by Steve Coll
Steve Kappes and Peter Lavoy, the administration’s two most senior intelligence experts on Pakistan, advocated for engagement. After a long career in C.I.A. espionage operations, Kappes had developed an operating philosophy about challenges such as Directorate S. All national security services were loyal to their own sovereign governments, he reminded C.I.A. colleagues and the National Security Council. I.S.I. represented itself, the Pakistan Army, and, to a lesser extent, the civilian-led Pakistani state. One American ambassador and C.I.A. station chief after another had tried across many years to convince I.S.I. that it did not need the Taliban to influence Afghanistan and that it did not require militant Islamists in Kashmir to pressure India. Yet those entreaties had failed. The situation now called for realism. The I.S.I. was not motivated to challenge America’s enemies in the tribal areas. That justified more drone strikes. It did not imply that it would be wise to sanction Kayani or I.S.I. or that such pressure would succeed, this line of thinking went. The expiring Bush administration was divided between those “who saw Pakistan as totally lost,” as the State Department’s David Gordon put it, and those “who had the view that they’re complicit, but there’s a chance this could turn out better.”
Sanctions imposed by the United States on Pakistan during the 1990s had had limited American influence as the threat from Al Qaeda metastasized, Kappes, Lavoy, and other Pakistan specialists believed. They recognized that the United States had conflicting interests with Pakistan but argued that Washington would get further through engagement. On the other side of the debate, C.I.A. officers such as Chris Wood argued that Washington had not gone far enough to pressure I.S.I. during the 1990s or after September 11. Wood and his allies believed that if I.S.I. did not stop tolerating and supporting the Taliban, the United States should threaten to impose sanctions that would stigmatize senior Pakistani generals, restricting their travel or personal access to international banking, as if they were equivalent to Sudanese war criminals or North Korean totalitarians. Wood argued that generals like Kayani so valued their legitimacy, travel, and freedom to bank and send children to universities abroad that they would bend to such pressure before sanctions ever had to be imposed.10
When he spoke privately to Kayani about the turn in American policy after the summer of 2008, Kappes tried to talk as one professional intelligence officer to another. To Kappes, engagement was the essence of intelligence work—without contact and continual discussion there was no chance to influence behavior. Kappes warned that if the C.I.A. located Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri hiding on Pakistani soil, the agency would recommend direct action inside Pakistan and that any American president would likely order an attack. He emphasized that the C.I.A. prided itself on never closing a communications channel. Kayani could always contact Langley if he wanted to get a message through to the White House, no matter how bad things got.
Kappes and Admiral Mike Mullen sweetened this tough messaging with new offers: What new military or counterterrorism equipment did Kayani need as he reevaluated the Pakistan Army? What was on his wish list? Could the United States and Pakistan restart a conversation at the highest levels about strategy and about how the United States might help Kayani modernize Pakistan’s forces?11
In the long history of schizophrenia involving Washington and Rawalpindi, a new chapter had opened.
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That summer, Senator Barack Obama landed at Bagram Airfield. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was on a tour of the wars he might inherit in Iraq and Afghanistan. He traveled with Senators Jack Reid of Rhode Island and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, both military veterans. At Bagram, Obama spoke to troops and posed for selfies. Helicopters lifted the three senators to an American base in Jalalabad.
Leading the Afghan delegation to greet Obama was Gul Agha Sherzai, the dog fighter’s son who had returned to power with C.I.A. backing after the Taliban’s fall. Following his dystopian tour as Kandahar’s governor, he had moved on to become the governor of Nangarhar Province, an important and relatively prosperous region near Pakistan. This day, the governor wore a striped western shirt over his large, soft belly and sported a trimmed black beard. Obama pumped Sherzai’s hand warmly and put his arm around his shoulder. At a hollow square table, across from American generals and colonels in camouflage uniform, Sherzai occupied the place of honor to Obama’s right and held forth about his accomplishments in eastern Afghanistan.12
Why the U.S. embassy in Kabul would select Sherzai as Obama’s huggable first interlocutor in Afghanistan was a mystery some of Obama’s aides would puzzle over in the years ahead. Among other things, the decision insulted Hamid Karzai before Obama had ever met him by elevating a rival and subordinate ahead of the Afghan president in highly visible protocol.
Obama was new to Afghanistan but he had personal connections to Pakistan. As a college sophomore in Los Angeles, he had shared an apartment with a Pakistani friend, Hasan Chandoo, a business-minded Shiite from a prosperous Karachi family. Obama visited Pakistan with Chandoo and made other Pakistani friends as he came of age and later entered Harvard Law School. Years later, this small Pakistani-American network helped raise some money for Obama’s political campaigns in Illinois and celebrated him in Washington when he reached the United States Senate in 2004. These friends provided Obama with informal insights about Pakistan. Gul Agha Sherzai might be familiar in that he resembled a Chicago ward boss of the Prohibition era, but the local mysteries of tribe, profiteering, landgrabbing, and influence peddling the governor presided over from Jalalabad were opaque even to the Americans who studied him up close. All Obama could really hope for as he prepared for the possibility of command of the Afghan war was an instinctual sense of direction.13
Hamid Karzai received Obama for a working lunch at the Arg Palace the next day. Amrullah Saleh of N.D.S. joined the discussion, as did other members of the national security cabinet. Karzai’s war advisers did not always work coherently, but this time they and their president had settled on a firm plan: They would seize this opportunity to try to educate Barack Obama about the treachery of I.S.I.
Saleh saw the coming Kayani era in Pakistan ominously. Saleh told American counterparts in 2008 that General Kayani would become more active “as he realizes the breadth of his power” as army chief, and that he would encourage the Taliban and allied radicals to concentrate on fighting in Afghanistan for as long as possible, while the army tried to restore order at home.14
At lunch, Karzai described Pakistan “as the source of increasing instability in Afghanistan.” His remedy included “U.S. military operations in Pakistan.” Pakistan’s civilian leaders, such as the late Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari, had good intentions, Karzai emphasized, but the problem was “I.S.I. and the Pakistani military.”
Chuck Hagel asked if Zardari could control the army and I.S.I.
“No, not without the help of the U.S.,” Karzai said.
The United States had to insist that Pakistan stop “using radical Islam as an instrument of policy” and issue an ultimatum as Bush had done in 2001, namely, that Pakistan choose whether it was with the United States or against it. “Softly, softly won’t work,” Karzai said.
Obama asked if Zardari’s problem was a “lack of capacity.”
“The problem is I.S.I.,” Karzai repeated, “which runs the country.”
Obama already knew enough to take Pakistan blaming by Afghan officials with a grain of salt. He told Karzai that the United States was committed to his country for the long run, but that U.S. support would be much more durable if Afghans started taking credible action on drugs and corruption. Obviously, too, the Taliban’s message was getting through to Afghans, regardless of Pakistan’s covert warfare. Were Afghans susceptible to Islamist messages? Obama asked gently.
Karzai insisted that without Pakistan’s intervention, the Taliban message would never have influenced Afghans. “Over three decades, thousands of Afghan boys were indoctr
inated into hatefulness disguised as Islam.” The Taliban were now killing off older Afghan clergy and replacing them with “younger, Pakistani-trained mullahs.”
“We still have a lot of work to do,” Obama noted.15
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By 2008, evidence to support the C.I.A.’s assessment that Al Qaeda was fusing with the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas was openly available on YouTube. The digital, laptop-enabled output of Al Qaeda’s media arm in Pakistan, As-Sahab, surged. Between 2002 and 2005, Al Qaeda released messages or videos once a month; between 2006 and 2008, it released fresh content more than once a week.16 Its videos, war documentaries, and digital magazines were diverse and global in concern but they bore down increasingly on the cause of the American war in Afghanistan.
Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a then-fifty-two-year-old Egyptian with a thin, long face, had been convicted as a young man in the successful conspiracy to assassinate Anwar Sadat and had gone into exile with Ayman Al Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda deputy emir. In 2007, he emerged as the spokesman for Al Qaeda’s commitment to the Afghan Taliban cause. He called himself the leader of “Al Qaeda in Khurasan and Afghanistan,” a name referring to historical territory overlapping with Afghanistan and Pakistan, “under Mullah Omar,” who remained at large and recognized as the Taliban emir. Yazid’s exact rank in the Al Qaeda hierarchy was hard to specify but he was the latest in a succession of visible senior frontline commanders, just below Zawahiri, and he evidently operated from Waziristan.17
In June 2008, a Toyota bearing Pakistan-issued diplomatic plates blew up in front of the Danish embassy in Islamabad, killing about half a dozen Pakistanis. Yazid surfaced through As-Sahab to claim responsibility, saying the attack was revenge for the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad published the previous winter in a Danish newspaper. The Egyptian felt secure enough the following month to invite a reporter from Pakistan’s freewheeling, independent satellite channel, GEO, to interview him. Yazid wore a white turban and owlish plastic-framed eyeglasses.
“The U.S. claims that it has successfully occupied Afghanistan and brought the resistance under control,” the GEO reporter observed.
That is “a total lie,” Yazid said mildly. Within the limits of Islamist propaganda idioms, he spoke crisply and coherently. “By the grace of Allah the killing of US soldiers is continuing and the mujaheddin are fighting against the Americans and their slaves with steadfastness,” he continued. The United States had “tried to assemble some tribal militias and use them against the mujaheddin,” he observed, apparently referring to the C.I.A.’s Omega border units. “And their failure in Afghanistan is even more evident. The proof of this is after every few days they hold an emergency meeting of NATO and request each other with great pleading to increase their forces in Afghanistan. But very few are ready for this great sacrifice.” He added that of all the compromised Muslim regimes in the world, none had more betrayed the Muslim faith than Pakistan under Pervez Musharraf.18
Because the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan did have common enemies, the Americans persisted in the belief that Kayani and the army would make common cause with Washington. But the closer Kayani moved Pakistan toward the United States, the more it brought violence down on his country from Al Qaeda and its allies.
The C.I.A.’s plan to step up its war in the tribal areas had two prongs: more drone strikes and more direct Special Operations raids by helicopter against Al Qaeda and affiliated compounds on Pakistani territory. A few weeks after Yazid’s interview with GEO, on August 28, Bush’s National Security Council met to authorize a ground strike in Angoor Adda, in South Waziristan, a town of ramshackle shops and bus depots that lay across a flat mud plain from Shkin, the long-standing site of a joint C.I.A.–Special Operations base. Uzbeks and other foreigners still infested the region. Around 2:00 a.m. on September 3, Navy SEALs borne by Chinook helicopters, flanked by Apache attack helicopters, struck three homes in Musa Nika, near Angoor Adda. Ten local tribesmen, one ninety years old, five women, and two children died in the firefight. A man from one of the targeted families drove a taxi and had recently carried an Arab passenger; the local assumption was that an informant had told the Americans that a senior Al Qaeda leader was staying at his house. The Pentagon insisted that all the victims were militants, but a Pakistani brigadier serving in South Waziristan later published a convincing roster of the women and children he said had died.19
Kayani dispatched Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir to inform U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson that Pakistan would issue a statement denouncing the strike but, as a courtesy, would not name the United States as the culprit. Bashir was a circumspect professional diplomat. He told Patterson that bilateral intelligence and military cooperation was “good” overall, but that this raid had occurred “without regard to the high-level understanding between the two military commands” that Pakistan would be taken “into confidence” about covert action on its soil. A week later, The New York Times reported what few beyond Kayani understood: The attack was a signal of the increased willingness of the United States to take unilateral action inside Pakistan. President Bush had directly approved the raid. Kayani issued an unusual statement declaring that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country would be defended at all costs, and no external force is allowed to conduct operations inside Pakistan.” An army spokesman added that if it happened again, Pakistan would “retaliate” against the attacking force. Twin headlines in Pakistan’s Daily News captured the army’s public ultimatum: BOOTS ON THE GROUND: BUSH and NO WAY: KAYANI.20
The White House and Special Operations Command had overreached. But Al Qaeda was becoming even bolder. On September 20, 2008, a Pakistani citizen drove a dump truck onto the grounds of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, a center of international diplomatic and expatriate life in the capital. The truck carried perhaps six times the explosive load of the car bomb deployed against the Indian embassy in July. The detonation and fire that followed killed fifty-four people, the great majority of them Pakistanis, and injured more than two hundred others. Two Americans died, one a Navy cryptologist on assignment in Pakistan for the National Security Agency.21 The attack allegedly was the brainchild of a Kenyan Al Qaeda operator who used the nom de guerre Usama al-Kini and who had been indicted in Al Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. Al Qaeda celebrated, but killing privileged Pakistani civilians en masse was a miscalculation; it hardened Pakistani and media opinion against foreign terrorists and the Taliban, as well as against the United States.
Kappes and Mullen flew back to Islamabad to again press their request for “I.S.I. reform” on Kayani. The C.I.A. had drawn up and vetted with the White House a list of concrete steps the general could take to demonstrate that he was sincere about cleaning up I.S.I. Kappes conveyed that he was speaking for President Bush. One proposed step was to appoint more reliable officers to run I.S.I. and Directorate S. The protocol in such messaging was to leave out the names of individuals, but the implication was clear: Kayani should fire Nadeem Taj and remove Asif Akhtar from Directorate S.
Kayani assured them he planned to act. To minimize embarrassment, he would reveal a shakeup at I.S.I. as part of a regular announcement about promotions, reassignments, and up-or-out forced retirements. Kayani had his own motivations: Moving Musharraf’s “bag man” out of I.S.I. would allow him to appoint a successor loyal to him. On September 29, Kayani announced that Taj would rotate to a division command. Asif Akhtar rotated from Directorate S and was assigned to the National Guard. (He soon became Pakistan’s ambassador to Nigeria.) As to the rest of Kappes’s confidence-building proposals—which included demonstrative steps to break ties with Taliban and Kashmiri militants—Kayani was noncommittal. The Islamabad embassy nonetheless remained optimistic. “Kayani has taken a critical first step,” it reported.22
Kayani had made his objections to American helicopter raids inside Pakistan crystal clear. Kappes made clear that the Unit
ed States intended to attack Al Qaeda directly with armed drones, given that the Pakistan Army was unable (or unwilling or both) to clear out North Waziristan. These positions did not preclude cooperation on some shared interests. Kayani indicated that summer and autumn that he wanted Baitullah Mehsud dead. In this the general had the full support of the civilian government of the Pakistan Peoples Party. They held Mehsud at least partly responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, along with the Pakistani security services.
The targeting discussions did not change the fact that Pakistan still distinguished between good militants and bad militants, however; it was merely Mehsud’s misfortune to have crossed the line. Even after the Marriott bombing, during an in camera session of parliament that autumn, I.S.I. officers briefing Pakistani lawmakers tried to explain “the virtues of some Taliban elements versus ‘the real militants.’” The I.S.I. briefers “reasoned small numbers from some of the militant groups could be useful in future operations in Kashmir or elsewhere.” Anyone in Washington reading the U.S. government’s own cable traffic would have reason to regard I.S.I. reform as an unlikely prospect.23
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Mike Mullen doubted that Kayani would follow through on the C.I.A.’s proposed reform list. His relationship with Kayani was just months old but it was becoming deeper. By protocol, as America’s most senior military officer, Mullen was Kayani’s counterpart. The admiral intended his willingness to devote more and more time to Kayani as a signal of respect and seriousness. Over the next three years, Mullen would be the good cop with Kayani, in tandem with a rotating cast of American bad cops.
