by Steve Coll
The fights dragged on for so long because everyone involved on the American side knew that President Bush had a conviction about spraying. He mentioned the issue to almost everyone who visited him to talk about Afghanistan. Yet he could not make it happen. Bush would not act without Karzai’s approval. And because neither the Pentagon nor the C.I.A. agreed that aerial spraying was wise, the two American security agencies with the greatest leverage over Karzai made little effort to change his mind.
The prolonged stalemate over Plan Afghanistan during 2007 wasted American money and effort. It also opened a breach of trust between Hamid Karzai and the United States—an early episode of mutual suspicion in what would soon become a cascade. Understandably, Karzai was losing faith in the conception and conduct of American and British policy in the Taliban heartland. He had long harbored suspicions that the British favored Pakistan over Afghanistan, at the expense of his government’s authority. Implausible and even outrageous as it might sound to American officials, Karzai was open to the theory, whispered to him by some of his palace advisers, that the Americans and British might be working a secret plan to bring the Taliban back in southern Afghanistan in concert with Pakistan. He remained irritated that the British and Americans had forced him to remove Sher Mohammad Akhundzada as Helmand’s governor on the grounds that he profited from the opium economy.
“The question is, why do we have Taliban controlling those areas now, when two years ago I had control of Helmand?” Karzai asked State Department visitors. “When Sher Mohammad was governor there, we had girls in schools and only 160 foreign troops. The international community pushed me to remove him and now look where we are. . . . My question is, do you want a bad guy on your side or working for the Taliban? When Afghans are in charge, drugs are less, but where the international community is in charge, drugs are up.”
The suspicion flowed both ways. In 2006, Newsweek published stories naming Karzai’s half brother Ahmed Wali, based in Kandahar, as a narcotics trafficker. Karzai asked “both U.S. and British intelligence whether they had any evidence to back that up,” but Washington and London admitted that they had only “numerous rumors and allegations,” not the kind of evidence to support a criminal indictment. Karzai fumed and threatened libel actions. But to Schweich and other enthusiasts of aerial spraying, it was hard to ignore the hypothesis that Karzai might be protecting Ahmed Wali and other political allies profiting from opium, particularly in the south, Karzai’s political base.24
Even though the debate about drugs and the Taliban was never resolved, the Plan Colombia model created a rationale for one of the most significant American military pivots of the war: the decision during 2008 and 2009 to send thousands of U.S. Marines to Helmand, the heartland of the poppy economy, despite the province’s small population and isolated geography.
There remained those at the D.E.A. and the White House who believed fervently that if Karzai had permitted aerial spraying, it would have weakened the Taliban profoundly. Those who doubted Plan Afghanistan broadened their examinations of Taliban finance. Only after the production of new intelligence studies did the evidence become clearer, at least to some decision makers at the White House, that Afghanistan’s opium economy was so decentralized that while the Taliban did indeed access funds, as a National Security Council official involved put it, “There certainly would be a Taliban insurgency without drugs.”25
The drug policy argument became the latest if only thread of the classified Afghan war debate in Washington as the Bush administration expired. If only the Taliban did not make money from opium. If only the Pakistan sanctuary could be eliminated. If only reconstruction aid would deliver a credible alternative to the Taliban’s coercive politics. In any event, for all the budget allocated, for all the fields burned and labs raided, Plan Afghanistan achieved little before it was largely aborted during the Obama administration. In 2007, the value of Afghan opium cultivation at the farm gate was one of the largest ever, according to the United Nations. The area under poppy reached a new record, at 476,000 acres. In the years to come, the Afghan opium economy would fluctuate, but ultimately reach new records still.26
SIXTEEN
Murder and the Deep State
By 2007, Dave Smith, the retired colonel deployed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, had moved to the Pentagon’s policy office to work on Pakistan. Part of his job still included staying in touch with his network of friends in the Pakistan Army and I.S.I. to listen in private to their assessments. That spring, he sought out his old Command and Staff College friend, Mahmud Ahmed, the former I.S.I. director fired by Musharraf in October 2001. He now lived in Lahore, the tattered but entrancing former Moghul city in the heart of Punjab, near the border with India. The previous summer, General Mahmud had spent a month or so with friends in the Tablighi, or the Proselytizing Group, a worldwide network of Deobandi Muslims devoted to deepening the faith of Sunnis. At I.S.I., Mahmud had worn aviator glasses and kept a brush mustache. Now he wore a trim white beard. He padded around his comfortable home in a salwar kameez. Analysts at the U.S. embassy had told Smith that he would find his friend changed by faith, but Smith found him to be much the same.
He arrived at Mahmud’s house on May 27, 2007. Pakistan was sinking into crisis, shaken by the very radicals the general had once protected. Encouraged by Al Qaeda, Islamist groups long nurtured by I.S.I. had turned on the Pakistani state. They mounted dozens of suicide bombings that would take more than six hundred Pakistani lives that year. In the capital, armed revolutionaries had barricaded themselves inside the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, from which they threatened the government and carried out vigilante assaults to enforce religious morals. Plainly, Pervez Musharraf had lost his grip on power after eight years in office. In March, he had rashly fired the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, touching off a mass revolt known as the Lawyers’ Movement. He was under pressure from both liberals and Islamists.
The old friends settled in Mahmud’s living room and took tea. Lahore was a bastion of the Lawyers’ Movement. “He has shot himself in the foot, the ankle, the leg, the knee, and the thigh—and all of it unnecessarily,” Mahmud said of Musharraf. Musharraf had held the high ground when he first seized power but had made one political mistake after another, Mahmud continued. Holding a phony referendum on his rule made him look like a tin pot dictator, and then he had built a political party run by traditional, thuggish pols who belied his promises of modernization. The question now was whether Musharraf would resign from the army and try to run for president again as a civilian, or whether he would do something rash such as to impose a national state of emergency to remain a dictator.
Musharraf was afraid of anything that threatened his grip on power, Mahmud went on, and would do anything to retain it. “He will keep his uniform on, because it is his source of power, and he will use the I.S.I. to manipulate the outcome of the next election if he thinks it’s necessary.” He spoke about that with an insider’s confidence.
They talked at length about religion. If Islam was truth, then a messy state like Pakistan was a flawed vessel for its revelations. “Splits in Islam have always been caused by politics and politicians,” Mahmud said. “Musharraf has no standing to advocate for enlightened moderation in Islam because he is not a moral man, and the people know it.”1
About the prospects for security in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and for the success of American ambitions, he remained doubtful. “Religious extremism is spreading,” he said. “Military force won’t work. Military force won’t work in Afghanistan, either,” he continued. “If the intent is to stabilize Afghanistan, the Taliban were and are the best solution.”
“What is the solution?” Smith asked him. It was clear that the Taliban was not an answer acceptable to the United States.
“Withdraw your legions,” Mahmud answered with a smile, quoting a line from the movie Ben-Hur. “The U.S. military campaign is not working. You’re creating more enemies t
han you’re killing. You don’t need a large military force to go after Al Qaeda. And what is Al Qaeda these days, anyway? It’s more of an idea than a force in being.”2
Smith took his leave and pledged to stay in touch. He wrote up his notes for the Pentagon’s leadership. Mahmud’s arguments would read to some there like the same I.S.I. talking points the United States had endured for a decade or more. In time, it would become clear that the general’s views of the American military campaign in Afghanistan, if irritating to hear, had a basis in fact. That spring, however, withdrawal was not a recommendation Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or his Central Command uniformed leadership was in a mood to consider. Their instinct, shared at the C.I.A.’s highest levels and among many of the agency’s operators on the front lines in South Asia, was something like the opposite: The United States had not yet applied enough military force to quell Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
—
Benazir Bhutto, the glamorous, Harvard- and Oxford-educated daughter of an executed former Pakistani prime minister, had served two terms as prime minister, between 1988 and 1990 and again between 1993 and 1996, before she was forced into exile in Dubai, pressured by corruption investigations focused on her family, particularly her husband, Asif Zardari, a rakish businessman who played polo and had bought a multimillion-dollar estate in England. Between her glaring sense of entitlement and a tireless use of the media, Benazir Bhutto could seem like “a machine that operates solely in the mode of victimization,” as her estranged niece Fatima Bhutto put it. Yet she remained in 2007 “a symbol of reform in Pakistan and had generally liberal political impulses,” in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s judgment. If the big idea shaping American policy toward Afghanistan in 2007 was Plan Colombia, in Pakistan it was the effort to bring Benazir Bhutto back home, to share power with Musharraf. Quietly but persistently, the State Department and the British Foreign Office worked to broker a deal between the two liberal leaders.3
Rice was aware that power-sharing arrangements are difficult to carry out because “in general, the parties don’t really want to share power.” Bhutto and Musharraf both tended to see themselves as indispensable saviors of Pakistan, a role that was inherently difficult to share. Yet Rice and her British counterparts hoped nonetheless that a deal might unite the country’s liberal-minded forces against violent Islamists. Ashfaq Kayani, Musharraf’s enigmatic protégé, now the director-general of I.S.I., led an initial round of discussions. In January 2007 Bhutto flew by helicopter to a palace in Abu Dhabi to meet secretly with Musharraf. To her surprise, the meeting was long and friendly. They exchanged cell phone numbers, talked periodically afterward, and met again privately in July. By then Bhutto had decided that she could return home and reenter politics, even though her negotiations with Musharraf were incomplete.4
In September, on the eve of her journey back to Pakistan, Bhutto met an American journalist in the lounge of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington. She had invited reporters to join her when she flew from exile into Karachi. She sat at a table near a jazz pianist. Her husband dropped by at one point, wearing a leisure suit and a gold chain and carrying shopping bags. Bhutto was fifty-four, with pale and youthful skin. She was in a giddy mood. She had the ability, honed when she was president of the Oxford Union, to transform informal conversation into oratory, a feat that made her seem at once impressive and untrustworthy. She spoke with particular conviction about the need to curtail Pakistan’s intelligence services. “The security apparatus must be reformed,” she said. “Unless that is done, it is going to be very difficult for us to dismantle the terrorist networks and the militant networks, and today they’re a threat not only to other countries but to the unity and survival of Pakistan.” She added that she wanted to bring the tribal areas “into the modern world, the twenty-first century. The people there do not have fundamental human rights.”5
This was vintage Bhutto: perfect-pitch liberalism and, at the same time, a formulation barely distinguishable from the American foreign policy of the moment. The exception to her accommodation of the Bush administration’s agenda lay in her jaundiced attitude toward the army and the I.S.I., institutions to which the administration had given more than $10 billion in financial aid. “General Musharraf’s team has relied on the principle that to catch a thief, you send a thief,” she said, speaking of the peace deals he had forged with militants in North and South Waziristan. “They’ve said, ‘These are “reformed Taliban,” or “reformed militants,” and let’s use them.’ It hasn’t worked. . . . And we must really pause and think, Where do they get their food from, after all, to feed and look after irregular armies that have thousands of people? And to clothe them, and to heal their wounds when they get wounded in battle? It requires a huge apparatus—so it requires a real breakdown in governance for such forces to continue to prosper and grow. That’s what we’re seeing in Pakistan, a breakdown in governance.”6
That was in some respects the Bush administration’s hypothesis as well. Its policy remained to train and equip Pakistani security forces and to provide extensive development aid. In the summer of 2007, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad produced a PowerPoint deck, “Strategy for Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” that summarized the latest plan to fix the country. Its “strategic objective” was to “permanently render F.A.T.A. inhospitable to terrorists and extremists.” This would be accomplished by enhancing “the legitimacy and writ” of the Pakistan government, improving “economic, security and social conditions,” and supporting “permanent, sustainable change.” These were buzzwords, but at least the clichés came with a well-funded five-year budget. In the tribal areas alone, where only a few million people lived scattered across a vast area, the Bush administration planned to spend $100 million a year on jobs, health services, water supply, and other development. It would add an average of about $25 million a year on road construction, to connect the region to the heartland of Pakistan, and tens of millions more annually on the Frontier Corps, “Special Ops,” “intelligence,” and “advanced training.” The tribal areas “will not be transformed overnight,” the embassy plan conceded, “but there are few missions more critical to U.S. national security, or more deserving of our considered patience. . . . Force is a necessary component of an overall strategy, but not sufficient alone.”7
The Bush administration placed a major bet during 2007 on the Frontier Corps, the locally raised paramilitary force. Its officers and soldiers were Pashtuns. They sometimes balked at assaulting fellow Pashtuns among the Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda exploited their weakness and recruited traitors. Compromised Frontier Corps soldiers faced court-martial proceedings and imprisonment in trials the Musharraf government never publicized. Mullahs in the tribal areas refused to preside over proper burials for fallen soldiers because the dead fought a mercenary campaign for Washington and did not perish righteously. “We know that you have become America’s slave and are serving infidel Musharraf and have become a traitor to your religion for food, clothes and shelter,” pamphlets tacked up on walls in North Waziristan warned. A soldier in a Frontier Corps uniform shot dead an American Army officer as he departed a “Border Flag” meeting that spring. The assassination was “most unfortunate,” the Pakistan Army vice chief Ahsan Hyat told a State Department official. Pakistan, he said, had “investigated the assailant’s personal history, family, and the state of the Frontier Corps generally” and remained “convinced the incident was the result of an individual disgruntled soldier, not part of any kind of trend or broader problem.”8
Neither Musharraf nor the Punjabi-dominated army leadership wanted to mount an invasion of the tribal areas with regular Pakistan Army forces, since that might only provoke more revenge-seeking suicide bombings and violence in the Pakistani heartland. Musharraf’s sense was that to have any chance of success in the tribal areas, the army needed at least one political ally among Waziristan’s major tribal groupings. The Mehsuds, from their stronghold i
n South Waziristan, did not look like candidates. Baitullah Mehsud, a plump, black-bearded radical in his early thirties, had organized an armed force of several thousand militia fighters. He gave interviews threatening revolutionary war against the Pakistani state. Among the historical rivals of the Mehsuds were the Wazirs. They had been influenced by radical ideology as well, but their leaders saw less cause to act in overt hostility to Pakistan, at least for now. Musharraf adapted the British colonial strategy of playing one tribal network against the other. The Pakistani military’s lines of communication to Afghanistan had long run through Wazir territory in North Waziristan. Musharraf and his corps commanders “thought we should play ball with the Wazirs,” as Musharraf put it. When American officials protested, he told them, “Leave the tactical matters to us. We know our people.”9
Musharraf’s top generals backed his strategy to accommodate some militants in Waziristan. “Shock and awe is fine for you if you fly in from the U.S. or Canada,” Musharraf’s defense secretary, retired Lieutenant General Tariq Waseem Ghazi, told the Pentagon. “Shock and awe is no good for us when we have to live with the tribal areas as part and parcel of Pakistan.”10
Ghazi increasingly found the Pentagon to be unsympathetic. In fact, U.S. commanders had concluded that American and N.A.T.O. soldiers across the border in Afghanistan were dying as a result of the Pakistan Army’s accommodations in Waziristan. Pentagon delegations arrived in Pakistan with “fancy graphs about attacks going up” in Afghanistan as a result of Musharraf’s approach but Ghazi and his colleagues found the statistics unconvincing. As more and more suicide bombers out of Waziristan attacked Pakistani government compounds and killed scores of innocent civilians in Pakistani cities, he found the American allegations that I.S.I. was complicit with such killers irresponsible. Was it not obvious that Pakistan had lost control of these groups and was just trying to quiet them? “If that’s what you want to believe, believe it,” Ghazi told his Pentagon counterparts. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”11
