Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  The focused use of the drones in Pakistan disrupted and dismantled the al Qaeda network in the country. It became increasingly difficult to train and dispatch terrorists like the Operation Highrise team; it was just too dangerous. For the first time since al Qaeda retreated into Pakistan after 2001, the terrorist group was under sustained and serious attack. It fought back hard. On December 30, 2009, a Jordanian al Qaeda operative posing as a double agent for the Jordanian intelligence service was set to be debriefed at a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. He was allegedly about to reveal the location of bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the CIA. Instead, once inside, he blew himself up, killing seven CIA officers and his Jordanian handler. It was the second-most-lethal day in CIA history.9

  But in 2011, thanks to good intelligence work, the CIA finally found the trail to bin Laden’s hideout. The breakthrough was a result of focused information gathering and painstaking data analysis, more Agatha Christie than Ian Fleming. Even so, the most that the CIA could tell Obama in April 2011 was that there was a 50-50 chance that bin Laden was hiding in the Abbottabad lair. The president gave the order to pull the trigger, and bin Laden was dead and buried on May 2, 2011.

  From the day that the CIA became focused on Abbottabad, Obama had decided that he could not trust the Pakistanis with information about the hideout. No Pakistani official was given any advance warning that the United States suspected that bin Laden was hiding in the Abbottabad complex or that it intended to send commandoes to find and either capture or kill him. During months of surveillance of the compound and preparation for the SEAL operation, Pakistan was kept completely in the dark. It was an extraordinary decision. Since 2001 Pakistani leaders from former president Pervez Musharraf to current president Ali Asif Zardari and General Ashfaq Kayani, the chief of army staff and the real power in the country, had promised again and again to help America fight al Qaeda. To help them do so, the United States had given Pakistan almost $25 billion in aid since 9/11 and sold the army huge amounts of new equipment, including eighteen new F-16s.10 Now, at the moment of truth, the American president correctly judged that he could not trust the Pakistanis with vital information on the location of al Qaeda’s top leader. Obama’s decision spoke volumes about America’s real attitude toward its Pakistani partner.

  Abbottabad is not an ordinary city. Pakistan’s first military dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, was born very close to Abbottabad. It is the home of the Pakistan Military Academy–Kakul, the Pakistani equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst. Several regiments of the army call it home. Pakistani military helicopters routinely flew over bin Laden’s lair, ferrying the senior command of the Pakistani army in and out of the academy, while bin Laden paced the roof.11 In 2006 the commandant of the Kakul academy was General Nadeem Taj, a close confidant of Musharraf, whom Taj had accompanied on an official visit to Sri Lanka in October 1999. While they were on the flight home, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif fired Musharraf from his job as chief of army staff, and Taj helped Musharraf engineer a coup from the plane. Taj was also with Musharraf when Musharraf survived an assassination attempt in December 2003. For his loyalty, Taj was appointed director general of military intelligence in 2003 and commandant of Kakul in 2006. So he was the man in charge when bin Laden set up his hideout.

  In late 2007 Taj was promoted again, to director general of Inter-Services Intelligence, the top intelligence job in the country, replacing General Kayani, who was moved up to be chief of army staff. On Taj’s watch, the drone campaign to kill al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan was expanded by President George Bush, but the targets consistently escaped because they were warned of the impending attacks. Since at the time the ISI was given advance notice of drone operations, it was not hard to determine where the leaks came from. Then, in December 2007, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi. A UN investigation later concluded that the ISI deliberately destroyed vital forensic evidence that would have assisted in finding those responsible. When in 2008 the Indian Embassy in Kabul was attacked by the Afghan Taliban, the United States determined that the attack had been ordered by the ISI.

  Under heavy pressure from the Bush team to move Taj out of ISI, Kayani promoted him again in October 2008, making him commander of the XXX Corps, one of the most important positions in the Pakistani army, and one of the dozen men who control the army. Taj was too powerful and well connected to be moved any other way. A month later, ten Pakistani terrorists attacked the Indian city of Mumbai, killing dozens, including six Americans. The attack was planned and partly funded by the ISI during the tenures of both Kayani and Taj as director general of the intelligence service.

  Pakistanis have wondered from the moment that the SEAL raid became public knowledge what their army and intelligence services knew about bin Laden’s location. No one believes that President Zardari knew anything; he is powerless and clueless about the ISI’s activities. Officially, the ISI says that it too was clueless and knew nothing, but many Pakistanis find that hard to believe. Four days after the raid, for example, an op-ed entitled “The Emperors’ Clothes” in the influential newspaper Dawn stated, “As the initial shock and disbelief wears off, there is a deep, deep sense of unease here. Did they know he was here? … They knew. They knew he was there. And they knew they could get away with it.”12

  But no one really knows. One senior Pakistani official told me that bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad was just a “freak coincidence.”13 Perhaps the ISI was clueless and negligent in looking for bin Laden. Maybe Musharraf, Kayani, and Taj were just incompetent. They had been warned to look in Abbottabad. In 2006, in his own memoirs, Musharraf wrote that they knew that al Qaeda was hiding key leaders in the city. The Afghan intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, says that he told Musharraf in a meeting in Pakistan in 2006 that bin Laden was hiding in the area around Abbottabad. According to Saleh, in response to the news Musharraf “banged the table and said am I president of a banana republic? How can you tell me bin Laden is hiding in a settled area of Pakistan?”14 After the SEAL raid, Musharraf told the media that he remembered jogging by the house that bin Laden was hiding in when he visited the academy.

  In early 2011 an Indonesian terrorist, Umar Patek, was arrested in Abbottabad by the ISI. Patek had been the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of nightclubs in Bali, in which more than 200 people were killed. According to Indonesian intelligence experts, he went to Abbottabad in 2011 looking for al Qaeda contacts to help him rebuild the Indonesian terrorist underground and train operatives in Pakistan. He may or may not have been looking specifically for bin Laden; the sources are uncertain whether Patek knew that bin Laden was there or just that some senior al Qaeda officials were there. One of bin Laden’s wives actually found bin Laden in Abbottabad; she had gone into exile in Iran in 2001 but was reunited with her husband in either late 2010 or early 2011. If she could find bin Laden’s house, why did not the ISI? The question haunts U.S.-Pakistan relations.15

  The Abbottabad raid and the drone war made it virtually impossible for Obama to develop a strong relationship with Pakistan’s leaders. He tried hard. In the first two years of his administration he pushed his cabinet to try to find common ground with Pakistan. Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mullen, and special representative Holbrooke made numerous visits to Islamabad. The message was that America and Pakistan faced a common threat from al Qaeda and Islamic extremism and that they should work together to defeat their common foe. That meant pressing the Afghan Taliban to accept a cease-fire and negotiate, attacking al Qaeda together, and cracking down on groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. Behind the message was a major increase in economic assistance to Pakistan. The so-called Kerry-Lugar bill, named after its Democratic and Republican sponsors in the Senate, promised $1.5 billion in economic aid each year for five years. The original bill promised a ten-year commitment and an annual $1 billion bonus if the president could certify that Pakistan was a democrat
ic government, but those ideas died in legislative wrangling. The bill that passed was intended to provide tangible support to those in Pakistan who agreed that the country needed to stop abetting terror or, worse, actively colluding with terrorists.

  Some in Islamabad agreed. President Zardari understood from the start that the jihadists and their generals were his enemies; they had, after all, killed his wife. His ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, understood the common threat and the perfidious role of the ISI; he had written about it extensively before becoming ambassador, and he tried hard to make the U.S.-Pakistan relationship work for both.16 The terrorists went after their critics. The governor of the Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated by his own security guard in January 2011 for his outspoken opposition to extremism and his criticism of the ISI. Obama sent a letter to Zardari in November 2009 urging that their two countries take a joint approach to fighting the extremists, who “plan attacks against targets in Pakistan, the region, and beyond.” He got back an answer written by the ISI that spoke of dark plots by India in Afghanistan “in which neighboring intelligence agencies are using Afghan soil to perpetrate violence in Pakistan.”17 Indeed, the real power remained with the army and the ISI. When the president met with Kayani in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on October 20, 2010, he got a fourteen-page memo from the general that labeled America “intrusive and overbearing.” The memo claimed that America was “causing and maintaining a controlled chaos in Pakistan. The real aim of U.S. strategy is to de-nuclearize Pakistan.”18

  Despite the best efforts of Obama and Zardari, a series of incidents damaged the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. In early 2011 an American security guard, Raymond Davis, killed two Pakistanis in Lahore and was arrested for their deaths. Washington claimed that he should be given diplomatic immunity; the Pakistani press said that he was a CIA operative. In the end, Ambassador Haqqani negotiated his release. Then came the bin Laden raid. The Pakistani air force scrambled two F-16s to chase the SEALs’ helicopters, one of which was carrying bin Laden’s body, on their way back to Afghanistan, but it was too late. The army was deeply humiliated that it had failed to defend Pakistan’s air space and territorial integrity.19 A Pakistani American claimed that Haqqani had sought American help after the raid to prevent an army coup against Zardari.20 Summoned home by the ISI, Haqqani was driven from office and barely escaped with his life.

  On November 26, 2011, American aircraft fired on Pakistani soldiers supporting the Afghan Taliban along the Durand Line and killed two dozen in a major airstrike. Pakistan demanded an apology and cut off the use of Pakistani territory to resupply NATO forces in Afghanistan. When Obama took office, more than 80 percent of NATO supplies in Afghanistan arrived via Pakistan, almost all through Karachi. He ordered a major effort to diversify the supply route and bring in more supplies from the north. The Pakistani aid cut-off therefore was not a fatal blow to the alliance, although it raised the cost of the logistical supply line considerably (by $100 million a month) by forcing near-total reliance on the northern supply route, via Russia and Uzbekistan. To try to reset the relationship, Obama invited Zardari to the NATO summit in Chicago in May 2012. But Zardari could not deliver a reopening of the supply line, and he demanded an apology for the November firefight. Obama and Zardari barely exchanged greetings in Chicago; the relationship was all but broken. In July, after Secretary Clinton said that she was “sorry” for the November incident, the Pakistanis finally reopened the Karachi-Kabul road.

  Hafiz Saeed, the head of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, was put on the American most-wanted list with a $10 million reward on his head. He was not hiding from justice, however; he remained the ISI’s darling and a friend of the generals. Instead, he often mocked America on Pakistani television, and in large rallies across Pakistan, he called for an end to the drone war, a complete cut-off of bilateral relations with America, and support for the “liberation” of all Muslims in India through jihad. He also led prayers mourning the loss of Osama bin Laden the Friday after his death.

  Saeed’s evident immunity from prosecution symbolizes the challenges that America faces in Pakistan. Despite overwhelming evidence of his culpability in the murder of dozens of innocents, including American citizens, in many terror attacks and despite repeated American demands that he be brought to justice, Pakistan still provides him not just a safe haven but also active support and assistance. Obama had made real and tangible progress in the fight against al Qaeda, progress that made Americans safer, but he had not changed Pakistani behavior. Nor did the drone war significantly affect the rest of the groups in the syndicate, such as Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. For Americans, the drones and the Abbottabad raid were essential means of self-defense, all the more important because Pakistan itself seemed unwilling to take the action needed to fight terrorism. Afghanistan had become a U.S. base for fighting terrorists in Pakistan.

  For Pakistanis the picture was different. The drones and the SEAL raid were constant intrusions into their territory without their foreknowledge or approval. That Musharraf had privately agreed to the drones back in 2007 was irrelevant; by 2012, he was a traitor and an outcast. In a review of policy toward America, the parliament demanded an end to the drone attacks, and polls showed animosity toward the United States at record levels. One poll in June 2012 showed 74 percent of Pakistanis regarded America as an “enemy,” and in the Punjab the level rose to 85 percent. In contrast, 90 percent saw China as a friend. The drones were seen by 94 percent as killing far too many innocents despite American claims that they were highly selective and killed very few innocents.21 One observer summed it up this way: “It was the drones, beyond any other real or imagined provocation, that inflamed Pakistani emotions against the United States. Their psychological impact on society was so disproportionate that the CIA might as well have dropped an atom bomb on Karachi’s Fatima Jinnah Avenue during rush hour.”22

  OBAMA AND INDIA

  It was no accident that the first foreign trip by Leon Panetta, Obama’s new director of central intelligence, was to India. It was a highly symbolic and significant gesture. It not only showed solidarity with India just after the Mumbai attacks, it also showed the ISI that the CIA was looking elsewhere for allies in South Asia. Obama wanted to send a signal to both India and Pakistan that it was a new day in Washington. More trips followed. On November 24, 2009, Prime Minister Singh became the first foreign leader to make a state visit to the Obama White House; the visit called for the highest level of protocol and a state dinner at the White House, the first such dinner for the Obama family.

  Obama himself traveled to India and Afghanistan in November 2010. He decided not to visit Pakistan on that trip, promising to go in 2011 instead. He visited New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kabul. In Mumbai the president and the first lady paid an emotional tribute to the victims of the 26/11 terror attack. During the trip Obama decided to announce American support for giving India a permanent seat at the UN Security Council. It was a major advance in the U.S. position, which had long advocated Security Council reform but had never argued explicitly to include India in the Security Council. It was further recognition that America not only understood that India was on the path to great power status but welcomed India’s inclusion in the elite circle of top global players.

  Of course, the news did not go down well in Pakistan. Nor was it welcomed in China, which has the power to veto Security Council reform. Some critics in the United States dismissed it as a hollow gesture; others have since noted that even after Obama’s announcement, India voted with the United States in the UN General Assembly in 2011 only 33 percent of the time.23 The criticism missed the point. Like his two predecessors, Obama was coming to grips with the inevitable rise of India and seeking to position America in the best way possible to take advantage of it.

  Arms sales to and military-to-military exchanges with India also increased on Obama’s watch. Secretary of Defense Gates and his successor, Secretary Panetta, both visited New Delhi. Like Obama
, Panetta skipped visiting Pakistan while flying to India and Afghanistan; he said that his patience with Pakistani support for terrorism had reached its limits. By 2012 the United States and India were holding fifty annual military training exercises. But India was careful in its military dealings with Washington. It purchased C-130J and C-17A heavy lift transport aircraft but not advanced fighter aircraft. When India held a multiyear competition to select a new fighter aircraft for its air force—a deal worth tens of billions of dollars—the two American jets, the F-16 and the F-18, lost out in the first round and France won the award.24 Memories of 1965 and 1971 remain vivid in the Ministry of Defense, where America is not considered a reliable supplier of lethal military equipment in a crisis. Should there be another war with Pakistan, which almost all Indian military planners believe is all but inevitable, New Delhi does not want to have to rely on Washington to resupply key combat equipment.

  Increasingly, India looked to Israel as its primary source of advanced military technology. Arms sales grew annually, to $1.5 billion by 2006, and have stayed around that level since then. Israel has helped to upgrade India’s jet fighter fleet, sold India advanced airborne early warning aircraft, and worked with India on satellite imagery technology. President Clinton had encouraged the start of the Israeli-Indian military entente in 2000 during his visit to New Delhi and at the Camp David peace summit with Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

  Counterterrorism cooperation also increased in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. Panetta’s 2009 visit to New Delhi was followed by trips by other senior U.S. security officials, including the secretary of homeland security and the director of the FBI. Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and the investigation of the Mumbai attacks became priorities for the American counterterrorism community. The United States worked jointly with India on the investigation of David Headley’s role in the massacre and in the apprehension of the LeT’s mastermind, Abu Jindal, in Saudi Arabia. Headley and his partner were prosecuted in Chicago in high-profile trials. In 2012, after first listing Hafiz Saeed as an al Qaeda accomplice, the United States publicly offered a $10 million bounty for him and for information leading to his arrest. India welcomed the decision. After decades of cool relations between the two countries’ security services, the change was important and significant.