American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Days after The Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl was abducted in a Karachi restaurant in late January 2002, his captors released a photo of their hostage with a gun to his head, along with a list of demands. Writing from the email address kidnapperguy@hotmail.com, they had two ultimatums: first, that the U.S. government release all Pakistani detainees from Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay; and second, that Washington fulfill its promise to send the Pakistanis several F-16 fighter jets purchased in the late 1980s and held up by sanctions over the country’s rogue nuclear program. It seemed like an awfully specific and sophisticated demand from kidnapperguy, and to many observers, evidence that elements of the Pakistani military, or at least a few bad actors in the ISI, were complicit in the Pearl atrocity.

  As the Taliban insurgency gained strength in the waning years of the Bush administration, Washington placed hope above experience and poured millions more into western Pakistan. In 2007, the State Department announced a five-year, $750 million Security Development Plan aimed at a range of social and economic initiatives, including infrastructure, women’s and children’s health care, and education; the Pentagon kicked in an extra $200 million to shore up Pakistan’s Frontier Corps (FC), the paramilitary force composed of soldiers recruited from the Pashtun provinces they were meant to patrol and whose sympathies the Pakistani Army struggled to retain. (Fliers distributed in Waziristan warned FC soldiers, “We know that you have become America’s slave . . . a traitor to your religion for food, clothes, and shelter.”)

  Washington’s investments were tied to the explicit goal, as then Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2008, “to bring these remote areas into the Pakistani mainstream and render them permanently inhospitable to terrorists and extremists.” Negroponte spoke frankly about the challenges—no clean drinking water, no public education, and a female literacy rate hovering around 3 percent made the western frontier provinces one of the most neglected and destitute places in all of Asia. The good news, he said, was that “nowhere are common U.S.-Pakistan interests more in evidence than in the [FATA].”

  Whether Negroponte believed his own pronouncements was unclear. He was privy to U.S. intelligence reports that told a starkly different story: Even as the State Department money was spent (along with the roughly $2 billion in annual military aid), the militias, terror groups, and Taliban only grew stronger. For President Bush, the final insult arrived on the Monday following the July 4, 2008, holiday weekend, when a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani detonated a Toyota Camry laden with explosives at the front gate of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. Fifty-eight people were killed, mostly Indian government and military personnel.

  There was little question who had been behind the attack. Bush and his national security team already knew that an ISI colonel was cozied up to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son and commander of the Taliban faction named for his father, the CIA’s former favorite warlord, Jalaluddin. “We’re going to stop playing the game,” Bush said to aides at the time. “These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I’ve had enough.”

  Three decades after Washington first saw his clan’s utility, American spy-craft was once again focused on Haqqani. The same man whom Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson once described as “goodness personified” and whom the CIA entrusted with frequency-hopping radios and heat-seeking, man-portable, anti-aircraft Stinger missiles was now a critical threat—and the ISI’s most effective proxy. Haqqani operated under the private approval and public denials of a rotating cast of Pakistani politicians and generals. Just as the Americans had used the mujahideen during Operation Cyclone, now the ISI turned to an assortment of mercenaries to carry out its hard-line policies. Lashkar-e-Taiba was another remnant of the Soviet War that the ISI had repurposed for a new era. In November 2008, ten Lashkar fighters staged a bloody four-day siege in Mumbai that left hundreds dead and wounded. The Pakistani authorities detained the group’s founder and leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, permitted him to hold an indignant press conference, and then held him under house arrest in his own upscale Lahore neighborhood. A Pakistani court acquitted him six months later.

  In 2008, Senator Barack Obama had no illusions about the war’s central shaky alliance. “Make no mistake,” he said during his presidential campaign that summer, “we can’t succeed in Afghanistan or secure our homeland unless we change our Pakistan policy. We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president, I won’t.” It was the kind of hopeful talk that got him elected. But Obama entered the White House knowing that finding common purpose with Islamabad could prove impossible. During his presidential transition, Obama read intelligence reports detailing the same stark realities that had so outraged Bush—former president Musharraf and the chief of staff of the Pakistani military, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, were personally authorizing ISI officers to work with the Haqqanis, the Quetta Shura (the Taliban’s government in exile), and Lashkar.

  Obama launched the most aggressive diplomatic campaign since Pakistan’s founding. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican who would go on to deride Obama’s team for what he saw as a string of rookie foreign policy mistakes, credited the young Democratic president’s approach. “No administration in my entire career devoted more time and energy to working the Pakistanis,” Gates later wrote in his memoir. Between 2008 and 2011, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs admiral Michael Mullen led the diplomatic charge, traveling to Pakistan twenty-seven times to meet personally with General Kayani and turn what had been an essentially transactional relationship into a truer partnership. Even when their meetings failed to produce concrete agreements, they helped Mullen discern the limits of Pakistani allegiance. When Mullen offered to send U.S. advisers to train Pakistani Army formations to fight extremists in the FATA, Kayani declined, saying his country would sooner go to war with India than launch such a massive assault on its own people in the territories.

  Kayani earned his master’s degree at the United States Army Command and General Staff College on Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1988, just as the CIA and ISI were assessing their victory over the Soviets. He wrote his thesis on the “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement.” There was no way to see that conflict without appreciating the CIA’s central role. Thirty years later, he had become the most powerful man in his country, and together with ISI director general Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, perpetuated their delicate liasons with Washington. Early in Obama’s first term, they shared ISI intelligence about radicalized Muslims from the U.S., U.K., Germany, Canada, and Sweden arriving in the FATA to train in al-Qaeda camps. In February 2009, Pasha even vowed to senior White House and State Department officials that he would clean out his agency’s “rogue elements.” As Obama ramped up the CIA’s drone assassinations, Pasha’s ISI shared more intelligence on al-Qaeda and Haqqani fighters who had joined forces in North Waziristan. Even as Pakistani president Zardari publicly vented that the drones were a violation of his nation’s sovereignty, Kayani and Pasha allowed the CIA to launch its drones from Shamsi Airfield in Balochistan.

  These were positive steps, but the Obama White House let Kayani and Pasha know that they would need to go further, publishing a tough-love policy report in March 2009 that addressed the issue bluntly: “The core goal of the U.S. must be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan,” it said. Terror networks must be confronted “in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan.” Global stability depended on it; the possibility of extremists obtaining a nuclear device “is all too real.” Instability in the FATA wasn’t simply an American concern about winning the War in Afghanistan, but an imperative of far greater consequence—saving Pakistan from itself. Even a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would cause a temporary nuclear winter, threatening the lives of a billion people.

  Ambassador Langley’s unruly horse was slipping away. Were it lost, the best outcome would have Islamabad f
alling under heavy influence from Moscow and Beijing, potentially in open war with India. The worst-case scenario—with men like Haqqani, Saeed, and their hard-line ISI enablers in control of the world’s only Muslim nuclear arsenal—was unthinkable.

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  THE FACT that the only American POW in the Afghanistan war was being held inside the borders of America’s key ally in that war meant a rescue raid was out of the question. With thousands of U.S. troops arriving at Bagram each month, the risk of triggering a larger regional conflict, or worse, destabilizing Islamabad’s own shaky hold on power, was simply too great. With each new proof-of-life video, U.S. officials issued the same vows to find Bergdahl and bring him home. But there was no actionable plan or coherent strategy to back up those promises. Bergdahl had been sucked into a geopolitical black hole. Held captive by America’s enemy under the protection of her ally, his plight mirrored the self-enforcing illogic of the entire war.

  Private First Class Bergdahl may have been the first U.S. soldier detained long-term in Pakistan, but he was not the first American, nor the Taliban’s first high-value hostage. Kidnapping was a business in Afghanistan, and during the war, business was good. More than one hundred foreign citizens were abducted between 2001 and 2011, including a dozen journalists. During the summer of 2007, Taliban gunmen stopped a bus carrying nearly two dozen South Korean missionaries on the road between Kabul and Kandahar. Before the nearly six-week crisis was over, two missionaries were executed; the Korean government in Seoul vowed to withdraw its two hundred troops from Afghanistan, stop sending missionaries, and according to various Taliban claims, paid $10 million or $20 million dollars to bring home the survivors.

  The Taliban called their hostages “golden chickens” or “golden sparrows.” For the Haqqanis, the chicken trade was brisk, and along with extortion, chromite mining, and fund-raising from Jalaluddin’s roster of Saudi benefactors, hostage ransoms provided the network with substantial revenue at little cost. Overhead was low, logistics straightforward: Taliban operatives used elaborate promises for high-level meetings to lure Western journalists into vulnerable settings. Once they were bound, blindfolded, and rendered docile, the captives were smuggled over the border and locked away in safe houses while Haqqani leadership haggled with the hostages’ families, insurance contractors, or governments over the price of their freedom.

  Several Taliban factions carried out abductions, but the Haqqani captor network that nabbed Bergdahl was the most sophisticated operation of the bunch. In 2008, it snatched three consecutive high-profile Western journalists: Jere Van Dyk, a CBS and New York Times contributor (held for forty-five days); BBC filmmaker Sean Langan (eighty-six days); and New York Times reporter David Rohde (two hundred twenty-two days). All three had years of experience in Afghanistan.

  Bergdahl was a hostage far longer than Langan, Rohde, or Van Dyk, but like them, he had fallen victim to his own hubris. Bergdahl would later acknowledge the ignorance and absurdity of his “fantastic plan.” Rohde called his own kidnapping “the stupidest disaster of my career.” Langan said that he “felt like Icarus,” and that interviews with dangerous men had become the sun around which not just his life, but his family’s lives, had come to revolve. Van Dyk knew the region better than most, and he would later say that he should have known better. In 1973, he and his brother had traveled the hippie trail through Afghanistan in an old Volkswagen. During the Soviet War, he had written about Haqqani’s military prowess and stayed as a guest on his property. But in February 2008, he ignored his gut and numerous warnings from his Afghan contacts, and traveled in disguise into the FATA. He was kidnapped after one day, held for forty-five, and released without explanation.

  Langan had covered kidnappings for years. In 1997, he filmed a three-part BBC series tracking two British tourists abducted in Kashmir. Four years later, just before 9/11, he was in Kabul, sneaking his forbidden cameras into meetings with Taliban officials. When the U.S./U.K.-led wars broke out, Langan was in them. In 2003, he was an embed in Fallujah, shuttling his cameras between U.S. combat patrols and Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s Anbar Province. Then it was back to Afghanistan, where Kabul became a second home, and his risk taking was rewarded with years of access to otherwise inaccessible subjects. Langan sat down with a company of Taliban fighters in Helmand Province, met masked Hezbi-Islami guerrillas infiltrating the border in the mountains of Kunar, and in a haunting 2006 conversation, chatted with an adolescent boy who had been packed with explosives and smiled serenely as he discussed his imminent martyrdom. With his career in full stride, Langan aimed higher. He wanted the stars of the insurgency—Siraj Haqqani and Baitullah Mehsud—and he wanted them on camera. His local fixers assured him it was possible, made all the arrangements, and sent him into a trap for a commission.

  By the time he was released on June 21, 2008, Langan had lost forty pounds from dysentery and malnutrition. He returned to London, where he found himself on the wrong side of the camera lens. There were rumors that his employer, the publicly funded Channel 4 Television Corporation, had paid a six-figure ransom. Tory politicians and Fleet Street columnists charged Langan and Channel 4 with incentivizing more kidnappings and questioned whether he had been worth the price. In public statements, the British Foreign Office said it discouraged paying ransoms, but unofficially the Foreign Office also told hostages’ families to do whatever they needed to do to bring their loved ones home; they would not be punished. Citing a Foreign Office source, The Times later reported that Channel 4 had paid £150,000 each for Langan and his translator. In a final dose of irony, Siraj Haqqani sat for an interview with an NBC producer at a safe house in Khost the following month.

  That summer, Rohde was nearing the end of his time as the South Asia bureau chief for The New York Times, newly married, and worried about his career. He had planned to write a book about the reporting that had taken him from the falling towers in Lower Manhattan to the front lines of the wars that followed. But in those years of work and dozens of bylines, he had never interviewed a Taliban commander and was anxious about returning home and being seen, as he later put it, as “a New York–based journalistic fraud.” When an opportunity arrived to meet a commander named Abu Tayyeb, Rohde told himself not to let the story fall victim to his own fears.

  The night before his appointment with Tayyeb, Rohde met with colleagues at a restaurant in Kabul’s international zone to discuss the plan. He noted the new blast barriers that had been set up following a wave of Haqqani-directed bombings, signs of the Taliban’s growing impunity. Rohde’s friends had mixed opinions about his scheduled interview. The gossip in Kabul was that Langan and Van Dyk had been reckless; no fair-skinned, blue-eyed American or Brit could go wandering alone and unarmed into the border’s lawless frontier. But Rohde wouldn’t take that kind of risk. His Afghan fixer, Tahir Luddin, was one of the best; he had worked for the The Times of London and arrived with glowing references. Luddin assured Rohde that Tayyeb was a known commander who had conducted on-camera interviews with European journalists before. He was a moderate Taliban, Luddin said. The biggest risk would be bandits on the road.

  Rohde and Luddin never did meet a commander named Tayyeb in Logar Province. Their car was hijacked at gunpoint that November morning, and they spent days stashed among blankets and rugs in the back of a Toyota station wagon that cruised the dusty desert back roads of southeastern Afghanistan. Their captors hiked them overnight through the mountains and through a small village. Rohde suspected he knew the moment when they had crossed the Durand Line; he saw his guards’ body language visibly relax. When they put him in another car that started driving down the left-hand lane, British style, he knew he was in Pakistan and assumed that he would be killed.

  In A Rope and a Prayer, the 2010 book about the ordeal he coauthored with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, Rohde called his plan “a bachelor’s decision.” His regret and guilt were compounded by the uncanny fact that it was not his fi
rst experience as the highest-value American hostage of a foreign war. In 1995, he was reporting from Bosnia and asking too many questions around the Srebrenica massacre when Serbian authorities locked him up, sparking a minor international crisis that ended only after substantial diplomatic pressure from U.S. envoys, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Thirteen years later, when Rohde told the legendary diplomat that he was headed to Afghanistan, Holbrooke quipped, “Don’t get captured again.”

  Six days after the 2008 presidential election, Rohde had done just that, and Holbrooke was wondering whether his own career was finished. He had been a leading contender for secretary of state under what would have been his second Clinton administration—had Hillary Clinton won the nomination and the election. Instead, after Obama named his former rival to be the country’s chief diplomat, Clinton hired Holbrooke for what was arguably the State Department’s most difficult job: special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, or SRAP.