by Steve Coll
Now that the Obama administration had briefed Karzai on the discussions with Tayeb Agha, Karzai shared his own information. His sketch of Tayeb Agha was intriguing. There seemed to be no question that Tayeb Agha was close to Mullah Mohammad Omar’s extended family. There was also agreement that Agha had emerged as chief negotiator because of the split within the Taliban’s leadership that followed Mullah Baradar’s arrest in Pakistan, early in 2010. According to one account, Tayeb Agha shared an office in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian republic, with two Taliban colleagues. Also, the Americans reviewed Saudi-sourced claims about Tayeb Agha’s relations with Iran. These included an account that the envoy had traveled to Iran and another that Iran was paying Mullah Mansour, the Taliban number two, as much as $800,000 a month to back the movement’s insurgency against N.A.T.O. In geopolitical terms, all these unconfirmed reports made sense: Everyone in the region, not just I.S.I., wanted the United States to fail militarily in Afghanistan, out of fear that if N.A.T.O. succeeded, America would be able to position forces in the region for decades, on air bases from Bagram to Shindand, near Iran’s border. Yet because of Saudi Arabia’s endless slander campaign against Iran, it was difficult to evaluate the credibility of the reports tying Mansour and Tayeb Agha to Tehran. The envoy had aligned himself more transparently with the Qataris.
On April 1, Hillary Clinton delivered to the White House an updated plan to advance the Taliban talks, based on Grossman’s mid-March memo. Grossman also worked up a sixteen-page paper, an outline for the next meeting with Tayeb Agha, which Frank Ruggiero would again conduct. On Tom Donilon’s advice, the document went straight to Obama, without the burden of another round of interagency argument. Increasingly, the president personally monitored the peace negotiations.17
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The United States had its own extremists. In late March in Gainesville, Florida, the Reverend Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center staged a “trial” of the Koran, found it guilty, and burned a volume in his sanctuary. The act sparked violent protests in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Early in April, Obama spoke to Karzai again by secure video. His agenda included corruption at Kabul Bank and Tayeb Agha, but he felt compelled to say something about the Florida minister’s incitement. “I condemn Pastor Jones,” Obama said. “There is no room for bigotry. But no one should direct their anger at innocent people.”
Karzai reminded him, “Eight years ago we were talking about cooperation among civilizations.” That seemed a distant memory.
“We’re planning a third meeting with Tayeb Agha,” Obama informed Karzai. To build confidence, they planned to offer the Taliban representative the possibility of a political office for the movement. The Obama administration would prefer the office to be in Kabul, but if he refused, they would insist that Karzai’s representatives join in future talks, wherever they were held.
Karzai remained deeply worried that the United States would sell him out by talking separately to the Taliban and Pakistan. He asked about planning under way for a conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, in December 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary of the agreement that had brought Karzai to power. “Is Bonn a peace conference?” Karzai asked. He meant, Would it be the forum where the Americans tried to finalize a deal with the Taliban?
Obama answered that they would all try to work together on an agenda for Bonn. He reminded Karzai that the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan would commence soon, in July. This was a time for political creativity. There was some discussion under way about whether the Taliban should be invited to Bonn, Obama acknowledged.
Karzai was adamant: “Afghanistan should be represented only by the government of the state.” It was a warning. The Obama administration was prepared to talk directly to the Taliban, without Karzai, as the Taliban demanded. Yet the administration maintained a pretense that negotiations would be “Afghan led.” Karzai had leverage over Washington and he knew it.18
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Pasha flew in to Washington in mid-April. He met with Panetta to deliver a message: The C.I.A. needed to shrink its presence in Pakistan. He and Kayani wanted dozens of case officers in the country to leave. They would not be granting visas for replacements. The relationship between the C.I.A. and I.S.I. should be “reset,” Pasha said. The same was true for the Pentagon. The Pakistanis would cut the number of U.S. military personnel stationed in Pakistan roughly in half. They would allow contractors who maintained military equipment purchased from the United States, such as F-16 fighter-bombers, but they would send the counterinsurgency trainers and special operators home. The C.I.A. should rely on I.S.I.’s intelligence and stop collecting intelligence on its own.19
The timing was awkward and so was the discussion. Pasha said later that he got into a “shouting match” with Panetta. In any event, the meeting took place amid high tension. Obama was that week considering two options for striking the house in Abbottabad occupied by “the Pacer,” the tall bearded man who walked daily in the courtyard. In one scenario, two stealth B-2 bombers would drop sixteen precision-guided, two-thousand-pound bombs on the site—a massive amount of ordnance that would guarantee everyone inside was killed. In the second plan, SEALs would conduct a helicopter-borne assault. Obama had been leaning toward bombing but hadn’t decided.
The president had reached one decision about Pakistan’s involvement in any operation, however. There would be none. There was too much danger that I.S.I. would leak the information and allow Bin Laden to escape. Also, what if the C.I.A. shared its intelligence but Kayani and Pasha refused to act? As Panetta summarized Obama’s position, “There was simply too much risk at stake to trust an untrustworthy partner.”20
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Pasha and Kayani continued to try to recruit Karzai into a separate bargain. That April, the generals again flew to Kabul. They reemphasized what they had been telling Karzai since the previous year. The Americans are leaving. Don’t rely on them. They use us and then they throw us out. Your future is with Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia. If you want peace, if you want the Taliban to make a deal, only we can deliver it.
A few weeks later, Marc Grossman flew to Kabul and met Karzai at the Arg Palace. Karzai told him that he might have to choose Pakistan, not the United States.
“At least we know now what Pakistan wants,” Karzai said. “They told us, like Bush, ‘Either you are with us or against us. But if you are against us, the U.S. and Europe will not save you.’”21
Karzai went into one of his soliloquies. “I have been the most vicious critic of Pakistan and its policy toward Afghanistan, long before 9/11,” he said. “Records of your embassies will show it. They killed my father and I have stood against them for that reason.” Yet for “three years,” Karzai continued, he had not “spoken a word against Pakistan” in public because he had “lost hope” in America’s ability to manage I.S.I.
“Can you find a way to bring stability to Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan?” Karzai demanded. “If you can find that way, I can give you everything else. If you can’t, then we have to humbly accept a deal with honor,” meaning with Islamabad. “Pakistan has Islam in their hands, madrassas, suicide bombs.” To make matters worse, the United States and N.A.T.O. had “attacked Afghan patriotism,” humiliating the country.
“Even the Communists showed more patriotism than us,” Karzai continued. “This is a government on contract. It is not a government for a patriot. Either we make a deal with Pakistan, or the U.S. must work for Afghanistan’s protection, rather than undermine Afghanistan’s patriots. You tell me, Mr. Grossman, are you ready?”
“There is nobody in the U.S. that fears a strong and self-confident Afghanistan,” Grossman assured him. He tried to steer the conversation back to the subject of negotiating with the Taliban. He was hoping to win Karzai’s support for the next round of talks with Tayeb Agha. But Karzai went on. He would not sign a strategic partnership agreement with the United States
if it was to be a “partnership in war” without a change in Pakistan’s conduct, because “that means failure.”
In the end, Karzai said, “It’s easier to be friendly with Pakistan. . . . Pasha knows where Mullah Omar is. We know what goes on there in Quetta. . . . Nothing will change unless we make a deal with Pakistan—or stop Pakistan.”22
Grossman returned to the embassy’s residential skyscraper to sleep. His job was extremely difficult, but it was his habit of mind after decades in diplomacy to press on, one step at a time. There was no eliding the intractability of the parties he was supposed to corral through negotiation. One was a radical militia movement whose leader hadn’t been seen in a decade. Another was an increasingly hostile military and intelligence service that controlled about one hundred nuclear weapons. A third was Karzai, who had lost confidence in the United States, and who sometimes spoke about the future like an unhinged street preacher.
It was Sunday, May 1, 2011, in Afghanistan, ten hours ahead of Washington. The next morning, Grossman woke to the news from Abbottabad.
THIRTY
Martyrs Day
Martyrs Day was the Pakistani military’s annual remembrance of fallen soldiers and officers. Five thousand people crowded into a parade ground at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi on the evening of April 30. A mournful procession of hundreds of children, widows, and parents shuffled in to inaugurate the formal ceremony. Ashfaq Kayani stood at attention in a dress uniform, the brim of his hat pulled low over his forehead, his chest draped with ribbons and medals. Then he took his seat as two presenters addressed the crowd from podiums on a marble rise. One was an attractive woman whose uncovered hair blew in the hot breeze. A second woman dressed like a Karachi model belted out a song of remembrance. Images depicting army heroism flashed by on two large outdoor screens—officers teaching destitute children, rescuing civilians from floods, delivering aid to earthquake victims. The presenters told stories of the fallen and interviewed a widow onstage. Finally an honor guard goose-stepped forward. Kayani tucked a swagger stick under his left arm, laid a wreath at a marble memorial, stood to fold his hands in prayer, and then ascended the stage to read out a ten-minute speech.
He said that Pakistan “is an Islamic and ideological country, the foundations of which are based on the blood of hundreds of thousands of martyrs” who had sacrificed their lives to realize “the dream of a prosperous and strong” nation. The country was passing through a “critical juncture of its history,” Kayani continued. Its military carried out its responsibilities, whether in the “fight against terror, services in flood and earthquake-affected areas, or safeguarding the borders.” He quoted Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder: “We have to make future generations secure and not let disappointments dominate us.”1
The following night, at home at Army House, Kayani was still awake, smoking Dunhills, when an orderly interrupted. It was about 1:00 a.m. Major General Ishfaq Nadeem, the director-general of military operations, was on the line.
A helicopter has crashed at Abbottabad, Nadeem reported.
Is it one of ours? Kayani asked. It would be highly unusual for a Pakistani helicopter to be flying in that area at night. It was much more likely that Pakistan was under foreign attack. Kayani’s first thought was that someone was staging a strike on one of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. There were several in the region.
In the flurry of telephone calls that followed, Kayani spoke to Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman. They discussed ordering two F-16 fighter-bombers into the air. Exactly what transpired on this call is not clear. The commanders did agree to scramble the jets from a base some five hundred miles from Abbottabad. It also seems likely that by the time they made this decision, Kayani knew from I.S.I. and the police in Abbottabad that the helicopter raiders were Americans and that the house they had attacked had been a hiding place for Osama Bin Laden. By one account, provided afterward to Pakistani journalists by senior military officers, Air Marshal Suleman asked Kayani if he should order the F-16s to shoot down the intruding helicopters if they could locate them, an admittedly doubtful proposition. After a long pause, Kayani reportedly said yes. Kayani later gave local reporters a contradictory account, saying that such an order would have been pointless because “you can’t shoot down an American helicopter with an American plane.” He meant that the Pentagon would know how to interfere with the F-16’s systems to prevent it from successfully operating air-to-air missiles. In any event, by the time the Pakistani F-16s reached the skies, the Chinooks bearing U.S. Navy SEALs had crossed out of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. There was no opportunity to retaliate.2
About half an hour after the first call, the American embassy rang. Admiral Mullen wished to speak to Kayani. It took about ninety minutes for embassy technicians to set up a secure telephone at Army House. In the meantime Kayani learned the full story. Police and I.S.I. officers in Abbottabad had by now found several dead bodies at the site, as well as Osama Bin Laden’s wailing widows. The widows had described the SEAL raid and explained that the Americans had shot Bin Laden dead and then taken his corpse away.
“Congratulations,” Kayani said when Mullen finally came on the phone. “This is good for you, but there will be issues here.”
Mullen reminded him that he had told Kayani more than once that if the United States ever located “Number One or Number Two,” meaning Bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri, any American president would have to act unilaterally. In seeking justice for the nearly three thousand people killed on September 11, the mission was in a category of its own.
Kayani had earlier said he understood. The problem was that this raid exposed the myths he so regularly promoted at events like Martyrs Day. The army hyped itself as a mighty institution yet it could not defend the country’s borders. This had obvious implications for Indian military planners. “There will be no love lost for Osama” in the Pakistani public’s reaction, Kayani predicted, but the military and his leadership would come under withering fire.
“It will forever remain a very deep scar in our national memory and our military’s memory, that we failed to detect the raid,” he told Mullen. “By the same token, it will never fade from our national memory that you guys did it.”
Mullen disclosed that President Obama had not yet decided whether to announce the raid or Bin Laden’s death. Although it seemed clear that the SEALs had killed Bin Laden, the C.I.A. was still working through a final confirmation of the corpse’s identity. Kayani was appalled that Obama might be considering delay. Pakistanis were lighting up Facebook and Twitter with news of the attack—including posts of photos of a damaged American helicopter abandoned by the SEALs. There was no way Kayani would be able to contain media reporting and confused speculation about who the target had been. “Our people need to understand what happened here,” he pleaded. “We’re not going to be able to manage the Pakistani media without you confirming this. You can explain it to them. They need to understand that this was Bin Laden and not just some ordinary U.S. operation.” In fact, as Mullen and Kayani talked, the White House was moving to disclose the news publicly, and quickly.
Kayani returned to the themes of the secret warning letter he had written to Mullen the previous August, when there was loose talk in America of bombing Pakistan. Direct American military action in the country would only turn public opinion against the United States and fortify extremists, Kayani had written. Privately, he was aggravated. He would have been prepared to put a Pakistani face on a raid on the Abbottabad compound. He knew there was mistrust, but I.S.I. and the police had arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and other high-value Al Qaeda leaders, in joint operations where there had been no leaks. The Americans had the drones and satellites necessary to watch overhead at Abbottabad, to make sure the Pakistanis did exactly what was required and that Bin Laden did not escape. If the Obama administration had wanted to be good partners, they could have worked o
ut a way. Instead, they had humiliated the Pakistani military and him. Kayani and Pasha had already moved to reset the relationship after the Raymond Davis matter, to reduce the American presence in their country, but this event would change public opinion and stir emotions in the army’s officer class. It was the end of an era between the United States and Pakistan.3
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The full story of Osama Bin Laden’s long fugitive exile in Pakistan may never be known. He appears to have lived in about four different houses in towns in the northwest of the country before moving to Abbottabad in August 2005, where he remained until his death. Kayani had been I.S.I. director for less than a year when Bin Laden set up in Abbottabad. The Al Qaeda emir and his family enjoyed support from a sizable, complex network inside Pakistan—document manufacturers, fund-raisers, bankers, couriers, and guards. His youngest wife, Amal, gave birth to four children in Pakistani hospitals or clinics after 2002. Bin Laden limited his movements, rarely leaving his homes, but he did travel on Pakistani roads numerous times without getting caught, as did his sons and wives. Amal traveled at least once on an internal flight. In one case a man dressed as a policeman accompanied Bin Laden, according to one of the women who traveled with him. It is entirely plausible that I.S.I. ran a highly compartmented, cautious support operation involving a small number of case officers or contractors who could maintain deniability. Yet there remains no authoritative evidence—on-the-record testimony, letters, or documents—of knowing complicity by I.S.I. or the Pakistani state. Indeed, passages from Bin Laden’s letters suggest that he did not have reliable or regular contact with the Pakistani state. In one 2010 letter he warned against allowing his sons to pass through the custody of a contact in Baluchistan because “people that he knows work for the Pakistani intelligence.” In another letter that year Bin Laden asked an Al Qaeda correspondent to bring a “card” for his son Khalid, who was living with him, and another for himself. He appears to be referring to a forged Pakistani identity card, suggesting he did not have one already. In other correspondence about smuggling his son Hamzah and Hamzah’s mother to Abbottabad, Bin Laden again worries about encounters with Pakistani police and makes clear that he must rely on forged identity cards provided by a contact in Baluchistan.
