Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  That summer, following Smith’s encounter amid the surge of alarming reports about Al Qaeda’s plans for a big attack, the United States redoubled its efforts to cultivate Mahmud, in the hope that the I.S.I. chief might use his influence with the Taliban’s leadership to persuade them to either expel or betray Osama Bin Laden. George Tenet flew secretly to Pakistan to meet with Mahmud. To reciprocate for his hospitality to Tenet, the C.I.A. invited Mahmud to Washington and promised to arrange high-level meetings across the new Bush administration and in Congress. The I.S.I. director’s visit was to end on September 9 and Mahmud and his wife were booked on the Pakistan International Airlines flight out of New York on the evening of September 10. However, he stayed to accept a late invitation to have breakfast at the Capitol on the morning of September 11, with Porter Goss and Bob Graham, the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, respectively. They were mid-meal when aides rushed in shouting that they had to evacuate immediately.7

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  Wendy Chamberlin, the newly arrived U.S. ambassador to Pakistan in 2001, was a career foreign service officer who had been posted previously to Laos, Malaysia, and Zaire. It was about 7:30 p.m. in Pakistan when United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. She called Dave Smith and half a dozen other senior aides to her upstairs living quarters within the embassy compound, where she had CNN on the television. As they watched in shock and discussed security measures, the ambassador’s young daughters sat at a desk to one side, doing their homework.

  General Tommy Franks, in charge of Central Command, the military headquarters that had responsibility for the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, called her the next morning. “You need to tell Musharraf they’re either with us or against us,” Franks told Chamberlin, referring to General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president and chief of army staff. “They need to get a very strong statement out as soon as possible.” But Chamberlin did not report to the Pentagon. She waited for instructions from Colin Powell at the State Department before she telephoned Musharraf.

  Musharraf was on a ship in the Arabian Sea, observing naval exercises. “You should be very clear that you support the United States at this time,” Chamberlin said when she reached him by satellite phone.

  “Come on, Wendy, Al Qaeda could not have done this,” Musharraf said. “They’re in caves. They don’t have the technology to do something like this.”

  “General, frankly, I disagree. They did this with box cutters.”8

  The next afternoon, September 12, Dave Smith drove to the Pakistan Army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, to meet Tariq Majid, the two-star general who ran military intelligence. He worked in an L-shaped building that also housed Musharraf’s official army office. (As commander of the military and president, Musharraf had offices in both Rawalpindi and Islamabad.) The inevitable portrait of Jinnah hung on one wall. A small door led off the main office to a map room filled with current intelligence charts depicting Indian military deployments. Smith was the rare outsider who got a glimpse of the uncovered estimates. Majid was another of the Pakistani officers he had befriended two decades earlier.

  Smith asked how the Pakistan Army’s commanders were reacting to the attacks on New York and Washington. Majid said that India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing, or R.A.W., was planting “false rumors” to implicate Pakistan in terrorism and the attacks. “There is concern that hostile states like India will use the attacks to gain an advantage over Pakistan,” he said. He added that he was not convinced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the hijackings.

  “It’s one possibility, but there are others—the Red Army Faction or some similar European group,” he said, referring to Marxist radicals of the Cold War era, now mostly defunct. He also mentioned Pakistanis who were living in Bolivia as possible suspects—a theory so far-fetched that Smith wasn’t sure what to say.9

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  In Washington, Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage drafted seven requirements to be presented to Pakistan as a “with us or against us” ultimatum. Armitage delivered the list to Mahmud in the form of a “nonpaper,” or unofficial memo, at a “businesslike” State Department meeting on September 13. Mahmud pointed out “the inconsistency of U.S. attitudes toward Pakistan since our creation and the hostile feelings it has engendered among our people against the U.S.” The same demands came to Wendy Chamberlin as written instructions. She had a previously scheduled meeting with Musharraf on September 13, Pakistan time, nine hours ahead of Washington. The meeting was a formal ritual of protocol where Chamberlin would present her credentials as the American ambassador.

  First on the list of demands was “Stop Al Qaeda operatives at your border, intercept arms shipments through Pakistan and end all logistical support for Bin Laden.” In addition, American warplanes should enjoy “blanket overflight and landing rights.” The United States should have access to Pakistani naval and air bases “as needed.” Also, Pakistan should “immediately” provide intelligence and immigration information about terrorist suspects. Pakistan should publicly denounce the September 11 attacks and “continue to publicly condemn terrorism against the U.S. and its friends or allies.” I.S.I. should cut off all fuel shipments to the Taliban and block all Pakistani volunteers from fighting in Afghanistan. Finally, should the evidence “strongly implicate” Al Qaeda and should the Taliban continue to harbor Bin Laden, Pakistan should break diplomatic relations with the Taliban and help the United States “destroy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.”10

  Chamberlin departed the American embassy in a horse-drawn carriage; the pomp was part of the ceremony of presenting an ambassador’s credentials. She clopped up to Musharraf’s grand office at the Aiwan-e-Sadr, the recently built presidential palace on Constitution Avenue. In Musharraf’s reception room, Chamberlin read out the demands, and asked, as she had been instructed to do, “Are you with us or against us?” She added, “Come on, General Musharraf, I know you are with us because we have talked.”

  “I am with you and not against you,” Musharraf said immediately, but rather than address Chamberlin’s specific requests, he filibustered. He launched into complaints about American “betrayals” of Pakistan in the past. The United States had used Pakistan as a frontline ally against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, then abandoned the region when the war was won, leaving Pakistan with a massive burden of refugees, gun violence, and heroin addiction.

  “That’s in the past,” Chamberlin said. Pakistan could now be either a “clear enemy” of the United States or a “clear friend.” If it became a friend, many good things could result, she said.

  Musharraf returned to his litany of complaints about America’s unreliability.

  “I’m not hearing anything different from what you said before these attacks,” Chamberlin said. “What do we need to do? We can help you get what you want. We need your help to get what we want.”

  “It’s hard for me to sign up to support a military operation that lacks any details,” Musharraf argued. “I can’t just send two brigades onto Afghan soil.”

  He said he was willing to cooperate with the United States, but he would require help to explain his betrayal of the Taliban to the Pakistani people. Washington had misunderstood his position on the Taliban, he said. India was mounting a strong propaganda effort to portray Pakistan as synonymous with extremism.

  “Frankly, General Musharraf, I have not heard what I need to tell my president,” Chamberlin finally said.

  “Well, we will support you unstintingly,” Musharraf answered. Yet he needed to consult with his generals and cabinet before he could formally answer the seven American demands.11

  Pervez Musharraf had a formidable ego. He was a Pakistani nationalist but not especially pious. There was no suggestion that he had undergone a religious recommitment like General Mahmud’s. Indeed, there was little evidence that Musharraf sought a u
nity of the “tactical and moral” in his life; he seemed above all to be a tactician. He had been educated in Catholic schools in Karachi and spent much of his boyhood in secular Turkey. Musharraf had faced expulsion from the army as a young officer because of discipline infractions. He salvaged his career in the Special Services Group, or S.S.G., as a commando. He won a gallantry award during the 1971 war for operating behind Indian lines. As he rose to become a four-star general and lead the army as chief of staff, he did not take advice easily. He remained a risk taker but did not always win. In 1999, he had authorized a reckless covert invasion of Indian-held Kashmir by Pakistani soldiers disguised as guerrillas; the operation touched off a small war with India and failed utterly. That same year, Musharraf had seized power from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a coup d’état. General Mahmud had secured Musharraf’s coup by leading forces into the streets of Islamabad. Musharraf then appointed him to I.S.I.

  Musharraf presided over Pakistan as a military dictator that September but he still required support from his fellow generals, particularly the nine three-stars who constituted the corps commanders. They held direct control of the Pakistan Army’s men and weapons.

  After putting off Wendy Chamberlin on the 13th, Musharraf jawboned his generals and admirals, as well as his civilian cabinet, newspaper editors, and politicians, to prepare them for what he regarded as a necessary swerve in Pakistan’s foreign and security policy. The essence of Musharraf’s argument during these critical days was: If Pakistan did not manage this moment of crisis to its advantage, India would.

  Musharraf faced resistance from several corps commanders, however, and from Mahmud at I.S.I. The dissenters believed it was unconscionable and dangerous for Pakistan to abandon the Taliban and align with the United States as it prepared to attack a Muslim country, an attack that would no doubt kill and maim many civilians. Musharraf tried to assure these doubters that he would preserve Pakistan’s national interests, that he was only doing what was necessary. As he put it later, “We were on the borderline of being . . . declared a terrorist state—in that situation, what would happen to the Kashmir cause?”

  The approach Musharraf sold in private was that he would tell the Americans, “Yes, but . . .” as the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid characterized it. Recalled Abdul Sattar, then Pakistan’s foreign minister, who heard Musharraf’s sales pitch: “We agreed that we would unequivocally accept all U.S. demands, but then later we would express our private reservations to the U.S., and we would not necessarily agree with all the details.”

  “The stakes are high,” Musharraf told Bush over a secure telephone. “We are with you.” Yet it was obvious from the start that Musharraf saw Afghanistan and Al Qaeda through his own prism. “In almost every conversation we had,” Bush recalled, “Musharraf accused India of wrongdoing.”12

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  Wendy Chamberlin met Musharraf a second time on September 15, this time at his home, Army House, the whitewashed, colonial-era residence of Pakistan’s top military officer, in Rawalpindi. “Yes, but” was already in full swing. Musharraf’s posture was “I’m going to share with you my concerns, but these are not conditions.” Chamberlin felt his caveats were not expressions of resistance but “gentle” reminders of Pakistan’s interests as it turned from ally of the Taliban to collaborator with America.

  On the Bush administration’s demand to seal the Afghan-Pakistan border, Musharraf said, frankly, that was impossible. “The entire Frontier Corps is insufficient for such an operation,” he said, referring to the tens of thousands of locally raised paramilitary troops that Pakistan maintained in forts and posts along the long mountainous border. “But we will try.”

  Allowing American planes to overfly Pakistani territory would be “no problem,” Musharraf said, but he asked for the U.S. and Pakistani militaries to map out specific air corridors. “We are concerned that India might try to intrude into airspace the U.S. wants to use—we are sensitive about our nuclear installations.” Musharraf said the United States should tell India to “lay off and stay off.”

  Musharraf had questions about what sort of war the United States intended to wage in Afghanistan. “Short and swift operations will be better than massive ones,” he said. Would the United States go “after all the Taliban or just their leaders? It would be best to focus on just taking out terrorists like Al Qaeda.” That, of course, would leave the Taliban, Pakistan’s ally, largely intact.

  He suggested inviting Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the smaller Gulf States into the American-led coalition to fight the coming Afghan war. That would add other Muslim nations to the cause. “Neither India nor Israel should be part of any U.S. coalition,” Musharraf insisted. “They are not friends of Pakistan.”

  India, he said at one point, is “not trying to help you so much as they are trying to fix us as terrorists.”

  Also, Musharraf urged, “Kashmir should be kept out of this.” He urged the United States not to “equate terrorism in Afghanistan with terrorism in Kashmir.” Finally, Musharraf wondered what Afghanistan was going to look like “when the operations are over.” The postwar regime in Kabul “must be a pro-Pakistan . . . government that is inclusive of all Afghans.”13

  In the days ahead, Musharraf and Mahmud advanced these talking points relentlessly in meeting after meeting with American officials. One theme was: The Taliban are not the same as Al Qaeda and can be engaged or at least divided in service of American goals in Afghanistan. Another was: India is spreading lies about Pakistan, seeking to exploit your tragedy. A third went: The Northern Alliance created and led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the C.I.A. favorite, is made up of murderous thugs from the country’s ethnic minorities and cannot govern Afghanistan.

  Musharraf considered the Taliban’s emir, Mullah Mohammad Omar, to be a stubborn man with a tenuous grasp of international politics. Negotiating with him, Musharraf had found, was like “banging one’s head against the wall.”14 Yet the broader Taliban movement was important to Pakistan, as the country’s generals conceived of Pakistan’s interests. Partly this was because the Taliban could be understood as an expression of ethnic Pashtun nationalism as well as of religious ideology. The Pashtuns were a tribally organized community bound by centuries of history along the Afghan-Pakistan border as well as by a distinct language. Throughout British imperial rule in South Asia, they had managed to preserve a sense of independence and autonomy, including the right to mete out their own tribal justice under arms, and the right to enforce their own socially conservative mores. Almost all Taliban were ethnic Pashtuns. The Taliban had captured and exploited the grievances and anxieties of Pashtuns during the brutal Afghan civil war of the 1990s. Pashtuns lived on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border. In Afghanistan, they made up about half of the population, concentrated in the south and east. In Pakistan, they constituted a minority of about 15 percent, but an influential and restive one. The future of Pashtun politics would affect Pakistan’s internal stability, and the Taliban’s outlook had become a part of Pashtun politics. At the same time, while the Taliban’s Islamic radicalism might pose a revolutionary danger to Pakistan, it also intimidated India—that was another reason for Pakistan’s India-obsessed generals to support the movement.

  The task facing Musharraf at that moment of crisis in September 2001 was not necessarily to preserve the life of Mullah Mohammad Omar, but to legitimize at least some Taliban elements in the eyes of the United States and the international community. Musharraf told Wendy Chamberlin at Army House that a postwar government in Afghanistan, in addition to being “pro-Pakistan,” should also be “Pashtun dominated.”15 For two decades, I.S.I. had tried to control Islamist Pashtun parties to influence Afghan politics; it was not about to stop now.

  “Extremism is not in every Taliban,” Musharraf told Colin Powell as the American-led Afghan war neared. “One knows for sure that there are many moderate elements.”16

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  Case officers in t
he C.I.A.’s Islamabad Station had been recruiting Taliban agents and contacts for several years, primarily to collect intelligence about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The agency’s most active recruiter until the summer of 2001 was Chris Wood, a second-generation C.I.A. officer. His father had risen into the Senior Intelligence Service before retiring. Wood had started out as a teenager working at headquarters in the security section, watching janitors and maintenance men in the hallways to make sure they didn’t try to steal any classified materials. He moved over to the agency mail room while attending George Mason University in northern Virginia. As a young officer he learned Farsi, Iran’s dominant language, a close cousin of the Dari spoken in Afghanistan. Wood worked Iranian operations for a number of years, but as penetrating the Taliban became a C.I.A. priority in the late 1990s he rotated to Islamabad, where he could use his Dari to recruit Afghan agents. He became renowned within the Near East/South Asia division of the Directorate of Operations for taking a large number of “hostile meetings,” as they were called in C.I.A. vernacular. These were meetings taken by career C.I.A. officers with paid reporting agents or informal contacts where it seemed possible that the individual might be armed and dangerous. Wood would drive a sport utility vehicle with the passenger seat unoccupied and an armed colleague—a contractor or a fellow case officer—would sit in the backseat, ready to shoot. They would wind through Islamabad, Rawalpindi, or Peshawar to an agreed-upon intersection, roll up to where the Taliban agent was waiting, invite him into the car, and drive away. From these tense, fractured conversations with informers, as well as less fraught meetings with anti-Taliban Pashtun activists and other local sources, the C.I.A. had developed insights about the Taliban’s leadership and its attitudes toward Al Qaeda.17

  In 2001, C.I.A. analysts reported to the Bush cabinet that “the Taliban is not a monolithic organization,” as then–deputy C.I.A. director John McLaughlin recalled. Their analysis was “There are ideological adherents but many others are with them because it is how you get money and guns.” The logic implied by this conclusion was “There has to be a way to drive wedges in the organization.”18