by Steve Coll
—
Besides Dave Smith, there was perhaps a basketball team’s worth of senior intelligence officers in the American system with a deep, street-level feel for Pakistan’s regional diversity, national resilience, kaleidoscopic Islamist militancy, and party politics. Like Smith, most of these specialists had lived and worked in the country in an earlier era, when informal travel was easier and safer. The embassy security protocols that kicked in after 2001 only tightened as suicide and truck bombings spread across Pakistan after 2006. That left American diplomats and spies often trapped behind the walls and razor wire of the embassy compound in Islamabad and the consulates in Peshawar, Lahore, and Karachi.
In the summer of 2007, the Bush administration recruited Peter Lavoy as the new national intelligence officer for South Asia—the government’s chief intelligence analyst for the region. In several roles over the next eight years, Lavoy would become one of the most influential Pakistan experts at the White House—an Oval Office briefer, a supervisor of classified National Intelligence Estimates, the expert in the Situation Room who stood before maps to try to succinctly describe the nuances of Pakistani ethnography or party politics. He was in some ways an unlikely intelligence bureaucrat. As an undergraduate, he had studied government and international relations at crunchy Oberlin College, and then enrolled in the political science doctoral program at the University of California at Berkeley. California suited him. He was about six feet tall, athletic-looking, and had the manner of a surfer-bartender. He took great care with the martinis he decanted at dinner parties and he typically traveled with a humidor of cigars. He was a natural organizer and master of ceremonies, quick with a joke, difficult to rattle. As a graduate student, after a false start in Soviet studies, Lavoy took a research position in India, where he decided to write his doctoral dissertation on the Indian nuclear program. To deepen his language skills, he enrolled in the Berkeley Urdu program in Lahore, Pakistan. (Spoken Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is similar to Hindi, India’s predominant national language.) Between 1989 and 1990, Lavoy lived with a Pakistani family near Punjab University. He traveled widely—to the Karakorum mountain range along the border with China, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and the deserts of Baluchistan. He developed a genuine fondness for Pakistan and encountered its diversity as few of its own citizens have a chance to do.12
After graduate school he worked in Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s C-Division, the nuclear lab’s center for proliferation analysis. Then he won appointment to the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, the fog-shrouded beach town to the north of Carmel and Big Sur. At Monterey, Lavoy became well known in South Asia scholarship and policy networks for the conferences he hosted, which brought together Pakistani and Indian military officers, journalists, and civilian government officials. The events usually climaxed with a beach bonfire and barbecue where Lavoy presided as the Indian and Pakistani visitors talked over the pounding surf, in an atmosphere as far from enmity as it was possible for Americans to create. During the Clinton administration’s second term, Lavoy joined the Pentagon’s counterproliferation office, whose missions included the containment of Pakistan’s nuclear program. In 2007, when the Bush administration searched for a new national intelligence officer to help the cabinet make sense of Pakistan’s worsening implosion, it turned to Lavoy, and he took up his position on the C.I.A.’s campus that summer.
Once inside the government’s classified bubble, Lavoy could see in vivid detail what he had discerned in broad strokes from outside, namely, how badly the relationship between the United States and Pakistan was going. A recent National Intelligence Estimate about terrorism had described Pakistan as a “safe haven” for Al Qaeda. It was a phrase that, to Musharraf at least, suggested that the Americans now believed Pakistan was collaborating with the authors of September 11. “‘Hideouts’ would be a better description,” Musharraf complained privately. Trust had eroded to the bone. At the White House, the main question debated by Bush’s advisers was “How can we navigate this increasingly impure relationship with Pakistan to pursue our urgent objectives against Al Qaeda?”13
As he began sitting in on national security meetings presided over by Bush, or, more often, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Lavoy felt duty-bound to brief the material provided by the intelligence bureaucracy. But he could tell how frustrated cabinet members and deputies were with a lot of these prepackaged briefs and PowerPoints; they seemed loaded with a lot of information but did not provide a lot of insight. Hardly anyone among the secretaries or deputy secretaries managing policy had long, direct experience with Pakistan. They might have gotten to know their counterparts in the Pakistan Army or the Foreign Ministry and formed a few impressions from these relationships and from reading. Yet their responsibilities at State, the Pentagon, or the C.I.A. spanned the world, and it was impossible for most of them to untangle complexities within complexities involving the Wazirs, the Mehsuds, or the structure of the Afghan Taliban’s revival. Principals and deputies in Washington tended to reach a judgment—“I.S.I. is the problem,” for example, because of the operations of Directorate S—and then never change their minds. It wasn’t as if such a judgment lacked a factual basis. The problem was that it did not account for what had become, in 2007, a very dynamic situation—the birth of a serious, violent domestic rebellion against the Pakistani state carried out by some of the Islamist forces the state had long nurtured.
On Directorate S and the revival of the Afghan Taliban, during 2007 and 2008, American and N.A.T.O. intelligence did become clearer, informed by harder evidence. It showed that Musharraf and Kayani had authorized deniable support to the movement, stopping short of weapons supply—the reporting showed that they were very cautious about directly providing money and weapons to the Taliban because they feared they could get caught and pay a price in the international system. Retired I.S.I. officers, nongovernmental organizations, and other cutouts supplied the Taliban to reduce this risk. American intelligence reporting on individual, serving I.S.I. case officers, who managed contacts with the Quetta Shura or the Haqqanis or Lashkar-e-Taiba, which fought in Kashmir, also showed that they were clearly in the Pakistan Army’s chain of command. This reporting belied any “rogue I.S.I.” hypothesis. Overall, it was very difficult to reach a judgment that “Pakistan” did this or that or even that there was such a thing as “Pakistan’s policy,” when there were so many actors and when Directorate S was engaging diverse militant groups for different purposes at different times. In the tribal areas, I.S.I. sometimes made deals with violent radicals for defensive, tactical reasons—to forestall attacks on themselves or to get military supplies through to isolated bases. Other times the I.S.I. made deals for strategic reasons—to encourage the groups to enlarge their influence inside Afghanistan or to attack Indian targets there. Still other times the army attacked these same groups in retaliation for attacks inside Pakistan.
Each major American intelligence agency had its own reporting stream about I.S.I. and Directorate S and each had its own emphasis. At the C.I.A., the most sophisticated analytical products about I.S.I. were distributed by the Near East and South Asia office of the Directorate of Intelligence, a warren of offices and pods in the New Headquarters Building at Langley. Some of the Afghan and Pakistan specialists there had moved to C.I.A. from intelligence positions in the military, while others had graduate degrees in political science or international relations. In considering I.S.I.’s relationship with the Haqqanis or the Afghan Taliban, the C.I.A. group would ask whether Directorate S or its contractors had “cognizance, influence, or control” of a particular guerrilla or terrorist unit—a sliding scale of culpability. Clearly I.S.I. influenced the Haqqanis and the Quetta Shura, but to say the service controlled these organizations was doubtful, according to this analysis. In Waziristan, the Pakistan Army was clearly weaker than the militants. The C.I.A.’s analysts also tried to convey the limits of I.S.I.’s competence.
From experience tracing to the 1980s, agency operators and former chiefs of station knew that while some I.S.I. officers were highly professional and capable, others were venal, corrupt, and passive. In Washington, it was increasingly common for policy makers and members of Congress to talk of I.S.I. as an omnipotent, malign, highly effective force, when in fact the rise of domestic terrorism in Pakistan could be just as well understood as profound evidence of I.S.I.’s incompetence. Overall, the United States began to collect large amounts of evidence that Musharraf and Kayani were directing the Taliban’s revival, but the Americans did not want to reveal this information because it would expose sources and methods that they wanted to continue to exploit. At the same time, the intelligence showed that at the lower levels of I.S.I., in the field, officers pursued their own plans without necessarily informing the army brass in advance of every operation. In the Situation Room, Lavoy learned, the best that might be realistically hoped for from overwhelmed decision makers, up to and including the president, was a willingness to avoid cartoonish, stubborn, black-and-white judgments, and to accept “It’s complicated.”
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I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman they will burn in hell,” Benazir Bhutto told the journalists who had assembled in Dubai to accompany her on an Emirates Airlines flight to Karachi. “Secondly, Islam forbids suicide bombing.”14
She boarded on the morning of October 18, 2007. Party workers in custom-made Benazir T-shirts chanted slogans as the jet reached cruising altitude, defying the pleadings of stewardesses in red pillbox hats to remain seated with their seat belts fastened. Bhutto agreed to a press scrum mid-flight. “I am not scared,” she said. “I am thinking of my mission. This is a movement for democracy because we are under threat from extremists and militants.”
Her plane skidded onto the tarmac and taxied to a V.I.P. terminal. The journalists descended first, to be in position to record her descent onto Pakistani asphalt. She had been away from Pakistan for almost a decade. Wearing a white head scarf and clutching prayer beads, she tilted her head to the sky operatically, summoned tears, and declared, “It’s great to be back home. It’s a dream come true.”
The stronghold of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party lies in rural Sindh Province, near Karachi. The party includes an undemocratic patronage machine that can mobilize large turnouts on order. At least a million loyalists packed the streets around the airport that afternoon. They waved red, black, and green P.P.P. flags, wore red, black, and green P.P.P. baseball hats, blew noisemakers, and pounded drums. By nightfall, the procession had advanced only a few hundred yards through the crowds toward the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, where Bhutto planned to speak to a rally. She rode in a tall truck with a custom Plexiglas crow’s nest on top, from which she could wave and orate through loudspeakers.
Near midnight two bombs—a smaller one, then one much larger—ripped through the throngs around her. They killed 139 people and wounded another 400 but left Bhutto unhurt. Her aides pulled her away from her truck as her parade descended into mayhem—body parts strewn about, ambulances pushing through the crowds, and rescue workers treating the wounded or carrying them away on stretchers. At Bhutto’s truck, party workers lifted reporters up a ladder into the crow’s nest, to examine the crime scene firsthand. She had left behind speech notes.
A few days later, at her Karachi home, Bhutto said she remained determined to campaign for office. Few targets of political murder attempts have contemplated the possibility of their demise in advance as thoroughly as she had. She had returned after half reconciling with Musharraf but did not know whether she trusted him. “You know, what is trust?” she asked. “You can’t see into people’s hearts. I don’t know him, so I can’t say.”15
The intelligence service of the United Arab Emirates, perhaps informed by intelligence relayed from Britain or the United States, had warned Bhutto before she flew to Karachi that suicide-bombing squads had been dispatched from Waziristan to attack her. Because of her family’s long history of intense, even fatal conflict with I.S.I. and the army, Bhutto was inclined to see the threat as rooted in Pakistan’s deep state, not merely attributable to martyrdom-seeking independent radicals from the tribal areas. Two days before she flew to Karachi, Bhutto had written to Musharraf. She named at least one former and two serving Pakistani officials as likely suspects if there was an attempt on her life. One of the names on her list was Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who had been director-general of I.S.I. during her first term as prime minister, until she dismissed him from the post. A second was Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the director-general of the Intelligence Bureau, the country’s equivalent of the F.B.I. The third was Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, a civilian politician allied with Musharraf and then the chief minister of Punjab. Bhutto felt these three “would go to any length to stop me,” as she put it. Yet she did not appear to possess—or, at least, she did not cite—specific evidence that any of them might be involved in a conspiracy to kill her.
Bhutto interpreted the bombing of her convoy in Karachi as confirmation that parts of the government were involved—at least on the periphery—in active plots to kill her. Her thinking was not irrational: The police teams sent to protect her homecoming were inadequate, and in the area where the attack occurred the streetlights had been turned off—perhaps owing to one of the city’s chronic power failures, but perhaps not. Anne Patterson, the American ambassador, flew to Karachi. Bhutto presented a written request to meet with U.S. embassy experts to evaluate her security. That night, Patterson cabled Washington urging that the Bush administration refuse her, because an audit “will inevitably expose performance gaps” in Bhutto’s arrangements “that would not meet American standards of training and equipment. Responsibility for security belongs with the Government of Pakistan.” This was a global policy, with only the rarest of exceptions, as with Karzai when he was first installed; the United States could not get into the business of managing security for officeholders and opposition leaders in foreign countries.16
Yet Bhutto insisted that Musharraf’s protection was inadequate. Patterson urged that while the embassy might refer Bhutto to qualified Pakistani security contractors who could evaluate her security, the embassy should not help directly. The Bush administration “should either undertake full responsibility for Bhutto’s personal security”—a nonstarter in nationalist Pakistan during an election campaign—“or not.”17
In early November, Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, in what would prove to be his final effort to hold on to power. Even then, Bhutto never broke with him entirely, and when Musharraf eventually confirmed that elections would go forward in January, Bhutto decided that the Peoples Party would compete. Later that month, Musharraf at last resigned as chief of the army staff, to stand for reelection as president as a civilian. He elevated Ashfaq Kayani as his successor in command of the military, handing over to him the most powerful office in Pakistan. At I.S.I. Musharraf simultaneously installed a man with family and personal loyalties to him, General Nadeem Taj.
Once Bhutto committed herself to the election, the question of her personal security took on renewed significance. Her competitors on Election Day would be Musharraf’s political followers, and they controlled the local governments and police forces whose services Bhutto required for her safety. Yet increasingly, amid the swirl of events, Bhutto and Musharraf no longer saw themselves as potential allies. Bhutto moved instead toward a political détente with Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the center-right Muslim League, who had also returned from exile to compete in the election.
Bhutto decided to hold a rally at Liaquat Bagh, a park in Rawalpindi. When the day arrived, December 27, Nadeem Taj, the new I.S.I. director close to Musharraf, visited her in the early hours, just after midnight. They talked for two hours about the campaigning as well as about threats on Bhutto’s life. A few days
earlier, the Pakistani Interior Ministry had received a report that Osama Bin Laden had ordered the assassination of Bhutto, Musharraf, and a third Pakistani politician. Taj warned Bhutto to take precautions.18
Hamid Karzai happened to be visiting Islamabad. After the I.S.I. meeting, Bhutto drove to see him in his fourth-floor suite at the Serena Hotel. She admired his cape and they laughed as he recounted how he had acquired it—an improbable tale that involved a visit to the exiled king of Afghanistan. They sipped tea and coffee and discussed the region’s gathering political violence. Militant Islamic leaders had by now named both of them as targets for assassinations. “I am not afraid of death,” Bhutto told Karzai.19
At the rally, Bhutto sat on the platform and listened to the opening speeches. Her aides’ cell phones began to ring. Sherry Rehman, a senior political and media adviser, leaned over to relay some news: Elsewhere in the city, gunmen had killed some of Nawaz Sharif’s election workers.
“Okay,” Bhutto said. “We must phone him” to offer sympathy and support. She asked Rehman to remind her to make the call. She was hoarse from campaigning, but delivered a rousing speech.
“Long live Bhutto!” the crowd chanted as she descended from the platform at around 5:00 p.m. She got into a white Toyota Land Cruiser with a sunroof. As the vehicle left the park, the driver crossed a median to turn east. Another crowd of chanting supporters swarmed toward her. The vehicle stopped; Bhutto’s aides unrolled the sunroof and stood up to wave to them. A clean-shaven man wearing sunglasses and a black vest moved toward her, raised a pistol, and fired three times. Then he tucked down his head and detonated a suicide vest filled with ball bearings. Bhutto died instantly. The blast killed twenty-four others.20
