‘88 Days to Kandahar:’ a former CIA station chief in Pakistan reflects on his career

Peter Finn is The Washington Post’s national security editor and the co-author of “The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.”

88 DAYS TO KANDAHAR

A CIA Diary

By Robert L. Grenier

Simon & Schuster.
442 pp. $28

Post-9/11 CIA memoirs keep coming with a frequency that must elevate the blood pressure of those Langley traditionalists who believe that the agency’s past should be forever entombed. Former CIA directors, division chiefs, station chiefs,

lawyers, case officers and analysts have all offered their takes on recent history. The work, collectively, tends toward a forgiving affection for the CIA, offers tantalizing but never entirely satisfying glimpses behind the agency’s institutional secrecy, and — almost always — wields the knife to settle some old bureaucratic scores. (Given the frequent pseudonyms, this latter activity is a very inside game but no doubt, somewhere, draws a little blood.)

But these memoirs, however individually flawed some are, will be a boon for future historians. They will usefully cross-reference these millions of words, including intimate moments and thoughts, to continue retelling the history of the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Robert L. Grenier’s “88 Days to Kandahar” is an admirably frank addition to the bookshelf. A CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, before and after 9/11, he has a sweeping story to tell, which he does in a sharp, straightforward style while pausing to let us in on the ad-hoc decision-making of the sometimes absurd world he inhabited.

His focus, as the title suggests, is largely on the immediate campaign to topple the Taliban, run down a scattering al-Qaeda and insert new Afghan leadership into the country: the “smooth, regal” and often prickly Hamid Karzai.

The centerpiece of the book, the evolution of the improvised, chaotic assault on southern Afghanistan by teams of CIA officers and Special Operations forces alongside hastily mustered Afghans, is vividly told. (The focus is on the Pashtuns, not the Northern Alliance nor the fall of Kabul.) But there is also a large measure of disappointment with U.S. mistakes in Afghanistan, those of a blundering colossus. “We triggered massive corruption through our profligacy; convinced a substantial number of Afghans that we were, in fact, occupiers; and facilitated the resurgence of the Taliban,” he writes. Grenier, now retired, is not optimistic about Afghanistan after the U.S. drawdown and is bluntly angry about the lost lives that achieved so little.