by Steve Coll
The December review’s outcome, after so much contention, was incoherent. The review ratified—but did not prioritize—five American “lines of effort” in Afghanistan. One was to continue to degrade the Taliban militarily and build Afghan capacity to fight the war. The second was to execute a transition to place Afghan forces in the lead combat role. A third was to negotiate a long-term strategic and security agreement with Afghanistan that might allow some American forces to stay behind after 2014. The fourth was to try to stabilize Afghanistan through regional diplomacy. And the fifth was to pursue political reconciliation with the Taliban, through direct talks.19
These lines of policy were not integrated into a single plan. Petraeus could fight his hard war of night raids as aggressively as he saw fit, and the State Department could try to negotiate a peace deal through Tayeb Agha, but there would be no effort to unify those strategies. Petraeus rejected Holbrooke’s premise that there was a deal worth pursuing with Tayeb Agha; Holbrooke rejected Petraeus’s premise that counterinsurgency doctrine could succeed.
Holbrooke died in the hospital on the evening of Monday, December 13. Three days later, Obama appeared with Gates and Clinton in the White House briefing room to present summary findings of the president’s latest Afghan war review. Obama acknowledged Holbrooke, “whose memory we honor and whose work we’ll continue.”
Obama delivered the positive spin about Afghanistan promoted in the Situation Room by Petraeus, Gates, and Clinton. “This continues to be a very difficult endeavor,” the president admitted, yet “we are on track to achieve our goals.” He detected “considerable gains toward our military objectives” on the ground in Afghanistan, although the progress was “fragile and reversible.” As for Pakistan, Obama was pleased that its government increasingly “recognizes that terrorist networks in its border regions are a threat to all our countries,” and he hoped to “deepen trust and cooperation.”20
All in all, it was an assessment that might have been delivered—and sometimes was—in 2006 or 2007. Whatever Obama’s private doubts about the Afghan war he had escalated, in public, at least, he was willing to speak optimistically. It was a practice soon to expire. The gossamer illusions of American partnership with Pakistan and with Hamid Karzai would be exposed in the coming year as never before.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Hostages
By late 2010, the estrangement between the C.I.A. and I.S.I. had become so deep that officers on both sides resorted to dismal metaphors to describe its descent. The liaison was like a bitter marriage that neither party had the will to break. It was like a fingernail on a dead man’s hand that kept growing when all other life had ceased. The more the C.I.A. and the Pentagon worked with Ahmed Pasha, and the more they eavesdropped on his conversations, the less they thought of his capabilities. Pasha texted Ruggiero and others on open cell phones; Ruggiero gave him a code name, “The Shoe.” He seemed more emotional and sensitive than ever.
The new American ambassador to Islamabad was Cameron Munter, a Ph.D. historian and career foreign service officer who had previously served in Iraq. As he settled into the embassy, he took a more sympathetic view of the I.S.I. chief. He saw Pasha’s outlook as the product of genuine feelings of betrayal. The I.S.I. chief had taken considerable professional risks to forge a closer relationship with the C.I.A., including putting up with unilateral drone operations that killed Pakistani citizens. Yet despite such cooperation, Pasha had often been treated as an incorrigible enemy. They had to deal with him as he was, a strong nationalist who might be cooperative from time to time. For holding these views, Munter was accused by C.I.A. counterparts of being soft on Pakistan.1
For his part, although he maintained and valued personal friendships with American counterparts in Islamabad, Pasha had more than wearied of the pressure and stubbornness of official visitors. One after another they arrived at I.S.I. headquarters or Army House with their diplomatic démarches, their complaints and their requests for more visas, more military offensives against Pakistani citizens, more access to Taliban prisoners. They constituted a diverse bureaucratic parade: ambassadors, special envoys, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, generals, C.I.A. directors, C.I.A. deputy directors, I.S.A.F. commanders, Central Command generals. Pasha and Kayani found these formalized meetings repetitive at best, offensive at worst, and, overall, less and less useful. They felt that most of their American visitors understood Pakistan and Afghanistan poorly. Yet the Americans’ cloak of global power made them hubristic, rarely inclined to listen sincerely to local knowledge.2
Around this time, U.S. intelligence distributed to allied spy services a memo laying out the Pakistani spy service’s day-to-day priorities, based on U.S. collection of intelligence about I.S.I. The document offered a snapshot of what I.S.I. really cared about. The service’s number one priority was collecting information about Pakistani president Asif Zardari—his scheduled meetings, his conversations, his political activities. A second priority involved suppressing the Pakistani Taliban. A third was to monitor and assess a medley of militant groups active against India, including indigenous Maoists operating in poor areas of India’s interior. The list of priorities did not include Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban, the enemies that animated the Obama administration. The United States might still have a few overlapping interests with the Pakistan Army, but not many.3
In mid-November 2010, American relatives of victims of the Mumbai terrorist attack named Pasha as a defendant in a lawsuit seeking compensation for the families’ losses. Pasha blew up in private about the suit. The Americans tried to assure him that he would not be subject to arrest when he next traveled to the United States. This was a civil case in a court outside the control of the Obama administration, they explained. Pasha didn’t buy it. If you really thought of me as a friend, this wouldn’t happen, he said. Pasha’s young adult children warned him to be careful about traveling to the United States ever again—this looked like a trick, one that could end with his arrest. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. assured Pasha he would not be bothered when he next flew to Washington, to attend Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, where Pasha felt a personal need to be present. Yet he remained on guard.4
A month later, an Islamabad human rights lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, who had previously worked on army-backed investigations into Bhutto family corruption, filed a lawsuit against the United States on behalf of victims of C.I.A. drone attacks. The court papers named as a defendant the C.I.A.’s Jonathan Bank, breaking Bank’s cover as station chief. Akbar said he had obtained the name through local journalists and had developed his case without any contact with I.S.I. The C.I.A. doubted that. This was Pasha’s revenge for the Mumbai lawsuit, some at the agency concluded. Pasha pleaded innocence; the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad was as much diplomat as spy and enjoyed hardly any cover. In any event, Bank received death threats. Akbar’s car and office were mysteriously trashed. C.I.A. deputy director Michael Morell flew to Pakistan. At the end of his scheduled visit, Bank followed his boss onto his unmarked jet and departed the country, without telling Pasha he was pulling out.5
The bad voodoo spread to street-level operations. By the end of 2010 there were 285 American military personnel in the country. More than half were Special Operations forces. They were notionally on a training mission but they had effectively created a forward operating base that neither Kayani nor Pasha could monitor or control. The goal in some sections of the Pentagon was to eventually persuade the Pakistanis to grant the United States “Title 10” authority, a reference to the section of federal law that governs American armed forces. This authority would allow the U.S. military to operate on Pakistani soil as it did in Afghanistan, which would be unprecedented in Pakistani history. There were also dozens of C.I.A. case officers, temporary duty officers, and security personnel in Pakistan. The C.I.A. and Pentagon personnel often applied for visas as “diplomats” but then arrived at Islamabad International in carg
o pants and T-shirts, inked with tattoos.6
“Do you think we’re stupid?” a Pakistani official asked a State Department intelligence analyst over lunch one day during this period. “Do you think we think those three hundred visas are for first and second secretaries?”7
American intelligence officers and diplomats with long experience in Pakistan were appalled by the rough arrogance of contractors and street surveillance specialists rotating through. The old hands were used to floating around Pakistan on their own, but now, whenever they wanted to visit carpet shops or bookstores, even in placid Islamabad shopping centers, they had to bring along personal security detail officers to keep them safe. Children would run up to shine the Americans’ shoes or beg for a few rupees and the contractors would shove the kids out of the way—conduct no American diplomat would have countenanced a decade before. The contractors drove around aggressively in S.U.V.s, talking on their Motorola radios as if they were deep in enemy territory, sideswiping or threatening Pakistani drivers who bothered them, calling them “monkeys” or “niggers” and getting spun up about any offense. The contractors and TDY types didn’t know anything about Pakistan or care. For the few Obama administration Urdu-conversant hands who had known the country before September 11 and were supposed to be fashioning a durable relationship in difficult circumstances, it all seemed embarrassing and ugly. The C.I.A. station was as infected as the Pentagon’s mission, some of them felt. These diplomats and intelligence analysts wondered: What happened to the agency’s elegant, light touch of old?8
American policy toward Pakistan remained on expansive automatic pilot. The State Department embarked on a massive building project on the Islamabad embassy grounds. The project called for every existing building to be replaced. The compound would grow from 60,000 square feet of office space to more than 600,000 square feet. Two Brutalist-inspired residential towers would ensure that American personnel would never have to travel outside the walls unless they wished. The design was a metaphor for misguided policy, Dave Smith, the D.I.A. veteran remarked: They were building Fort Apache.
When he went over the building plans, Munter cabled the office for the undersecretary of state for management, warning, “This is going to be a white elephant. It is going to be half-empty.” In reply, the office said it was expensive to change plans. He would need hard facts about the projected U.S. presence in 2016 or beyond in order to scale back. “I have no hard facts,” Munter admitted. “I have only trends.” They were bad and about to get worse.9
—
The safe house from which Raymond Davis operated early in 2011 lay in Scotch Corner, an upscale Lahore neighborhood of flowering bushes and vine-draped brick-walled homes. Davis was typical of the new militarized American cadres in Pakistan. He had grown up in Big Stone Gap, in rural Virginia, wrestled and played football in high school, joined the Army, migrated to the Special Forces, and then retired and joined Blackwater, which sent him as a security contractor to Iraq. At the time of his Pakistan tour, Davis was thirty-six years old and working exclusively for the C.I.A. He was a barrel-chested, clean-shaven street operator whose agency contract involved setting up and providing security for career case officers when they held “hostile meets” with paid reporting agents in cars or cafés. He also conducted photographic surveillance of Pakistani targets and may have done the odd black-bag job, judging by the gear he carried. Since Mumbai, the C.I.A. base in Lahore had been assigned to watch and document Lashkar-i-Taiba, the Kashmir militants whose cadres had carried out that mass murder. C.I.A. contractors photographed and helped N.S.A. colleagues eavesdrop on the homes of I.S.I. and Pakistan Army officers who met with Lashkar leaders.10
On Thursday, January 27, 2011, at midday, Raymond Davis drove out from Scotch Corner by himself, steering through Lahore’s smoky traffic in an unmarked Honda VTI. He had a digital camera, a Motorola radio linked to the C.I.A. base in Lahore, a G.P.S. device, a 9mm Glock pistol, five magazines of ammunition, a mobile phone, a small telescope, an infrared lighting device, wire cutters, a flashlight attached to headgear, another flashlight, cigarettes, a passport, various bank documents, a little over 5,000 Pakistani rupees, and 126 U.S. dollars. He was conducting a routine surveillance check of routes to and from meeting points for reporting Pakistani agents. At a traffic light on Jail Road, a ten-lane divided expanse lined by stores and auto dealers, Davis noticed two men on a motorcycle behind him who appeared to be following him. He pulled out his pistol and set it on the passenger seat. He drove on toward Qartaba Chowk, a massive roundabout where five main roads converge. As he idled at a red light, the motorcycle pulled up. The passenger flashed a 30-bore pistol. Davis picked up his Glock and fired five times through his windshield, killing one of the two men, Mohammed Fahim, who was nineteen. The second man, Faizan Haider, fled on foot. Davis got out of his car, followed for about ten yards and shot Haider dead.11
Calmly, he retrieved his camera and took five photographs of the dead men, apparently to document that one of the victims had a gun. A crowd gathered. Davis’s picture taking inflamed them and they began to shout. Davis radioed C.I.A. colleagues for help but decided to drive away. He steered past the crowd. Outraged Pakistani bystanders jumped in cars and onto motorcycles to trail him.12
The C.I.A. base chief in Lahore had been stationed at the American consulate since the previous summer. The consulate was on Davis Road, so named during the British colonial period. The chief knew the city well by now. He ordered two armed colleagues on a rescue mission. They roared down Jail Road in a Land Cruiser with tinted windows and phony license plates.13
Ibad ur Rehman, thirty-two, steered his motorcycle in the opposite direction, toward the Mall. He owned a small shop in the wealthy Gulberg area of Lahore, where he sold cosmetics, handbags, and upscale accessories; two of his brothers, who lived in Britain, had invested in his business. The Rehman brothers had grown up in the Punjab’s precarious middle class; their father edited an Urdu children’s magazine called Uncle Moon. Ibad was to marry in a month.14
The driver of the C.I.A.’s Land Cruiser saw congestion where the crowd had formed a few minutes earlier around Raymond Davis and the two dead men, who still lay in pools of blood. The driver decided to jump the median strip and speed against traffic. As he hopped the median he struck Ibad Rehman’s motorcycle; the shopkeeper flew skyward and landed on the asphalt. He died. His bike lodged in the S.U.V.’s grill. The C.I.A. driver backed his vehicle into a wall as he tried to discard the motorcycle. A traffic warden threatened to stop the vehicle, but one of the Americans opened the door and brandished a weapon. The C.I.A. team fled back to the U.S. consulate without Raymond Davis. The men tossed live ammunition, a pair of gloves, and a black mask out of their vehicle.15
Pakistani police arrested Raymond Davis near Old Anarkali Square, about a mile and a half from where he had killed Fahim and Haider. The victims turned out to have long records of petty crime and armed robbery. Their possessions included Pakistani rupees, Japanese yen, Omani rials, five mobile phones, and a pistol pouch. Zulfiqar Hameed, the senior superintendent of police for Lahore, took charge of the case that afternoon. He was a well-educated career police officer who spoke English fluently and enjoyed cordial relations with the American consulate. Hameed sealed off the several crime scenes, bagged physical evidence, and ordered witnesses interviewed. He was afraid that an angry mob might break into the police station where Davis was being held, so he moved the American to an unmarked safe house used by the police to store sensitive witnesses and prisoners.
“Seeing the situation, I shot at them in self-defense,” Davis told one of Hameed’s colleagues.
Davis intimated that he was afraid that I.S.I. would frame him for unjustifiable murder.
“This is not a witch hunt,” Hameed assured him. “We’re not after anyone. We’re trying to investigate this as police professionals.”16
Carmela Conroy, a former prosecutor from eastern Washington State who h
ad traded law for the Foreign Service, was the consul general in Lahore. She was an attractive, fashion-forward woman who, as part of her public diplomacy efforts, joined haute couture shows for Lahore’s wealthy elite and sat for glamour spreads in the local papers. She had extensive contacts in the city. Her staff dialed police officers and politicians frantically that Thursday to try to assure that Davis was kept safe.
As soon as the C.I.A. team that had run over Rehman in the Land Cruiser returned to the consulate, Conroy huddled with the base chief to discuss what to do with them. They considered whether it was right to evacuate the two colleagues immediately. Jonathan Bank’s experience was fresh in their minds. His successor as Islamabad station chief, Mark Kelton, had arrived in Islamabad only a few days earlier. He had joined the C.I.A. in 1981 and spent a dozen years initially overseas, including in Africa. From 1999, he had worked periodically in and on Russia and had rotated to Islamabad from Moscow. That was a posting that required operating under the nose of a hostile service, where mistakes with agents or sources were matters of life and death. Kelton knew about the ongoing assessment of a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where it was possible that Osama Bin Laden was hiding. He had to supervise that surveillance operation from Islamabad Station that winter while keeping the secret from virtually everyone else at the embassy and also managing I.S.I. on the assumption that its officers or leadership might be knowledgeable about Bin Laden’s sanctuary.
“Don’t give an inch,” he told Munter when the news about Davis broke. “Don’t tell them anything.” Pakistan was a dangerous place; so far as Kelton could tell, Davis had acted properly. He was on a mission that was designed to keep American soldiers in Afghanistan safe; he deserved full support.
