Karachi’s slums are violent no-go areas for the police, making the city an attractive place to hide for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the 9/11 operational commander, as it was for Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani militant released from an Indian jail following the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet to Kandahar in 1999. Omar Sheikh and KSM would fatefully cross paths during the murder of Daniel Pearl, which perhaps better than any one single event demonstrates the nexus between Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, ISI, and Kashmiri militant groups tied to al-Qaeda such as Jaish-e-Mohammed (“Army of Mohammed”).
One of the Wall Street Journal’s star reporters, Pearl had made a name for himself writing deeply reported, often quirky stories from around Asia and the Middle East. As a journalist working in the Muslim world, Pearl had made no secret of his Jewish ancestry. This would make Pearl an inviting target for Omar Sheikh and later too for KSM, once al-Qaeda itself became involved in his abduction.
As the 9/11 attacks unfolded, Pearl had recently married Mariane, a French radio journalist, and she was pregnant with their first child. The Pearls, who were then based in New Delhi, traveled together to Pakistan. There Danny, as he was universally known, began reporting on the various Pakistani militant groups. One in particular aroused his interest, an obscure sect named Jamaatul-Fuqra (“Party of the Poor”), which recruited African-Americans from its base in the Pakistani city of Lahore and maintained a number of communes in the United States. Of particular interest to Pearl in mid-January 2002 was Richard Reid, the British-Jamaican “shoe bomber,” who had recently tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with explosives hidden in his sneakers. Reid had visited the Fuqra headquarters in Lahore before 9/11.
Pearl set out to interview Fuqra’s founder, Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who, unlike many Pakistani militant clerics, shunned the spotlight. The contacts he reached out to in Pakistan’s militant community did not lead Pearl to the shadowy cleric but instead to Omar Sheikh, posing as someone who could arrange a meeting with Gilani. Omar Sheikh was quite adroit at conning Pearl; in his breezy email exchanges with the reporter, Sheikh played hard to get, apologizing for delays in setting up the supposed meeting with Gilani because he had given Pearl some incorrect contact information, or because his wife was supposedly gravely ill in the hospital.
The last person to see Pearl before his abduction on the night of January 23, 2002, was Karachi businessman Jameel Yusuf, the chief of the Citizen Police Liaison Committee, a group that he had founded in the mid-1990s to help the police solve the epidemic of kidnappings then gripping the city. Yusuf recalled that Pearl “dropped in to talk to me about the reforms after September 11th—How much is the international community doing to strengthen the law enforcement agencies?” Yusuf was struck, as were many others, by Pearl’s engaging and open manner: “Very humble down to earth person.”
Yusuf remembered that during their meeting Pearl received two calls on his cellphone. Pearl told the caller that he was close by and would be able to meet at 7 P.M. Pearl then met with Omar Sheikh in a fast-food restaurant, where he made the fatal mistake of agreeing to be driven to another location. Pearl did not show up later that night at the house he was living in, which prompted a search in which Yusuf was quickly involved since his organization was the leading investigator of kidnappings in Karachi. Yusuf remembers their worst fears being confirmed when they examined the phone number of Pearl’s last caller. “It was a prepaid telephone card, not traceable.”
The Pearl case was the first act of anti-American terrorism conducted by the al-Qaeda network after 9/11. And it would be the first time that members of the network, rabid anti-Semites to a man, would specifically target a Jew. Until Pearl’s kidnapping, international journalists had had little reason to fear doing their jobs in Pakistan. Now the rules had changed.
On January 24, an email was sent to a number of reporters in Pakistan from the account [email protected]. The message demanded the release of all Pakistani prisoners in American custody, including those held at the just-opened Guantánamo Bay prison camp. The email said “CIA officer” Daniel Pearl was now in the custody of “The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.” Attached to the message was a photo of a handcuffed Pearl wearing a pink and blue jogging suit. A man was holding a gun to Pearl’s head.
Using a specialized computer program, Pakistani and FBI investigators analyzed phone calls made by Pearl before he was kidnapped, and subsequent calls made by those Pearl had contacted, thus building up a phone tree of anyone who might have had a role in the kidnapping. The FBI also dispatched experts in computer forensics to Karachi who worked on tracing where the emails from [email protected] might have originated. Both of these approaches successfully pinpointed several of the conspirators in the kidnapping, but none of this investigative work was enough to prevent Pearl from being murdered by three Arab men on February 1 in the cruelest manner: his head was cut off with a knife, a scene that was recorded on video and posted to the Internet in late February 2002. Another new low for al-Qaeda.
One of the great mysteries of the Pearl case is that kidnapper Omar Sheikh had surrendered to Brigadier Ejaz Shah, a former ISI official, on February 5, 2002, more than a week before the Pakistani government announced to the world that he had been captured. His surrender to the former ISI official strongly suggests that Sheikh had ties to the Pakistani military intelligence agency, and the official silence about his capture, at a time when the Pearl kidnapping was a leading story around the world, also suggests that ISI was debriefing one of its own before he entered into the public Pakistani court system.
Much remains murky about Pearl’s kidnapping and murder but what is clear is that Omar Sheikh—who had shown no propensity for murder in the past—kidnapped Pearl on behalf of the Kashmiri militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed in order to spring fellow jihadists from jail. But as the kidnapping evolved, a number of Arabs entered the scene, including KSM, and matters then took a darker turn and the kidnapping became instead a murder; KSM has claimed that he was the man who beheaded Pearl. While some have cast doubt on this assertion, there is little debate today that it was Arab members of al-Qaeda who killed Pearl.
Two months after Pearl’s murder, Yosri Fouda, Al Jazeera’s chief investigative reporter, scored a journalistic coup: an interview with both KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh, who had together overseen al-Qaeda’s attacks on Washington and New York. Buttressing KSM’s assertions of his role in the slaying of Pearl is the fact that he gave Fouda an unedited videotape of Pearl’s murder.
Fouda, an urbane Egyptian based in London not averse to a pint or two in his local pub, remembers his phone ringing in early 2002 and the man on the other end of the line making him an unusual offer: “He asked me if I was thinking of preparing something special with my program, Top Secret, for the first anniversary of September 11th. If so, he would be able to give me some exclusive stuff for the program.” Fouda, a secular journalist ideologically far removed from the militant Islamists of al-Qaeda, would then accomplish what it would take another year for the CIA to do: track down the man who more than any other was the operational commander of 9/11.
Fouda made his way to Karachi and was met there on April 20, 2002, by an intermediary and driven around the city at night, blindfolded, until they arrived at an apartment block. Fouda recalls, “I counted four floors as I was walking upstairs. I hear a doorbell ringing, and then someone snatches my hand, pulls my hand inside. And then he started taking my blindfolds off.” Fouda remembered, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed asked me, have you recognized us yet? I said, ‘You look familiar.’”
One of Fouda’s first observations to KSM was, “They say you are terrorists.” KSM quickly replied, “They are right. That is what we do for a living.” Ever the terrorist technocrat, KSM explained that his main concern about the attacks on Washington and New York was their mechanics: finding the pilots like Mohammed Atta, “people who would know first of all how to fly, people who would mix
nicely in a Western atmosphere; people who would speak English well.” KSM said that finding the “muscle hijackers” willing to die in the operation was “the least of his worries … they had at the time a department for martyrs and that his problem was the office had too many volunteers.”
By contrast, Ramzi Binalshibh was more concerned about making the case that the 9/11 attacks were religiously justified, explaining, “Targeting civilians in particular was, in Islam, permitted because America is considered to be a country at war. And that’s a very old concept from the early age of Islam.”
Much of what KSM and Binalshibh freely volunteered to Fouda was later confirmed by the 9/11 Commission. Fouda remembers that KSM said he had originally contemplated targeting American nuclear power plants with the hijacked planes, “and he said that later they decided to take it off the list because they were not sure if they could control the operation.”
The al-Qaeda leaders also explained that the hijacked United Flight 93, which Ziad Jarrah crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, was routed to fly into the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. “The White House was initially on the list, but they decided that it be taken off the list for navigation reasons. Apparently it was difficult to hit it from the air, according to them. And it was later replaced by another spectacular target, Capitol Hill.” The two al-Qaeda operatives told Fouda every detail of how they managed the operation; what codes they had used when communicating with the hijackers in the United States; how they had kept bin Laden in Afghanistan apprised of developments; and the kind of training they had given the hijackers about how to operate in the West.
KSM’s and Binalshibh’s interview with Al Jazeera would turn out to be a monumental act of hubris. On September 11, 2002, within hours of the first airing of Fouda’s documentary featuring the 9/11 masterminds, Binalshibh was arrested in Karachi following a four-hour gun battle and was transferred to American custody. KSM had already slipped away to Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, the western desert region of Pakistan, where his family had hailed from.
Between 2001 and 2004, none of the key captured al-Qaeda operatives was captured in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan; instead they were all run to ground in its teeming cities, not only in Karachi, but also in Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad, Gujrat, and Rawalpindi. Those arrested included Abu Zubaydah, who provided logistical support to al-Qaeda recruits; Walid bin Attash, who played a role in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was one of the conspirators in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who bankrolled the 9/11 hijackers.
The most important al-Qaeda member to be captured was KSM, who was arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003, in a 3 A.M. raid in the city that happens to be home to the headquarters of Pakistan’s army. A Western diplomat in Pakistan remarked, “What the fuck was this guy doing just down the road from GHQ [army headquarters]?” KSM was run to ground with the help of an informant in Pakistan who would later pick up a substantial cash reward. The informant text-messaged his American controllers, “I am with KSM,” when he had slipped into the bathroom of a house in Rawalpindi where the al-Qaeda leader was staying. Later that night KSM was arrested. After KSM was captured, the CIA gave the Associated Press a photo of what the mastermind of 9/11 looked like freshly rousted from his bed in the middle of the night. It was not a pretty sight. KSM, dressed in a rumpled T-shirt, looks dopey, disheveled, and paunchy, the exact opposite of his own heroic self-conception as the James Bond of Jihad.
After KSM’s capture there was a brief flurry of anticipation that bin Laden himself would soon be arrested, but according to a U.S. intelligence official interviewed some months after KSM’s arrest, bin Laden’s “personal signature trail has gone cold.” However, computer hard drives seized at the time of KSM’s capture did contain a trove of information about al-Qaeda, including spreadsheets listing families who had received financial assistance from the terror group, three letters from bin Laden, a list of wounded and killed al-Qaeda “martyrs,” a summary of operational procedures and training requirements for the organization, and passport photos of al-Qaeda operatives.
In the five years after 9/11, Pakistan handed over 369 suspected militants to the United States, for which its government earned bounties of millions of dollars. The high rate of capture of al-Qaeda operatives meant that two or three years after the fall of the Taliban, the militants made the collective decision that the anonymity of Pakistan’s teeming cities was not quite as protective as they had once assumed. In fact, typical urban activities like making cell phone calls or dialing up Internet connections had provided many important clues to the whereabouts of al-Qaeda’s operatives. Robert Dannenberg, the head of CIA counterterrorism operations at the time, says that the Agency developed new technologies and techniques to target al-Qaeda members in Pakistan, exploiting signals from cell phones and electronic traces from Internet usage: “There’s some very creative young engineers and technology people in the Agency who got right on geolocation technologies and used them to grind in on these guys. It’s as impressive a technological and operational performance as I’ve ever seen.” The result was that “it absolutely demolished al-Qaeda’s operational capability” in Pakistan’s urban areas, recalls Dannenberg.
And so al-Qaeda migrated to the remote Pakistani tribal regions on the Afghan border known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Dannenberg says that al-Qaeda members “retreated to the tribal areas because they felt safer there and they were willing to sacrifice the ability to communicate efficiently with their networks for their own safety.” Indicative of this trend was Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the Tanzanian member of al-Qaeda involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, who decided to leave Karachi for the tribal agency of South Waziristan in April 2003.
The term “Federally Administered Tribal Areas” is really a misnomer, since the region has never really been administered nor under the federal government’s control. The British fought the Pashtun tribes there in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A young Winston Churchill wrote his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, about his experiences fighting those tribes, whom he described as possessed of a “wild and merciless fanaticism.” The British concluded that the tribal regions were more trouble than they were worth and allowed the tribes de facto independence and the right to enforce their own system of laws. After World War II, Pakistan inherited this arrangement and did little to change it.
The general backwardness of the tribal regions can be gauged by the female literacy rate, which is only 3 percent. And an indicator of the ferocity of the Pashtun tribes is the kind of compounds in which they live, generally mud or concrete fortresses studded with gun ports ideal for fighting off raiding parties. Larger compounds are defended by artillery. In Pashtu the words for “cousin” and “enemy” are roughly the same, which is indicative of the endemic low-level warfare that is the way of life in the FATA, where all males are armed and the blood feud is a multigenerational pursuit that the tribesmen seem to genuinely enjoy.
It was in this remote, ungovernable region that al-Qaeda started rebuilding its operations. A former American intelligence official stationed in Pakistan said that by 2008 there were more than two thousand foreign fighters in the region, while a U.S. intelligence official who tracked al-Qaeda put the number somewhat lower, saying the foreign militants in the FATA consisted of around 100 to 150 members of the core of al-Qaeda who had sworn bayat, a religiously binding oath of personal allegiance to bin Laden; a couple of hundred more “free agent” foreigners, mostly Arabs and Uzbeks, living there who were “all but in name al-Qaeda personnel”; and thousands of militant Pashtun tribal members, into whose families some of the foreigners had intermarried.
To root out those militants, the Pakistanis first tried the hammer approach in the FATA in 2004 with a number of military operations. They were essentially defeats for the Pakistani army, wh
ich was geared for land wars with India, rather than effective counterinsurgency campaigns. Those military operations were sometimes designed to coincide with the arrival in Pakistan of top Bush administration officials, as was the case in Waziristan in March 2004, when the campaign there kicked off at the same time that Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting Islamabad. At the time of Powell’s visit, President Pervez Musharraf went on CNN to explain that a “high value target,” likely Ayman al-Zawahiri, was now surrounded in Waziristan by Pakistani troops. That proved to be wishful thinking, and the failed military operations were followed by appeasement in the form of “peace” agreements with the Taliban in 2005 and 2006, which were really admissions of military failure and allowed the militants to establish even greater sway in the FATA.
By 2009 the Taliban wholly controlled all seven of the tribal agencies in the FATA and their writ extended into the “settled” areas of the North-West Frontier Province, almost up to the gates of Peshawar, the provincial capital. They also controlled the northern region of Swat, whose verdant valleys and towering mountains had once been one of Pakistan’s leading tourist destinations. In areas they controlled, the Taliban conducted their own kangaroo courts, publicly hanging men for infractions such as drinking, and shooting burqa-clad women for supposed promiscuity. The Taliban, who had once banned television, filmed their executions for distribution on DVDs and posting to the Internet. And militants in Waziristan set up a parallel judicial system, lynching and torturing civilians for infringements of their code. Much of what was going on in the tribal areas was opaque because the Pakistani government prevented international journalists from traveling anywhere near these areas, and journalists were sometimes detained or even killed when they reported on the tribal regions.
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