by Steve Coll
I.S.I. may have also sought a perverse sort of credibility through the Mumbai assault—to prove to its own restive clients that it was not going soft, and that it should not be considered the enemy. After I.S.I. lost control of important sections of its militant clients in 2007, not only were its offices targeted in suicide bombings, its legitimacy was increasingly ridiculed within radical Islamist circles. There was “I.S.I. jihad,” the dissenters argued, meaning pinprick strikes in Kashmir, and there was “the real jihad,” carried out by Taliban militias and allies against Western occupation forces in Afghanistan. I.S.I. officers could point to the Mumbai attack as evidence of their credentials: We are still with you, bolder than ever.
A few weeks after the attack, a new C.I.A. station chief arrived in Islamabad. John Bennett had graduated from Harvard University in 1975, served five years as a U.S. Marine officer, and then joined the C.I.A. In between management roles at Langley, he had served seventeen years abroad, mainly in Asia and Africa, including several previous tours as station chief.35
The U.S. embassy’s strategy after Mumbai was to present Pakistan’s government with as detailed evidence about the attack as could be released to such a poorly trusted foreign ally. Anne Patterson and the F.B.I. handed over copious amounts of “tearline information”—intelligence cleared for sharing with a foreign government, sometimes written in sanitized form below the “tear line” of a fuller classified cable—about the Pakistani company that had sold the outboard motor used on the dinghy bearing the terrorists to Nariman Point, as well as information from the surviving attacker, Kasab, who was now undergoing interrogation in Indian custody. Bennett presented to I.S.I. dossiers of evidence about the attack that India had distributed to international diplomats. The Americans again sought direct access to Lashkar commanders in I.S.I. custody. Pasha now said the F.B.I. and C.I.A. could submit written questions quietly and he would see what could be done. Pasha told Bennett “that the detainees refused to sign their confessions,” leaving I.S.I. to work with Pakistani police “to develop an evidentiary trail that would allow prosecution.” A familiar I.S.I. rope-a-dope to protect clients had begun.
The U.S. embassy hypothesized that Pakistan was “struggling to come to grips with the consequences of an attack that exposed I.S.I.’s decades-old policy.” Yet the best evidence was that Pakistan sought to minimize the fallout from Mumbai, not reverse I.S.I. policy. As ever, the default American approach remained engagement and hope for change, a hope based on the attraction of new leadership personalities in the army and at I.S.I. In the final days of the Bush administration, as the South Asia hands departed, they took with them a darker view, with Mumbai as the last straw in a seven-year journey from counterterrorism partnership to disillusionment. After Mumbai, Eliot Cohen concluded, “I think in some ways we were actually fighting the I.S.I.”36
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Bush wanted to visit Afghanistan one last time. Despite the war’s deterioration on his watch, he remained proud of the Taliban’s initial defeat and the elections that had brought in Karzai and a diverse parliament. He found it difficult to grasp that the Taliban were rooted in rural Pashtun society. In Bush’s mind, the Taliban were merely the promoters of “a fanatical, barbaric brand of Islam” characterized by the oppression of women and the denial of “the simplest pleasures—singing, clapping, and flying kites.” The National Intelligence Estimate of 2008, issued as Bush prepared for his farewell visit, tried to explain the Taliban’s comeback as partly the result of its perceived growing legitimacy, as an alternative to Karzai’s predatory government. In the Oval Office, before Bush departed for his final visit, Peter Lavoy presented these findings.37
“The Taliban? Legitimate?” Bush asked. “These same guys who are hanging people on soccer fields?” He rejected the conclusion. He could afford to stand firm; the war was no longer his to solve.
Flying by Black Hawk helicopter from Bagram to Kabul, Bush detected an acrid smell and realized it was coming from burning tires, “sadly, an Afghan way of keeping warm.” After meetings at the palace, Bush and Karzai shook hands and hugged. Bush made one pointed concession to the Afghan president. About I.S.I., he told Karzai, “You were right.”38
TWENTY
The New Big Dogs
Since the 1970s, the vice president of the United States has lived in a white nineteenth-century home on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, a tree-lined campus on a rise between Massachusetts and Wisconsin avenues. Dick Cheney, who had made a fortune in the oil industry, had furnished the home from his own resources. When he moved out, he took his furniture with him. Joe Biden had been living on a senator’s salary for thirty-six years. He commuted to Washington by train from his family home in Delaware. He had no spare sofas and beds grand enough for such a place when he moved in early in 2009. Navy personnel rummaged around some warehouses and pulled together a loosely coordinated, classical-looking assortment. In its air of improvisation, the house reflected its newest occupant.
Biden was sixty-six years old that winter, still vigorous and handsome with a full head of silver hair and an uncannily white smile. Obama had only arrived in Washington in 2005. It made sense for him to choose a running mate with Biden’s experience. The vice president–elect had served for a dozen years as chairman or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, traveling widely and meeting many world leaders. Yet Biden could be a frustrating source of counsel. He talked a lot and seemed to revel in the sound of his own voice. “I’m here to listen,” he would say to open a meeting and then he would hold forth for twenty minutes. He was not mean-spirited but he could be defensive and combative, as Hamid Karzai had discovered the previous January over dinner in Kabul. Because Biden spoke in such an undisciplined fashion and made a display of his vanity, he was also easy to underestimate. Over the decades he had rejected conventional Washington opinion on some important foreign policy dilemmas, such as whether Iraq could survive as a unified, multiethnic state after the Bush administration’s invasion (he did not think so) or the threats of leakage posed by Pakistan’s growing nuclear program (which Biden called out well before A. Q. Khan’s smuggling network was revealed). On those issues he had been lonely and right. Yet his judgment was hardly infallible. He had endorsed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Well before Inauguration Day, Obama asked Biden to investigate the time-sensitive choices he would face about the Afghan war. George W. Bush’s final strategy review had passed along a recommendation from the American field commander in Kabul, now General David McKiernan, that the United States dispatch thirty thousand additional troops to help provide security for the Afghan presidential election scheduled for the summer of 2009. Bush had deferred the general’s request so that Obama could decide. The president-elect had said during the campaign that he supported sending at least seven thousand additional American soldiers. The request for thirty thousand was a large demand. And Central Command’s generals said they needed an answer quickly, to deliver the troops to Afghanistan before summer.
“What do I need to put into Afghanistan now, so that when the summer arrives, we are not losing ground to the Taliban?” Obama asked Biden privately.1
Biden flew to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He invited Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, a vocal supporter of the war in Afghanistan, to come along. It was tempting for Biden to think that the problems the Obama administration would inherit were due in large measure to Bush’s coddling of Karzai and Pakistan’s generals, and that what was required was greater toughness. In the Senate, during 2008, Biden had coauthored a plan, eventually enacted, to deliver billions of dollars in additional aid to Pakistan’s civilian government, in an effort to stabilize the country and strengthen civilian rule over the army. He was well acquainted with I.S.I. leaders’ long record of unreliability. As vice president, he would be in a position to play enforcer to Obama’s statesman.
In Islamabad, on January 9, he and Graham met
Ashfaq Kayani and Ahmed Pasha. Biden told them that he “wanted to be sure the U.S. and Pakistan had the same enemy” as they moved ahead, meaning the Taliban. “What kind of Afghanistan would represent success for Pakistan?” Biden asked.
Kayani assured him that “Pakistan and the United States have a convergence of interests” in the Afghan war. Kayani’s goal was “a peaceful, friendly and stable Afghanistan. I have no desire to control Afghanistan. Anyone who wants to control Afghanistan is ignorant of history, since no one has ever controlled it.”
That phrase—“a peaceful, friendly and stable Afghanistan”—had become Kayani’s stock answer to international leaders inquiring about the Pakistan Army’s aims amid the Taliban’s revival. Kayani thought the phrase conveyed a neutral, cooperative approach that identified shared stability as the main goal. Yet Americans and Afghans heard his search for a “friendly” Afghanistan as a subtle demand for I.S.I. influence through the Taliban, an interpretation also well grounded in recent history.
Kayani told Biden that there had certainly been some “confusion” about I.S.I.’s pursuit of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan since the Soviet war. “Strategic depth” was the phrase a previous army chief had used to describe Pakistan’s pursuit of a friendly regime in Kabul. In fact, what it meant, Kayani said, was merely the search for a peaceful neighbor where Afghan Pashtuns were adequately accommodated in Afghan politics.
“The Taliban are a reality,” Kayani also said, using another of his stock phrases. Yet Pakistan did not want to go back to the 1990s or restore the Islamic Emirate in Kabul. The Taliban government of that era “had had a negative effect on Pakistan,” Kayani said.
Biden made clear that the C.I.A. did not trust the I.S.I. and held it partly responsible for the Taliban’s resurgence. Pasha said he was “hurt” by Biden’s inference. After his appointment to I.S.I. three months earlier, he assured Biden, he had enjoyed a “frank talk” with C.I.A. director Michael Hayden, and he had “sought the advice” of the Islamabad Station repeatedly, he added.
“I’m not going to revisit the past,” Biden said.
There is no reason for I.S.I. to be protecting “these people,” meaning the Taliban and its allies, Pasha insisted, and he had no interest in saving them.
“I need to know the situation has changed,” Biden said. He understood that the Pakistan Army had limited capacity, but if the Obama administration provided more aid, would anything really change?
“It’s important to know if we have the same enemy,” Biden repeated.2
In Kabul, Biden met Karzai at the palace and told him the Obama administration would offer a “new contract” to Afghanistan but that it would have conditions: Karzai had to address corruption and the opium problem.
Biden said these problems could be managed privately, without resort to public criticism or pressure. Karzai should stop publicly calling out the United States over civilian casualties caused by American forces and the White House would express its concerns about graft and drugs discreetly, too.
“Mr. President, if you will keep the volume down about civilian casualties, you won’t hear about corruption or the drug problem,” as Karzai recounted the exchange to aides. Yet the discussion was tense. Biden’s insulting theater of the previous year remained in Karzai’s mind.
“Mr. Vice President, we should do more about Pakistan, the sanctuaries,” Karzai argued.
“Mr. President, Pakistan is fifty times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.” Karzai received this analysis in stunned silence. Biden also told him, “The golden time of the Bush administration is gone.” The essence of his message, as Karzai summarized it after the meeting, was: “The Taliban is your problem, Al Qaeda is our problem.”3
No sooner had Biden departed for Washington than Karzai read anonymous quotes in the media, attributed to senior Obama administration officials, that America would “expect more” from Karzai on corruption. He also heard reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called Afghanistan a narco-state. So much for discretion, it seemed.
In private, Karzai now expressed resentment toward Washington continually. He struck his own cabinet as unstable. At an Afghan cabinet meeting on January 17, some ministers remarked to Karzai that the Afghan people were facing real difficulties.
“Are you with me or against me?” Karzai raved. “The U.S. can leave. What they are talking about is unacceptable. I will declare jihad and go to the mountains!”
The meeting broke up and the ministers asked one another what had just happened. Several made discreet calls to Washington: Someone should try to talk to Karzai and calm him down.
A few days later, an Afghan aide spoke to Karzai for two and a half hours. The president denied saying that he would “go to the mountains” but he complained that the United States “is not listening to us.” Karzai seemed enormously insecure about how the Obama administration would view him. He was on the eve of seeking reelection as president. His family’s security and financial interests were at stake in that election. Improbably enough, Obama seemed to favor Gul Agha Sherzai, his rival, whom Obama had met the previous summer and who claimed to be invited to his inauguration, according to Karzai’s information.4
Karzai summoned to the palace Kai Eide, a Norwegian diplomat who was the United Nations special representative to Afghanistan. Karzai told him, “They are after the two of us, the Americans. They are after you and I.”5
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Several weeks later, back in Washington, Biden invited half a dozen specialists on Afghanistan to dinner at the Naval Observatory residence. He was still ruminating over what the Obama administration should do. The issue he was most qualified to assess, he said, was domestic politics, and he knew one thing for certain: The American people were not going to sustain the Afghan war for very long. They were already weary. “This is not the beginning,” he said. “We’re already seven years in.”
The American economy was collapsing that winter, shedding jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Every morning, President Obama received two dark briefings: one about international threats from the director of national intelligence, and a second about the collapsing financial system. Seventy-five percent of American banks were underwater, Biden remarked. And here come hubristic generals from Central Command with polished stars on their shoulders, demanding the president’s signature on a costly troop escalation in Afghanistan, graveyard of empires. Obama’s position was like Kennedy’s in 1961, Biden thought, when Kennedy was pressed in his first months to endorse a C.I.A. invasion of Cuba. Obama reacted to the pressure coolly and deliberately. The president, Biden remarked, “has balls like pool cues.”6
Biden instinctively resisted the counterinsurgency doctrine General David Petraeus promoted around Washington that winter. He wondered if using the American military to stabilize Afghanistan made sense when the real problems lay in Pakistan. He leaned back in his chair and asked, at length, “what if” the United States poured all the new money it was being asked to direct toward Afghanistan into Pakistan, coupled with a push for regional diplomacy, to include bringing in the Chinese and the Saudis to put pressure on I.S.I. to change course once and for all? It was a radical notion, certainly unconventional. Of course, Biden’s idea would leave the Kabul government to fend for itself, which it could not do. A few weeks later, Obama settled on a seemingly safer course: He cut the Pentagon’s request for thirty thousand troops to seventeen thousand and approved sending them forward to try to hold a successful election.7
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On February 13, 2009, in the director’s conference room at Old Headquarters, Steve Kappes swore in Leon Panetta as C.I.A. director. Panetta, like Biden, was a seasoned Washington hand. He had served in Congress for sixteen years and another six in Bill Clinton’s White House, ultimately as chief of staff. He was a charming, profane first-generation Italian American who owned a small ranch outside Carmel, California. He had scan
t experience of intelligence. He barely knew Obama and considered his appointment to C.I.A. as “odd” and “not necessarily a great fit.”8
As with all outsiders arriving on the Seventh Floor, Panetta’s first challenge was to establish authority over a permanent C.I.A. workforce that had long ago learned to distrust and outlast political appointees. The task was complicated in his case by the reluctance of his predecessor, Mike Hayden, to leave. Hayden had hoped that his credentials as a nonpartisan career military officer might prompt Obama to leave him in place for a year or so, to oversee a transition in C.I.A. operations. But Hayden was an advocate for waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques that Obama intended to end. Hayden had pressured the incoming national security team to reconsider its position on interrogation. It was futile. Obama called Hayden early in the New Year and told him, euphemistically, “I don’t want to look back,” referring to the years of enhanced interrogation techniques. The new White House team wanted only Hayden’s departure as a symbolic change; they worked hard to keep Kappes and D’Andrea, at the Counterterrorism Center, in place. On his third day as president, January 22, Obama signed executive orders banning harsh interrogation techniques, which he called “torture,” to the consternation of many career C.I.A. officers who had convinced themselves over the previous eight years that they had engaged in no such thing.
Obama accepted Hayden’s advice on drone operations in Pakistan, however. The next day, while presiding over his first National Security Council meeting, the president approved C.I.A. proposals to continue lethal strikes against Al Qaeda targets under the same rules Bush had approved the previous summer. Hayden remained in charge of the C.I.A. for several weeks as Panetta awaited confirmation. He briefed Obama on targets in Waziristan under active surveillance. Two C.I.A. drones fired missiles at suspected Al Qaeda operatives that same day, January 23—one in South Waziristan and one in North Waziristan. Both attacks reportedly killed civilians. The strike in North Waziristan hit a private home in the village of Zeraki. According to an affidavit from two witnesses, the dead included an eighth-grade boy and schoolteachers. The South Waziristan strike killed a pro-government peace negotiator who was a tribal leader and four of his family members, entirely in error. When John Brennan, the former C.I.A. leader who had joined the White House as a senior counterterrorism adviser, briefed Obama about the civilian deaths, the president was incredulous, but ordered no immediate changes in C.I.A. procedures.9
