Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  Today, the disconnect between what the White House and Pentagon are publicly saying and the stark reality on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan has once again become as apparent as it was during the Bush administration. Take for example the classified report submitted to President Obama on December 16, 2010, which concluded that the White House’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan was “showing progress.” In Afghanistan, the report asserted, General David H. Petraeus, who arrived in Kabul in June 2010 to replace General Stanley A. McChrystal as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, had managed to right the ship, and the Taliban’s momentum had been “arrested in much of the country and reversed in some key areas.” In neighboring Pakistan, the report boldly announced, “significant progress [had been made] in disrupting and dismantling the Pakistan-based leadership and cadre of al-Qaeda over the past year.” Curiously, it said nothing about whether the Pakistani military and intelligence service had made any effort to go after Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban forces hiding in the northern part of their country or had made any progress attacking the militant Pakistani Taliban strongholds in the FATA.

  At almost the same time President Obama’s status report was released, two highly classified National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which were prepared by the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Dr. Neil H. Joeck, were sent to Washington policymakers, contradicting much of what was contained in the unclassified version of the president’s progress report. The intelligence estimate on Afghanistan painted a particularly bleak picture of the situation. According to the estimate, the “positive trends” that the White House was claiming were based solely on relatively minuscule improvements in the security status of five districts in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The gains that had been made were extremely tenuous, leaving both provinces still very much up for grabs. In other key provinces, like Paktika in eastern Afghanistan, the report showed that the Taliban were still prevailing, with some districts in the province being 80–90 percent controlled by the insurgents. These were hardly impressive indicators of success. According to a Canadian intelligence officer interviewed after he returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, the Taliban used the winter months to reinfiltrate hundreds of fighters into the districts cleared during the fall.

  Left unsaid in the estimate was that it is now widely accepted inside the U.S. intelligence community that, barring a complete collapse of the Taliban from within, it is probably not possible to defeat them militarily, no matter how many more American troops are sent to Afghanistan. Not only were the Taliban continuing to gain strength and expand the scope and intensity of their operations, but their underground “shadow governments” were now probably dug in too deep to be uprooted, especially in the rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan.

  If one accepts this basic premise, as many (but not all) intelligence officials do, then direct negotiations with Mullah Omar’s Taliban are an unpalatable but necessary step if the war in Afghanistan is to be resolved. Secret peace negotiations with the Taliban are currently taking place outside of Afghanistan with Mullah Omar’s representatives. The United States is directly involved in the talks, as well as a number of NATO governments and Hamid Karzai’s Afghan regime. But the outcome of these talks is very much up in the air. With President Obama facing what promises to be a stiff reelection fight in 2012, there is only a very narrow window of opportunity to ink a deal with the Taliban, because no one seeking the Oval Office wants to be seen as negotiating with terrorists.

  Pakistan remains an even more complex and perhaps intractable problem. According to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Pakistan may be a knot that we may never be able to untangle.” The intelligence community’s view was that the security situation in Pakistan, while significantly better than it was in 2009, was nowhere near as good as President Obama’s progress report made it out to be.

  According to the December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, Pakistan remained a safe haven for virtually every major terrorist or insurgent group on the U.S. intelligence community’s “Most Wanted” list. Osama bin Laden may be dead, killed in Abbottabad in northern Pakistan on May 1, 2011, but his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of al Qaeda’s leadership are still hiding in northern Pakistan. In the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden, questions are now being asked in the United States and Pakistan about whether the terrorist leader was protected by the ISI or elements of the Pakistani security forces. Mullah Mohammed Omar and the rest of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership continue to operate freely inside Pakistan with the apparent blessing of the Pakistani government. Tens of thousands of heavily armed extremist fighters belonging to the Pakistani Taliban still control huge segments of the lawless tribal areas of northern Pakistan. Pakistan is also the home for over a dozen other homegrown terrorist groups, which the Pakistani government refuses to go after, despite intense pressure from the U.S. government, because almost all of them were created decades ago by the Pakistani intelligence service to serve as covert proxy foot soldiers in Pakistan’s never-ending war against neighboring India over the disputed province of Kashmir.

  Even with incessant pushing and prodding by Washington over the past three years, and the presence of 140,000 heavily armed Pakistani troops and paramilitary forces in the region, the Pakistani military seems unwilling to make a concerted effort to clear the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of the Pakistani Taliban and their Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda allies. The attacks that the Pakistani military made into the FATA in 2010 achieved very limited short-term gains, which the Pakistanis then promptly surrendered to the Taliban after their troops returned to their barracks. The frustration of the Obama White House with the Pakistani military was all too apparent in an earlier report sent to Congress in September 2010, which stated that “unless these challenges are overcome, the Government of Pakistan risks allowing the insurgency the opportunity to reestablish influence over a population that remains skeptical of its staying power.”

  So the unmanned drone remains the only reliable weapon available to the U.S. intelligence community to go after al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. In 2010, the CIA carried out 112 drone attacks on al Qaeda and Taliban targets in northern Pakistan, double the number of attacks in the previous year, according to figures published by the authoritative Web site The Long War Journal. These drone attacks proved to be far more lethal than in previous years, thanks to a new generation of technical intelligence sensors, such as automated cell phone intercept and unattended ground sensor systems, which have vastly shortened the interval between the time that an al Qaeda target was located in northern Pakistan and the time that a drone could put a missile on the target in the FATA. These new sources have also allowed the CIA to dramatically lessen its dependence on the Pakistani intelligence service, whose agent sources have become viewed at Langley as increasingly unreliable.

  While the number of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters killed inside Pakistan jumped significantly in 2010, a small but vocal group of mid-level intelligence officials at DNI headquarters has argued that classified statistics showed that the vast majority of the militants being killed were low-level fighters, not high-level commanders. This argument is supported by a tally compiled by Reuters, which showed that the CIA drone strikes had killed about five hundred al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban militants during the two-year period from May 2008 to May 2010. Of the five hundred dead, only fourteen were rated by the intelligence community as senior “high-value” al Qaeda or Taliban officials, and another twenty-five were rated as being mid-level al Qaeda militants.

  Events that have taken place in Pakistan since the issuance of President Obama’s December 2010 progress report reveal just how dangerous the situation had become. On December 16, 2010, the same day that the report was issued in Washington, the secret war in Pakistan claimed its most important victim. It wasn’t a senior al Qaeda commander hit by a m
issile in the FATA. Nor was it a Taliban commander grabbed by a U.S. Special Forces “capture-kill” team.

  The victim was Jonathan D. Bank, the CIA station chief in Islamabad. A veteran of several high-profile assignments in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world, Bank had replaced John Bennett as head of the Islamabad station in the summer of 2009.

  The weapon that suddenly ended his tenure in Islamabad was not a bullet, a missile, or a bomb. It was a lawsuit filed in the city of Peshawar on December 10, 2010, by a Pakistani journalist named Karim Khan, which alleged that Bank and his boss, CIA director Leon Panetta, were responsible for the deaths of Khan’s brother and son, who were killed in a CIA drone strike at Mir Ali in North Waziristan a year earlier, in December 2009.

  On December 16, 2010, CIA headquarters sent a flash “Eyes Only” message to Bank advising him that his cover had been blown and ordering him to leave the country immediately. Station security personnel hustled Bank to the airport in a convoy of black armored SUVs, where he was put on a plane bound for the United States along with a security escort.

  Bank’s hasty departure was big news in India and Pakistan, where newspapers splashed his name and Khan’s allegations all over the front pages. Back in Washington, CIA officials were furious. Unidentified CIA officials told the New York Times and the Washington Post that they “strongly suspected” that Bank’s name had been leaked by ISI officials in retaliation for the filing of a lawsuit in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in November 2010, which alleged that the current director of the ISI, General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, was partly responsible for the November 26, 2008, terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, by the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 173 people. ISI officials vehemently denied this charge.

  In the months that followed, the CIA-ISI intelligence relationship rapidly went from bad to worse. On January 27, 2011, Raymond A. Davis, a thirty-six-year-old CIA contract security officer stationed in the U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, was arrested by Pakistani police after he killed two Pakistanis he claimed had tried to rob him in broad daylight at a busy intersection. The case caused an immediate sensation in the Pakistani press and quickly became a diplomatic incident when the Pakistani government refused to honor Davis’s diplomatic status, holding him in prison pending trial for murder.

  Pakistani security officials further inflamed the situation by leaking details of the matter to the local press, including the fact that Davis, a former Special Forces soldier, was working for the CIA. Davis spent several weeks in prison, then was released and quietly flown out of Pakistan after the CIA made what was described a large “blood money” payment to the families of the two slain men.

  When the Pakistani government initially would not release Davis, the CIA suspended all intelligence-sharing activities with the Pakistani government and the ISI. In retaliation, the Pakistanis halted all joint intelligence collection programs with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, including a number of joint human intelligence collection projects in the FATA, and banned the CIA from using Pakistani airfields for unmanned drone flights over northern Pakistan. A number of CIA case officers and contractors were also ordered to leave the country immediately.

  The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, in Abbottabad only further inflamed the already deeply troubled relations between the CIA and the ISI. On Saturday, May 7, 2011, a private Pakistani television network and a right-wing newspaper published the name of the new CIA station chief in Islamabad a day after the chief of ISI and the CIA station chief had held an angry meeting in Islamabad over the killing of bin Laden. Although the name given in the broadcast and the newspaper article was incorrect (the name given in the Pakistani press was Mark Carlton), CIA officials immediately claimed that the name had been leaked to the press by the ISI in retaliation for the embarrassment caused by the killing of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. The Pakistanis then arrested five of the Pakistani military officers and police officials who had helped the CIA monitor bin Laden’s home in Abbottabad, and ordered the immediate closure of three intelligence fusion centers that U.S. special forces were secretly running in Peshawar and Quetta.

  At the time that this manuscript went to press in mid-2011, U.S.-Pakistani intelligence relations had reached their lowest levels since 9/11. Officials in Washington confirmed that intelligence cooperation between the two countries had come to almost a complete stop. When asked to comment about the state of his agency’s relations with Pakistan, a senior CIA official put it bluntly: “They couldn’t be much worse than they are right now.”

  A typical New Year’s Day in Washington, D.C., is a surreal experience. The streets are almost completely empty of cars, and the sidewalks empty of people. In a town of serial workaholics, January 1 is one of the very few days of the year when the city’s population of politicians, government workers, and lobbyists are not at the office working a typical ten- to twelve-hour day. It may be one of the very few days of the year when you can actually be assured of reaching people at home because they are all parked in front of their television sets watching a never-ending series of college football games.

  New Year’s Day 2011 was no different. But breaking with tradition, I abandoned my television set and attended a party at a private home in the Washington suburbs because I was promised that a number of senior intelligence officials would be present. The talk among the multitude of diplomats and spies in attendance centered on a polite debate as to whether the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan were going as well as President Obama said they were. But in one knot of partygoers the conversation focused on a topic that at the time I did not think was particularly important—the Middle East.

  Almost everyone participating in the conversation was of the opinion that the Middle East and North Africa had become a backwater on the global stage, upstaged by the more pressing events taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There was a dissenting voice, though. One State Department official, apparently a veteran Middle East hand, was not so sure. “Things have been too quiet over there for too long. I think something’s going to blow,” he intoned with great seriousness. Judging by the derisive comments his assessment received, he was clearly a minority of one.

  It is easy to see why no one thought that the Middle East or North Africa warranted much serious concern at the time. The region had been remarkably quiet during President Obama’s first two years in office. The Israeli and Syrian militaries had not fired a shot at one another in almost five years, and the number of terrorist attacks inside Israel since Obama became president could be counted on one hand. The rest of the region seemed, at least on the surface, relatively peaceful.

  That changed rapidly in the days immediately after New Year’s as waves of popular unrest exploded across the region. On January 14, 2011, massive nationwide protests forced Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a longtime U.S. ally, to resign and flee the country. Less than a month later, on February 11, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down from his post after eighteen days of public demonstrations on the streets of Egypt’s cities.

  The U.S. intelligence community had been reporting for years that popular unrest with the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes was building, but according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, nobody at DNI headquarters at Liberty Crossing foresaw that mass street demonstrations would lead to the collapse of both the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes. The thinking among the intelligence analysts at the time was that the massive police and security services of both countries were more than capable of suppressing any public unrest. The analysts were wrong.

  It is small comfort, but all of our foreign intelligence allies, many of whom have better connections in the region than the United States, also did not see the unrest coming. According to a senior CIA official, the Mossad incorrectly predicted that Hosni Mubarak would be able to ride out the mass demonstrations in downtown Cairo without any difficulty. And the French foreign intelligence service, which had agents ope
rating at all levels of the Tunisian government, had no inkling that the Ben Ali regime was so structurally weak that it would collapse of its own volition.

  The collapse of the Mubarak regime in Egypt will almost certainly have serious long-term consequences for the U.S. intelligence community’s efforts in the Middle East, especially in the realm of counterterrorism. Leaked State Department cables show that for twenty years the U.S. intelligence community enjoyed excellent relations with all four of Egypt’s intelligence and security services. Particularly important was the CIA’s intimate relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence and Security Service (Al-Mukhabarat al-’Ammah), headed by Major General Omar Suleiman, which worked closely with Langley combating terrorism in the countries around Egypt, spying on the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as well as acting as a middleman during the on-again, off-again Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. The FBI worked closely with the Egyptian State Security Service (Jihaz Amn al Daoula), headed by Hassan Abdul Rahman, which was the principal agency for combating terrorism and militant extremism inside Egypt, as well as crushing political dissent. On foreign intelligence matters, the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) depended on the Egyptian Military Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat el-Khabeya), which monitored all external threats to Egypt, including Israel, Sudan, and Libya.

  In the weeks that followed the collapse of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, mass street demonstrations, some of them violent, erupted in Bahrain, Jordan, and Yemen, all American allies. This marked the beginning of what has since become known as the “Arab Spring.” The Obama administration was particularly concerned about the potential collapse of the government of Bahrain, which in addition to being a key ally in the war on terrorism is the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and homeport for all American warships operating in the Persian Gulf. A small detachment of U.S. Navy SIGINT aircraft, which fly daily intelligence collection missions off the coast of Iran, operates from the airbase outside the Bahraini capital of Manama. The Bahraini military and police were ordered to break up the protests by force. In the ensuing street battles, hundreds of protesters were killed or wounded.