One source told me it was always five particular guys at Gitmo the Taliban wanted. I've heard and read a number of different accounts now about what the Taliban initially asked for in exchange for Bowe. Bowe was like a line item-an important line item, but a line item nonetheless. That's pretty clear when I've asked diplomats and State Department officials about it.

The Americans weren't allowed to call it a prisoner exchange, by the way. Bowe would be part of what are called confidence-building measures that would pave the way for substantive peace talks. hands over some Taliban prisoners, they'll hand over the American soldier. And now, at this meeting, his fate becomes tied to the fate of the peace process in Afghanistan. By that time, the Haqqanis had been holding him for almost a year and a half. (They wanted it in Doha, Qatar.) And they wanted their prisoners back.ДЄnd that's where Bowe comes in. They wanted a political office outside of Pakistan. to distinguish between them and al-Qaeda, take their names off a UN-sanctions list of terrorists. The idea, as the State Department put it, was to get Afghans talking to other Afghans about the future of Afghanistan, so we could get out of the room. (That was especially important to Hillary Clinton.) The big goal was to get the Taliban to start talking to the Karzai government. We wanted the Taliban to stop fighting, break with al-Qaeda, and support the Afghan constitution-including rights in there for women and girls. But while they weren't talking terms, the U.S. Tayeb Agha opened by reading a formal propagandistic statement he knew the Americans wouldn't like. Although Tayeb Agha had worn Western suits in his earlier meetings with the Germans, at this meeting, he wore traditional Afghan clothes, a white tunic. They met in a small village, in a safe house run by German intelligence. The Taliban insisted it be secret, or else they'd walk. It was to be just outside Munich, right after Thanksgiving, 2010.ДЄnd it was to be secret. He took it to Hillary Clinton, who was skeptical but gave the go-ahead for a first face-to-face meeting between the Taliban and the United States government. Neither side knows, in fact.Д«ut Holbrooke wanted to try it. You don't know if the guy's for real, whether you're being played. In her memoir about being secretary of state, Clinton tells a story about how relentless he was, how he once followed her into a ladies' room in Pakistan so he could finish making his point.ДЄ meeting with A-Rod would be risky.

Holbrooke was this legendary negotiator, a huge tenacious talent, and also a huge personality. Basically, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had hired him to help end the war. Holbrooke had just been appointed SRAP: special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The person who argued the most forcefully for that to change, who said we should start talking to the Taliban now, was a diplomat named Richard Holbrooke. Peace talks-meaning talking directly to the Taliban about ending the war-that was not part of the plan, not yet. The idea the president settled on was fully resourced counterinsurgency. And a struggle was going on inside the Obama administration about what to do about it. In 2009-the year Bowe was captured-the war in Afghanistan was going very badly for U.S. So what happened? How did this become the solution to getting Bowe home? And there was supposed to be something much greater at play here, something as big and grand as a plan to end the war.

Serial podcast episode 9 transcipt