by Steve Coll
Mullen had the least likely upbringing of anyone wearing four stars in the American military. His mother had worked as an assistant to Jimmy Durante, the comedian. She met his father in the publicity department of Republic Pictures. Jack Mullen struck out on his own as a Hollywood press agent whose clients included Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Peter Graves, Ann-Margret, Anthony Quinn, and Julie Andrews. His son Mike, one of four brothers, grew up in North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley among actors, vaudevillians, comedians, and gossip columnists. Except for one uncle who was a veteran, his family had little military heritage. Mullen was tall and athletic and enrolled at the Naval Academy as a basketball recruit in 1964. He rose in the Navy as an operations manager and collaborative, people-centric leader. Congenial, self-effacing, curious, he was a natural for staff command, liaison with foreign militaries, and Pentagon process—a sailor-diplomat who placed his faith in relationships, made himself accessible, and did not seek to bend the world to his will. The Democrats had taken control of Congress and looked, with Obama, to be in a strong position for the 2008 presidential vote. Mullen was an ideal figure to communicate across the aisle.24
The admiral resided in the chairman’s residence on Twenty-third Street, across from the State Department. He and his wife were Broadway enthusiasts and covered their home’s walls with framed playbills from the musicals and plays they had seen. Learning about Afghanistan, he was enthralled by Greg Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea, the national bestseller about schools and culture. He read copiously, hired advisers to connect him to think tanks and humanitarian organizations like Doctors Without Borders, and tried to get out of Washington as often as possible. He visited Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan at least once a quarter. The Navy regularly produced leaders with some of Mullen’s characteristics—Army and Marine generals did not require much prompting to joke about admirals with their feet up on a ship’s bridge, cruising the open seas, smoking cigars, and thinking great thoughts about world order. But even for a Navy man, Mullen was ambassadorial. The question was whether he had a sharp enough mind of his own to shape the disastrous conflicts he had inherited.
Mullen’s relationship with Kayani was “the most difficult, intense” of the liaisons with world military leaders worldwide. Between early 2008 and the summer of 2011, Mullen would travel to Pakistan twenty-seven times to visit with Kayani. He met the general many other times in Washington, Europe, and elsewhere and they spoke frequently by secure telephone. Mullen had no experience in Pakistan. That summer of 2008 he relayed to Kayani in their early meetings talking points developed by his Afghanistan-Pakistan staff, the C.I.A., and the White House—“Nadeem Taj at I.S.I. must go” was one such talking point—but mainly he tried to connect the lengthy classified memos in his briefing books to what he observed and heard during long, open-ended conversations with the general.25
By the fall of 2008 Mullen was forming a hypothesis about Directorate S, one aligned with intelligence reporting. At the very top of its hierarchy, I.S.I. was a black-and-white organization, fully subject to discipline and accountability, Mullen told colleagues. In the middle the organization started to go gray, fading into heavily compartmented operations that drew upon mid-level officers, civilians, contractors, and retirees. Then there were retired I.S.I. director-generals or senior brigadiers with their own followings among militants.26
At their first conference in Islamabad, Kayani presented a list of seven counterterrorism and surveillance technologies that he said Pakistan needed urgently. He emphasized that Pakistan needed its own signals intelligence intercept ability. Kayani’s list included technology to intercept and listen to satellite telephone conversations, digital or GSM cell phones, mobile platforms that would allow Pakistan to locate cell phones quickly, and aerial collection platforms for Pakistani aircraft that could intercept low-powered military radio transmissions. He said he was not interested in acquiring and operating Predator drones, but he wondered if there were smaller, less expensive tactical drones that the United States could grant or lend to Pakistan for surveillance in Waziristan. Kayani’s other great need was helicopters—Cobra or Apache gunships to strike militant compounds and more Chinook transports to quickly lift Special Forces to and from attacks. Waziristan’s vast terrain and muddy roads had trapped Pakistan’s infantry-heavy army into a lumbering, defensive position, holed up on bases.27
Helicopters were a tough ask, Mullen warned Kayani. Everybody in N.A.T.O. seemed to need more; the supply chain remained stressed. The admiral pledged to send a team of National Security Agency and other experts out to Pakistan to study the army’s SIGINT capabilities and needs, to see what the United States might be able to do.
From the start, Kayani’s requests for state-of-the-art surveillance technology strained the trust Mullen sought to build. Cell phone intercept equipment, night-vision goggles, and aerial SIGINT platforms could be used to thwart the Taliban or enable them. If the United States supplied such gear, would it make I.S.I. and the Special Services Group more dangerous?
Kayani told Mullen that his army had to focus on the “fundamentals” of Pakistan’s internal security. By this he meant public opinion and the fighting morale of his soldiers when forced to kill fellow citizens preaching revolution in the name of Islam. Kayani feared that too many of the army’s rank and file doubted the righteousness of the fight in alliance with the United States.
“What is fundamentalism? What is extremism?” Kayani asked as he traveled from cantonment to cantonment that year, speaking to officers and enlisted men. To his generals, he emphasized: “We have to define extremism so that it’s the 98 percent against the 2 percent. We can’t define it so that it’s 50-50 or 60-40—then we’ll be fighting a civil war. Different opinions don’t make someone an extremist. It’s when they take no one’s advice, when they arrogate to themselves the right to define who is a Muslim or who is legitimate. When this person picks up the gun, he becomes a terrorist. This is how you make it 98 to 2.”
Four decades of promoting faith as a source of morale in the Pakistan Army had made it necessary to distinguish between “fundamentalism and extremism” in order to hold the army together, Kayani believed. That meant tolerating the conservative practice of individual faith while waging a counterrevolutionary campaign against those who challenged the state’s legitimacy. It was necessary to accept a rising tide of Islamism in the military and public life in order to maintain unity against Al Qaeda and Pakistani Sunni extremists.
“The army has to detach itself” from America, Kayani told his corps commanders. “This is our fight, our war. This is not a U.S. war.”28
Kayani suggested to Mullen that they convene a conference with senior commanders from both countries about joint strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Let’s have a very open discussion,” he proposed.
Mullen jumped at the suggestion. In late August, Kayani flew secretly across the Arabian Sea to the USS Abraham Lincoln, an American aircraft carrier. In addition to Mullen, the U.S. delegation included David Petraeus, who had just been appointed to lead Central Command, Admiral Eric Olson of Joint Special Operations Command, and General Martin Dempsey, then acting head of Central Command. Kayani brought along Major General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then director-general of military operations.
They talked for at least eight hours over two days, trading PowerPoint decks and maps. Kayani pledged to be “transparent” about his campaign plan in the tribal areas over the next two years. The army was in the midst of an undeclared surge of troops into Waziristan, Kayani said. He did not want to inflame the locals further by announcing the troop deployments but he had rotated in tens of thousands of infantry from mainland Pakistan or the Indian border. Kayani presented charts of “major operations” carried out by brigade-size units. With Musharraf gone, he had removed Aurakzai and abandoned the failed negotiations with Taliban and tribal leaders, yet there could be no purely “military solution” in the region.
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��We’re carrying out operations against our own people,” Kayani emphasized. “It has to be done subtly.”29
All Kayani had to do was read the newspapers to understand that many in Washington—probably many of the commanders on the Abraham Lincoln—believed that he was “hedging his bets” in Afghanistan by covertly enabling the Taliban’s revival. He tried once more to convince them that it wasn’t so. No outside power had ever controlled Afghanistan, Kayani often pointed out. Pakistan had a vitally important relationship with the West at stake. “We can’t be controlling Afghanistan,” he said. “That would mean we haven’t learned anything.”30
He warned Mullen and the generals, however: “Don’t expect too much because I can’t do everything.” Major ground operations in North Waziristan would have to wait as he built up forces, morale, and political support from civilian politicians. He needed help—technology, equipment, and patience. “If your expectation is here,” he said, gesturing at eye level, “and our abilities are there,” he said, dropping his hand, “the gap will be frustrating.”31
About that he was prescient. The American commanders on the Abraham Lincoln generally respected Kayani. He cared about soldiering. He was reticent and professional, if also hard to comprehend—literally, when he spoke, and more broadly, as a mystery of intentions. The conference also gave Mullen, Petraeus, and the others their first sustained look at Kayani’s trusted lieutenant, Ahmed Shuja Pasha. About five feet eight, clean-shaven, with a glint of gray in his eyes, Pasha displayed little of Kayani’s reticence. He was energetic, openly emotional. He clearly had the army chief’s confidence. Like Kayani, Pasha was the self-made product of a modest Punjabi middle-class family and had grown up without access to wealth or social privilege. Five weeks after the conference, Kayani named Pasha the next director-general of I.S.I. It would prove to be a momentous choice.
NINETEEN
Terror and the Deep State
The new I.S.I. chief’s family had come originally from India, in the Punjab, and had migrated to what was now Pakistan before Partition. Ahmed Shuja Pasha’s father attended Government College in Lahore and then moved his family to a village about forty miles from Islamabad. He taught high school there. He had three daughters and four sons; Ahmed was the youngest boy. They were not poor but it was a strain to raise seven children on a teacher’s salary. By the time Ahmed came of age the family had fallen under financial pressure. One of his brothers had enlisted in the air force; the other two brothers had joined the Pakistan Army. His father urged him to become a scholar, but Ahmed wanted to follow his brothers. He passed the admission exam for the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad, equivalent to West Point. He enrolled there during the spring of 1972. This was less than a year after Pakistan’s devastating defeat in its third war with India, a military and political catastrophe that led to the dismembering of the country and the birth of independent Bangladesh on the former territory of East Pakistan. The humiliation left many young Pakistani military officers thirsting for revenge against India.
Pasha graduated as a second lieutenant assigned to the infantry. Two of his brothers left the military after relatively short periods, one after falling ill, and the other following disciplinary infractions. (The third brother eventually became a brigadier.) Ahmed rose steadily. His assignments included a tour on the Line of Control in Kashmir, the militarized de facto border where Pakistani and Indian troops routinely skirmished and shelled one another. He was also selected for advanced military education abroad, at the German Staff College in Hamburg, where he learned German. He married and raised a family but was tested by tragedy just as his professional success seemed assured. His eldest son died in a car accident that took place on Pasha’s birthday. It was a wound so deep that it would surface unexpectedly and emotionally in conversation, even with American counterparts with whom he had complicated relations.
Pasha never studied in the United States. He did not send his surviving children abroad for college or graduate education, as many elite Pakistani families and generals did. By the time he reached his fifties and won promotion to general, Pasha’s decision to school his children in Pakistan had become a part of his identity. He seemed increasingly to define himself in opposition to the globalized salons of Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore, and he expressed contempt for their cosmopolitanism.1
“Your problem,” he once announced to a Pakistani journalist with whom he had become annoyed, “is that you’re an elitist, whereas I began my life as a son of a schoolteacher. I sat on a mat on the floor and learned to read and write. . . . We are homespun. We are nationalists. We are not like your Sandhurst friends. Not like Musharraf.”2
He saw the army as a kind of Spartan force defending—even as it was undermined by—Pakistan’s dissipated, privileged, landed families. “Why is the Army different from the rest of society?” he once asked a visitor. “Training is part of the answer, but there is more. It comes, in the end, from a feeling of responsibility. Young men pick this up, in good schools or in the Army. A lieutenant will say that he wants to repay what he has been given, that he wants to serve. The Army is very different from the rest of the country.”3
On September 11, Pasha was posted to a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone. After he returned to Pakistan as a two-star general, he seethed at Musharraf’s accession to American demands. On security policy, Pasha was essentially in the Mahmud Ahmed camp. He believed that if the United States negotiated with the Taliban, with Pakistan serving as an intermediary, the region might be stabilized and even Bin Laden could be located with the Taliban’s assistance. At private commanders’ conferences, Pasha made a habit of challenging Musharraf, to such an extent that he wondered if he would be fired. But he wasn’t. Instead he made a favorable impression on Kayani, who shared some of Pasha’s views but did not make such a display of them.4
Pasha had not worked closely with American generals or spies until 2006, when he became director-general of military operations. The United States had fine intentions for Pakistan, Pasha said repeatedly, and he appreciated all that American aid had done to support the country’s economy. Yet he also thought that American diplomats in Islamabad trapped themselves by overreliance on Pakistan’s debased elites. A relatively small circle of politicians, corrupt businessmen, and journalists misled the United States about Pakistan’s true character and assumptions, Pasha told his American interlocutors. In the years to come, some of the Americans who worked with Pasha would come to think of him as an extreme nationalist, overly emotional and prickly, a man who seemed to take everything personally. Pasha certainly made no apologies for his nationalism; he embraced it.5
Pasha stated his politics plainly and in line with the views of many educated, urbanized Pakistanis, in uniform and out: “I want to live in a country where my kids don’t have to choose between a Bhutto and a Sharif.” The Americans wanted Pasha to embrace Pakistan’s counterterrorism alliance with the United States more or less as Musharraf had done. Going further in 2008, they wanted him to recognize that I.S.I.’s tolerance of domestic militants and the Afghan Taliban was unsustainable and unacceptable. Pasha bristled at such talking points.
“Of course we have links with these guys,” Pasha would tell American counterparts when they pressed him about I.S.I.’s relations with the Haqqani network. “Of course we influence them. Of course you can have phone taps of us talking with them. We talk to them, I imagine, the way the F.B.I. talks to the Mafia. That doesn’t mean they do what we say.”
He came to understand that virtually every American he met with professionally believed that he was a liar and assumed that any particular claim he made about I.S.I.’s operations could be a lie. The suspicion galled him.6
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One hundred fifty-five Americans lost their lives in the Afghan war during 2008, an increase of about a third from the previous year. British, Canadian, and other N.A.T.O. casualties also rose to their highest levels since the war began. It
seemed all but guaranteed that 2009 would be worse. The Taliban had improved their fighting tactics. They had stopped investing great effort in ineffectual suicide bombers, reserving those dark networks more often for strategic assassinations of Afghan officeholders. They had learned to avoid massed infantry fighting that invited N.A.T.O. to call in its airpower on defenseless Taliban positions. They had ramped up their manufacture and use of improvised explosive devices detonated by pressure or remote control—roadside bombs, mines on footpaths, bicycle bombs, even the occasional donkey bomb. The Taliban mounted some 3,867 improvised explosive attacks during 2008, an increase of almost 50 percent over the previous year. Just as had been the case for Soviet forces during the 1980s, the improvised bombs and mines forced N.A.T.O. to restrict its movements, tempted forward commanders to hunker down on bases, and left platoons to struggle with the random devastation the bombs inflicted on comrades who lost legs, arms, and lives.7
David Kilcullen, the unconventional warfare specialist advising Condoleezza Rice, returned to Pakistan and Afghanistan that year. The Taliban clearly had professional help, he could now see. Their indirect fire from mortars and rockets had become more accurate. They had acquired heavy sniper weapons and optics, which demand training. Some units even had uniforms with badges of rank. He and other American analysts also started to grasp that the Taliban forces operated a formal rotation system—training in Pakistan, field deployment, and then rest and recuperation back in Pakistan. Pakistan Army and Frontier Corps troops along the Pakistani border were firing on American border posts to provide covering fire for the Taliban to infiltrate into Afghanistan and return—the same tactics Pakistani forces employed for Kashmiri militants along the Line of Control.8
