by Steve Coll
An immediate question was what to tell Hamid Karzai about the administration’s willingness to talk to the Taliban. The Afghan president was due to visit Washington in May. His trip offered an opportunity to repair the damage done by the 2009 election fiasco. The Conflict Resolution Cell had glimpses of I.S.I.’s campaign to reel Karzai in that spring. They believed Karzai favored talks with the Taliban. Offering support for talks might help to steer Karzai back to the American camp.
Holbrooke told his aides that he favored “small steps. We get in trouble when we say we want a peace deal with Mullah Omar.” Petraeus advocated waiting until 2011 to consider talks so that American forces could batter the Taliban and win defections.
Rubin quipped, “Negotiating when leverage is at the maximum is like selling your stocks at the top of the market—it’s desirable, but not easy to do. Negotiating takes a long time. We are already late if you want to be negotiating at top leverage.”
Tom Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, appeared at the next meeting, on April 27, and again two days later, when the cell reassembled. What should they tell Karzai? Holbrooke objected to Petraeus’s timetable. “We will be lame ducks by the beginning of 2011,” he said. “The real issue is, should we accelerate? This schedule is too slow. It will take a long time.”
“The Taliban want to talk to the United States,” Rubin emphasized.
Chris Wood agreed. He had met with Taliban commanders through the C.I.A.’s channels and “they want to hear it from an American. We can provide safe passage” to organized talks “and not confuse that with a ceasefire.”
“Pakistan wants to control this,” Holbrooke reiterated.
Yet the cost of any political deal with the Taliban that was influenced by Pakistan, said Sedney, would be the risk of “civil war in Afghanistan.” The former Northern Alliance leaders and large sections of the Afghan population would convulse if they believed I.S.I. had authored a peace deal that returned the Taliban even partially to power. The United States was in a difficult position, Sedney continued. I.S.I. believed the United States had aligned with India and the Northern Alliance, to win a military victory that would leave Afghanistan hostile to Pakistan. Simultaneously, Hamid Karzai interpreted Holbrooke’s embrace of Kayani and Pasha—the “strategic dialogue” and the flags-and-flowers tours of Washington that spring—as just the latest evidence that the United States planned to sell Karzai’s government out and cut a secret deal with Pakistan to exit the war. If they could not somehow resolve this chronic, triangular mistrust, they were unlikely to succeed—at war or at secret diplomacy.19
TWENTY-FIVE
Kayani 2.0
Faisal Shahzad, the son of an air force vice marshal, enjoyed the privileges and mobility common to families of senior Pakistani military officers. He studied at English-language schools in Karachi. He earned a master’s of business administration in the United States, married, fathered two children, and took a succession of corporate jobs in Connecticut, including one with Elizabeth Arden. Around the time he became a naturalized American citizen, at the age of twenty-nine, in 2009, Shahzad had grown disillusioned with the United States. He had suffered personal setbacks. He borrowed to buy a house but lost it to his bank during the Great Recession. Increasingly, he felt called to jihad against his adopted country. He decided to wage war, he explained later, “until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands.”1
Late in 2009, Shahzad contacted the Tehrik-i-Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban—the confederation that had murdered Benazir Bhutto. He traveled to Waziristan, stayed about six weeks, learned to build bombs, and accepted $5,000 in cash to cover expenses for an attack inside the United States. He flew back to America on February 2. His family left for Pakistan.
In late April, Shahzad bought a used Nissan Pathfinder, a sport utility vehicle. He packed its rear gun cabinet with white plastic bags of explosive fertilizer. He also installed two five-gallon canisters filled with gasoline, three canisters filled with propane, and 152 M-88 fireworks. He fused his vehicle bomb to a pair of alarm clocks.
On the afternoon of May 1, 2010, Shahzad drove to New York City. He brought along a 9mm Kel-Tec rifle folded up in a laptop case, in the event he had to fight the police. Around 6:00 p.m., Shahzad parked near the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, in the heart of Times Square. It was a warm evening. Revlon had sponsored its annual Run/Walk for Breast Cancer earlier that day, drawing tens of thousands for an opening ceremony that had featured Jimmy Fallon. Run/Walk volunteers still mingled with thick crowds of tourists as the sun fell behind the Hudson River. Shahzad kept the Pathfinder’s engine running, grabbed the bag holding his rifle, and walked toward Grand Central Terminal, listening for an explosion.
It didn’t come. He was a poor bomb maker. The car smoked, drawing the police, who quickly ordered an evacuation. When the bomb squad eventually broke into the vehicle, officers found an incriminating car key Shahzad had left behind. The police traced him in two days. On May 3, the F.B.I. discovered his name on the manifest of an Emirates Airlines flight from New York to Dubai. They stopped the plane as it taxied toward a runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Shahzad soon pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.2
The near miss jolted the Obama administration. The previous Christmas Day, a Nigerian jihadi loyal to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen, had tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet as it landed in Detroit. The suicide attacker’s bomb, stuffed in his underwear, had fizzled. Now again, just five months later, the White House found itself one mediocre terrorist away from a bloody made-for-TV crisis.
If Shahzad’s bomb had gone off, the fact that his attack had been prepared and funded in Waziristan could have forced the Obama administration into an escalating military confrontation with Pakistan. Republicans in Congress, seeking to take back the House of Representatives during an angry midterm election year, would likely have demanded action—heavier bombing inside Pakistani territory, Special Forces raids, or even an American ground invasion to clear out Taliban and Al Qaeda training camps. Shahzad’s fusing failure reduced the pressure but did not eliminate it. How should they convert this crisis into an opportunity? Perhaps if Kayani and Pasha truly understood that another terrorist attempt on American ground might lead the United States to war against Pakistan, they might at last reconsider I.S.I.’s position. This was perhaps the best leverage they had, short of breaking relations. Some of the Pakistan hands in the administration thought of it this way: They wanted Kayani to wake up every morning concerned that this was the day the United States had lost patience and decided to come after Pakistan.
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Stan McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry worked closely with Hamid Karzai to prepare for his state visit to Washington, scheduled for May 10. Holbrooke flew out to Kabul to join the preparations. Throughout, Karzai failed to mention that he was in private contact with Pasha and I.S.I.
On May 9, Pasha flew secretly to Kabul and rode to the Arg Palace for what Karzai described to the Obama administration, a few days later, as a “twelve-minute” one-on-one discussion. To some of Karzai’s aides, who later briefed American counterparts, the visit seemed to be Pasha’s latest opaque effort to recruit the wobbly Karzai to I.S.I.’s priorities. It isn’t fully clear what Pasha and Karzai discussed. Pakistan wanted peace and stability in Afghanistan, Pasha assured Karzai again, according to one account. Pakistan would not submit to “pressure by others,” meaning the United States. You are the president of Afghanistan and we support you, Pasha said.3
The next morning, Karzai boarded a U.S. military transport for the long flight to Andrews Air Force Base. That evening, at Blair House, Hillary Clinton hosted a state dinner. Only then did Karzai mention Pasha’s latest visit and entreaties.
As Vikram Singh, one of Holbrooke’s aid
es, put it, I.S.I.’s plan was to recruit Karzai to work with Pakistan exclusively and then bring the United States in after a peace settlement with the Taliban had been forged. The Obama administration’s plan, on the other hand, was to talk to the Taliban in secret about a settlement, then bring I.S.I. into the picture afterward. In this tug-of-war, Karzai looked like a kind of floppy rag doll, holding the middle of the rope.
Pasha had another agenda during his briefly secret visit to Kabul. The I.S.I. worried, because of the Times Square bombing attempt, that Karzai would defame Pakistan repeatedly during his state visit and perhaps rally Obama into action against Islamabad. To preempt that, Pasha offered Karzai “partnership without conditions.” It was an effort to persuade him to bite his tongue while in Washington, Karzai’s chief of staff, Umer Daudzai, thought.4
On May 11, Karzai joined Clinton, Lute, Holbrooke, and other American officials at the State Department. It seemed clear that Karzai imagined he had great leverage and was cleverly using his indecision to extract concessions from the United States. He seemed unaware that what he was really doing was driving the Obama administration mad, undermining the president’s faith in the cause of an independent, democratic Afghanistan. Karzai’s tone was both friendly and threatening. “Afghanistan needs to rally people against extremism and for partnership with the U.S.,” he said. “We will pay a price and work with the U.S.,” but only if Washington was invested in Afghanistan for more than just a war on terrorism.
“It’s not just the war on terrorism,” Clinton assured him.
Karzai repeated his point: “If the U.S. is only in Afghanistan for the War on Terror,” then he needed to partner with Pakistan. “If the U.S. has a broader purpose, we will be with you.” He added, “Pakistan wants you out.”5
Lute asked Karzai what he thought Pasha’s latest offer of “unconditional support” to Afghanistan really meant.
Two months ago, Karzai answered, Pasha had said there were two preconditions for an agreement: Reduce or eliminate India’s presence in Afghanistan and create political accommodations for Pashtuns. The latter goal was implausible, Karzai had concluded, he said. It would be “suicide” for any Afghan leader to compromise on some of the political issues most important to Pakistan, such as the future of the Afghan-Pakistan border.
“Maybe Pakistan is not capable of changing,” Clinton said. “Maybe it needs enemies” so that the army and I.S.I. could retain power.
Karzai leaned in to the secretary of state. “What is your objective?” he asked. “Either you are with us forever, or I make a deal with Pakistan.”
By “forever,” Karzai explained, “we want the same relationship as Israel,” or at least the same as Egypt and South Korea. Those American allies enjoyed long-term defense guarantees and robust arms sales. Republicans and Democrats alike accepted those countries as essential allies. Was Afghanistan in the same category?6
There was no way for Clinton to answer Karzai’s questions directly. It would have been awkward to explain, in any event, that the policy reviews undergirding Obama’s dispatch of tens of thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan had actually concluded that the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the elimination of Al Qaeda on Pakistani soil were America’s only truly “vital interests” in the region. The United States had declared publicly, again and again, its enduring commitment to Afghanistan, yet it was doubtful whether Obama and bipartisan leaders in Congress regarded Afghanistan’s importance as comparable to South Korea or Israel.
They discussed the prospects for talking to the Taliban. “How do we fight and die while also pursuing peace talks?” Clinton asked.
There were Taliban determined to be “inclusive and take manpower away from the I.S.I.,” Karzai answered. These Taliban were “all for peace without Al Qaeda.”7
With the Conflict Resolution Cell now formed secretly at the White House, Richard Holbrooke’s objective was to persuade Karzai to “authorize direct contacts” between the United States and the Taliban, as he now put it. But Karzai refused. Pakistan controlled the Taliban. Peace talks had to involve the I.S.I., Karzai believed. There was no other way because the Pakistani service controlled the Taliban.
He reached out to a tray before him. “Picking up Mullah Omar for them is like picking up this cookie,” Karzai said. The Taliban were just a bunch of “country bumpkins,” of no consequence without their Pakistani patrons, he added at another point.8
Holbrooke met separately during the visit with Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, whom Holbrooke had unsuccessfully promoted as an alternative to Karzai the previous year. The I.S.I. believes “that without Massoud, the Taliban will sweep through” to power and take Kabul when the time is ripe, Atmar said.
Holbrooke said that the problem was that in order to turn off the Taliban insurgency, Kayani probably wanted a civilian nuclear deal comparable to the one the Bush administration granted India, and also a major free trade agreement to lift Pakistan’s economy. Yet these demands were politically unrealistic in Washington. To give Islamabad what it wanted is a “deep impossibility,” Holbrooke said.
The Times Square attack was “important,” he went on, because the case history showed that the Pakistani Taliban now posed a direct threat to the U.S. homeland. The Afghan Taliban did not. “Faisal Shahzad’s phone numbers all led to the T.T.P.,” the Pakistani Taliban, “not Al Qaeda.”
Holbrooke asked Atmar a question that had been on his mind all year. “Would the elimination of Mullah Omar change anything?”
“No,” Atmar predicted. The I.S.I. would find a way to manage a leadership succession within the Taliban, he implied.9
After all the hours of preparation, after all the flags and flowers and one-on-one time with Karzai, the Afghan president’s state visit left Clinton frustrated and sarcastic. Obama, Lute, and the National Security Council had displayed a “mania” for process—“threads,” “resolution cells,” and the like, Clinton complained to aides. “I wouldn’t do it this way if I were president,” she declared pointedly.
What was the “end-state vision” that the United States sought in Afghanistan? Clinton asked. That was perhaps why Karzai pressed so hard for Israel-like guarantees—perhaps he sensed correctly that the Obama administration did not know the answer. “Pakistan knows what end state they want,” Clinton said. “They’ve gotten more threatening to Afghanistan recently. They are letting loose the Haqqani network. But we don’t know our end-state vision because we don’t have one. We don’t have a Pakistan strategy or a reconciliation strategy. Just words and process.”10
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Ashfaq Kayani asserted that he was being misunderstood. His efforts to recruit Karzai into a separate peace negotiation might be competitive with Washington but, in fact, American and Pakistani interests were compatible, he believed. To prove it, after Karzai’s Washington visit, he said he was willing to talk to Karzai openly, with the United States in the room.
McChrystal invited Kayani to Kabul on May 26 to spend time with Karzai alone, with the American general standing by to facilitate or mediate. By this time McChrystal had warmed to the possibility of ending the war through a negotiated settlement. “They didn’t give me enough to win outright,” he told an aide that spring, referring to troop levels, and Karzai’s government “is not going to win the battle of legitimacy.” McChrystal did not think that the United States could settle the war but he thought he might be able to set conditions for an agreement between Kayani and Karzai.
Kayani flew in bearing a concession. The general said that he would no longer describe Pakistan’s goal as the establishment of a “friendly” government in Kabul. Pakistan would merely seek a “stable, secure” Afghanistan. Kayani regretted that his earlier statements about seeking a “friendly” Afghanistan had been heard as code for the Taliban’s restoration. That wasn’t his goal, he insisted.11
The army chief sold Karzai, who was “glowing
” afterward, Ambassador Eikenberry reported to Washington. McChrystal’s view was that Karzai and Kayani were moving ahead as a pair to find an understanding despite serious doubts among their advisers. Amrullah Saleh and Rangin Spanta were among those in Karzai’s cabinet who opposed seeking a deal with Pakistan. Spanta felt that such an agreement had to be grounded in equality and that Pakistan wanted to dictate its conditions to Kabul. In Islamabad, Pasha and I.S.I. had their own doubts. Yet Kayani and Karzai “showed that they want a relationship,” in McChrystal’s estimation. The C.I.A. circulated analysis that month reporting that “Kayani has been pushing for reconciliation” with Afghanistan since 2004, but that Musharraf had overruled him. Kayani was probing now for what kind of agreement might be possible. “Pakistan doesn’t know what its red lines are” in pursuit of a deal, according to the C.I.A.’s take. If Pakistan’s army could achieve by negotiations what it had tried and failed since the late 1980s to achieve by force—a stable Afghanistan that was not regarded by the corps commanders as an ally of India—it might welcome all kinds of unlikely bedfellows in a political settlement, including the Panjshiris.12
Yet it was obvious that Kayani and Pasha remained hostile to some of the key figures in Karzai’s security cabinet, particularly Amrullah Saleh. Karzai’s own doubts were growing about Saleh, partly because of Saleh’s close ties to the C.I.A.13
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The Loya Jirga Tent on the flowered grounds of Kabul Polytechnic University had become a symbol of a revived Afghanistan. The tent covered an area the size of a soccer field, serviced by a generator and equipped with Internet connections. That spring, Karzai organized a National Consultative Peace Jirga at the tent complex, to symbolically engage more than 1,500 delegates around the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. As with so much else, Karzai’s approach was instinctive, tactical, and erratic, but also deft and hard to derail. He had fashioned international support for his peace initiative. The United Nations, Great Britain, and other European Union governments openly backed Karzai’s search for a political solution to the war, even if they lacked faith in his ability to find one.
