by Steve Coll
Again, after Medusa, the Canadians and their Afghan allies declared victory. “The ability of the Taliban to stay and fight in groups is finished,” Asadullah Khalid, the longtime C.I.A. ally and young confidant of Hamid Karzai, who was now Kandahar’s governor, announced on September 17. “The enemy has been crushed.”36
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It was not evident to senior American diplomats posted to Afghanistan during 2006 that the Taliban had acquired momentum. “The increased number of suicide attacks remains deeply disturbing,” reported a Kabul embassy cable to Washington on April 24, 2006. The police needed more guns and ammunition. Afghan soldiers in Kandahar needed to form a quick reaction force to respond to pop-up Taliban attacks. Yet there was “noteworthy good news” from southern Afghanistan, the cable added. “So far this year, the Taliban do not appear to have the capability to recruit or field as many fighters as they did last year.”37
To the extent that America’s Iraq-distracted intelligence apparatus examined the Taliban threat closely, it focused across the border in Waziristan, where Al Qaeda had embedded and where American signals and overhead collection were expanding. There, too, in early September, the Bush administration received a shock. Musharraf’s government announced a peace deal with tribal elders, Taliban commanders, and foreign fighters in North Waziristan. The Taliban said they would not cross into Afghanistan or mainland Pakistan to carry out attacks. The agreement had no enforcement mechanism. Pakistan released scores of jailed militants and promised never to prosecute the militants for past crimes. The army dismantled recently established security checkpoints, promised to staff older checkpoints only with local tribal militias, returned previously seized weaponry and vehicles, stopped all military operations, and paid compensation for damage from past operations. The U.S. consulate in Peshawar noted that “many observers” were “skeptical” that the agreement would “effectively reduce cross-border attacks on coalition and Afghan forces” or halt the spread of Islamism in the long term. That would prove to be a considerable understatement.38
The Waziristan peace deal’s architect was retired Pakistani lieutenant general Ali Muhammad Aurakzai. Musharraf had appointed him governor of Northwest Frontier Province earlier that year. The governor also oversaw the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Aurakzai was a Pashtun; his family hailed from one of the smaller tribal agencies. The position of Pashtun Army officers who made up about 20 percent of the Pakistani military officer corps, the largest ethnic group after the dominant Punjabis, was complicated. General Aurakzai’s local contacts and credibility among Pashto-speaking tribes struck Musharraf as an asset. For his part, Aurakzai urged Musharraf to give peace with his brethren a chance. The military incursions in the F.A.T.A. urged by the Americans had failed. Rather than attack the tribes, Aurakzai argued, Pakistan should negotiate to restore their autonomy in exchange for loyalty to Pakistan’s core goals and interests. Once peace was established, Pakistan could provide jobs and services that would cement the tribes to the state.
Musharraf flew to Kabul on September 6. The Afghan government arranged for him to address about four hundred members of parliament and religious leaders. Hamid Karzai was reluctant to accompany Musharraf personally to the speech, for fear of being seen as soft on Pakistan, but the American and British ambassadors persuaded him to do so. In his remarks, Musharraf drew a line between Pakistani policy toward the Taliban before 2001 and now. He said Pakistan no longer “sees the Taliban as representing Pashtuns.” His peace policy in Waziristan was designed to empower non-Taliban moderates through investment and development. In a rare concession, he acknowledged that Al Qaeda and the Taliban were active inside Pakistan, “as they are in Afghanistan,” yet he took pains to make distinctions between good and bad Taliban. He argued that Afghan and Pakistani security were mutually dependent, and he concluded by reading, in Dari, a few lines of Afghan poetry: “Whenever there is trouble in Afghanistan, there is trouble in all of Asia.”39
Musharraf and Karzai flew on to Washington. Bush greeted them in the Rose Garden. At dinner in the family quarters of the White House, Musharraf sold the North Waziristan peace deal as forcefully as he could. Give it a chance, he urged Bush. He spoke for more than thirty minutes, “sugarcoating the facts and overselling the potential benefits,” as Condoleezza Rice put it. Karzai interrupted at last to say that Musharraf had cut a deal not with tribal leaders but “with the terrorists.” Karzai theatrically pulled a translation of the agreement out of his cape and read from it at the table.
“Tell me where they are,” Musharraf demanded of Karzai, referring to the Taliban’s leaders.
“You know where they are!”
“If I did, I would get them.”
“Go do it!”40
Later, it would become commonplace for American officials to describe Karzai as erratic, corrupt, ungrateful, or all three, off the record at first, then publicly. In late 2006, there was little basis for such an accusation. Tethered by his close personal relationship with Bush and still willing to bear the political fallout at home from American mistakes, Karzai spoke out publicly in defense of Bush administration policy, even though such advocacy risked reinforcing the Taliban’s relentless propaganda that Karzai was nothing but a puppet of Western powers. Bush checked in with him regularly in order “to lift his spirits and assure him of our commitment.” Yet while he offered advice and made requests, “I was careful not to give him orders.” Years later, Karzai dated the first deterioration of his relations with Washington to 2005, when civilian casualties caused by American bombing first became untenable for him, yet even then, Karzai recalled, “I had a very good relationship with President Bush” and “we had not experienced what we experienced later” by way of stinging personal criticism of his rule. As late as the autumn of 2006, in television interviews, in speeches, Karzai’s principal complaint was not American arrogance or civilian casualties, but Pakistan. Musharraf was not doing enough to deprive the Taliban of a base of operations on its soil, and Afghanistan was paying the price.41
The Waziristan peace plan was now official Pakistan Army policy. Soon American military officers in Afghanistan encountered John Lennon’s immortal plea in bold letters on PowerPoint slides presented by their Pakistani counterparts: “Give Peace a Chance.” In the next slide the Pakistani officers would brief on Carl von Clausewitz’s familiar observation about war as an extension of politics. Some of the American officers who endured these presentations could barely contain themselves.
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Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry commanded American forces in Afghanistan during 2006. He was in the midst of the second of what would prove to be three tours in the country. He was a West Point graduate who later earned graduate degrees at Harvard and Stanford. He had a reputation as a demanding character who could be difficult to work for, but who had a sharp and independent mind. When he arrived in Afghanistan, Eikenberry toured frontline bases and heard from diverse S-2s, the field military officers in charge of intelligence, about the enemy’s infiltration routes and supply lines. The tactical picture was impressive in its specificity. His S-2s put up PowerPoint slides with red diamonds to mark cells and lines running into Pakistan.
“Where does this go to across the border?” Eikenberry asked.
“General, we really don’t know” was the typical answer.42
Joint Special Operations Command and the C.I.A. “didn’t want to be distracted by fights against the Taliban in the interior” of Afghanistan at this time, in Eikenberry’s experience. They were focused on the borders and Al Qaeda. The tensions between C.I.A. officers based in Kabul and Islamabad that had flared during Zalmay Khalilzad’s ambassadorship remained. Kabul Station felt Islamabad was naïve about I.S.I. complicity, while Islamabad defended the partnership. The fights were so intense that Eikenberry felt that “if two dear twin brothers were assigned respectively to serve the different station chiefs, they would hate each other within twenty-f
our hours.”43
Eikenberry flew to Quetta and Rawalpindi with C.I.A. and intelligence officers to present classified briefings to Pakistani counterparts about Taliban sanctuaries inside Pakistan and the ease with which Taliban forces were flowing into Afghanistan. The Pakistanis would admit nothing and countered with briefings of their own about sanctuary Afghanistan provided to fugitive violent guerrillas from Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province. On Al Qaeda, they could still do business, but on the Taliban, the C.I.A. and I.S.I. settled now into a dead embrace informed by accusation and denial.44
THIRTEEN
Radicals
In May 2006, British security services asked Ashfaq Kayani at I.S.I. to watch Abdulla Ahmed Ali, a Londoner traveling in Pakistan. It had been less than a year since four British-born suicide bombers detonated themselves on London Underground trains and a double-decker bus, killing 52 people. A second attempt three weeks later failed narrowly. The problem of violent extremism among British Muslims was complex, but Pakistan was part of the story. About 825,000 people of Pakistani origin lived in England; every year, at least a quarter of a million people traveled between Pakistan and Britain. Identifying violent radicals within that flotsam became an urgent priority for British intelligence after 2005. Cooperation from I.S.I.’s Directorate C, the counterterrorism division, seemed essential, given the needle-in-a-haystack dimensions of the problem.1
Abdulla Ahmed Ali was then twenty-five years old. He had been born in Newham, a low-income borough of East London, to parents who had emigrated from Pakistan’s Punjab. He was one of four brothers. His eldest brother was a technology consultant. Another worked part time for the London Underground. The third was a probation officer at the Home Office, which oversaw the British police. None of them had a criminal record, nor did Ali. Yet Ali’s frequent travel to Pakistan and his contact with other Britons under surveillance as terrorism suspects had led British services to request I.S.I.’s help.
A cousin picked Ali up at Islamabad’s international airport and drove him toward the family’s home village, Jhelum. Pakistani police stopped the car and searched it, but let the men go. In his village Ali learned from relations serving in the local police that I.S.I. was on his case.
The suspicions about him were well grounded, as it happened. Ali had entered into a conspiracy with Al Qaeda to carry out spectacular bombing attacks in Britain. His main contact was a fellow Briton, Rashid Rauf, who was now living as a fugitive in Pakistan. Rauf had left England in 2002 after falling under suspicion in the stabbing murder of an uncle. He had since joined up with an Al Qaeda bomb maker from Egypt known as Abu Ubaydah, who worked out of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. By May 2006, when I.S.I. picked up Ali’s trail, the conspirators had completed experiments on potent liquid explosives manufactured from hydrogen peroxide, hexamine, and citric acid. Their formula could disguise a powerful bomb as a colored sports drink, to be detonated by ordinary AA batteries. Initially, the group had planned to strike oil or gas refineries in England but by May they had discovered that their bombs might be smuggled aboard commercial airliners and detonated at altitude, bringing the planes down. Rauf and Abu Ubaydah had recruited Ali to lead a team of bombers that might destroy half a dozen or more packed airliners over the Atlantic as they flew from London to the United States. If the plan succeeded, it would be the most devastating Al Qaeda attack since September 11.2
After leaving his village, uncertain how closely he was being watched, Ali met Abu Ubaydah in Waziristan, studied the latest bomb design, and flew back to London carrying notes scribbled to himself:
Clean batteries. Perfect disguise. Drinks bottles, Lucozade, orange, red. Oasis, orange, red. Mouthwash, blue, red. Calculateexact drops of Tang, plus colour . . . Select date. Five days B4. Alllink up. Prepare. Dirty mag to distract. Condoms. One drink used, other keep in pocket maybe will not go through machine, putkeys and chewing gum on D in the elec device. Keep ciggies. Camera cases. The drinks that you drink should be dif flava. . . .3
The London Underground bombings of 2005 had appeared to be homegrown. The bombers’ prerecorded martyrdom testaments emphasized their opposition to the Iraq war and Anglo-American occupation of Muslim lands. Their grievances suggested that the provocation of the U.S.-led Iraq invasion had led dispersed, isolated individuals to take action in the name of Al Qaeda or its ideology. In the absence of initial hard evidence about how the Underground bombers had made their relatively simple bombs, packed into lumpy backpacks, the British government was cautious about whether Al Qaeda had a role. A year later, however, surveillance of Ali and his conspirators, among other intelligence, had brought a revised picture into focus. Rauf and Al Qaeda bomb makers had in fact aided the Underground bombers decisively.4 Between that case and this latest one, it was becoming clear that an evolving Al Qaeda consisted of both a new wave of dispersed angry Muslims inflamed by American and British foreign policy and the residual, skilled Arab terrorists who had fled Afghanistan to hide in Waziristan after 2001.
Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, shocked by televised images of Afghan refugees seeking shelter from the American-led air war, Ali had volunteered at a London charity, the Islamic Medical Association. It ran an ambulance service in refugee camps near Chaman, the Pakistani town on the border with Afghanistan, to the south of Kandahar. Later, with one of his older brothers, Ali joined street protests against the invasion of Iraq. He attended the huge antiwar march in London on February 15, 2003. At the time, “It felt good . . . to know you’re doing something, you’re getting your voice heard,” as he put it later. Soon after, he flew to Pakistan to volunteer as an ambulance driver around Chaman. He had never seen such suffering:
It’s so mucky, smelly, loads of kids running round crying, really like appalling conditions. Lots of arguing, kind of chaotic . . . I don’t think anything can prepare you for something like that. . . . Emotionally it was very straining. . . . Some were maimed, some had their legs blown off, some had bits of their fingers missing, scars, burn marks, skinny, rugged, rough-looking faces. . . . There was lots of deaths in these camps, daily. We have to come on funerals almost every day, but it’s mostly kids that were dying, children, young children . . . seeing the mothers going through, pulling their hair out.
Ali blamed Britain and America for what he saw. The following spring he wrote a will that suggested he was prepared for martyrdom. He became “less enthusiastic and confident in things like protests and marches. . . . We knew now the war was illegal in Iraq and it wasn’t a secret no more. It was a lie. It was just deceit. It was a criminal war. In my eyes that made the government criminals. . . . The root problem was the foreign policy and that’s something that should be tackled.”5
On several trips to Pakistan after 2004, Ali connected with Rauf and Abu Ubaydah. In June 2006, after traveling under I.S.I. surveillance, he flew back to Heathrow. British police secretly inspected his luggage. They found AA batteries and many packets of powdered Tang. Unbeknownst to Ali, the police then placed him under fuller surveillance, in the hope that they could identify everyone Ali was working with in Britain, so that all participants in the conspiracy could be arrested. Detaining Ali prematurely risked having his case dismissed for lack of evidence. It might also leave other as yet unknown conspirators in Britain untouched.
The surveillance operation unfolded during a period of rising estrangement between the C.I.A. and British security services. In the second-term Bush administration, some American policy makers had come to think of the French as “really a more engaged ally than the Brits,” as one senior administration official put it. In Afghanistan, C.I.A. officers from the paramilitary Special Activities Division dominated Kabul Station and the border bases. Their Omega Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams operated on their own, without collaboration with the British. Some of the paramilitary types from C.I.A. regarded MI6’s Oxbridge types as cerebral and even effete, or so it seemed to the estranged British officials who dealt with Langley. In
Afghanistan, the Americans dressed in cargo pants and flak jackets and had beards and were “immensely cool and carried a weapon,” as one senior European official involved in the war put it. “Most of the C.I.A. chiefs of station [in Kabul] came from the sort of paramilitary wing.” The Americans were “taking up all the oxygen” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a senior British intelligence official described it. “The C.I.A. has always been very mission-driven and they thought that we were a bit wimpy and weren’t all that useful anymore. It was a difficult time.”6
By August 2006, the C.I.A. had been drawn into the British surveillance operation involving Ali. American “clandestine technical resources” had determined that “planning for the strike was coming from North Waziristan,” according to Jose Rodriguez, then the head of worldwide C.I.A. operations. Rodriguez had only “a vague understanding that British authorities were hoping we would not move too rashly” against the surveillance targets.7
That was an understatement. The Ali case was so sensitive that Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke to President Bush about it, to obtain Bush’s agreement that the C.I.A. would move slowly so that British officers could identify all the conspirators. The day Blair and Bush spoke, however, Rodriguez happened to be in Pakistan, meeting with Ashfaq Kayani at his home.
They had what was becoming a typically tense conversation about whether Pakistan was succoring militants. “I’m tired of you Americans saying we are not doing enough to fight the terrorists,” Kayani declared.
As if to reinforce his grievance, the I.S.I. chief described an opportunity for joint counterterrorist action. He reported that surveillance officers following Rashid Rauf believed he was about to board a bus and might be difficult to follow further. “We want to proceed with his capture,” Kayani said. “Are you with us?”
