by Steve Coll
Dave Smith led the generals on a tour of American bases and training facilities around the United States. They visited Fort Monroe in Virginia, Fort Knox in Kentucky, and Fort Irwin in Southern California. They took a weekend off in Los Angeles, where some of Yusuf Khan’s relatives resided. They stayed in a hotel in Anaheim and made repeat visits to a local indoor mall. The generals and their wives carried shopping lists and plenty of cash. Smith procured V.I.P. passes to Disneyland. In civilian clothes, the travelers skipped the resort’s lines and rode all the popular rides—It’s a Small World, Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean—and were out in just a couple of hours.
From the tour, Smith assessed Kayani to be “a very smart, intelligent guy, quiet, not boastful—someone Musharraf counted on.” Six months after Kayani returned home, Musharraf promoted him to lieutenant general and handed him command of X Corps, the army’s most politically sensitive force because it was headquartered near Islamabad and had enforced past army coups d’état, including Musharraf’s, in 1999. Previous X Corps commanders had led I.S.I. The spy service was in Kayani’s future, too. He would prove to be a natural.4
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After the Taliban’s collapse, I.S.I.-C.I.A. collaboration fell into a steady tempo. C.I.A.-controlled Predators flew out of a Pakistani air base, mainly on surveillance missions. During the weeks after Tora Bora, Pakistani security forces captured about 130 Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, and other foreign fighters fleeing from Afghanistan. They found the Al Qaeda stragglers in the country’s western hills but also in Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore. The Pakistanis transported the captives to Chaklala Airbase near Islamabad and handed them over to the United States. Air Force C-17 transport planes flew them to Bagram Airfield, then on to Kandahar Airfield, where the prisoners were held in outdoor cages.5 Some were subjected to sleep deprivation and other harsh conditions. Many were sent on to Guantánamo, once the Bush administration opened that prison on January 11, 2002. Yet hundreds of other Al Qaeda volunteers escaped capture and hid in Pakistan’s cities, sheltered by religious parties and networks that had collaborated with Bin Laden and his followers since the 1980s.
Musharraf found it tolerable to support the Americans as they hunted down Arabs. The Arab fighters were not decisive to Pakistan’s guerrilla strategy against India in Kashmir or to its efforts to influence Pashtuns in Afghanistan. The bargain of targeting Arabs while leaving local Islamist guerrillas alone worked as long as the C.I.A. recognized that “any Pakistanis,” including violent radicals fighting in Kashmir, should be “remanded to Pakistani law enforcement,” as Islamabad station chief Grenier put it.6
Under the Bush administration’s generous policy, in exchange for its arrests of Al Qaeda suspects, Pakistan received cash and armaments, as well as a veneer of legitimacy as an ally in Bush’s global war on terrorism. The administration would eventually authorize the sale of thirty-six F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, ending a long stalemate over Pakistan’s access to America’s high-performing aircraft. Also, under a program referred to as Coalition Support Funds, the Pentagon transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in cash each year to Pakistan, ostensibly to reimburse its military for its participation in counterterrorism operations that benefited the United States. In fact, the program was little more than an unaudited cash subsidy to the Pakistan Army, strengthening Musharraf’s grip on the country’s politics.
Barry Shapiro, the Special Forces colonel who had studied with Kayani in Hawaii, served during 2002 and 2003 in the U.S. embassy’s swelling Office of the Defense Representative–Pakistan, where he channeled requests for reimbursements from Pakistan to Central Command. The Pakistanis presented itemized bills to Shapiro for all of the military activity they had supposedly conducted against terrorists in the previous month. Shapiro was unimpressed by the accounting: “It was amazing the crap they would try to tell us they were doing just so that we would reimburse them.” The bills would list specific actions, such as “Seventeen T.O.W. antitank missiles fired at enemy targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” accompanied by a price tag in the tens of thousands of dollars. The Pakistanis billed out air defense expenses such as radar tracking even though the Taliban and Al Qaeda had no air force. Judging by their invoices, they were expending ammunition at a rate that exceeded that of American combat units in Afghanistan, even though the Pakistani military was rarely in the fight against militants during this period.
Shapiro asked, “What did you fire the missiles at? What is your battle damage assessment?” Yet he never received documented answers. The Pakistan Navy would bill him on a per diem formula for sailors “on duty fighting the Global War on Terrorism.” Shapiro thought that was laughable—what were these sailors doing to thwart Al Qaeda? (Supposedly, the Pakistan Navy conducted patrols to prevent Al Qaeda members from escaping by sea.) The most egregious cases concerned supposed road construction to support Pakistani military operations, especially in the country’s western tribal areas. If Shapiro had sat down and counted all the roads they claimed to have built, he thought, Pakistan’s tribal areas would have been “one big asphalt parking lot.”7
Yet when Shapiro challenged the bills or demanded proof, word came down to him from superiors “to just stop asking questions and sign off on this stuff.” The Pentagon was content with blanket subsidies. His orders were to pass on the requests for Coalition Support Funds “even though we knew all of this stuff was trumped up.” The Coalition Support Funds provided a kind of legal bribery to Pakistan’s generals. Musharraf and his lieutenants could use the cash for legitimate military purposes, or they could spread it around as they wished. Theoretically, if the Pakistani generals came to depend on the American largesse, they might moderate their conduct to align with the Bush administration’s aims in the region, so as to avoid being cut off. The money did not buy love, but it did seem to purchase a certain level of cooperation and tolerance.8
Musharraf delivered by arresting Al Qaeda fugitives in Pakistan while evading accountability on Taliban or Kashmiri militants. The I.S.I. did betray a few highly visible Taliban leaders, such as Ambassador Mullah Zaeef. The Pakistanis arrested him and turned him over to the Americans, who shipped him to Guantánamo. Yet as many other high-ranking Taliban officeholders melted into Quetta, the I.S.I. ignored them or claimed they could not be located.
According to Hank Crumpton of the Counterterrorist Center, the C.I.A. suffered from “a lack of intelligence . . . lack of access and collection” in Quetta, now the Taliban’s principal sanctuary. The agency accepted “dependence to some degree on the Pakistanis” to identify high-value Taliban suspects hiding there. In any event, after 2001, Mullah Omar “was a secondary target” for the C.I.A. Cooperating I.S.I. officers were “chasing down key Al Qaeda targets and rendering them to us.” The feeling at Langley was “Why push them, and why anger them” by harping about the defeated Taliban? Another motivation remained: to keep as close to I.S.I. as possible so that C.I.A. case officers in Islamabad or offshore could identify and recruit I.S.I. officers as unilateral American sources. The C.I.A. might not be able to recruit many important Al Qaeda defectors—that organization has proved to be a very hard target—but surely there were I.S.I. officers who might be willing to work with the C.I.A. and who knew or could find out where Osama Bin Laden had taken shelter.9
Robert Grenier and his I.S.I. counterparts set up a joint intelligence operations cell in a walled safe house in Islamabad, from where they targeted Al Qaeda fugitives. They pooled tips, directed surveillance, and planned raids on suspected compounds in Pakistani cities. Islamabad Station swelled with temporarily deployed C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents, eavesdroppers, and contractors—TDYers, as they were known in U.S. government jargon, referring to their short, temporary deployments. And just as the C.I.A. had infused the Afghan National Directorate of Security with cash, the agency now poured tens of millions of dollars into I.S.I.’s counterterrorism directorate. The payments took the form of reward mo
ney for the capture of specific Al Qaeda leaders as well as investments in new facilities, vehicles, technology, and training.
It did not require deep experience in Pakistan to understand that even though I.S.I.’s counterterrorism directorate found it agreeable to operate with the Americans against Al Qaeda, other I.S.I. directorates might simultaneously monitor and support Pakistan’s indigenous jihadi clients, including the Taliban. The Bush administration and the C.I.A. accepted this arrangement as necessary, if chronically frustrating, during 2002 and 2003. As John McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, put it: “We were getting traction on Al Qaeda. In a war situation, you’re drawn to where you can succeed. . . . The attraction of going after Al Qaeda was just so great.”10 All along, it was clear what I.S.I. wanted from the United States, besides cash and arms: Pakistan sought greater influence in Kabul, to counter India’s presumed influence over Hamid Karzai and the Northern Alliance. (India had funded the Northern Alliance before 2001 and Karzai had attended school in the country.)
During this period, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, visited headquarters. He met Director-General Ehsan ul-Haq. The I.S.I. chief opened the meeting with a thirty-minute monologue about what a terrible ally of Pakistan the United States had proved to be over the years. The Nixon administration had stood by as India dismembered Pakistan during the 1971 war, he noted. The first Bush administration and then the Clinton administration washed their hands of Pakistan after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan alone to bear the costs of refugees, heroin addiction, and loose guns.
“September 11 has provided another opportunity,” the I.S.I. chief continued, but now, once again, the United States was neglecting Pakistan’s legitimate desire to influence Afghanistan. “The interim government” in Kabul “is being led by the Three Musketeers of the Northern Alliance,” Haq said bitterly. He meant Fahim Khan, Karzai’s minister of defense; Yunus Qanooni, another former lieutenant of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the minister of interior; and Abdullah Abdullah, who was minister of foreign affairs. The Russians and Iranians had infiltrated Afghanistan through the Northern Alliance and were “in there with a vengeance,” the I.S.I. director continued. “I’m speaking with my heart, but Pakistan has suffered as an ally of the United States.”11
He summoned for Wilson two brigadiers from I.S.I.’s analysis directorate. They advanced their boss’s talking points. “The ethnic composition of the government in Kabul is unbalanced,” one of them complained. “As soon as the U.S. leaves, there will be a return to chaos.” It was a forecast that could also be read as a threat.12
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Since the 1970s, the Haqqani network had been a linchpin of I.S.I.’s covert policy. The network consisted of thousands of fighters along the Pakistan-Afghan border, relatively close to Kabul. The network drew funds and volunteers from a web of smuggling businesses, fund-raising operations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf, and prestigious Islamic schools. As with so many other nodes of influence in Pakistan and Afghanistan, at the network’s heart lay an extended family empowered by war and instability. The family’s home village lay in the Wazi Zadran district of Afghanistan’s Paktia Province, close to the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal agency of North Waziristan. Before the Second World War, a family patriarch, Khwaja Muhammad Khan, owned land and traded on both sides of the border. His son Jalaluddin was born in 1939, followed by several other boys. Khan had means to enroll his boys at a conservative Deobandi madrassa in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, known as Dar al-’Ulum Haqqaniyya. The Deobandi school of Islam, born in northern India, was a rule-prescribing sect that sought a purer faith. The madrassa also had ties to an Islamist political party in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, or J.U.I. Jalaluddin graduated with an advanced education in 1970 and took his school’s name as his own, as did his brothers. He dabbled in electoral politics before the spread of Communist ideology in Afghanistan drew him into the skirmishes of an incipient jihad against the Communists and secularists, as early as 1973. As Abdul Salam Rocketi, a former Taliban commander who met with Jalaluddin over the years, put it: “His background was in politics—he was a politician and also a religious scholar. He had plans. He always seemed to have some secret plans that I did not know about—this was his personality.”13
Geography, above all, determined the family’s rise to wealth and power during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s. A key part of I.S.I.’s strategy in the war was to exploit the relatively short distance between its frontier in North Waziristan and the capital of Kabul to stage guerrilla strikes that harassed and punished Soviet forces around the capital. Pakistan’s covert supply lines ran through the highlands of the two Waziristans, but especially through North Waziristan. By the account of a former I.S.I. officer who ran logistics during the covert war, the Haqqanis received as much as twelve thousand tons of supplies every year. Jalaluddin and his brothers poured their funds into the construction of religious schools on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, an archipelago of influence, shelter, ideological support, and fresh student recruits. In 1980, they built an elaborate flagship madrassa in Danday Darpakhel, outside Miranshah, the tribal agency’s capital. Urban North Waziristan was an ideal base of operations. It lay beyond the reach of Soviet ground forces, beyond the writ of the Pakistani government, yet it was proximate to the battlefield and to supply lines fed by I.S.I. and the C.I.A. Just inside Afghanistan, in a natural citadel, Zhawara, the Haqqanis and I.S.I. constructed a massive base and training center, ultimately consisting of dozens of buildings and underground tunnels and arms depots. The project benefited from Osama Bin Laden’s aid and participation. The Haqqanis did more than any other commander network in Afghanistan to nurture and support Arab volunteer fighters, seeding Al Qaeda’s birth.14
During the late 1980s, the C.I.A. adopted a strategy of providing cash directly to anti-Soviet commanders, in addition to funneling the money through I.S.I. A case officer operating under nonofficial cover, outside the embassy, handled the Haqqani account and provided hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Haqqani family in turn was professional and efficient. It maintained representative offices in Peshawar, Islamabad, and Riyadh, for ease of doing business. During the early 1990s, the family used its control of an airstrip in Khost to export scrap metal gathered from the war’s detritus, earning millions. It published magazines and ran a radio station.15
American and N.A.T.O. intelligence officers would come to spend long hours after 2001 trying to evaluate the Haqqanis’ loyalties—to I.S.I., to the Taliban, to Al Qaeda. The record makes plain that the family valued its independence. The Haqqanis maintained alliances and client ties to I.S.I. but they were also estranged, at times, from the Pakistani service. Equally, the Haqqanis swore fealty to Mullah Mohammad Omar and the Taliban after they took power, and cooperated with the Taliban on the battlefield, but there were also strains from time to time. The Haqqanis differed with the Taliban’s bans on music and women’s access to education; the family allowed CARE International to build coeducational schools in territory it controlled around Khost.16
Musharraf’s decision to back the United States in its war against the Taliban presented the Haqqanis with a profound dilemma. Jalaluddin visited Islamabad in October 2001 and held ambiguous meetings with I.S.I. officers and American interlocutors. By one account, the Bush administration demanded only a form of unconditional surrender. The longtime Pakistan-based correspondent Kathy Gannon reported that Pakistan told the Haqqanis to hold firm against the Americans and await I.S.I. aid. In any event, Jalaluddin made his decision clear in an interview as he left the Pakistani capital: “We will retreat to the mountains and begin a long guerrilla war to claim our pure land from infidels and free our country like we did against the Soviets.”17
Then in his early sixties, scarred by war injuries, Jalaluddin commanded the family enterprise. He relied on two of his younger b
rothers, Ibrahim and Khalil, both educated at the Haqqaniyya madrassa as he had been, to negotiate and mediate on the family’s behalf. Ibrahim in particular evolved into a kind of ambassador.
After the fall of the Taliban, Ibrahim moved to Kabul. The Haqqanis did not reconcile formally with Hamid Karzai’s administration, but Ibrahim’s presence signaled that they were open to discussions. The Haqqanis had fought with Ahmad Shah Massoud during the 1980s and against him during the mid-1990s. They were masters of violent coexistence.
During 2002, Ibrahim Haqqani had even established contact with C.I.A. officers in Gardez and had been helpful. In November 2002, he visited the station at the Ariana Hotel to talk with C.I.A. officers. A senior officer named Mike, in Afghanistan on a second tour, was working on a plan with the agency’s Paris station chief to persuade Ibrahim to arrange a meeting with Jalaluddin in the United Arab Emirates. Mike wanted to propose that the Haqqanis help the C.I.A. locate Osama Bin Laden. At the Ariana, speaking through a Pashtu translator, Mike warned Ibrahim that the United States would track down and kill his brother if he didn’t cooperate. If the Haqqanis used intermediaries and distanced themselves from the betrayal of Bin Laden they might end up better off, enhancing their prestige and creating new conditions for their own influence. If not Bin Laden, perhaps they would help with Ayman Al Zawahiri or Mullah Mohammad Omar.18
The gambit fell apart before the hypothesis could be tested, a victim, as one C.I.A. officer involved saw it, of fraying trust and communication between the C.I.A. and Special Forces in Afghanistan. At Bagram Airfield, C.I.A. officers marked off their computer terminals with the equivalent of yellow police tape to prevent Defense Department personnel from looking at their screens, an almost comical expression of the agency’s posture toward everyone else in the government. The C.I.A.’s clandestine service had long struggled to overcome its reputation for arrogance. The agency’s élan and mythology of omniscience and power was a key aspect of its effectiveness in the field, in the same way that great salesmen drive expensive cars in order to influence clients with the shine of their success. Yet if a certain degree of constructed hubris was an aspect of spying tradecraft, it also invited self-delusion. The C.I.A. never stopped projecting its claim to be the elite of the elite. Yet while the Senior Intelligence Service certainly had star performers and jaw-dropping stories of bravery and daring to tell, it also had fools and screamers in its ranks who authored operational failures that colleagues elsewhere in U.S. intelligence and the military had no trouble learning about, if they had the right clearances.
