Directorate S

by Steve Coll

  Clinton, Panetta, and Gates outdid one another at the table, describing how dysfunctional America’s relations with Pakistan had become. It wasn’t just that the atmosphere was poisoned by mistrust. It had become almost impossible to get even minor work or accounting completed with the Pakistanis in an orderly way. Everything was frozen, broken after the Raymond Davis affair.

  Intercepts of phone conversations by Kayani and Pasha after the Abbottabad raid had them sounding surprised about Bin Laden’s whereabouts—or pretending to be surprised—but also captured them expressing envy. “We should have this capability,” Kayani said on one call. The Americans marveled: We’ve been trying to train them up for counterinsurgency operations, including this kind of capability, but they have resisted mightily, as much from pride as anything else. Do they listen to anything we say?

  “Look, we know Pakistan is dysfunctional,” Obama finally said. “I take that as a given, the baseline. Let’s work at what we can do. And let’s stop trying to change their minds” about where Pakistan’s interests lie.

  With that, the president put the final knife into the ambitions of the strategic dialogue and the Kayani memos, 1.0 through 3.0. There were just too many structural obstacles to transforming the relationship, Obama concluded. It was going to be transactional and difficult.18

  Day by day that May, Kayani’s position looked more and more precarious. Among the three-star generals in the corps commanders conference who constituted his privy council, the feelings of anger and humiliation about the raid were described as the worst since the loss of East Pakistan to India in the 1971 war. These emotions were compounded by lingering resentment at the top of the officer corps over Kayani’s decision to extend his term as army chief the previous autumn. Intercepts and other reporting showed that senior three-star Pakistani generals at the corps level really wanted Kayani out.

  On Friday, May 13, Kayani and Pasha, accompanied by a deputy chief of air force operations, arrived at Parliament House, on Constitution Avenue, in Islamabad’s section of broad avenues and grand public buildings. Parliament House was a modern, boxy white building designed by an American architect and opened twenty-five years earlier. The generals sat in an ornate, carpeted chamber before about four hundred senators and members of the National Assembly. Kayani opened with one of his standard PowerPoint briefings, talking over slides that reminded the parliamentarians of how many thousands of Pakistani soldiers and civilians had died in terrorist attacks since 2001 and how many Al Qaeda leaders the army, I.S.I., and police had arrested.19

  After the PowerPoint, Pasha did most of the talking. He said Pakistan’s relationship with the United States had “gone bad” and they would now reassert themselves. “They want to take action on their own on our soil,” he said. “We will not allow their boots on our ground.” The Americans had “conducted a sting operation on us,” with the raid on Abbottabad. Yet the problem was one of military capabilities, and if the United States wanted to conduct such a raid again, they might succeed.

  Pasha offered to resign at one point. “I present myself for accountability before any forum, including Parliament,” he said. “There was no intentional negligence but an aspect of failure is there.” I.S.I. should have known where Bin Laden was, he admitted.20

  Six days later, Kayani appeared at National Defense University, on the edge of Islamabad, across from a golf club. The main building had an auditorium with a long horseshoe-shaped table. Kayani sat down by himself in full dress uniform with only a file of papers, a glass of water, and an ashtray. He told eighty or so officers and civilian faculty they could ask anything they wished. He lit a cigarette.

  “If they don’t trust us, how can we trust them?” a colonel asked about the United States.

  “In uniform, we tend to see everything in black and white,” Kayani answered. “In the real world, there are a lot of gray areas and you have to deal with it.”

  He described Pakistan as a mortgaged house, with the United States in the role of banker. “We are helpless,” he professed. “Can we fight the United States?” The solution was to strengthen the economy, and to raise taxes domestically, so they could end their dependence on Washington and its allies.21

  By late May American intelligence reports showed that Kayani and Pasha had opened vigorous discussions about how to break off the relationship with America and reorganize around Pakistan’s alliance with China. How could they raise money from alternative sources? How could they build their own Chinese-inspired economy with surpluses that could be reinvested in defense? The Obama administration officials who read accounts of these conversations figured that some of the posturing was deliberately constructed for American eavesdroppers, to caution the United States, but that some of it was probably a genuine search for strategic alternatives. There was little room for Kayani to act precipitously. The Pakistani state and its bloated military depended on American, European, Japanese, South Korean, and Australian aid, as well as loans from the International Monetary Fund, to avoid bankruptcy. There might come a day when Chinese-led finance could replace those flows, but it hadn’t arrived yet. For the Chinese Communist Party leadership, Pakistan remained an essential ally, a rare friend, and a long-term check on India. Yet the Chinese government had grown as exhausted by Pakistani dysfunction as the United States had.22

  After the May 4 meeting in the Situation Room, Obama’s national security team decided to try to embrace Pakistan rather than repudiate its army or I.S.I. The C.I.A.’s drone campaign against Al Qaeda and its allies in Waziristan had depended on tacit Pakistani permission, and supply lines to American troops in Afghanistan ran through Pakistani territory. For all its failings, Kayani’s army had fought to reduce violence and restore some stability since Pakistan’s low point of 2009 and the cabinet did not want to see the Pakistani Taliban revive. Doug Lute, Marc Grossman, and Hillary Clinton, in particular, also hoped that Bin Laden’s death might shift the ground favorably in talks with the Taliban. It would certainly make it easier, in a political sense, to carry out the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan that Obama had preannounced at his West Point speech almost eighteen months earlier.

  In the documents seized at Abbottabad they soon found evidence that around 2010, Tayeb Agha had traveled from Quetta to deliver a message in person to Bin Laden from the Taliban leadership. Essentially, the message was “If we—when we—return to power in Afghanistan, all things being equal, it would be a good idea if you did not come with us, and if you do come, you will have to maintain a very low profile.”23 This reinforced the hope that the Taliban might be willing to break with Al Qaeda in a comprehensive peace deal.

  On his initial visit to Pakistan after the raid, which had been previously scheduled, Marc Grossman met with Brigadier Saad Muhammad, a former I.S.I. station chief in Kabul, who was part of a Pakistani delegation designated to talk regularly to the Americans. “What goes on in the I.S.I. mind?” Saad asked out loud. The I.S.I. had given a concrete proposal to Karzai in April to build a new relationship with Pakistan, which could deliver the Taliban to talks. Now, with Bin Laden dead, “You and others who favor negotiation will be stronger,” the brigadier advised.24

  Biden worked the telephone to Islamabad. Michael Morell at the C.I.A., John Kerry, Mullen, and Clinton flew to Pakistan to try to start to repair the relationship.

  Morell met Pasha alone at the I.S.I. director’s home. The first fifteen or so minutes were awkward to the point of palpable discomfort; no one knew what to say. Pasha complained about the C.I.A.’s unwillingness to share what it knew about Bin Laden at Abbottabad, and about the Pentagon’s unwillingness to inform them about the raid. Morell expressed frustration about I.S.I.’s long-standing work with extremists. He said the Obama administration could not share its secrets about Bin Laden because they believed the information might leak and that Bin Laden would walk away, which was unacceptable. After fifteen minutes, they started talking once more about where to go fro
m here. Pasha called Army House and escorted Morell to a meeting with Kayani after midnight. Both sides felt freer to gripe. The Pakistanis pointed out that the administration was still keeping them in the dark about its talks with the Taliban, a subject of vital interest to them.

  “What’s the big picture?” Husain Haqqani asked Pasha during this period.

  “We’re a small country,” he answered. “They are the big ones. We have to keep our pride. We have to outmaneuver them. It’s all about being smart.”25

  THIRTY-ONE

  Fight and Talk

  Frank Ruggiero, Jeff Hayes, and Chris Kolenda flew back to Munich in the days following Bin Laden’s death. They rehearsed for negotiation with Tayeb Agha, with Kolenda playing the Taliban envoy. They discussed how to use Bin Laden’s killing as leverage. The team met Tayeb Agha in the German safe house on May 7, 2011. Ruggiero urged Agha to see Bin Laden’s killing as an opening for the Taliban to break with Al Qaeda. “This is a historic opportunity for you to correct your mistakes,” Ruggiero said.

  Tayeb Agha asked the Americans to define more precisely what a Taliban break with Al Qaeda would entail. (The American side later delivered a nonpaper.) Tayeb Agha said it might take time for him to get firm guidance from the Taliban’s underground leadership. “We communicate by courier,” he said drily. “Finding good couriers is becoming more difficult” after the events of May 1.

  They returned to Tayeb Agha’s demand that the United States release senior Taliban prisoners. The Americans informed him that releasing senior leaders from Guantánamo was a nonstarter. Michael Steiner, the German envoy, thought that Agha was willing to compromise and that the Americans were too cautious. The American negotiators worried that Agha might be using the talks solely for prisoner releases, with no real intention to explore a political compromise to end the war or reduce its violence. Agha seemed agitated about the prisoner issue. At one point, he left the room. One member of the American team heard him throwing up in the bathroom. They thought he might be so upset about the stalemate over prisoners that it had made him sick, but of course they could not rule out an aversion to Bavarian food.

  The Americans were prepared to continue discussions about a Taliban political office. The politics around prisoner releases in the United States looked treacherous; an office to pursue peace might be easier. The Taliban’s prospective political office had to be located in Qatar, Tayeb Agha insisted as the talks went on. This was a position expressing Taliban foreign policy, he explained. The Taliban’s political commission had decided it would not open an office in any country that had military forces in Afghanistan, in any neighboring country, or in any country where the presence of such an office might cause a backlash against the movement. Choosing Saudi Arabia, for example, would provoke a negative reaction from Iran. The governments of the United Arab Emirates and Turkey were too close to Pakistan. It had to be Qatar. The American team had decided beforehand to accept this demand, in part because they were not prepared yet to accommodate prisoner exchanges, Tayeb Agha’s other priority.1

  A week after the Munich meeting, Der Spiegel and The Washington Post carried accounts of the talks and published Tayeb Agha’s name for the first time. Furious, the envoy informed the Americans through his Qatari intermediaries that he was suspending negotiations. Grossman, Lute, and others in the Conflict Resolution Cell sought to signal their regret about the leaks (which were inevitable, given the divisions about the talks within the Obama administration and the Karzai regime). Hillary Clinton instructed Ruggiero to fly to Qatar to deliver a message that they wanted to get back on track. The Qataris soon replied that Tayeb Agha was willing to meet, at least informally.

  Ruggiero and Hayes flew to Doha during the first week of July, to the Sharq resort hotel, a Ritz Carlton property. It featured sharks in its decorating themes. They met Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani, the member of the Qatari royal family who had been working as an informal interlocutor with the Taliban. Later, Tayeb Agha joined them. He handed the Americans a one-page, unsigned, typed letter in fractured English, with the boldface word “Message” as its header. It was a letter, the envoy explained, from Mullah Mohammad Omar to President Obama.

  It said, in essence, that both leaders had to manage domestic political risks to seek a settlement of their war, but that Omar was willing to be courageous and Obama should be as well. “I made the important decisions for the sake of humanity, and a desire to stop the casualties on both sides, for peace in the country, and for good relations between the two countries after the complete withdrawal of your forces from Afghanistan,” the letter began. It rankled, Mullah Omar or his ghostwriter continued, that because the Taliban had extended an olive branch, this was dismissed by the United States as “a sign of our weakness, or subordination, as said by high-ranking officials in your government.” He was apparently referring to how Gates, Petraeus, and other officials were quoted in the press. The Taliban had made significant concessions already, the letter continued. These had “negative aspects for us,” and yet, “I made them in order to get the above-mentioned objectives,” that is, peace and American withdrawal.

  Now it was time for President Obama to step up. “I have acknowledged the legitimate hurdles you face regarding Guantanamo prisoners, but still you have to make important and tough decisions in order to get what you have been calling [for] for years.” The letter said that Mullah Omar would guarantee that released Taliban prisoners would not return to the war. “I am determined to [sic] what I have said in this regard and I will stick to my words (promises) without hypocrisy.

  “We are in the stage of confidence-building and still there is [a] way to get to the stage of negotiations,” the letter continued. “We should both listen to each other carefully and act honestly and sincerely so that [we] will have positive impacts on our negotiations in the future.” The Obama administration’s willingness to allow the Taliban to open a political office in Qatar “is a positive step, and [I] hope you will take steps for the release and transfer of Guantanamo prisoners” and the elimination of sanctions and travel bans on Taliban leaders, “as these are the necessary steps required for confidence building.”2

  It appeared to be the first direct communication from the Taliban’s leadership to an American president since N.A.T.O.’s war in Afghanistan began a decade earlier. Of course, everything about Mullah Omar’s whereabouts and independence from I.S.I. was a mystery. Nobody could say for sure who had authored the letter.

  Tayeb Agha agreed to start talking to the Americans again. They would meet again in Doha the following month. Amid the satisfaction and high public standing the Obama administration enjoyed after knocking off Bin Laden, there was rising hope at the White House—even confidence—that they might be on a path to negotiating an end to the war.

  “I’m building on what Holbrooke created, trying to take it to the next level,” Marc Grossman told Prince Muqrin, the Saudi intelligence chief, around this time. “President Obama and Secretary Clinton are both serious” about the talks. “To be fair,” Grossman added, “a ceasefire is some time away. We have to be sure that they stop suicide bombing, and attacking women’s schools.”

  With a State Department colleague that summer, Grossman was less cautious: “Sometime in 2012,” he predicted, “I’m going to get all these guys on an island off the coast of Turkey and hammer out a deal.”3

  —

  In Islamabad, Ruggiero briefed Kayani about the negotiations but told the general only about half of what he was up to. His reticence had a logic: The Conflict Resolution Cell believed that if a peace negotiation about Afghanistan’s future did become serious, the American side would, in effect, be negotiating against I.S.I., which would be aligned with the Taliban, even if it did not control them fully. They could not afford to be too forthcoming in advance about U.S. positions.

  Kayani and Pasha remained insistent: If you want peace, you should be talking to the Haqqanis. Ruggiero dis
closed that he would be willing to meet Ibrahim Haqqani for exploratory conversations. For most of Obama’s war cabinet, the idea of talking to the Haqqanis, as part of a peace process, remained anathema. The network had the blood of Americans on its hands. Without question, the network remorselessly slaughtered Afghan civilians in terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere. It had collaborated with I.S.I. to kill Indian civilians, diplomats, and military officers. It had collaborated with Bin Laden since Al Qaeda’s birth. Yet President Obama noted that the Haqqanis were different from Al Qaeda: They lived in the region, it was their home. They were not foreign implants. They could not simply be wiped out. The Haqqanis were part of the Taliban—both they and the Taliban leadership said so—and Obama had authorized ambitious confidence-building talks with the Taliban’s envoy. Why should the Haqqanis belong to a different category from the Quetta Shura?

  On August 10, a few weeks after receiving the letter from Mullah Mohammad Omar, Frank Ruggiero and Jeff Hayes met Ibrahim Haqqani in a room at an Egyptian-themed hotel in Dubai. Clinton and Obama had sanctioned this meeting. Ahmed Pasha, the I.S.I. director, also greeted Ruggiero. As they talked, Pasha translated between English and Urdu.

  Haqqani thanked the United States for supporting the mujaheddin during their war of resistance against the Soviet Union. Without that support, they could not have prevailed. He added that the Taliban, including the Haqqanis, were not enemies of the United States, but were only fighting against a foreign occupation. And he undermined I.S.I.’s claim that the Haqqanis were essential to any negotiation: Ibrahim said that the only official channel for peace talks with the Taliban ran through Tayeb Agha. His purpose with the Americans seemed to be to press for the release of a pair of Haqqani network commanders held at Bagram.