Immerse yourself in your enemy’s world before deciding whether to act or not, especially in those places where truth is determined by power. And definitely don’t take any blind shots.
Rule number one in politics: Never invade Afghanistan.
—HAROLD MACMILLAN
Khost, Afghanistan, December 30, 2009: Forty-five-year-old Jennifer Matthews, mother of three, was the unlikeliest of assassins. Or for that matter, of targets. Born to a strict evangelical family from suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she was raised and remained a believer her entire life. She attended Ohio’s Cedarville University, an evangelical college where Bible study is mandatory and creationism is taught to the exclusion of Darwin. She married a devout boy from the same school, and their first child was soon on the way. Like a lot of people from small-town America, Matthews felt a strong pull to raise a family close to home. But she decided there had to be more to life and applied to the CIA.
Hired in 1989, she and her family moved to Washington, D.C.; they bought a home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Like all new émigrés, they had to learn to cope with the high cost of living and the shitty traffic that comes with northern Virginia’s unremitting vinyl-sided suburbs. But working for the government had its attractions—steady employment, regular pay raises, good health insurance. So northern Virginia was where they’d settle down, she making a career at the CIA and he as a chemist.
At Cedarville, Matthews had majored in television journalism, so it made a certain sense that the CIA would turn her into a photo analyst, someone who typically spends a career poring over stacks of glossy black-and-white satellite photographs. She’d do well if she could learn to write succinctly and quickly, churning out a regular stream of finished intelligence reports. Promotions would come with predictable regularity.
Matthews entered the CIA near the end of the Cold War, an era when a lot of people thought it was high time to cage the beast. The CIA had never gotten over its 1961 half-baked “invasion” of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs. Or its half-baked attempts on Castro’s life. So when it came time to arm and train the mujahideen to fight the Red Army in Afghanistan, the CIA gladly handed the task off to the Pakistanis. No new Bay of Pigs equaled no wrecked careers.
In the same spirit, a great cultural shift started to sweep across the CIA, the bureaucrats triumphing over the field operatives. Things such as modern management, cost-benefit analysis, and balancing budgets were prized over classic espionage. It wasn’t exactly thought through, but the basic idea was that a corporate sensibility would file the rough edges off the CIA, clean it up enough so it could go out and mix in polite company.
Soon enough, the writing was on the wall: If you wanted to get to the top, you’d better punch your ticket behind a desk at Langley. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before manicured, deskbound bureaucrats started to be promoted faster than field operatives. The notion of rubbing shoulders with foreigners and parachuting into foreign jungles was now as quaint as a top hat.
Soon people who’d never served in the field were put in charge of the field, allowed to call the shots in a country they’d never laid eyes on. The analyst who oversaw the CIA teams tasked with tailing people around the world was confined to a wheelchair from a boyhood accident. Although he himself had never tailed anyone, he was expected to advise people who did.
The patently unqualified were sent out to the field. In the middle of the hunt for bin Laden, the CIA sent a career logistics officer to Islamabad as the boss. No one bothered to ask how, with absolutely no understanding of South Asia, he was supposed to comprehend one of the most opaque countries in the world.
An analyst was appointed as head of all CIA clandestine operations. His first and only act of significance was to sever all CIA connections to the dark side—swindlers, dope dealers, mercenaries, religious fanatics, assassins, forgers, the mob, or anyone else who didn’t share America’s ideas of decency and propriety. For the old-school operatives, it came as a neck-wrenching, 180-degree reversal from a practice of keeping in touch with the world’s scum, if only to keep a pulse on it. Arms dealing, money laundering, and all the other black arcana now became terra incognita for the CIA. It was as if the Mayo Clinic had stopped seeing sick people.
The CIA also decided it would make itself as politically correct and vanilla as the rest of America. It introduced things such as “off-sites,” management gurus, and casual Fridays. For the adventuresome, there were Outward Bound–like “bonding” weeks on the Pecos River—hikes, singing around the campfire, rappelling off cliffs. Cultural barriers came down too. When America stopped looking at homosexuality as moral turpitude, so did the CIA. It even introduced LGBT seminars. Could transgender bathrooms be far behind?
In the great leavening, operatives were expected to spend the bulk of their careers in Washington learning the bureaucratic ropes. It all worked out nicely. While the ambitious, smart operatives came home to fight on Langley’s bureaucratic battlefields, the analysts could go overseas to get their tickets punched. It was the CIA’s version of the World Is Flat.
There was an undisguised sigh of relief when the old-school operators who knew their way around guns and explosives finally decided to shuffle into retirement, taking along with them the oddballs who’d spent their careers in the exotic parts of the world and spoke exotic languages. Who needed some sad bastard whose only talent was to speak fluent Baluchi? The new mantra was if a foreigner couldn’t speak English, he wasn’t worth knowing.
—
Act Two: The CIA would have been completely out of the rough trades if it hadn’t been for 9/11 and drone assassinations. Never mind that EO 12333 was never rescinded. The way I read it, the same lawyers who’d ignored me in Iraq finally got off their asses and, rightly or wrongly, conjured up the semantics to authorize political murder.
Before I get any further, I need to make it crystal clear that I separated from the CIA in December 1997 and haven’t read a piece of classified information since. In fact, I’ve steered well clear of my still (serving) ex-colleagues in order to keep CIA security off their backs. In other words, what I know about drones and the Khost tragedy I’ve learned as a journalist (i.e., you’re getting my opinion). Whether it’s more worthy than Main Street’s, I leave it up to the reader.
I also should add that from what I’ve gleaned over the years, the people doing most of the targeted killing is the Pentagon rather than the CIA. After all, it’s the military that pulls a drone’s trigger rather than the CIA. I’m told that thanks to the military’s “waived special access programs”—i.e., no congressional or judicial oversight—we don’t hear much about Delta Force and the Seal assassinations. It’s a detail, though, that doesn’t matter for this book. Again, it’s a rulebook rather than a survey.
It’s been reported in the press that CIA drones killed more than two thousand people, mostly in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The unit responsible for them, the Counterterrorism Center, became the CIA’s fixed center of gravity. If you wanted into management, an assignment there was a de rigueur rite of passage. But it didn’t mean the old-school operatives were brought back. Thanks to brand-spanking-new technology, drones are flown and monitored remotely, from even as far away as the continental United States. Anyone who could work a mouse and had the patience to sit in front of a flat-panel screen for hours on end could get into the drone assassination business.
The CIA’s analytical side was completely swept up in the drone craze. Overnight, analysts went from paper pushers to high-tech assassins. According to The Washington Post, twenty percent of them were turned into drone “targeters.” With godlike powers of life and death, they were now the CIA’s new operatives.
Drones came as a nice fit for the CIA, seamlessly folding into its tight-lipped and cloistered little world. Targeters could send out for Chinese takeout and lattes, and never have to take their eyes off their screens. The most dangerous part of their day was the drive to work and back home. As for the grunt work, it was left to the contractors in the field who repaired and armed the drones.
One side effect of drones was that an overseas career pretty much became irrelevant. A six-month stint in a war zone such as Iraq or Afghanistan was enough to classify you as a seasoned field officer. Never mind that these tours amounted to being locked up in fortresses like Baghdad’s Green Zone.
No surprise, drones did wonders for cleaning up the CIA, wiping away a lot of the Bay of Pigs stain. After all, interacting with the world with a mouse is pretty much risk-free, sort of like fishing in a septic tank with a mechanical arm. Even better, it was the White House and the bloodless lawyers who slavishly do its bidding that made the final decision on the “kill lists.” The moral hazard of assassination was on its back rather than the CIA’s.
In a town that feeds on hard power, the CIA’s sudden rehabilitation was easy to gauge. A CIA tech could run a drone video feed into the White House’s subterranean Situation Room and offer the president and his cabinet a front-row seat on a “kinetic strike,” as they’re so quaintly described. It has probably occurred to Langley that it is more relevant today than it ever was during the Cold War.
I’ll get deeper into drone assassinations in Law #12, but the point here is that when the CIA sent Jennifer Matthews to Khost, Afghanistan, it was pretty much a bureaucratic exercise—a ticket-punching. Never mind that she was just as unprepared for the shit mist she was shoved out into as I was in Kurdistan. And as I’ve come to realize, there but for the grace of God go I.
Samuel Johnson: “Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.”
By that measure, getting to know the Pashtuns isn’t possible. They neither want to drink nor eat with us, and most definitely they don’t want us wandering around their backyard. Throw in the fact that these people have no fixed addresses, no fixed telephone lines, and that they behead people like pollsters and marketers and are all seemingly named Khan, and the chances of an outsider’s ever getting to know them is zero. Which translates into the related truth that the chances of ever conducting a successful campaign of political murder against them is also zero.
Political murder in Pashtunistan is all the more impossible because there’s no one Pashtun head to lop off. The one-eyed Mullah Omar is only a public face, pretty much disconnected from the thousand-headed hydra that runs the Pashtun resistance, or as it is commonly referred to, the Taliban. The only people in history who’ve ever been able to make the Pashtuns properly submit were the Mongols, and that was only thanks to genocide.
Adding to the complexity, rural Pashtuns have a reputation for being unfathomable, primitive, and superstitious people. They imbue time with mysterious properties. Such as believing that in the winter at midnight, witches will call to them with voices stolen from someone they know. During the last two hours of daylight, a Pashtun will refuse to loan milk from his cow for fear it will leave a curse on the cow and cause it to go dry.
Pashtun society is dominated by low technology, small landholdings, small workshops, and trade carried out on the street. Most houses aren’t hooked up to the electrical grid, and their only source of light is kerosene lamps. Water is drawn from wells; there’s scant medical care; goats and sheep are the main source of protein.
People who have the misfortune of going to war against the Pashtuns characterize them as an unforgiving and belligerent people. Seemingly, a man will sire a large family because he knows he stands to lose half his boys in war. When the Pashtuns don’t have an outside enemy to fight, they fight one another. Like the ancient Greeks, they find self-worth in killing other men.
Pashtun politics are pretty much indecipherable to outsiders. Strictly organized along tribal and kinship lines, all power is personal and contingent. A patriarch or a militia commander often will have no public title or position.
Important decisions are made in what’s called a loya jirga, an impromptu congress. No minutes are taken, and a very rough nonbinding consensus prevails. Its proceedings are invariably opaque, with even participants unsure of why or who made a particular decision. It’s as if Congress debated and voted blindfolded in a mosh pit.
Pashtun politics are all the more complicated because there are nearly four hundred Pashtun tribes, each occupying a place with stable boundaries. Within them, there are hundreds of important clans and extended families. As I said, there’s no preeminent leader of the Pashtuns, often not even in a particular district. Ties between distant tribes and clans are irregular and sporadic, or sometimes there are none at all.
The British Raj spent nearly a hundred years attempting to subdue the Pashtuns, alternating brute force with bribery. During tribal uprisings, the British conducted punitive raids in an attempt to put them down, blowing up houses and often destroying entire villages. They called it “butcher and bolt.”
Like Julius Caesar in Gaul, the British marched up and down the Pashtun tribal belt desperately trying to put down one revolt after another. Although some British officers spoke Pashto and were familiar with the Pashtuns, they never discovered a way to convince them of the benefits of empire. In the end, unlike Caesar, the best the British could hope for was a truce, a temporary and fragile one at that.
Between 1919 and 1947, the British Royal Air Force relentlessly bombed Pakistan’s tribal belt in hopes of forcing the Pashtuns to submit. It was a strategy founded on nothing more than the untested hypothesis that a spectacle of force would do the job. The British would have accepted symbolic submission for the actual act, but they didn’t even get that. When they finally gave India its independence, the British left the Pashtuns as ungovernable as when they arrived.
After partition from India, the Pakistanis also never found a way to subdue the Pashtuns. Even today Pakistani military and Frontier Corps patrols rarely stray far off the main roads for fear of ambush. From time to time, the Pakistanis launch punitive raids, with a lot of air power and bluster, but with no more success than the British. (Why exactly the United States thought that drones would succeed where the British and Pakistani air forces failed I’ll get into in Law #12.)
A fortress is taken most easily from within.
—JOSEPH STALIN
In a lot of ways, Afghanistan reminds me of Lebanon. For one, its modern history’s been one long and uninterrupted negotiated compromise. When the British gave up the ghost in 1919 and granted the Afghans their formal independence, the two main linguistic groups, the Tajiks and the Pashtuns, saw no point in forming a let’s-get-along, homogeneous nation. Combine it with the Afghans’ deeply rooted tribalism and, like Lebanon, Afghanistan becomes a perfect emporium for political violence . . . a place where one murder does end a conversation.
Also like Lebanon, Afghanistan is the victim of colonial cartographers who drew its borders in the interest of the metropolitan centers rather than local sensitivities. Take a look at a map: Matthews’s new posting, Khost, is a thumb stuck in the eye of Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal badlands. Legally speaking, it may sit on the right side of the border, but with the way Pakistan’s North Waziristan province loops around it, it’s a hangman’s noose.
For true believers like the Taliban—a people who only care about divine demarcations—borders are of no importance. Which means they went to bed and woke up dreaming of ridding Allah’s sacred vineyards of the American base at Khost. But with its high dirt berms, Jersey barriers, floodlights, machine-gun emplacements, and helicopter gunships flying night and day, Khost was a fortress as impregnable as any Crusader’s castle. There was no easy way to sneak in and slaughter the infidels.
According to the newspapers, stopping the Taliban from coming over the walls was the military’s problem rather than Matthews’s. The CIA had its own security people attached to the base, but they were meant only to keep the curious from poking around the CIA’s little corner. In fact, the more deeply embedded and out of sight its people were, the happier Langley was. Whose orders, incidentally, were unambiguous: No one from the CIA was allowed to set foot outside Camp Chapman, not even for afternoon shopping in Khost. The CIA people arrived at base by helicopter or plane and left the same way. If they needed something from town, they’d send a local Afghan employee for it. If Khost felt like a prison, it’s because it pretty much was. Stuck watching DVDs and eating communal meals in a trailer didn’t improve anyone’s mood.
And neither did the daily work routine. Days were spent reading through hundreds of intelligence reports, most of it pap. In between times, it was waiting for the occasional Afghan source to show up. They all arrived with big promises, such as they could find bin Laden if they had only a little more money. Since no one at the base spoke Pashto, there was no three-cups-of-tea chitchat. Which meant that the people who lived around them on that high Central Asian plain, with all of their bizarre tribal politics and ideas of justice and reprisal, were an alien and threatening mystery.
Matthews coped with the boredom by taking a daily run around the airfield. There were regular Skype calls home. On her first one, she posed for her children in a flak vest and toting an M4 assault rifle. But mostly life at the Khost base was a matter of dull endurance. Until, as it did to me in Kurdistan, fate found a way to turn the tables on Jennifer Matthews.
As the Jordanians told the story, they’d caught the young Palestinian doctor secretly writing for a militant Islamic blog. They knocked on his door, offering him the choice of either infiltrating al-Qaeda on their behalf or rotting in jail. To spare his family, the doctor agreed to become a mole inside al-Qaeda. He even proposed moving to Pakistan to improve his chances.
It was only after the doctor was taken in by al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas that the Jordanians decided to come to the CIA. Having no station of their own in Pakistan, the Jordanians needed the CIA’s assistance to meet the doctor. And as always, they hoped to curry favor in Washington with a potential goldmine of intelligence.
The CIA’s seventh floor could barely hide its glee. The CIA had never had an al-Qaeda informer before, not even a foot soldier. And not only was the Palestinian doctor inside, he was where it counted: al-Qaeda’s rear base in the Pashtun tribal belt. How could the White House not hope he’d be the one to finger bin Laden for assassination, fulfill Bush’s promise to get him “dead or alive”?
Any lingering doubts about the doctor’s bona fides were put to rest when he reported back that he’d started to treat Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who then was al-Qaeda’s number two. The doctor described Zawahiri’s condition in enough clinical detail to corroborate it using old Egyptian medical records.
Zawahiri may not have been the prize bin Laden was, but there was nothing to stop the doctor from worming his way into bin Laden’s circle. My personal take is if that were to happen, the White House would have the option to assassinate both of them. All that was needed was for the Palestinian doctor to leave behind concealed beacons in their residences. (Beacons would emit signals for the drones to follow.)
The plan fit in nicely with the new cleaned-up and chlorinated CIA. There was no need for long-term vetting of the doctor, nor all the mess that comes with handling informers. Either the doctor would plant the beacons or he wouldn’t. And if he planted them in the wrong house, who cared? It wasn’t as if anyone was going to sue the White House or the CIA.
The only question now was where to meet the doctor. The CIA wasn’t about to send an operative into North Waziristan or anywhere else in Pakistan’s tribal areas; the chances of a kidnapping or an assassination were too high. So why not let the closest CIA outpost in the region meet him, the one at Khost? It was only a short ten-minute drive from the border.
I can only imagine what went through Matthews’s mind when she read the cable from headquarters informing her that she’d be the one meeting the doctor to start to organize the assassinations. She’d spent a career behind a desk and now she was handed a bat destined to hit a grand slam in the World Series of the Global War on Terror.
When the doctor e-mailed the Jordanians that he was ready for the meeting, his Jordanian handler started making preparations to fly to Khost. In the meantime, the CIA quickly started to prepare to debrief the doctor. If things went according to plan, Zawahiri’s days were numbered . . . and just maybe bin Laden’s were too.
Everything was set for the meeting with the doctor at the end of December. But a revolt had started to boil up in the ranks. Matthews’s security chief wanted to run the doctor through a metal detector at the front gate, then search him by hand. He said it was the only way to treat someone who’d been living in a place where young men stand in line to go on suicide missions.
The security chief also didn’t like Matthews’s plan to have the entire CIA base turn out to meet the doctor. Were they hosting a diplomatic reception or something? When she announced she intended to throw a birthday party for the doctor, he shrugged his shoulders in resignation. Who bakes a birthday cake for an al-Qaeda mole?
There was also the creeping realization that the doctor was calling all the important shots about when, where, and under what circumstances the meeting would occur. The doctor had stubbornly refused to meet in Amman and now insisted that if he was to come onto an American base he must be treated with “respect” and not searched like a common criminal. To the jaundiced old hacks, the doctor was starting to smell like a “dangle.” A Pashtun Trojan horse.
Matthews didn’t pay attention, and neither did anyone else up the line. The problem was that the president had already been briefed. How do you now tell the president that the whole thing had been called off because of a funny feeling about your best mole inside al-Qaeda? (Incidentally, cluing in the president is a flagrant violation of Law #10 about never ceding tactical control.)
The doctor was already a day late, and now the day was wearing away fast. But at 4:40 p.m. the Jordanian handler’s cell phone finally rang. He listened for a moment, unable to hold back a grin: The doctor was en route. Matthews moved fast to assemble everyone for the meeting. In ten minutes, there were sixteen of them milling around the motor pool. There were only two officers missing: the two girls in the kitchen baking the doctor’s birthday cake.
They all saw the base’s old red Subaru station wagon at the same time as it nosed through the main gate. Good, Matthews must have thought. They didn’t ignore my orders and stop them.
They kept their eyes on the Subaru as it skirted the airfield and picked up speed as it headed in the direction of the CIA’s side of the base. Only the driver was visible. It’s okay, Matthews must have thought. The doctor would be slouched down in the back behind the driver to keep him out of sight of the Afghans.
When the car pulled up in front of the motor pool, the Afghan driver shut off the engine and got out. It was a second before the doctor let himself out. Matthews had seen the doctor’s picture, and this definitely looked like him—the CIA’s first and only mole inside al-Qaeda.
The doctor unfolded himself and climbed out of the car. He looked uncertainly around himself at the dozen faces that couldn’t help but stare back. He was half bent, a little unsteady, supporting himself on a metal crutch. He adjusted his crutch to better walk. When he was on the phone with his handler, he had told him that he’d been injured in a motor scooter accident in North Waziristan. So that explained the crutch. No one thought twice about it, and it wouldn’t be until the postmortem that it was concluded that the crutch was a prop to explain why the metal detector went off—that is, course, if he’d been run through one.
The doctor looked over at his Jordanian handler, but the doctor didn’t seem to recognize him. Something was wrong. The handler stepped forward, his hand raised to shake the doctor’s. But the doctor kept his hand inside his salwar kameez. The doctor started to mumble something. The handler couldn’t understand him. He then realized the doctor was muttering a death prayer—La ilah illa Allah. There is no God but God.
The doctor looked up at the sky. He fumbled under his salwar kameez. Two of the security contractors lunged at the doctor to wrestle him to the ground. The handler hesitated, and then he too jumped on the doctor, grabbing for his arm. But it was too late. They call it the “great white light.” But is that really the last thing you see when you die of an explosion?
Matthews died in the helicopter on the way to surgery. Not counting the doctor, nine people died. It was the CIA’s worst loss of life in a single attack.
In his Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell describes how one day a fascist soldier jumped out of a trench in front of him. The man was holding his pants up so they wouldn’t fall off, which is what saved his life. “I did not shoot, partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come to shoot at ‘Fascists,’ but a man that was holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he’s visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”
Orwell was thrown by the realization he didn’t really know the enemy. Which brings me to the question, Shouldn’t we be killing people we know and all of the really evil shit that comes along with them? Isn’t it the enemy you know, with a face and a past, you want to destroy, instead of the one you don’t know? You’re certain he’s either done you harm or is about to. What I’m trying to say is that killing total strangers, especially at great distances, is something other than proper assassination. It’s more like—I don’t know—spraying insects from a crop duster.
Let me go back to the Lao assassins. There was no misidentifying the victim or mistaking the crime. The locals knew everything there was to know about the victim, in particular how exactly his murder would better everyone’s chances of survival. They were able to put both a face and a price on blood.
At the other end of the scale, the CIA can murder as many Pashtuns as it likes, but with the Pashtuns’ horizontal power structure and their opaque politics, it could never know what it was getting out of it. With a faulty understanding of an enemy, murder is a blind shot. Which in turn means we’re making more enemies than we’re eliminating.
Our military faces the same problem. While the Pentagon has permitted targeted killings in Afghanistan and can do things like number each and every house in every suspect Taliban village—they call them “battlefield maps”—it hasn’t been able to identify the Taliban command well enough to eliminate it. Indeed, when U.S. troops do finally withdraw from Afghanistan, they’ll be leaving the country in the same state as they found it—with the Taliban in charge.
It would be a mistake to lay the entire blame at the feet of the American military or the CIA. Washington is a capital so far from an age when assassination was the common fate of leaders that it’s unable to understand its rules or workings. Couple that with Washington’s devouring lack of interest in anything foreign and its near-sighted, one-dimensional view of the world, and it is all but inevitable that complicated, nuanced political murder is beyond its grasp.
In ancient Rome, prominent families kept mounted in the atrium of their houses what’s called a tabula patronatus. It was a sort of brag wall, a certification of influence and wealth that let visitors know exactly who they were dealing with and what sort of respect was due them. Though it was never the intention, a tabula was a handy road map for exterminating a particular Roman clan, ruthlessly moving down the tabula until the clan’s power was destroyed. A victim was ostracized, sent into exile, or assassinated.
In India, when the Gandhis started to mistake themselves for royalty, assassins stepped forward to erase the line, killing Indira and then her son Sanjay. In Pakistan, Prime Minister Ali Bhutto and his daughter met the same fate. (Ali was hanged, and Benazir Bhutto was blown up by a suicide bomber.) Should we include the Kennedys in the wiping out of a charismatic line?
Hariri was the only truly important figure in his clan. But in his enemies’ eyes, he was an oversized and dangerous one. He’d purchased political loyalty across Lebanon, taking under his wing parliamentary deputies, army officers, judges, and clerics. He was often on the phone with them to make sure their bank accounts were doing well and, more important, to make sure they were doing his bidding. Hariri’s tabula was starting to look like Caesar’s, which is one reason Hajj Radwan decided to take a sledgehammer to it.
Hajj Radwan generally never moved against anyone until he fully understood his pedigree, his influence, and who stood where in his family. When Hajj Radwan decided to close down the Hariri investigation, one of his first victims was the nephew of the Lebanese president assassinated in September 1982. It was a message to his clan that it had best back off pushing the investigation. And that it did.
I suspect something similar was at play when Hajj Radwan made an attempt on Ambassador Habib. The way Hajj Radwan looked at it, with Habib having a reputation for being close to President Reagan, his murder would have struck at Reagan’s base of personal power—i.e., diminished Reagan’s tabula patronatus.
As long as I’m on ambassadors, I wonder if Hajj Radwan didn’t succumb to the common error of overestimating the true significance of American ambassadors. Although Habib indeed may have been close to Reagan, and while the State Department may bill an ambassador as a personal representative of the president, the truth is most are either political hacks or bureaucrats with fancy titles. The president would be hard put to even remember their names, let alone take the assassination of one of them as a political defeat.
Make no mistake, Hajj Radwan would have fared no better than the United States in the Pashtun tribal belt. With no understanding of Pashtun politics, he too wouldn’t have known where to start with political murder. But at least he would have had the sense not to try.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: When an assassination is incomprehensible to Main Street—or, even worse, to the assassin—the chances of it producing the desired result are slim. It’s best when an assassination is embraced by a wide swathe of people.