Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  The first American delegation to visit Islamabad after Musharraf’s coup in 1999 was led by Assistant Secretary of State Inderfurth, who pressed General Mahmud Ahmed and the ISI to track down and arrest a Saudi al Qaeda operative known as Abu Zubaydah, who was involved in another millennium plot in Jordan and a third in California. The CIA believed that Zubaydah was in Peshawar and operating openly for al Qaeda. William Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at the time, later said that Mahmud turned Inderfurth down, claiming that the ISI did not know where Zubaydah was. In fact, as Milam put it, “The ISI just turned a blind eye to his activities, even though everyone knew where he was.” Zubaydah was helping ISI recruit and vet Kashmiri militants and sending them to al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.7

  By the summer of 2001, the CIA was receiving multiple reports that a major al Qaeda attack was coming. George Tenet, who was then director of central intelligence, recalled later that “threat information poured in, almost from every nook and cranny of the planet.”8 In July he met with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s new national security adviser, and told her that the CIA expected a “spectacular” attack designed to cause mass casualties through multiple and simultaneous attacks.9 On August 6, 2001, the “President’s Daily Brief” included an article entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the U.S.” Tenet traveled to Texas, where Bush was on a month-long vacation, to brief him face to face on the gathering storm.

  The CIA had been briefing Bush on the al Qaeda threat since he won the Republican nomination for president in 2000. Ben Bonk, the deputy director of the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center, traveled to Texas then with the message that al Qaeda was the top terrorist threat to the United States, that it was intent on mounting a catastrophic attack, and that it was seeking chemical or biological weapons to do so. After the election Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, told his successor, Condoleezza Rice, the same thing: that al Qaeda was the country’s greatest national security threat.10

  But the new administration was slow to react. The Principals Committee of the National Security Council did not hold a meeting on the al Qaeda threat until just before 9/11. When Berger had been national security adviser, in periods of high terrorist threat, such as during the Air India hijacking, he had held daily meetings of the principals to ensure maximum interagency cooperation and information sharing. In the summer of 2001, no such meetings took place. The warnings from the CIA and other counterterrorism experts got louder and louder, but the White House was complacent.

  If the CIA was getting so much warning that a massive al Qaeda attack was in the works in 2001, then the ISI must also have had knowledge of the preparations. After all, the ISI had officers throughout Afghanistan and met regularly with those at the highest levels of the Taliban, including Mullah Omar. The ISI was closely tied with al Qaeda, as the Air India operation demonstrated. Their friends, such as Harakat ul-Mujahedin, were training with the al Qaeda operatives. Nonetheless, no warning came from the ISI; instead, General Ahmed, ISI’s director general, came to Washington on September 9, 2001, to press Tenet and the Bush team to reduce the sanctions on the Taliban and Pakistan. When Tenet had lunch with Ahmed that afternoon, Tenet pressed for action against Omar and bin Laden. Ahmed defended Omar, saying that he was just a “man who wanted only the best for the Afghan people.” Tenet remembers that he was “immovable when it came to the Taliban and al Qaeda.”11 Ahmed shared no intelligence of any impending al Qaeda attack with Tenet.12

  Three days later, after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Ahmed was given an ultimatum by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Pakistan was either with America or against it. It must immediately give the U.S. air force access to its bases for military operations against the Taliban, withdraw all its support (experts, oil, and everything else) from the Taliban, and cooperate in the hunt for al Qaeda. If not, the United States would treat Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism and an enemy. Ahmed took the message home to Musharraf. General Ahmed later complained bitterly to the new U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, that Armitage had been very rude in the meeting.

  Chamberlin followed up Armitage’s meeting with Ahmed with a meeting with Musharraf. After an hour of pressing, Musharraf agreed to support the United States. Pakistan would allow U.S. aircraft to overfly its territory to strike targets in Afghanistan as long as they did not fly from India, and the United States could use Pakistani airbases for emergency landings and station a few personnel at a base to deconflict flight operations so that Pakistani and American aircraft did not clash. Musharraf insisted that there could be no Indian role in the Afghan war or in the government that would follow the Taliban; he also said that while Pakistan would assist in capturing al Qaeda operatives who fled into Pakistan, there could be no operations against Pakistani citizens, meaning that Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and other Pakistani groups were off limits to counterterrorism operations.13

  Mahmud Ahmed was sent to Kandahar upon his return from Washington to convince Mullah Omar that the world had changed and that bin Laden was a liability. The two met alone; Mahmud ordered the rest of the Pakistani delegation to stay outside. What they said remains unknown. Mahmud later told Shuja Nawaz that he felt that he could not press Omar to hand over a fellow Muslim. Even if Mahmud tried to convince Omar to hand over bin Laden, he failed, perhaps because his heart was not in the mission. He may have told him to hang tough and fight.14 Mahmud told a senior intelligence officer that he found it distasteful to betray the Taliban to America given the American betrayals of Pakistan and the Pressler amendment.15 It is most likely that Mahmud made his argument half-heartedly because he did not want to abandon the course that the Pakistan army and ISI had been on for over a decade in Afghanistan.

  Musharraf fired his protégé Mahmud. It was a brave decision: Mahmud had been his partner at Kargil and was responsible, as 10th Corps commander during the coup, for his coming to power in the first place. However, Musharraf knew that Mahmud was not ready to do what Musharraf felt was essential: move toward the Americans or be isolated as a friend of terrorists. In his memoirs, Musharraf relates that he “war gamed” what would happen if Pakistan stayed with the Taliban. His war game showed that India would be the major beneficiary and that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would be at risk. “Our military forces would be destroyed … and the security of our strategic assets would be jeopardized. We did not want to lose or damage the military parity that we had achieved with India by becoming a nuclear weapons state,” Musharraf wrote.16

  Musharraf put it succinctly. Pakistani policy derived from Pakistan’s concerns about India. There would be no role for India in the Afghan war, and Pakistan would temporarily sacrifice its terrorist pawns if necessary to save its nuclear arsenal. “The ultimate question that confronted me was whether it was in our national interest to destroy ourselves for the Taliban. Were they worth committing suicide over? The answer was a resounding no.”17 Years later Musharraf told me that it was an agonizing decision for him, especially as he knew that many of his fellow officers would not like it.18 Musharraf immediately cut off supplies to the Taliban army and evacuated the Pakistani advisers with the Taliban; many were air lifted out of northern Afghanistan from Kunduz. The impact on the cohesion of the Taliban forces was devastating, and they rapidly collapsed under the weight of U.S. air power and a revitalized Northern Alliance, which had CIA support and money. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which had taken six years to build, collapsed in less than three months. The United States had intervened in the Afghan civil war and tilted the balance decisively against the Pashtuns.

  The defeated Taliban fighters were ordered by Mullah Omar to scatter and avoid further direct confrontation with the enemy while they regrouped. Many just went home. The leadership and the hard core fled south from Kandahar into Pakistan. Most relocated in Baluchistan, around the city of Quetta, where Omar himself settled and began rebuilding the Taliban in exile, with critical assistance from Pakistan.19 Without Pakistan’s hel
p, the Taliban would never have recovered. A NATO study published in 2012 that was based on more than 27,000 interrogations of 4,000 captured Taliban, al Qaeda, and other fighters in Afghanistan concluded that ISI support has been critical to the survival and revival of the Taliban since 2001, just as it was critical to the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Even today “the ISI is thoroughly aware of Taliban activities and the whereabouts of all senior Taliban personnel.”20 A central player in this relationship, NATO concluded, remains Hamid Gul, the former director general of the ISI.

  The Bush White House paid little attention to the Taliban after 2001. The CIA’s chief officer in Islamabad was never told to make apprehending Mullah Omar or his associates a high priority.21 A $10 million reward was offered for information on Omar’s whereabouts, but no serious effort to find him was made. The ISI, however, knew where to find him all along. Once Bush began the war in Iraq, resources became even slimmer for fighting the Afghan war and the Taliban. As one study by the U.S. Army War College concludes, once preparations were made to invade Iraq, “the impact of the shift in focus and resources from Afghanistan to operations in Iraq cannot be overstated. Under-resourced from the beginning, the campaign in Afghanistan now fell to a distant second place.”22 The undersecretary for resources in the Bush Pentagon, Dov Zakheim, later wrote a book about how the war was systematically under-resourced by the Bush team, as did Bush’s ambassador to Kabul, Ron Neuman.23

  Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also escaped from the allies. Again, there was a tragic lack of attention to the hunt for bin Laden in the last days of 2001. A comprehensive study of the failure to catch bin Laden, based on extensive interviews with all the Americans involved, concludes that the White House failed to provide clear guidance to the military that capturing or killing bin Laden was a top priority.24 Bin Laden went into hiding for the next decade. After escaping to Pakistan, he moved back to Afghanistan in 2002 to remote Kunar province, a longtime al Qaeda stronghold. In 2003 he moved back to Pakistan, first to Peshawar and then to Haripur in 2004. Two of his wives and some of his children were with him during this exodus. Another wife and some children were in Iran, under Iranian detention of some kind. In 2005 a property was acquired by al Qaeda to build a more permanent hideout in Abbottabad, a small city about thirty miles north of Islamabad and the home of the Kakul Military Academy, Musharraf’s alma mater.25

  The new hideout was less than a mile from the academy, putting it within the military security zone that surrounds the school. Abbottabad was named for a British general, Sir John Abbot, who founded the city as a cantonment for the British East India Company’s army in January 1853. Abbot was very fond of the location, which he later wrote “seemed like a dream.” Ayub Khan was born nearby. After partition, the Pakistani army took it over, and three regiments call it home. It is one of the most secure military zones in the country, so much so that the first Chinese-Pakistani military counterterrorism exercise was held there in December 2006, about a year after bin Laden moved in. The Kakul academy is central to the Pakistani officer corps: future corps commanders and chiefs of army staff start their careers in Kakul.

  Bin Ladin’s hideout was considerably larger than most of the other homes in the area and had walls varying from twelve to eighteen feet in height to prevent outside observation of the interior. It was known in the neighborhood as the “Waziristan house,” a reference to the district along the Afghan border where al Qaeda has most of its training facilities. Bin Laden and al Qaeda practiced excellent operational security—no surprise since he knew that he was the CIA’s number-one target and the most wanted man in history. All communication with the outside world was done through one courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a Pakistani who had lived in Kuwait. Al-Kuwaiti relied on an extensive support network to help maintain the hideout and keep bin Laden in communication with his global jihadist network. Although bin Laden was a recluse, he was very active in overseeing al Qaeda’s activities and in putting out propaganda messages.

  According to the New York Times, telephone numbers found in the hideout when U.S. Navy SEALs finally found and killed bin Laden on May 1, 2011, suggest that the support network included Harakat ul-Mujahedin, the group that hijacked the Indian airliner in 1999. Its leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, lives openly in a suburb of Islamabad and works very closely with the ISI.26 In the summer of 2010, bin Laden and Khalil reportedly even had dinner together in one of the al Qaeda leader’s rare trips beyond his hideout.27

  Pakistan did help the CIA find other important al Qaeda figures after 2001, including Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in a Lashkar-e-Tayyiba safehouse, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the tactical commander of the 9/11 hijackers. Mohammed was found in Rawalpindi, the military capital of Pakistan and home of the general headquarters of the Pakistani army. But the number and rate of captures steadily declined after 2004, dropping to almost nothing by 2008.

  Bush acknowledges in his memoirs that his relationship with Musharraf was troubled. As the president looked back, he noted that “over time it became clear (to me) that Musharraf either would not or could not fulfill all his promises. Part of the problem was Pakistan’s obsession with India. In almost every conversation we had, Musharraf accused India of wrongdoing.”28 But the most dangerous crisis of the Bush administration in South Asia was the result of Pakistani wrongdoing.

  INDIA AND PAKISTAN AT THE BRINK OF WAR

  While bin Laden was escaping from Tora Bora into Pakistan, a squad of five terrorists invaded the Indian parliament’s grounds in New Delhi on December 13, 2001. A forty-five-minute gun battle followed, in which nine policemen and parliament staff were killed. The terrorists had hoped to get inside the building and kill as many senior Indian politicians as possible. Fortunately, both houses of parliament had just adjourned, but 200 members were still inside, along with several senior cabinet ministers. It was an outrageous attack. Indian intelligence soon identified the plot as the work of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), operating together. India demanded that Musharraf immediately crack down on both and arrest their leadership. When Musharraf procrastinated, India mobilized for war.

  The timing of the attack may well have been linked to the hunt for bin Laden. By creating a crisis on Pakistan’s eastern border, LeT and JeM forced Pakistan to withdraw troops from its western border and the Durand Line; any hope of finding bin Laden or Zawahiri or blocking their escape was thus lost. The mastermind of the New Delhi attack was Ghazi Baba, the JeM’s India operations commander, who had been deeply involved with bin Laden in the Indian airlines hijacking.29 The ISI’s role in the attack on India’s parliament remains a subject of intense debate. Musharraf, whose memoirs are unusually chatty about most issues, is curiously silent on this one. He did tell Ambassador Chamberlain soon after the attack that intelligence work was often a “dirty” business, but he did not elaborate.30

  Five days after the attack, on December 18, 2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee announced the start of Operation Parakram (Operation Valor) and the mobilization of Indian military forces to compel Pakistan to turn over twenty top terrorist leaders. More than 800,000 Indian army troops deployed along the border, air force units forward deployed to advance bases near Pakistan, and the Indian Eastern Fleet in the Bay of Bengal was moved to the Arabian Sea to unite with the Western Fleet to prepare to attack Karachi and blockade Pakistan.

  The United States and United Kingdom moved quickly to try to avert Armageddon. London was especially concerned that war was imminent, a war that would vastly complicate the Afghan operation and benefit al Qaeda. It would also cause enormous human and material damage, even if it could be kept from going nuclear. The British pushed the Americans to get involved in trying to stop disaster. The British ambassador to India told me later that he thought that the chance of war was at least 50-50. According to one participant, the interagency daily meetings in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (nicknamed COBRA) at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London were
calculating wind speeds to measure radiation dispersal and trying to estimate the number of civilian casualties if nuclear weapons were detonated. One American estimate put the estimated deaths in a nuclear war at 12 million.31

  The American ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, also saw the danger in the crisis. Blackwill was a close adviser to President Bush during the election campaign and transition, and his mission was to build a strong relationship between India and America. From the start of the Afghanistan war, Blackwill was worried that Bush and Washington were being taken in by Musharraf and tilting too much toward Pakistan. The day after the attack on parliament, Blackwill went to the site of the firefight and publicly described the attack as “no different in its objectives from the terror attack in the U.S. on September 11th,” thus equating it with 9/11.32 Most Indians saw it the same way.

  Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were reluctant to put it in those terms because doing so implied that India was justified to use force in retaliation, as America had in Afghanistan. However, they moved quickly to press Musharraf to take action against LeT and JeM and to urge New Delhi to avoid military action. On January 12, 2002, at U.S. prompting, Musharraf gave a speech in which he promised that Pakistan would not be a base for terror. He banned five terrorist groups, including LeT and JeM, but reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to the Kashmiri cause. In practice, the two terrorist groups simply changed their names. No serious crackdown followed the speech, but it did reduce the tension. India and Pakistan remained mobilized for war.

  In February tensions worsened when a train filled with Hindu pilgrims was attacked by a Muslim mob in the Bharatiya Janata Party–run state of Gujarat. A fire started, and at least fifty-eight Hindus burned to death. Anti-Muslim riots followed, and hundreds of Muslims in the state were killed. The sectarian violence only fueled the perception that the subcontinent was on the verge of disaster. On May 14, 2002, the second peak of the so-called Twin Peaks Crisis occurred when another major terrorist attack, in which the families of Indian soldiers were killed, took place in Kashmir (the attack on parliament had been the first peak). India again threatened military action, and Musharraf gave another speech. On May 30, 2002, Washington and London announced a drawdown of their nonessential diplomatic personnel in both countries and issued travel advisories to their citizens that India and Pakistan were in danger of going to war. At the same time, in an unrelated occurrence, an article that I had written on the Kargil war and its possible nuclear dimension was published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India and got front-page attention in the Washington Post and London Times. The saga of the Blair House meeting added to the sense of danger that was so vivid in the spring of 2002, reminding readers that Pakistan and India had only narrowly escaped a wider war in 1999.