Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  For the first time ever in a Pakistani-Indian conflict, the United States was unequivocally and publicly siding with India. Islamabad was devastated, and New Delhi could hardly believe it. When the Indian ambassador called on me in the White House to make sure, I told him that the United States was fully behind India. Jaswant Singh later wrote that “this was perhaps the first-ever articulation of an unambiguous stand by the U.S.”36 Clinton urged Sharif to pull back and sent the commander of CENTCOM, General Zinni, to Islamabad with the message. Panicked, Sharif tried to secure Chinese support for Pakistan’s position. Beijing received him in late June but gave no promise of support. Pakistan’s so-called “all-weather friend” (so called in contrast with the United States and its “betrayals”) would not help, and Sharif was left with nothing. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, firmly backed the U.S. demands. Pakistan must pull back unconditionally. Sharif called the White House and asked to come to Washington for an immediate meeting with Clinton. Clinton’s response was clear: if Sharif came to Washington, he would have to announce a complete and unconditional withdrawal to the LoC; if not, Pakistan would be fully blamed for starting a war. Sharif, now desperate, came on July 4, 1999.

  The two leaders met that morning at Blair House, the official guest house of the executive mansion. I was the third person in the room for the entire summit.37 Clinton later read my account and sent me a handwritten note confirming its accuracy; Sharif also privately confirmed every point with me. Before the two leaders met, the “President’s Daily Brief,” the CIA’s daily report to the president, had delivered alarming news to the Clinton team, which was gathered in the Oval Office to get ready to see Sharif. As Talbott later recounted, intelligence indicated that “Pakistan might be preparing its nuclear forces for deployment.” Among the team preparing to see Sharif “there was a sense of vast and nearly unprecedented peril.”38 Some would argue later that the danger was not really that serious. Musharraf, in his memoir, argued that nothing unusual was under way in the Pakistani nuclear forces.39 Moreover, he claimed that Pakistani forces were still fully in control of the main heights above Kargil. Indian commentators also tended to diminish the risk. Some have noted that Clinton never mentioned the intelligence to Vajpayee, which is true. Clinton hoped that by the time that he and Vajpayee talked later in the day, Sharif would have backed down and agreed to withdraw from Kargil; he saw no reason to alarm New Delhi further. Both Jaswant Singh, then foreign minister, and General Malik note in their accounts that on its own India had detected unusual activity in Pakistan’s missile forces. Singh says that they saw evidence of Pakistan “operationalizing its nuclear missiles,”40 and Malik refers to “intelligence reports about the Tilla Ranges being readied for possible launching of missiles.” According to Malik, the Indian army “considered it prudent to take some protective measures. Accordingly some of our missile assets were dispersed and relocated.”41

  Clinton confronted Sharif directly with his concerns about the nuclear menace when the two met alone (with me as the only note taker) the morning of July 4. Clinton said that he was worried that India and Pakistan were taking a horrible risk: getting into an escalation of the conflict similar to the one that the Soviet Union and the United States stumbled into during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He asked Sharif whether he knew how far along his military was in preparing for nuclear conflict. Sharif was evasive. Clinton pressed harder: “Do you recognize what even one nuclear bomb would mean?” As Talbott recalls, “Sharif finished the sentence: ‘… it would be a catastrophe.’”42 Clinton was now very direct. He gave Sharif a choice. If he would announce the immediate withdrawal of all Pakistani forces to a position behind the LoC, the United States would support resumption of the Lahore process between India and Pakistan and urge India to allow the withdrawal to proceed. If not, America would blame Pakistan for starting a war that could end in nuclear disaster. On top of that, Clinton would blame Pakistan for assisting Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. In his memoirs, Clinton notes that on July 4, 1999, he also signed an executive order placing sanctions on the Taliban and freezing its assets. The direct message was to Kabul, but the indirect message was to Pakistan’s army, the Taliban’s and al Qaeda’s protector.43

  Sharif very reluctantly agreed to withdraw, knowing that he would be castigated at home for giving up Pakistan’s territorial gains with nothing to show for it. Musharraf immediately began a whispering campaign that labeled Sharif a coward, and the move to oust Sharif began. Benazir Bhutto later put it well when she wrote that the outcome of the Kargil war “was the most humiliating moment for the military since the fall of Dacca. A blame game started, and it was just a matter of time as to who would move first against the other.”44 The Indians were delighted with the outcome, although they were also confident by July 4 that their army had the situation well in hand and that Operation Vijay (Victory) had triumphed. As Malik later wrote, the Blair House summit was a fundamental turning point in U.S.-India relations.45 A few weeks later, on a visit to New Delhi, I was delighted to see large models of the White House on display in public parks, celebrating America’s intervention on India’s side in the Kargil war.

  CLINTON’S VISIT TO SOUTH ASIA

  The Kargil war and the Blair House summit marked the beginning of a new era in American diplomacy with India and Pakistan. Before Kargil, America was preoccupied with trying to keep India and Pakistan first from acquiring the bomb, then from testing it, and then from further developing their nuclear arsenals. After Kargil, America was much more focused on trying to keep them from ever using the arsenals that they were building. In part, Clinton had little choice. The Republicans in the Senate voted against ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on October 13, 1999. I was in New Delhi a few days later, and it was clear that once the U.S. Senate had rejected the treaty, Vajpayee was no longer seriously considering having India sign it.

  Clinton recognized that the Kargil war allowed him to skip over the nonproliferation dispute at long last and do what he wanted to do: open a new chapter in America’s relationship with India. He had also been seared by the experience of the war, and he was determined to try to do more to persuade India and Pakistan that if they remained focused on their rivalry, they would sooner or later go over the edge. The intelligence community sent the president a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in the winter of 1999–2000 that concluded that the chances for a full-scale war in South Asia had increased further because of the nuclear tests and the Kargil conflict. In February 2000, John McLaughlin, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed the president in depth on the nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan based on the draft NIE. The NIE concluded that the chance of war between India and Pakistan within the next few years was 50-50.46

  Clinton’s trip to South Asia in March 2000 was the first by an American president in a quarter of a century. He visited Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. In India he spent five days traveling across the country, and he was cheered by enormous crowds. He delivered an eloquent message to the Indian parliament that called for nuclear restraint but also pushed for a new era in Indo-American relations. He traveled across the subcontinent, visiting Dacca, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Jaipur. As he put it, “Somewhat to my surprise, I got a grand reception. Indians were as eager as I was for our long estrangement to end.”47 A series of agreements on environmental, trade, health, and other substantive issues were signed, and the two leaders committed to meeting regularly to follow up. Later that year, Vajpayee came to the White House for a state visit.

  The Pakistan stop was much briefer, only a few hours. Sharif had fired Musharraf in October 1999 while he was visiting Sri Lanka. Musharraf refused to be fired and staged a coup, literally from the air, as his plane was returning from Colombo to Karachi. Sharif was arrested and jailed. General Ahmed, the 10th Corps commander, became director general of the ISI, and Musharraf became Pakistan’s fourth military dictator. The United States cut off any remaining ties betw
een the two militaries, as required by law in the wake of a military ouster of an elected government. In the meeting between Musharraf and Clinton in Islamabad, the two disagreed on virtually every issue. Clinton pressed especially for Pakistan to take action on al Qaeda, but he was rebuffed. On only one issue did Musharraf suggest some willingness to compromise: he thought Sharif should not be executed. After a good deal more behind-the-scenes American effort and intricate diplomacy involving Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia; Pakistan’s new ambassador, Maleha Lodhi; and me, Sharif was sent into exile in Saudi Arabia.

  By the start of the twenty-first century, American diplomacy had helped manage two major crises in South Asia in less than a decade: the spring 1990 near-war experience under Bush and the Kargil mini-war in 1999 under Clinton. It had also dealt with the dangerous days in May 1998 surrounding the nuclear tests. After much effort, thanks largely to Talbott and Clinton on one side and Singh and Vajpayee on the other, America and India were poised to end their decades of estrangement. U.S. relations with Pakistan, however, were again at a very low ebb.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BUSH, MUSH, AND SONIA

  PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH was a man in a hurry, pacing the Treaty Room of the White House. The Treaty Room, on the second floor of the mansion, is a private study for the president; a large painting hanging there depicts President Lincoln, General Grant, General Sherman, and Admiral Porter in a meeting in early 1865 to decide the final offensive campaigns of the Civil War. The room is usually a place of refuge, but on that day the usually relaxed president was agitated. He was eager to get the war started. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda had destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. Now it was October 7, almost a month later, and the American military response was set to begin in Afghanistan. The government of Afghanistan—the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar—had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. America was poised to invade Afghanistan, a landlocked country on the opposite side of the planet, with a handful of CIA officers and the U.S. air force.

  A short list had been prepared by the National Security Council of key foreign leaders who were to get a heads-up call from the president just before the military campaign was to begin. I was with the president in the Treaty Room when he called Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his half-brother King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries—Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were the others—that had diplomatic relations with the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden was, of course, a Saudi. The conversation with the crown prince was short. The president informed him that America and a coalition of allies including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia were about to begin air strikes on Taliban targets in Kabul, Kandahar, and other locations. He did not tell the prince that CIA teams were already on the ground, working with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s enemy, to help locate targets for the strikes. Bush did ask for Saudi support for the operation, especially in getting Pakistan to break its long-standing ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda completely. Abdullah promised Saudi support and assistance. The president thanked him and closed the call quickly.

  The war that he was so eager to get started became the longest in American history. Begun with a lightning campaign, it would turn into a stalemate. The Taliban were evicted from Afghanistan within a few months but then gradually regained their footing in Pakistan, with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Within five years, they again controlled much of the eastern and southern parts of the country.

  At the start of a new millennium, George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States. His new team called him “43” to differentiate him from his father, called “41,” who had been the forty-first president. However, there were many other differences between the very experienced elder Bush and his son. During the election campaign, 43 could not name the president of Pakistan when asked by a journalist. In office he would fail to take note of the growing threat of catastrophic terror based in South Asia until it literally smashed into America on 9/11. He would then fail to bring the perpetrators of the attack to justice, allowing them to hide for years in Pakistan. He would be lied to by the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, whose name Bush did not know when he was a candidate. But Bush did shut down Pakistan’s proliferation of nuclear technology to a host of bad actors, from Libya to North Korea.

  Bush would also preside over a significant further improvement in America’s relationship with India. He would sign a landmark civil nuclear power treaty and shepherd it through Congress, something that probably only a Republican could have done. Like his father and Clinton, Bush would help prevent nuclear war in South Asia by helping to defuse another Indo-Pakistani crisis. Like Clinton, he would have a very successful visit to India. He would forge a partnership with a new Indian leadership, led by Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian widow, Sonia Gandhi, who had become the head of the Congress Party.1 Bush usually tried to reject any policy that Clinton had pursued, but on India he outdid his predecessor in looking for ways to build strong ties between the United States and India.

  To those in the National Security Council, the change was apparent from the first days of the new administration. After decades of including South Asia in the Near East office—the responsibility of the senior director for Near East and South Asia affairs, who was also a special assistant to the president—South Asia was moved into the East Asia office. Or at least most of it was; Afghanistan was forgotten for a couple of months during the reorganization. It was unclear whether it would stay with the Near East office or move to the East Asia office. When I and my counterpart for East Asia asked for guidance, we were told to wait for the arrival of Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who would have responsibility for the Afghan portfolio when he came to the White House staff in a few months. Unfortunately, Afghanistan and al Qaeda were not waiting for Zal.

  MUSHARRAF AND THE “WAR ON TERRORISM”

  Pakistan’s fourth military dictator was born in New Delhi in August 1943. His family fled to Pakistan in August 1947, and from 1949 to 1957 they lived in Turkey, where his father was a diplomat and the young Musharraf learned Turkish. In 1961, at the age of eighteen, he entered the prestigious Kakul Military Academy, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He served with distinction in the 1965 and 1971 wars, fought with the elite Special Services Group (SSG) on the Siachen Glacier in 1987, but played no role in the war against the Soviets. In 1990–1991 he attended the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. Upon his return to Pakistan, he was involved in supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Sharif picked him over several more senior officers to be chief of army staff because Sharif thought that Musharraf was apolitical and unlikely to be a threat. Just as Zulfikar Bhutto had been wrong about Zia ul-Haq, Sharif was wrong about Musharraf. Two weeks after ousting Sharif on October 13, 1999, Musharraf traveled to Saudi Arabia to secure Saudi support for his new regime and then visited the United Arab Emirates. With their backing, he felt confident enough to challenge India again. His partner in the Kargil war, General Mahmud Ahmed, became the new director general of the ISI.

  On Christmas Eve 1999, five terrorists hijacked Air India flight 814 in Katmandu, Nepal. They were Pakistanis from Harakat ul-Mujahedin (HuM), a group long supported by bin Laden; it was a HuM camp that bin Laden was visiting in Afghanistan when Clinton’s cruise missiles failed to kill him. The airplane refueled in Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai before it finally landed at Kandahar on Christmas Day for negotiations with India on the terms for release of the hostages. The hijackers told the captain, “Fly slowly, fly carefully, there is no hurry. We have to give India a millennium gift.”2 In fact, there was a bomb in the cargo hold of the plane that had been smuggled on in Nepal and was timed to go off at midnight on December 31, 1999.3 One passenger was murdered by the terrorists, a young man who had just been married. His bride was widowed on her honeymoon.

  The airport in Kandahar was controlled by
the Taliban. Al Qaeda had an office at the airport, as the 9/11 Commission later reported. Osama bin Laden was behind the scenes, directing the plot and the negotiations.4 The ISI had helped the terrorists hijack the plane by assisting them with getting weapons in Nepal. The Indian government also reported that the hijackers were in constant contact by satellite phone with ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi.5 The terrorist cabal demanded the release of three Kashmiri terrorist leaders held in India: Maulana Masood Azhar (the senior Kashmiri militant whose release Ilyas Kashmiri had also demanded in the 1994 Delhi kidnappings referred to in chapter 5), Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. India’s foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, flew to Kandahar to arrange a deal to free the hostages.6 After the exchange, the ISI took the three terrorists to Pakistan, where they did a fundraising tour for a new terrorist group that Azhar had founded, Jaish-e-Mohammad. Saeed would later be implicated in the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl. Jaswant would later rightly call the episode the “dress rehearsal” for 9/11.