by Steve Coll
PNS Zulfiqar, a Chinese-built seven-story Pakistani frigate, which typically had 250 to 300 sailors and officers aboard, was one such ship. On December 19 and 21, 2012, the frigate reportedly test-fired Chinese-made C-802 Land Attack Cruise Missiles, which have a range of about 180 miles. C-802 missiles can fly as low as 25 meters above the surface of the ocean, making them difficult to detect by radar. The missiles can also be fitted with a small nuclear warhead with a yield of two to four kilotons, or about 15 to 25 percent of the explosive force of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.20
Around the time that it launched its Naval Strategic Forces Command, Pakistan also accelerated its development of small, or “tactical,” nuclear weapons like the ones that might fit on C-802 missiles. During the first decade after the invention of the atomic bomb, the United States, too, had built and deployed small nuclear bombs that could be dropped from planes or even fired from special artillery guns. The United States sent the small bombs to Europe and planned to use them on the battlefield against Soviet troops and tanks if a land war erupted across the Iron Curtain. It was only later in the Cold War that the idea of using atomic bombs on a battlefield as if they were just a more potent artillery shell became anathema in most nuclear strategy circles. Nuclear deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union evolved into an all-or-nothing proposition under the rubric of Mutually Assured Destruction, or M.A.D. At the peak of M.A.D., each side had more than twenty thousand nuclear bombs that were so powerful that any full-on nuclear exchange would have ended human civilization. The effects of nuclear war became so dramatic and unthinkable that it made such a war—or any conventional war that might go nuclear—less likely. That was the theory, at least.
India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998. As their version of mutual nuclear deterrence evolved, it displayed some parallels to the position of the United States in Europe during the 1950s. The United States feared a massive conventional blitzkrieg by Soviet forces and saw small nuclear weapons as a way to counter such an invasion. In South Asia, a similar factor was Pakistan’s fear of a conventional armored invasion by India. Because India has a much larger military than Pakistan, as well as a larger economy and population, it might be expected to prevail in a long war. Pakistan acquired nuclear bombs to deter India from considering a conventional tank-and-infantry invasion, no matter how provoked India might feel from time to time by Pakistani-sponsored terrorism. For this defense to work, Pakistani generals had to plant doubt in the minds of Indian leaders about whether the generals were really rash enough to be the first to use nuclear weapons in anger since 1945. The development of small or tactical nuclear weapons aided Pakistan in this respect. Small atomic bombs might be dropped on a desert battlefield against Indian troops, away from population centers. Or they might be fired on cruise missiles against an isolated Indian military base. The use of even a small nuclear weapon on a battlefield would likely shock the world and provoke international intervention to end the war, perhaps before India could achieve its war aims. Overall, the existence and deployment of small nukes by Pakistan made it more likely that its generals would actually use them, which in turn deepened doubts in the minds of Indian leaders about how costly a war with Pakistan might become. That is, in Pakistan’s twisted and dangerous logic, small nuclear weapons strengthened deterrence. Yet there were obvious downsides. One was that building and spreading out so many small, loose bombs exacerbated the threat that terrorists might try to steal them—or might come across them inadvertently.
Lieutenant Zeeshan Rafiq and former lieutenant Owais Jakhrani knew all about the PNS Zulfiqar’s internal security systems. After they made contact with Al Qaeda in 2014, they developed elaborate plans, seemingly derived from Hollywood thrillers, to defeat that security in order to seize control of the ship and its weapons, including its 76mm gun and its C-802 cruise missiles. One part of their plan was to exploit “a particular weakness of the security system,” as Rafiq put it, namely, that “the lockers and rooms of officers are not checked.”21
Rafiq and other officers successfully smuggled weapons aboard the PNS Zulfiqar “in batches, in their backpacks,” and stowed them in lockers. The next part of their plan was to make duplicate keys to the doors of the missile rooms and the operations rooms “so that these rooms could be accessed without the knowledge” of the ship’s commanding officers. Here, too, the insider knowledge of the two lieutenants offered an advantage. They planned to sneak into the magazine room of the 76mm gun to load its shells before they moved to seize control of the ship. They also understood that it was possible to prime and operate both the gun and the C-802 missiles outside of the ship’s main operations room, in an alternate area below, on the second deck. The C-802 missiles could be operated manually from the second deck when the missiles’ automated system was off—with their duplicate keys, they could accomplish this.
The conspirators also scoped out the armed security guards they expected to find on the PNS Zulfiqar. These were elite commandos from the Special Services Group. There were typically five Pakistani commandos aboard when the frigate sailed to join N.A.T.O. for operations of Combined Task Force 150. The commandos were deployed in part to protect the ship in case Somali or other pirates attacked. Rafiq, Jakhrani, and their coconspirators devised a plan to kill them or hold them at bay. First, they would bring two dozen or so coconspirators aboard—some after the ship was at sea. They would try to avoid any confrontation with the crew as the PNS Zulfiqar sailed toward American and other vessels operating in the coalition.
Their target was the USS Supply, a lightly defended American supply and refueling vessel. According to Rafiq, the American logistics ship’s defense was assigned to a U.S. Navy frigate that always shadowed it, no more than a few miles away. When the PNS Zulfiqar got close, they would use their duplicate keys to arm and fire its big artillery gun and its cruise missiles, to “secretly attack the U.S. ship,” as one of the conspirators put it, before the Pakistani crew aboard realized what was happening. They would use the 76mm gun to “destroy” USS Supply and then turn the C-802 cruise missiles on whatever American ship came to its defense. After they launched their attack on the U.S. Navy, they expected the crew of the PNS Zulfiqar to try to stop them, but “since it doesn’t take much time to fire missiles” they would already have done a lot of damage. At that point, they planned to defend the frigate’s armory so the Pakistani crew could not arm themselves. They also would lock all the doors and hatches between the second and third decks, to barricade themselves below. They would take the frigate’s commanding officer as a hostage and force him to order the crew to abandon ship, by donning life jackets and jumping into the sea. Once in full control of the PNS Zulfiqar, the conspirators planned to use all of the frigate’s weapons—the 76mm gun, “torpedoes, antiaircraft gun, Shalka and C-802 missiles” to attack “any U.S. Navy ship.” They would continue to fight until “the PNS Zulfiqar was destroyed” or until the mutineers themselves were “killed in action.” They hoped to use the ship’s communication systems to reach “the media and tell the world about this entire operation.”22
Early in September 2014, Al Qaeda publicly announced a new branch, Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, under the leadership of Asim Umar, the Indian from Uttar Pradesh. Al Qaeda’s leaders explained that they had worked for some time to recruit and unite militants from disparate Pakistani groups. The announcement seemed designed to provide Al Qaeda with new visibility and relevance at a time when the Islamic State had risen to prominence in Syria and Iraq and had started to recruit local allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. An Al Qaeda member, Hasan Yusuf, explained that the group’s main motivation in forming the new branch came “in the wake of the American defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan. . . . This jihad will not end; America’s defeat is only the prelude.” A withdrawal that was seen in Washington as an intelligent winding down of an unsustainable war was inevitably understood by jihadists world
wide as a historic victory and a source of new momentum.23
On September 6, 2014, in Karachi, at dawn, Rafiq and Jakhrani boarded the PNS Zulfiqar in navy uniforms, with their service cards displayed. A number of coconspirators, in marine uniforms, approached through the harbor in a dinghy. An alert Pakistan Navy gunner noticed that the “Marines” were carrying AK-47s, which are not normally issued in the navy. He fired a warning shot. A full-on gun battle erupted. S.S.G. commandos joined the fray to defend the ship. When it was over, by one count, eleven attackers died, including Rafiq and Jakhrani. They never had a chance to access the weapons they had smuggled aboard or to use the duplicate keys they had made to the C-802 missile room.24
The Pakistani defense of the PNS Zulfiqar was professional and successful. Yet there was a disturbing postscript to Al Qaeda’s strike. About six weeks after the attack, India’s principal external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing, citing agent reporting from Karachi, informed India’s national security adviser that a nuclear warhead had been on board the PNS Zulfiqar at the time of the attack. If their plan had succeeded, Rafiq and Jakhrani would have had more on their hands than they expected, by this account. It was possible that India put a false story out to stir up global alarm about terrorism and nuclear security in Pakistan. Yet if the Indian report was accurate, September 6, 2014, would mark the first known armed terrorist attack in history against a facility holding nuclear weapons. Judging by Pakistan’s trajectory, it was unlikely to be the last.25
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On September 14, Ghani and Abdullah completed negotiations on a four-page power-sharing agreement under which the former would become president of Afghanistan, succeeding Karzai, and the latter would appoint a “Chief Executive” of Afghanistan, to run the country day to day. When Abdullah again threatened to back out of the deal a few days later, John Kerry telephoned him and issued a warning on speakerphone to the candidate and about thirty of his aides. “If you don’t come to agreement now, today, the possibilities for Afghanistan will become very difficult, if not dangerous,” the secretary of state warned yet again. “I really need to emphasize to you that if you do not have an agreement, if you do not move to a unity government, the United States will not be able to support Afghanistan.”26
Abdullah gave in. At the end of September, a new government limped into being, with Ghani as president. Karzai delivered a bitter farewell speech in which he reiterated his conspiracy theories about American motivations and did not mention the soldiers’ lives sacrificed or the billions of dollars expended to develop Afghanistan. “America did not want peace for Afghanistan because it had its own agendas and goals here,” Karzai said.27
Ghani retained Nabil at N.D.S., the only holdover from Karzai’s cabinet. As Kayani and Pasha had done with the waffling Karzai, the new leadership of the Pakistan Army tried to encourage Ghani to cut a deal with Islamabad. Ghani met with Kayani’s successor as army chief, Raheel Sharif, and the newest I.S.I. director, General Rizwan Akhtar. As Amrullah Saleh had experienced before him, Nabil found himself cut out of meetings between the president and the Pakistani leadership, uncertain about what sort of accommodation they might be exploring. Nabil later discovered that I.S.I. had installed in the Arg Palace two sets of encrypted hotlines between Ghani and the Pakistan Army and spy service leadership. He eventually resigned. After fitful efforts, Ghani withdrew from negotiations about peace with Pakistan.
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From the first days following September 11, America’s principal goal in Afghanistan was to destroy Al Qaeda. After more than a decade of effort, Al Qaeda remained active, lethal, and adaptive. Osama Bin Laden and many of his former lieutenants were dead and the ability of the group’s original branch in Pakistan and Afghanistan to carry out complex attacks in Europe and America had been greatly reduced. Yet Bin Laden’s deputy and successor, Ayman Al Zawahiri, remained in charge, presumably in hiding in Pakistan. New Al Qaeda branches formed in Pakistan to attack India and elsewhere in South Asia carried out well-organized strikes; Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent claimed responsibility for the murders of four freethinking Bangladeshi writers, including Avijit Roy, an American citizen. Other Al Qaeda allies based in Pakistan remained active across borders. Some Al Qaeda cells returned to Afghanistan as security there deteriorated. And the broader goal announced by George W. Bush in 2001, to defeat Al Qaeda and its ideological allies worldwide, and to suppress the threat of terror generally, lay in shambles. The Al Qaeda branch seeded in Iraq to challenge the American invasion of that country morphed into the Islamic State, recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to Syria and Iraq, and seized territory there, in Libya and Afghanistan. Its operatives and followers killed hundreds of civilians in France, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere. In 2014, more than thirty-two thousand people died in terrorist violence worldwide, a record number. This represented a fivefold increase from 2001 and an 80 percent increase from 2013. Almost four out of five deaths from terrorism in 2014 took place in just five countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria. The first three of those nations remained embroiled in civil violence directly set off by the American-led invasions that followed September 11.
The United States also sought to stabilize and develop Afghanistan, to prevent it from becoming a terrorist sanctuary again. For many Afghans, life did improve as billions of dollars poured in from the United States, European capitals, Japan, the Gulf States, and other donors. The aid was often poorly managed and siphoned off by corrupt Afghan elites and criminal networks, yet it made a difference. Average life expectancy improved from about fifty-five years to just above sixty years. The economy grew almost tenfold, from about $2.5 billion in estimated gross domestic product in 2001 to about $20 billion in 2014. School enrollment quintupled, and after the dark, unplugged years of Taliban rule, nine out of ten Afghans gained access to modern communications, including smart phones. The population grew in size by about half, to thirty million, partly because several million refugees returned home, lured by the growing economy and the promise of peace. Yet Afghanistan nonetheless remained one of the world’s poorest countries, with more than a third of its citizens living in poverty, and its government and security forces remained almost entirely dependent on outside subsidies of doubtful longevity.
The war that followed the American-led invasion of 2001 caused about 140,000 deaths directly by the end of N.A.T.O.’s formal combat role in 2014, according to estimates assembled by researchers at Brown University. This compared with the estimated one million to two million Afghan lives lost during the decade after the Soviet invasion. The dead after 2001 included about 26,000 Afghan civilians and about 21,000 Pakistani civilians. The extent of Pakistani losses was one difference from the wars of the 1980s and the 1990s. In those decades, Afghanistan’s wars spilled over into Pakistan, in the form of loose weapons, sectarian hatred, and heroin addiction. But there were fewer cases inside Pakistan of terrorism inspired by the ideologies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. After the American-led intervention, Pakistan gradually fell victim to terrorism carried out in the name of a broader revolutionary Islamic politics. To some extent the country was destabilized by Al Qaeda’s opportunistic escape across the border from Afghanistan, under U.S. military pressure, during late 2001 and 2002. But to a much greater extent the violence reflected how Pakistan reaped the price of a state policy that nurtured and accommodated violent jihadi groups.
Hamid Karzai’s conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the United States had no coherent geopolitical vision when it counterattacked Afghanistan after September 11, other than perhaps to try to avoid destabilizing Pakistan, a goal it failed to achieve. Gradually, American diplomats, intelligence and military leaders in the second Bush term and then the Obama administration did come to believe that access to at least one or two military bases in Afghanistan would be helpful to counter regional terror groups—even after the withdrawal of the great bulk of American troops, the remaining bases would become a
South Asian link in a chain of American counterterrorist outposts from Kurdistan to the Gulf to Djibouti to East Asia. Whether Afghanistan would remain stable enough after 2020 to accommodate such a modest foothold in the region looked questionable.
The rising, embittered skepticism toward Pakistan at the Pentagon, in Congress, and at the C.I.A. engendered by America’s experience of the Afghan war after 2001 helped to solidify ties between the United States and India; after 2001, the two countries judged increasingly that they shared a common enemy. Yet India proved to be cautious about working too closely or explicitly with Washington in Afghanistan or the region. The country’s noisy democratic politics contained a large strain of skepticism about American power. And India’s security establishment remained wary of taking risks in Afghanistan—say, by providing lethal military aid and troops to bolster Afghan forces against the Taliban—that might confirm Pakistan’s fears of encirclement and thereby provoke I.S.I. to retaliate by sponsoring more terrorism inside India. The fallout from the Afghan war also persuaded Pakistan’s leaders, after 2011, to give up on any strategic partnership with Washington and to deepen ties to Beijing. This effectively opened Pakistani territory to Chinese companies and military planners, to construct transit corridors and bases that might improve China’s regional influence and links to the Middle East. Overall, the war left China with considerable latitude in Central Asia, without having made any expenditure of blood, treasure, or reputation.
