No joke. I thought I was watching an after-school special on the dangers of alcoholism. And when Wultse left, Gordie King came and we were excited for about two minutes. Thought he was going to kick ass and take names. But he just didn’t have the stones anymore. He hated Kabul. Refused to live here. This is where the war is. It’s not moving to Switzerland.”
“You lost more than a year.”
“It was brutal. We covered for it. Getting bin Laden took a lot of heat off. We didn’t have much to do with that — it came out of Pakistan and then the CTC took over. But it had a halo effect, made everybody look good. Plus we kept running the drones, and that’s basically a military op. Runs off tactical intel. So we blasted lots of low- and midlevel guys. A lot of the intel for those hits comes direct from the insurgents, by the way. They use the drones to settle scores with one another, and we let them.”
“What about civilian casualties?”
“We’re careful. We see kids around, anything like that, we won’t shoot. And the optics these things carry are amazing. You ever seen them?”
“Not really.”
“You should. You know how in the movies they show the bad guys’ faces and you see every pore crystal clear? It’s even better than that.”
“Too bad you can’t read their minds.”
“Too bad. So yeah, even in the worst days, we blew up a bunch of guys carrying guns over the border, that kind of thing. But they’re totally replaceable. There’s an infinite supply of them.”
“We kill their drones with our drones.”
Yergin laughed wheezily. He sounded like a flooded lawn mower engine trying to start. “More or less. And that’s not what we’re here for.”
“What are you here for?”
“You know full well.”
“I want to know how you see the job.”
“If we’re doing it right, we’re getting into the top of the government, assessing who’s trustworthy. Figuring out which Talib commanders we can buy off and which we can’t. Offering an independent view of how the war is going, so the White House isn’t relying only on the military.”
“And finding al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar.”
“Ron and Pete haven’t emphasized that as a goal. And I agree. The logic is that (a) they’re probably in Pakistan and it’s Islamabad’s job, and (b) al-Qaeda doesn’t have much to do with the insurgency here.”
“Makes sense.”
“Glad you approve. Can I have my promotion now?”
Wells smiled. More and more, Yergin reminded Wells of Shafer. He probably wasn’t as cynical, not yet. Give him thirty years.
“So how many officers do you have?”
“We’re close to full strength now. Six hundred in country.”
“Six hundred?”
“But you have to remember, only a few are case officers. More than two hundred handle security. Then we have the coms and IT guys, logistics and administrative — just keeping this hotel running is a massive job — and the guys at the airfields, handling the drones. Fewer than forty ever get outside the wire to talk to the locals. Of those, most are working with Afghan security and intelligence forces. If you’re looking at guys recruiting sources on the ground, it’s maybe a dozen.”
“The few and the proud.”
“But unavoidable. The security situation is impossible. Only the very best officers can work outside the wire without getting popped, and even then only for short stretches.”
“You oversee them.”
“Correct. There’re few enough of them that they can all report directly to me.”
“Do you report to Lautner or Arango or both?”
