88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  The Indian Army mobilization reported to me by General Jafar back in December had been quickly matched by the Pakistanis. Now, with the punishing South Asian summer about to descend, the two armies still confronted each other toe-to-toe, and every available unit of the Pakistan Army was deployed on the eastern frontier. “I cannot afford to reassign those brigades,” he said. “And if I lack the means to deal with the problems I might cause, I simply cannot afford to invite them.”

  Sending in the Special Services Group to mount JSOC-style commando raids against terrorist targets might be all well and good, he said. There was no doubt they could successfully attack any compound we might designate. But likely as not, once they had succeeded in taking their objective, they would find themselves surrounded by a howling mob of well-armed tribals, and a large force would be required to rescue them.

  Still, Kayani was prepared to answer our concerns, but only using the traditional means employed by the Frontier Corps. The Urdu code name he gave to the ensuing campaign spoke volumes: “Operation Tewazen—Operation Balance.” The job of the political agents and the Frontier Corps, at the end of the day, was to maintain a rough equilibrium in the Tribal Areas. Lacking sufficient force to impose their will on their own, they could nonetheless police the area according to established tribal norms, relying on the implied threat of a punitive campaign by the powerful Pakistan Army if their authority were challenged by the tribes or the situation otherwise got out of hand. Lacking the means to exercise that implied threat, Kayani gave them the task of investigating the reported presence of al-Qa’ida, but without upsetting the delicate political balance in the wild buffer zones along the Afghan border.

  A pattern took hold in the subsequent weeks. We would pass the Pakistanis an unconfirmed report alleging the presence of al-Qa’ida militants in a compound in some remote part of North or South Waziristan. A day or two later, troops from the concerned unit of the Frontier Corps would noisily fire up their trucks at dawn, and sally forth in cumbersome fashion. Approaching the target area, they would fan out to establish an extensive cordon, designed to keep the alleged “miscreants” from escaping. In the meantime, the political agent and several concerned tribal maliks, or elders, would be summoned. They would join a Frontier Corps officer to present themselves at the gate of the alleged al-Qa’ida hideout, where they would request permission to conduct a search, albeit one where any areas housing women were strictly avoided. Such searches predictably revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Foreign militants with any wits would have disappeared long before the Frontier Corps arrived.

  Not only was Operation Tewazen inadequate to the task at hand, but it was interpreted within CTC as a manifestion of Frontier Corps complicity with the militants. Why else would they so blantantly telegraph their moves? To Washington and the station in Kabul, the whole exercise was a pantomime designed to warn off al-Qa’ida and thus avoid having to do anything about their presence. In fact, Tewazen was not a conspiracy; it was just the unfortunate local way of doing business in a place where tribal sensitivities had to be respected, and where normal law enforcement did not involve the capture of alleged criminals, but instead negotiation with tribal authorities, who would hand over the suspects themselves under the threat that the hamlets of the concerned families would otherwise be destroyed. Speed and subtlety were foreign to the Tribal Areas.

  Still, despite the limitations of the tactics used, as the months progressed beyond my scheduled rotation out of Pakistan in June 2002, these Frontier Corps searches would produce a number of firefights with foreign militants, who in turn gained the growing assistance of local extremists, operating under the influence of radical mullahs inflamed by the continuing American presence in Afghanistan. Soon, Frontier Corps convoys would be ambushed, and Pakistani casualties would mount. By the time I returned to South Waziristan three years later as director of CTC, the tribal insurrection originally feared by General Kayani had taken place, and South Waziristan had been occupied by the Pakistan Army. Not wishing to repeat this history in North Waziristan, the Pak Army would negotiate with local mullahs and tribal strongmen there, this time from a position of weakness, producing results clearly unacceptable to the Americans, who would turn increasingly to the use of drone strikes as the only effective means of attacking the al-Qa’ida militants operating beyond Islamabad’s reach. As Pakistani-based support for the insurgency inside Afghanistan increased, so too did the breadth of the American target set. Rather than a limited counterterrorism tool, focused on significant international terrorists, drone strikes would become a broad-based counterinsurgency tool, employed against large groups of Pakistan-based militants. Collateral casualties would rise commensurately, producing greater radicalization. In time, the tribally affiliated Islamic extremists of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban, would be in open warfare with a Pakistani government seen as fully complicit with the Americans.

  Now, from the vantage of thirteen years later, it is perhaps instructive that much of this sorry history was seen and predicted from within a little bunglow at the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in the early spring of 2002. General Kayani, who would become the most powerful man in his country, was right. But as I look back, I fail to see how the history of the past dozen-plus years could have been different. Given American interests, the nature of the Tribal Areas, and the limitations—both physical and moral—of the Pakistan Army and its nominal civilian masters, the course of subsequent events seems inevitable. So long as America remained in Afghanistan, Pakistan was condemned to erupt in flames, and then as now, there was nothing to be done about it.

  Chapter 43

  * * *

  FLIRTING WITH ARMAGEDDON

  LATE MAY 2002

  RICHARD ARMITAGE, THE VOLUBLE and energetic deputy secretary of state, strode confidently into the dark-paneled White House Situation Room. A bald-headed, barrel-chested weightlifter, he looked as if he might burst out of his suit. No sooner had he entered, though, than he was fixed by Stephen Hadley, the slight, bookish deputy national security advisor, sitting at the head of the table. Had the deputy secretary not seen the latest from CIA? That representatives in both New Delhi and Islamabad were jointly predicting war between India and Pakistan? And if so, just what was State doing about it? Armitage was taken up short; if he was momentarily discomfited, he had me to thank for it.

  As of early May 2002, tensions between India and Pakistan, already high, were growing markedly higher. The armies of the two great South Asian rivals remained fully mobilized along much of their 1,800-mile border; some 500,000 Indian troops, including three armored strike corps, stood ready to invade. They were opposed by the most capable elements of the Pakistan Army, numbering 300,000 strong. Neither side could maintain this posture indefinitely. With the summer heat coming on, the speculation, widely circulated in the press, was that India would either have to go on the attack or stand down.

  The war hysteria would rise further. On May 14, three Muslim gunmen disguised as Indian soldiers and later reported to be Pakistani nationals infiltrated an Indian Army camp near Kaluchak, killing thirty-one people and wounding forty-seven others, many of them the wives and children of Hindu and Sikh troopers serving in Kashmir. The country exploded in outrage. On May 18, India expelled the Pakistani high commissioner (ambassador), as villagers in both Indian- and Pakistani-occupied Kashmir fled exchanges of artillery fire. Further clashes on the 21st left six Pakistani soldiers and one Indian, as well as a number of civilians, dead. On May 22, the Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, toured the Line of Control, the tense, “temporary” mountain border along which the Indian and Pakistani armies had confronted one another since its formal creation in 1949. At a neighboring Indian military base, he announced: “The time has come for a decisive battle . . . and we will have a sure victory in this battle.” For its part, and as if to underscore the point that it could compensate for its relative deficits in conventional arms through resort to nuclear weapons, Pa
kistan began a series of long-range missile tests on May 24.

  Observing the situation from Islamabad, I was convinced that U.S. counterterrorism policy was encouraging and emboldening the Indians to deal with the problem of Pakistani-supported terrorism once and for all. The whole point of the American “War on Terror,” after all, was to set new international norms, rejecting terrorism as a means of redressing grievances. After it was struck on 9/11, the United States had taken quick military action. India had been menaced by Pakistani-supported terrorism in Kashmir for many years: if America could deal with its terrorism problem in such summary military fashion, why shouldn’t India do the same?

  During a visit to Islamabad by Secretary Rumsfeld in April 2002, some of his closest military aides, quite uninstructed on South Asian history, had begun to ruminate in my presence. “Say,” one said, “isn’t this stuff going on over there in Kashmir terrorism?” The United States had long decried outrages against civilians in Kashmir, of course, and had exerted pressure on the Pakistanis for years to do something about it, several times coming close to sanctioning them as a formal state sponsor of terrorism. The implication here, though, was that consistency in the War on Terror would demand far more muscular action on our part. I was aghast.

  “Hold on,” I said. “There’s a long history behind this, which dates back to 1947 and beyond. It would be a big mistake to try to deal with terrorism in Kashmir in isolation from the underlying dispute. We can’t think about addressing the terrorism unless we’re willing to seriously address the dispute.” They all looked at me. “And no one in the U.S. government has ever been willing to do that,” I added. There was little doubt in my mind that the U.S. government’s counterterrorism zeal was leaking out in all sorts of other ways, and having unanticipated effects in New Delhi.

  The American ambassador in New Delhi at the time was a highly ambitious former State Department officer and sometime Harvard academic named Robert Blackwill. Since his arrival in Delhi, he had been aggressively pushing the line that despite a few decades of unpleasantness during the Cold War, the United States and India were natural strategic allies. Blackwill seemed determined to foster such a strategic alliance through sheer force of personality, if necessary. His missives from Embassy New Delhi touted the importance to the United States of our “common strategic interest” in counterterrorism, among other things. I was highly skeptical. As a career intelligence officer from the Near East and South Asia Division, I knew we had never gotten much of anything from the Indians, least of all on counterterrorism. “If they really want to help us on terrorism,” I told our political counselor in Islamabad, “they should stop abusing the Kashmiris.”

  Now, in the aftermath of the December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, Blackwill was beating the drum of Indian-American solidarity. I closely followed the accounts of his private meetings with senior Indian officials and his public pronouncements. He never precisely said so, of course, but I thought his statements suggested that the United States would be very understanding, at a minimum, if India felt compelled to use military force to end Islamabad’s support to Kashmiri militants. I had little doubt that his words would be so interpreted by those in India inclined to read them that way.

  By late May, I was convinced that India and Pakistan would in fact go to war, and initiated an informal exchange with John Ferguson, an old friend, now in India, under whom I had served years before, to see if he agreed. To my great alarm, he asserted that the Indians would launch at least a limited attack. It was clearly time, I felt, for an Aardwolf—a chief of station field appraisal.

  It occurred to me, though, that such a field assessment would be far more powerful if issued as a single document from either side of the potential conflict. The fact that to my knowledge a joint assessment had never been done before made it all the more appealing. I broached the idea with John, offering to compose the initial draft. He enthusiastically agreed. I then informed my division leadership. As I expected, the senior division reports officer wasted no time in responding: there was no provision for such a joint document, she said. The Aardwolf was to be issued only by an individual station chief, providing his or her own view of the situation.

  The chief of staff to deputy director for operations Jim Pavitt was another old friend. I sent him a note, informing him of my idea and the current state of play. Perhaps, I suggested, if the DDO himself were to request a joint field assessment, this might be enough to overcome the opposition of the Vestals. I got an amused reply: “Go ahead,” it said.

  I didn’t mince words. Recounting past history, recent events, the evolving views, and the underlying political imperatives, both international and domestic, of all concerned, I predicted that India would launch a military strike on Pakistan within weeks. In addition to airstrikes in Pakistani-held Kashmir targeted against alleged terrorist training camps, which would probably be ineffective, the primary intent of the Indian campaign would be to make a limited incursion designed to seize territory and force the Pakistanis to negotiate. From such a position of strength, the Indians would expect to have the whip hand in coercing concessions from Islamabad. However, there should be no illusions with regard to the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Knowing the Pakistanis as I did, I had no doubt that they would employ nuclear weapons if they became convinced that the continued viability of Pakistan as an integral, contiguous state were imperiled. It would not be the intent of the Indians to dismember Pakistan, I said, but Pakistani judgments as to Indian intent would be highly subjective, and made rapidly in the heat of battle. Both sides could be seriously prone to miscalculation. I did not think the coming conflict would go nuclear, but one could certainly not exclude the possibility.

  My other main point was that U.S. policy, as enunciated both in Washington and in New Delhi, was making an Indian attack more, and not less, likely. It was a point I had to make carefully. This document, unlike the one I issued after 9/11, could not be policy prescriptive. As I explained in an accompanying internal CIA message, I was being very careful neither to criticize current policy nor to suggest an alternative. I was merely offering an analytic view as to how statements emanating from Washington and New Delhi were likely to be interpreted by the Indian government.

  John and his senior reports officer offered a number of excellent suggestions and refinements, tightening up the analysis considerably, especially regarding politics in Delhi, which they understood far better than I. I was pleased with the result. As required, I gave my newly arrived ambassador, Nancy Powell, the opportunity to comment. Having arrived only the day before to replace Wendy Chamberlin, she was at a great disadvantage. Here was her station chief predicting war between India and Pakistan—no small pronouncement—and she was supposed to indicate whether or not she agreed, with little personal basis on which to make such a judgment. She delegated the task to her deputy chief of mission, also newly arrived, who shared her concerns and offered a few mild caveats, but otherwise commented little.

  The effect of the document, when it reached policymakers in Washington, was electric. As recounted to me later by Rich Armitage, his arrival the next day at the White House for a Deputies’ Committee meeting precipitated an onslaught from his interagency colleagues.

  Action was soon in coming. On May 31, 2002, the American Embassy in New Delhi declared an evacuation of dependents and non-essential staff, and issued a Travel Advisory warning Americans against travel to India. Other Western countries immediately followed suit. American businesses, ever alert to signals from the State Department, immediately announced plans to remove staff. According to Indian accounts, the abrupt American order came as something of a shock, and was interpreted by many as an implicit threat of economic punishment if India did not seek a negotiated solution to the crisis. That seemed to induce a bit of stocktaking in New Delhi.

  I immediately arranged a meeting with ISI chief Ehsan ul-Haq for the following day, June 1, a Saturday. The ISI normally worked only a half-day on Saturdays,
and things were ordinarily quiet. I arranged to meet in the early afternoon, wanting to make sure we would have an extended chat. Armitage would soon be traveling to both Islamabad and New Delhi for a round of shuttle diplomacy, and I knew the discussions would revolve primarily around the activities of just one Pakistani government entity—the ISI.

  Armitage’s discussions with Pakistani leaders, I realized, would fall within the context of the peculiar dysfunction that has long beset U.S.-Pakistan relations. Since the 1980s, and especially since the early 1990s, Pakistan has promoted a number of policies of which Washington has disapproved—development of nuclear weapons, construction of long-range missiles, and support to Kashmiri militants principally among them. When not otherwise constrained, the United States has excoriated and sanctioned Pakistan. But when Pakistani support has become necessary, as during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, America finds a way to overlook Pakistani misdeeds and focus instead on common interests. After 9/11, we found ourselves in another such cycle. Now our other concerns would have to be set aside once again, so that we could focus on the joint task of ridding the region of al-Qa’ida.

  Although the Pakistanis would often complain of U.S. inconstancy, neither they nor the Americans would admit to the mendacity underlying relations on both sides. The unwritten rule for Pakistan has been never to admit engaging in activities of which Washington disapproves; and in fact, such duplicity is tacitly welcomed by the Americans during times, such as the one in which we then found ourselves, when the United States too would not want to admit that it was looking the other way on banned Pakistani activities.

  That was why, I knew, President Musharraf had been so outraged the previous December when, in the aftermath of the attack on India’s Parliament, Ambassador Chamberlin had pressed him on Pakistani support to the militants. At first, Musharraf had engaged in the usual, ritual denials. But when Chamberlin refused to be put off, he had become enraged. In effect, she was breaking the tacit rule: “You must understand our compulsions,” he had complained. After all, wasn’t he giving us everything we wanted in the War on Terror?