Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (39 page)

It was the kind of compact that in simpler times we might have judged to be farsighted, betting on the locals, respecting differences, taking the long view. But these weren’t simpler times, and we predicted that decreased Pakistani military activity would result in an al-Qaeda and Taliban safe haven and resurgence.

ISI chief Ashfaq Kayani didn’t say anything to ease our concerns when he reported that there was little prospect of the Pakistani military conducting robust ops in the tribal region. He said that it was less a matter of will than of capacity. His army was certainly India-focused. Indeed, one senior Pakistani official told me that his was the only army in the world that sized the perception of the threat (India) to meet the desired end strength of the military. So PAKMIL was big, artillery heavy, and road bound—and ill-suited to navigating mountain trails or dealing with insurgents.

But we didn’t see evidence of much will, either. If there is a problem up there in the FATA, Kayani seemed to be saying, it’s all yours, not ours.

He was at least partially right. It
was
our problem. The roots of the Taliban comeback in Afghanistan can be traced to late 2006; the same with al-Qaeda safe havens in Waziristan.

I was in Jordan with Jose Rodriguez, head of the National Clandestine Service, in January 2007. By chance Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, was in the Hashemite Kingdom at the same time. We sought and received permission to visit him in his hotel suite in Amman and laid out our case as to why we thought the Aurakzai agreement was a really bad idea.

Musharraf was gracious. After all, he didn’t even have to grant us an audience. Gracious, but also immovable. He listened patiently and then sent us on our way. There would be no change in policy. His army was built to fight India, not tribal insurgents, and he wasn’t going to bleed it in Waziristan’s mountains chasing Pashtun, Uzbek, or Arab jihadists.

Over the next year we continued to press Musharraf and Kayani to do more against the growing militancy in the FATA or to allow the United States to do more. We made little progress. When the US government presented Pakistani officials with intelligence that pinpointed an al-Qaeda leader and a plan of action to “take him off the battlefield,” the response was no, maddening delay, or our target suddenly and unexpectedly relocated. Our irreverent and frustrated summary for the year was that the United States was pretty much “0 for ’07.”

It was a year of what one of my best analysts called “great drift.” We needed speed to dismantle the AQ network faster than they could reconstitute it, and we weren’t winning. Analytic pieces on the growing threat routinely crossed my desk. We had snippets of plotting, the arrival of Westerners in the tribal region, and evidence that some of these were “graduating” and returning home. Organizationally, the AQ leadership was getting their feet under them, the hierarchy was reforming, committees were regenerating.

This wasn’t just bad for us. Musharraf’s strategy was ultimately dangerous for him too. Within the year militancy had spread back into the settled areas and he had a raging Islamist outpost within a few hundred yards of his Parliament building in Islamabad.

The Red Mosque had been a hotbed of mujaheddin recruitment and training during the jihad against the Soviets, and by the summer of 2007
it was getting its militant mojo back. Squads of women from the mosque were seizing adjacent land and raiding video stores in the capital; a fatwa from the mosque’s imam denied Pakistani soldiers a proper Muslim burial if they were killed fighting the Taliban, and there were rumors flying around Islamabad of suicide bombers being protected in the compound.

Musharraf decided to act. After a short siege, he sent special forces into the massive mosque complex; there was resistance and hundreds were killed. In a national address explaining his actions, Musharraf complained, “They prepared the madrassa as a fortress for war and housed other terrorists in there.”

Other wheels were flying off in Islamabad. Within days of the Red Mosque attack, Pakistan’s Supreme Court—egged on by demonstrating, briefcase-packing barristers—ordered the reinstatement of the activist chief justice whom Musharraf had sacked for opposing his one-man rule. Musharraf was also under increasing pressure to give up his other role as chief of army staff, which he did in November in favor of ISI chief Kayani. By now the United States was pushing for the return of Benazir Bhutto, the exiled former prime minister, in a kind of power-sharing arrangement with Musharraf.

Granted amnesty for still-pending corruption charges, Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007 to run in the upcoming election. She survived one assassination attempt shortly after her arrival, but she was not as fortunate in late December when a suicide bomber killed her and nearly two dozen supporters at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi.

We gathered in the Situation Room on December 27 as CNN and other outlets played the video of the attack. Bhutto and America’s plan for a soft landing for Musharraf were dead. President Bush wanted to better understand the big picture.

“Musharraf made a fatal mistake,” I said. “He felt that radicalism in the FATA threatened only us and Afghanistan, not him. He cut the Waziristan deal last year and wrote it off. That allowed Pashtun militancy and al-Qaeda fanaticism to grow and then coalesce in a way reminiscent of the anti-Soviet jihad.

“After he forcibly went into the Red Mosque last summer, bin Laden issued a fatwa against him. Now they’re coming out of the mountains into the flatlands and they’re coming after him and his government.”

A few days later DNI Mike McConnell and I were directed to secretly fly to Islamabad to give this lay-down to Musharraf. We tried to keep the long flight as low profile as possible, and our aircraft stayed on the ground in Islamabad only long enough to drop us off.

Ambassador Anne Patterson allowed us to shower and change at her residence, and then we departed for the presidential palace. We met with Musharraf, new chief of army staff Kayani, and Kayani’s temporary successor at ISI, Nadeem Taj, a longtime Musharraf loyalist.

McConnell and I laid it out the way we had played it in the Situation Room. I knelt down in front of a coffee table and stretched out a map and a bunch of images showing militant training areas and safe houses. The message was pretty simple: “They’re coming after you, too, not just us.”

Musharraf may have believed our description of the
physical
threat. It’s hard to say. But Musharraf was a brave man who had survived multiple assassination attempts, and right then his main problem was the fight for his
political life
in Islamabad. Despite some idle talk of gunships and other forms of heavy firepower during our meeting, the Pakistanis were not going to move in the FATA. The political struggle in Islamabad and the settled areas was all-consuming.

It was a long flight home and not just symbolically. It was longer than it should have been because the Pakistanis wouldn’t gas up the aircraft that had returned for us and we had to fly to Bagram in Afghanistan to fuel up. The crew had forgotten their government credit card—you can’t make this stuff up—and the Pakistanis wouldn’t budge. One more bit of evidence that these guys really were the ally from hell.

Back home we refocused on the continuing al-Qaeda buildup in the FATA, especially in Waziristan. It wasn’t Afghanistan pre-9/11, but it was pretty bad. We continued to have good intelligence from both human and technical sources. It was the actionable kind, but we had an ally unwilling and unable to act and even less willing to untie American hands.

I went back to South Asia a few months later in the spring of 2008, hitting the usual stops, but lingering longer than normal in Afghanistan. I got to visit some of our locations that were, for security reasons, better approached at night, and I also got to just hang out at Kabul station. The station chief, a veteran of multiple war-zone deployments, made sure I had plenty of time with his officers, informally in his raucous basement “Talibar” and only slightly more formally in his station offices.

Frustration was palpable. We were losing ground because of the Taliban–al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan and along the border. What existed of the Pakistani state along the Durand Line, separating Afghanistan and Pakistan, was of little use. On most nights border units and frontier police ignored the enemy’s movements; sometimes they aided and abetted them.

I had a long talk with Kabul station’s chief targeting officer, Yolanda, an energetic young woman with long brown hair whom the station had dubbed “the Angel of Death.” She had a lot of intelligence reporting, most of which she could not act on, and she gave strong individual voice to the collective frustration.

Our putative partner, ISI, continued to support Taliban chieftains like Commander Nazir. They viewed people like Nazir as a hedge to ensure strategic depth in their all-consuming competition with India. For us, people like him cost American lives, including one of our own from Kabul station.

The Pakistanis were badly distracted. As 2008 wore on, Pervez Musharraf’s government, such as it was, was disintegrating. General elections in February gave now-deceased Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) the largest bloc in Parliament, and by August a PPP-led coalition began impeachment proceedings against Musharraf. He resigned before the month was out and fled to London in November.

Musharraf was replaced by Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, put up by the party when she was murdered because the party likely couldn’t survive a bruising internal fight over a different successor. Our talented, tough ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, could see where this was
heading and worked hard to nudge Pakistan toward democracy while building a relationship with the incoming president.

On one visit she took a senior CIA officer to background Zardari on what was now happening and what we were doing. Zardari, anxious to keep American support and with plenty else on his plate, took it in stride. He warned that he would have to be publicly critical and admitted that there would be parts of the government that he would not really control (read ISI and the military).

That was certainly true, but politics and policies aside, professional-level CIA exchanges with Pakistan’s ISI were usually dispassionate and factual. Mid-level ISI officers seemed to get it in terms of what the United States was doing and why.

But ISI often acted like a plural noun and there were occasional issues, like their trying to squeeze the manpower that CIA could get into the country. The United States was clearly getting some very good intelligence there, a reality that must have made ISI incredibly uncomfortable. They may or may not have had a clear window into how we were developing intelligence, but they correctly judged that it would be harder to do if we had fewer people in the area. So ISI began to quibble, question, delay, and ultimately deny visa requests for multiple officers we were trying to dispatch. It was petty. It was a pain. And it didn’t stop what we were doing.

We were personally lobbying Zardari too. In September 2008 Steve Kappes and I spent a day in New York during the UN General Assembly session. The UNGA multiplies the normal chaos of Manhattan, so Steve and I and our security detail moved around largely on foot for the day. It was worth it. We were there to meet the new Pakistani president.

Zardari was engaging, hyperactive, and allegedly so corrupt that Pakistanis had labeled him “Mr. Ten Percent.” We met him in his suite at the Waldorf and quickly consumed the time that had been allotted. Zardari had to run to see the Indian prime minister, but insisted we stay until he returned. He wanted to continue talking. So we stayed, surrounded by
the new president’s staff, who tried to make us feel at home by offering us some juice and South Asian sweets.

We gave Zardari the same macro lay-down we had given Musharraf nine months earlier. He wasn’t disinterested, but this was a man who clearly valued relationships more than data. He just wanted us to stay there and “relate.”

The US government had a bone to pick, though. Pakistani government “sources” were getting into the habit of routinely claiming massive harm to innocent civilians in South Asia. It may have satisfied some internal Pakistani political need that wasn’t obvious to us, but it wasn’t true. And if the purpose was to put pressure on the American government to stop anything we were doing, we assured him that it wasn’t going to work.

“Mr. President,” I explained, “we know the truth and frankly we think these lies are ultimately going to make it harder for you. What’s the benefit of feeding this story line?”

I began to spread out some materials in front of Zardari to explain to him “the great care that the US government takes—” He quickly interrupted me, grabbed my arm, and with a half smile said, “General, I am not an American. I don’t care about such things.”

Well, I guess that was some sort of license, but not one that we welcomed or needed. Steve and I left Manhattan marveling at the personality we had just encountered and went back to our work.

Pakistan was never far from our focus, and two months later it imposed itself on us again in the ugliest of ways.

The day before Thanksgiving, I was chopping celery for holiday stuffing while watching unblinking news coverage of the magnificent Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai burning while Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) terrorists roamed the streets killing or maiming nearly five hundred people in India’s commercial center.

The attack in Mumbai was troubling on multiple levels. Of course, there was the human cost: innocents gunned down in a hotel restaurant,
at a train station, and at a Jewish center. Then there was the fear that our counterterrorism partner, Pakistan’s ISI, was involved. And there was the character of the attack itself. Fewer than a dozen fanatics with cell phones and automatic weapons had just pulled off a terrorist event with strategic effect. What did that mean about future threats to the homeland? What if al-Qaeda went to school on this?

There was also another, more immediate problem. How would India react? There already seemed to be so many Pakistani fingerprints on the atrocity that a sharp Indian response seemed inevitable. And then what?