Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  NATO had bet a great deal on its mission in Afghanistan: that it would find meaning for its continued existence and re-create the unity that Western Europe showed during the cold war. Yet NATO had arrived with little understanding of the Afghan conflict, a lack of realism regarding public opposition at home, a complete lack of transparency in dealing with the public, and an overreliance on U.S. leadership and analysis of the conflict. General Richards was later to admit that “probably we all underestimated the potential for a [Taliban] resurgence.”45 Increasingly NATO officers blamed the Bush administration for refusing to get tough with Pakistan. Above all, NATO had addressed Afghanistan as though it were a classic post-conflict peacekeeping operation confined to the country’s borders, whereas it was actually an insurgency that was a cross-border phenomenon, as the Taliban were also present in the neighboring countries.

  Moreover, NATO’s counterinsurgency effort required the close integration of civil and military objectives, but NATO was unable to get it right, as it failed to provide adequate reconstruction efforts in the war zone. By 2007, NATO had established PRTs in almost every province, but they were too small to be effective, too cut off from the people because of the PRTs’ own security concerns, while their quick-impact projects made no dent in the rebuilding of infrastructure that was desperately needed to get the economy moving and to provide jobs for people.

  All the PRTs operated under different mandates and caveats, decided upon by the home government rather than by the needs on the ground. In 2006 a large proportion of international aid was being delivered to just four opium-growing and insurgency-hit provinces in the south, leaving the rest of the country bereft and angry. USAID, the largest donor, directed half of its aid for 2006—some $119 million—to these four provinces but had little to show because the lack of security there prevented aid workers from venturing out. Britain’s development agency DFID and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) had enormous funds at their disposal but were unable to deploy in Helmand or Kandahar.

  Karzai’s indecisiveness and his apparent unwillingness to improve the performance of his government angered NATO countries. The ease with which some Afghan officials continued to benefit themselves contrasted sharply with the self-sacrifice espoused by the Taliban. The European governments wanted the Americans to put more pressure on Karzai. NATO’s Scheffer warned Karzai that " ’parliamentary and public support’ in NATO countries for their troops in Afghanistan depends on the respect for universal values demonstrated by the Karzai government.”46 In Kabul, deep disillusionment set in, which resulted in the best and brightest of the Western-trained Afghans, who had come to work for the government, beginning to leave.

  The divisions in NATO, its recourse to intensified aerial bombing, which only increased civilian casualties, and the continued refusal of many European countries to fight the Taliban left Afghans asking how committed the international community really was to Afghanistan. Before the world’s eyes in the summer of 2006, East Timor, a once-failed state that had received the most aid money per capita in the world and had been administered by the UN, fell apart through riots and mayhem. There was no guarantee that the same thing could not happen in Afghanistan. There was a lesson here, said Kofi Annan.47 International aid, money, and troops did not guarantee a quick fix or a solution to failing states unless the entire package was welded together with a coherent nation-building strategy that everyone agreed upon. NATO had bet its future role on bringing peace to Afghanistan, but every day the risks of failure and the fear of a geostrategic meltdown seemed to increase. “In committing the alliance to sustained ground combat operations in Afghanistan . . . NATO has bet its future,” said Gen. James Jones, the former NATO chief. “If NATO were to fail, alliance cohesion will be at grave risk. A moribund or unraveled NATO would have a profoundly negative geostrategic impact.”48

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Conclusion The Death of an Icon and a Fragile Future

  Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.

  —American diplomat George Kennan, October 20021

  In the last few moments of her life, Benazir Bhutto, a youthful and still beautiful fifty-four, stood up on the backseat of her bulletproof Toyota Land Cruiser and popped her head through the sunroof. She waved to the crowd surrounding the vehicle as it slowly edged out of the rally ground in Rawalpindi, where she had just finished delivering a stirring election speech in the late afternoon of December 27, 2007. Elections were due on January 8, 2008. Hundreds of police patrolled the ground, but only one was anywhere near Bhutto’s vehicle. A young, thin man wearing a black waistcoat and sunglasses standing to the vehicle’s left suddenly pulled out a Chinese-made pistol and fired at Bhutto at close range. We will never know the exact cause of death, as no autopsy was carried out, but Bhutto dropped down through the sunroof as the vehicle picked up speed. She may have been shot by the assassin or hit her head on the latch of the sunroof as she ducked. Seconds later a suicide bomber, probably the shooter or another man standing just behind him, detonated explosives strapped to his body.

  The massive explosion tore through the crowd, killing the bomber and twenty-one others—many of them Bhutto’s young bodyguards. The blast shook Bhutto’s vehicle and blew out its tires but injured no one inside. Naheed Khan, Bhutto’s devoted friend and secretary, who was sitting next to the former prime minister, thought Bhutto had just slumped in her seat, until Khan noticed blood forming a thick pool on the plastic floor mat. The explosion, the blood flowing from Bhutto’s wounds, the bumpy ride, numb eardrums, and the shock of the blast had affected all the vehicle’s occupants, but the driver had the wherewithal to stop and transfer Bhutto into another vehicle, which rushed her to a hospital. Doctors there tried to revive her for nearly forty minutes, but it was too late. She was already dead. She’d loved her country and in the end gave her life for it.

  A few moments earlier she had been onstage in Liaquat Gardens—the site of the assassination in 1951 of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan—giving the speech of her life. “Wake up, my brothers!” she shouted. “This country faces great dangers. This is your country! My country! We have to save it,” she implored.2 Ultimately she was unable to save herself from the very extremists whom she cursed in her final speech.

  After eight years of self-imposed political exile in London and Dubai, Bhutto had returned home only two months earlier, on October 18, to a large bomb blast—one that tore through her convoy as she traveled from Karachi airport to her home. She barely escaped with her life, but 179 of her supporters and bodyguards were killed and more than 600 injured. It was the single largest terrorist attack in Pakistan’s history, and Bhutto was distraught at the staggering loss of life. Afghan intelligence had privately warned her that there was a plot by extremists to assassinate her. It was clear that somebody was out to get her, but she refused to falter in her campaign or to stop appearing in public. The security promised by Pakistan’s government never materialized, and it was certainly not there on that terrible December day.

  Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), whose green, black, and red flags could be seen from the Karakorum Mountains to the Arabian Sea, came the closest of any party in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to espousing a secular, democratic, antimilitary political culture. Election results proved that the PPP, the country’s only national party, consistently commanded the loyalty of about one-third of the electorate, a faction mostly against military rule and Islamic extremism. Bhutto’s longest-running battle was with the army, whose generals never trusted her. Gen. Zia ul-Haq had hanged her father, former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and placed
Benazir in jail for nearly five years while she was still in her twenties. She was forced into exile by Musharraf as the government launched one corruption case after another against her.

  Under Musharraf, Pakistan’s democratic politics had regressed and Islamic extremism became ever stronger. Bhutto’s promise to restore civilian rule and democracy while combating extremism was a breath of fresh air for millions of Pakistanis, and vital if Pakistan was to avoid becoming a failed state. Her past mistakes, her inability to deliver on her promises to the people even though she had been prime minister twice, the allegations of corruption against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were all forgotten as Pakistanis now pinned their hopes on Bhutto’s ending military rule.

  The Bhutto family had lived through many tragedies. After Benazir’s father was hanged, her two brothers were hounded into exile. Her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, died from poisoning under mysterious circumstances in Cannes in 1985. In 1996 her other brother, Murtaza, was killed by police in Karachi, an incident that appeared to be an assassination. What made his death doubly troubling for Benazir was that she was prime minister at the time. That year she was deposed from power, losing the elections to Nawaz Sharif, and went into exile.

  For eight years the U.S. State Department studiously ignored Bhutto, with even junior U.S. officials declining to meet with her lest their doing so anger Musharraf. Yet, over the twelve months preceding her death, the State Department and London’s Foreign Office had quietly tried to tie up an agreement between Musharraf and Bhutto, one that would allow her to return home after all corruption charges against her had been withdrawn, to contest free and fair elections, and, if she was elected prime minister, to share power with President Musharraf. The aim was to use Bhutto to revive Musharraf’s flagging fortunes, cover him with a varnish of legitimacy, bolster Pakistan’s dwindling fight against extremism, and mobilize the masses. The Taliban’s expansion into Pakistan demanded a new political dispensation.

  The “deal,” as it was dubbed by the Pakistani media, proved to be immensely unpopular in the PPP and among the opposition leaders, including Nawaz Sharif, who were banking on Bhutto to lead a movement in the streets to topple Musharraf rather than to bail him out. To fulfill her side of the bargain, Bhutto was to overrule her party, courting major criticism and leaving many wondering if she was a front for the Americans or just hungry for power. Bhutto had calculated that this was the only chance for her to make a comeback, enjoy the full support of the international community, and cleanse her reputation. She knew that in the army, only Musharraf, who was an Urdu-speaking Muhajir, now irrevocably weakened, could be persuaded to accept her. The next army chief and the majority of generals were Punjabis, who would prefer to deal with fellow Punjabi Nawaz Sharif, who satisfied their political preferences: he was sufficiently right-wing, anti-American, and close to the Islamic parties. Moreover, Bhutto knew that no matter how weak he was, Musharraf was solidly backed by the army and the Americans; confrontation would not remove him, but a slow, steady inching into the spaces he provided just might.

  For Musharraf, the deal was an opportunity to extend his tenure as president safely into a second term, to transition the country to a more genuine democracy, and to complete the political transformation he had promised back in 1999. All that was needed was that he shed his uniform as army chief, hold free and fair elections, show a little modesty, agree to share power with an elected prime minister and parliament, and keep the army from hogging the limelight of political and economic power.

  However, Musharraf would double-cross both the Americans and Bhutto, implementing none of the benchmarks he had earlier agreed to in two face-to-face meetings with Bhutto in Dubai and London, in which the Americans had acted as guarantors. These benchmarks included appointing a neutral interim government and an independent election commission to supervise the elections, and disbanding local government officials, the nazims who could influence the vote on the side of the ruling party. As Musharraf refused to fulfill his side of the bargain, and the Americans refused to pressure him, Bhutto was left struggling against the odds.

  Two weeks before her death, Bhutto told me she was facing enormous pressure from the White House—particularly Vice President Cheney’s office—to conform, while there was no similar pressure placed on Musharraf to carry out his side of the bargain. U.S. officials refused to accept that the deal was dead or that Musharraf was double-crossing them, even though the U.S. embassy in Islamabad reported extensively on plans being drawn up by the ISI to rig the elections. Still, U.S. deputy secretary of state John Negroponte traveled to Islamabad in late November and urged Bhutto to continue collaboration with Musharraf, as did Richard Boucher, head of the State Department’s Bureau of South Asia Affairs.

  With the elections just days away, Bhutto’s main message the day she died was that Musharraf was preparing to rig the elections in favor of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) or the Qaid-e-Azam faction. On the previous evening, she was scheduled to meet with two U.S. lawmakers— Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy—to hand them a dossier of evidence describing the preelection rigging being carried out by the ISI. She spoke of this rigging both to the crowd who assembled to hear her final speech and to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who met with her that morning. “She was very frank to me about the ISI and the role they were playing in undermining her,” Karzai later told me. “She was a brave, brave unafraid woman who wanted the best for her country. The sad thing about her death is that she predicted it, and she was proved right.”3 There is little doubt that Bhutto and Karzai, working together, would have formed a team committed to combat extremism.

  The Bhutto-Karzai meeting reminded me of another day of hope in 1989, when the young Bhutto—only thirty-six when she first became prime minister—hosted in Islamabad Rajiv Gandhi, the equally young prime minister of India. Both had promised to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation between their two countries—a promise soon thwarted by the insurgency in Indian Kashmir.

  As her body was carried in an air force plane to her hometown of Larkana, in Sindh province, public grief and suspicions about possible government involvement turned into anger. The government managed to act guilty even as it claimed not to be so. The fire brigade hosed down the site of the bombing within a few hours, destroying all evidence, and doctors at the hospital where Bhutto was treated changed their statements after being pressured by unknown intelligence officials. No autopsy was held— although Bhutto’s husband did not insist upon one. Musharraf refused PPP calls for an international investigation led by the United Nations, but he eventually agreed to Scotland Yard detectives being brought in—although they were mandated to discover only how Bhutto died, not who killed her.

  For the next three days the country experienced mayhem as banks, railway stations, government offices, and container trucks in Sindh province and Karachi were attacked and burned. Nearly forty people were killed in the ensuing riots and disturbances. In panic, the government delayed the general elections until February 18, and quickly claimed to have identified the perpetrators of the assassination plot. It blamed Baitullah Mahsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal agencies, for organizing the assassination and released a telephone transcript of him asking a colleague about the plot.

  In 2007 there had been 56 suicide bombings in Pakistan, which killed 419 security officials and 217 civilians, compared to just 6 such attacks the previous year. Despite this tenfold increase in suicide bombings, the regime had failed to track down a single culprit.4 Now the public was expected to believe that the military had resolved the Bhutto murder in a couple of days, blaming the very man with whom the ISI had struck a peace deal earlier in the year. Reinforcing this sense of disbelief and anger at the government was Musharraf’s failure to show any remorse over Bhutto’s death. Instead, he blamed her for sticking her head out of the sunroof and said that the army had never liked her anyway.5

  “The United States thought Benazir
was the right person to fight terrorists, ” Musharraf said after her death. “Who is the best person to fight? You need three qualities today if you want to fight the extremists and the terrorists. Number one, you must have the military with you. Well, she was very unpopular with the military. Very unpopular. Number two, you shouldn’t be seen by the entire religious lobby to be alien—a nonreligious person. The third element: don’t be seen as an extension of the United States. Now I am branded as an extension, but not to the extent she was.”6

  A few weeks later, in January 2008, the police in Dera Ismail Khan, close to the Afghan border, arrested Aitezaz Shah, a fifteen-year-old boy alleged to be a member of the group responsible for killing Bhutto. Shah told police that Baitullah Mahsud had planned the murder, that the shooter was a man named Ikram, and that the suicide bomber standing behind Ikram was Bilal—the latter two both Pashtun tribesmen from South Waziristan. 7 Two more tribesmen from South Waziristan were arrested in Rawalpindi in early February. A report by Scotland Yard on the cause of Bhutto’s death agreed with the government that she had died not from a gunshot but from hitting her head on the latch of the sunroof. However, the Pakistan Peoples Party continued to insist upon a full inquiry by the United Nations.8

  Bhutto’s death was the latest in the past ten months of crises as Musharraf came under intense domestic and international pressure to share power, doff his uniform, and allow free and fair elections. Instead, he was to manipulate the political scene in order to ensure his political survival and a second term as president. Now, as a result, the country hovered on the edge of political meltdown.

  In the spring of 2007, Musharraf was confident that he faced no real political threats to his reelection as president. The opposition parties were subdued, divided, and unable to mobilize mass agitation against the regime; the Bush administration fully supported his reelection and described him as indispensable in the war against terrorism; and the Pakistani economy was doing relatively well, posting annual growth rates of 7 percent.