Over one hundred people were killed in the seige, including ten special forces commandos. Ninety-three bodies were retrieved from the mosque complex, most of them militants, among them eleven foreign fighters. The Ghazi brothers had turned their mosque into an arsenal rather than a place of worship, with weapons, mines, and suicide vests, and had sheltered scores of trained fighters among their young students.
There is some evidence that al Qaeda had orchestrated the Red Mosque clash in order to precipitate a confrontation with the Pakistani army and start a war against the Pakistani state. Besides the Ghazi brothers’ own links to bin Laden, there were people inside the Red Mosque who were connected to al Qaeda in the tribal areas. One of the most radical people in the Red Mosque was Ghazi’s secretary, Abdul Qayuum, seen brandishing a pistol in television footage. He was a disciple of Sheikh Isa, an Egyptian co-conspirator in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Isa had been imprisoned in Egypt with al Qaeda’s deputy leader, Ayman al Zawahiri. Along with Zawahiri, Isa aimed to spark a revolt in Pakistan that would allow jihadis to take control of key institutions and use Pakistan to project their dream of global jihad against the West.
Zawahiri was quick to condemn the government’s raid of the mosque. He released a video statement criticizing “the criminal aggression carried out by Musharraf, his army and his security organs—the Crusaders’ hunting dogs—against the Red Mosque in Islamabad,” and calling for retaliation on the Pakistani army.2 Even bin Laden, who had been more muted in his criticism of Pakistan, added his call for revenge for the Red Mosque martyrs in an audio message released in September.
The aftermath of the Red Mosque siege played out in al Qaeda’s favor and was exploited ruthlessly by the organization. Rumors spread that the government had killed far more than the official death toll, and that one thousand students, or even several thousand, had died and been buried on top of each other to conceal the true number. On her release from jail, Umme Hassan claimed that three hundred female students had died, which was blatantly untrue. There were no victims’ families or lists of names to bolster her claims, and human rights groups never found proof that the government figures were inaccurate. Yet the Red Mosque battle became a major rallying cry for the religious parties and militant Islamists, and handed them a powerful propaganda tool. It spawned a plethora of tapes, videos, and speeches that circulated the country. Musharraf’s use of force against the mosque cost his supporters dearly at the polls in 2008.
The ISI played a strangely ineffective role, failing to prevent the threat from the Red Mosque despite its long relationship with the mosque and its leaders. The ISI had two informers inside the Mosque complex during the siege, and had accurate intelligence on the number of armed militants inside, but does not seem to have used its influence on the Ghazi brothers.3 In a cabinet meeting after the siege, ministers questioned a senior ISI official about the intelligence service’s failure to prevent the militant action in the city. “Who I meet in the evening and what I discuss is on your desk the next morning,” one minister told the general. “How come you did not know what was happening a hundred meters from the ISI headquarters?” The general sat in silence as ministers thumped their desks in a gesture of agreement. “One hundred percent they knew what was happening,” a former cabinet minister who attended the meeting told me. The ISI could have prevented militants from gathering in the city but had allowed them to do what they wanted out of sympathy for the Ghazi brothers and the militants, he said. “The state is not as incompetent as people believe.”4
The Pakistani military faced an immediate and vicious backlash from militants. One group struck a convoy of soldiers in the North West Frontier province even as the special forces were still storming the Red Mosque. Another group blew up a military convoy on July 17 in North Waziristan killing twenty-four soldiers. Baitullah Mehsud, the militant leader in South Waziristan, announced he was breaking his truce with the government. In August, he captured and disarmed a convoy of 250 government soldiers passing through his district in a show of power that shamed the army. In September, he announced the formation of a movement called Teherik-i-Taliban Pakistan, joining all the main militant groups across the northwestern region into the Pakistani Taliban. As Ghazi had promised, and as bin Laden and Zawahiri urged people to rise up and avenge the deaths of the faithful, a wave of suicide bombings engulfed the country, striking at government, military, and civilian targets.
On September 13, a suicide bomber targeted the SSG, Pakistan’s elite, American-trained special forces, the very commandos who had been used to storm the Red Mosque. The bomber managed to infiltrate the SSG base at Tarbela, fifty miles from Islamabad, and blew himself up in the canteen, killing twenty-two commandos and wounding forty others. The bombings were hitting right at the heart of the army and intelligence services. In November, a bomber attacked guards at the army’s General Command Headquarters in Rawalpindi, and another threw himself at a staff bus entering Hamza Camp, the ISI’s headquarters in the army town, killing at least twenty-four intelligence workers. The militants were attacking their own masters.
After years of nurturing jihadists to fight its proxy wars, Pakistan was experiencing the ultimate blowback. Its protégés had turned on their creators. “We could not control them,” a former senior intelligence official told a colleague and me six months after the Red Mosque siege. “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”5
Successive Pakistani governments, both military and civilian, had long used a policy of divide and rule over the country’s many factions, political, religious, and militant. As the former leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, told me, the ISI was always the government’s tool of choice, using it to support groups with money, political gerrymandering, and protection from justice. This is the government that famously formed seven different Afghan mujahideen parties to fight the Soviet Union, so that none dominated the resistance. The ISI sometimes encouraged them to fight each other for territory, and assassinate rival commanders to prevent any one group from growing too strong and independent. This is the government that then formed a plethora of Pakistani militant groups, and managed those who became too troublesome by creating splinter groups, detaining leaders, and even assassinating them. The militant groups themselves complain that many of their members have been killed in deadly ambushes by the police. The government of Nawaz Sharif for example targeted sectarian leaders who grew too disruptive in the late 1990s.6
Post-9/11, the Musharraf government paid off the leaders of the main militant groups to keep them loyal, asking them to go quiet. Musharraf formally banned most of the groups linked with al Qaeda or the Kashmir insurgency in 2002, but they were allowed to re-form under new names and establish humanitarian and educational wings that could continue recruiting followers, running discreet training camps, and raising funds legally. “The ban was for domestic purposes. They were told to lie low but did not really,” a former security official told me. Cross-border raids into Kashmir were largely curtailed, and Taliban and Kashmiri militants remember the years after 9/11 as a period of suppression and fear of arrests. Cross-border attacks into Afghanistan were allowed, but terrorist attacks on Western targets inside Pakistan were not acceptable. Those who ignored the rules were detained.
There were seeds of blowback sewn long before the Red Mosque siege. Some of the most dangerous opponents of the Pakistani state seem to have turned against the military after periods in custody of the military or the intelligence service in the years after 9/11. There are blood-curdling stories of the torture and harsh detention that goes on in underground cells in Pakistan at the hands of military and intelligence agencies. Human rights organizations have documented extensive cases of torture and dozens of incidences of people dying in custody. Doctors told me they had seen detainees unable to walk or speak after sleep deprivation, beatings, and the use of drugs, such as powerful laxatives, to debilitate them. Former detainees de
scribed being beaten, sodomized, strung up, and held under strobe lights for days on end, in extreme heat or cold. One former detainee, a Baluch rebel commander, described to me being held for hours, handcuffed, with his head encased in a leather hood, in a roasting hot cell that made his brain feel as if it were boiling. Afghans and Taliban militants have also complained of harsh treatment in ISI jails.
In one instance in 2009, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani handled the militant blowback personally. By then he had been in the top military post, chief of army staff, for two years, having replaced Musharraf in October 2007 (Musharraf remained the president of Pakistan until August 2008). A group of ten militants stormed the General Command Headquarters of the army in Rawalpindi, the base of military power in Pakistan. They used the type of complex attack that was already familiar from attacks in Afghanistan: breaking through outer security with a suicide attack, they shot and blasted their way into the headquarters and stormed an office building, killing and seizing hostages as they went. Within minutes, they had seized over forty hostages, including several senior army and intelligence officers. They killed a brigadier general and several other officers. Led by a fighter called Dr. Usman, they were well armed and wore suicide jackets stuffed with explosives, and began a thirty-six-hour hostage siege. They demanded the release of a long list of Taliban and other militants held prisoner by the Pakistani authorities.
The army brought in one of its favorite mediators, Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, a famous preacher and former jihadi who has since become a television personality with his own chat show. He is a colorful character of enormous girth and appetite, with a long beard and flowing white clothes. He arranged to meet me for an interview in a gym in Lahore, plopping himself down on a pink leather sofa in the café and dropping three smart phones on the glass coffee table.
Ashrafi cultivates a benign image, making public statements against sectarian attacks and trying to intervene in cases where people have been accused wrongly of blasphemy. Yet he has worked tirelessly to secure the release of militants from jail and remains a fervent supporter of jihad and the jihadi groups. He told me he had helped secure the release of seven hundred Pakistanis held in Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, including some important militant commanders, who had successfully hidden their real identities from their captors. In 2007, he had been called in to help negotiate with the clerics at the Red Mosque.
Now, Ashrafi worked with senior military officers in night-long negotiations with Dr. Usman, the leader of the militants. They called in the heads of almost every banned militant group to intercede with the militants to release their hostages.7 Thinking the militants were connected to the vicious sectarian group Sipa-e-Sahaba, the army sent a military plane to fetch its notoriously hard-line leader, Maulana Mohammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, to intercede. When Dr. Usman said he wanted the army to free men from another group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the most dangerous of all, often described as the foot soldiers of al Qaeda, Kayani sprung the group’s leader Malik Ishaq from a Lahore jail. Fifty years old, Ishaq was a Sunni extremist and the most notorious of murderers. He had been in jail since 1997, charged with forty-four cases of homicide, mostly for murdering Shiites. Kayani treated him like a valuable mediator. He sent his personal plane to fly Ishaq to Rawalpindi, and promised to free him in return for helping to release the hostages. Meanwhile, the drawn-out negotiations gave the army time to prepare a rescue. Before dawn, SSG operatives stormed the building and killed four of the five hostage-takers.
“We requested time to talk,” Ashrafi told me. “We saved forty-two people.” Usman nearly escaped by hiding in a false ceiling and was only caught after soldiers realized they had five suicide vests and only four bodies. The militants, however, had shown what they could do. They could kill and take hostages at will, and win at the negotiating table.8 During their negotiations, the army chief asked Ishaq to “please stop the sectarian killings,” but the Sunni extremist and longtime protégé answered, “We are your children, but we will not follow this.” Kayani had no response. He remained silent.9
The most revealing example of Pakistan’s loss of control of its militants came when a splinter Pakistani group captured Colonel Imam, the old ISI controller of the Taliban, in 2010. Now gray-bearded and officially retired, Colonel Imam had remained active in the years after 9/11, supporting the Taliban resurgence and touring Afghanistan. He denied visiting Afghanistan but over the years, I came across several credible sightings of him there, including once at Kabul airport and once in Uruzgan, where he seems to have been reengaging old Taliban supporters.
Colonel Imam traveled into Pakistan’s tribal areas in March 2010 with another former ISI operative, Khalid Khawaja; a British-Pakistani journalist; and a local driver. They were detained by a formerly unknown group of militants who called themselves the Asian Tigers. The journalist and driver were released after months in captivity, probably after payment of a ransom, but Khawaja and Colonel Imam were killed, accused of being government and American spies. Despite his long association with generations of militants, and efforts by the ISI to win his release through the Taliban leaders Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani, Colonel Imam was shot dead in January 2011. The head of the Pakistani Taliban at the time, Hakimullah Mehsud himself, oversaw his execution, which was filmed and distributed on DVDs. The Taliban movement was devouring its own.
Yet even as the militants were turning against their masters, rather than crush them, Pakistan’s generals sought to use them and direct them toward other targets. They were quite literally playing with fire. Pakistan’s first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was preparing to fly home from ten years in exile in the fall of 2007. She had forged a deal with Musharraf that envisaged him resigning as army chief but staying on as a civilian president while she served as prime minister. Kayani, who helped negotiate the deal, would take over from Musharraf as army chief. Bhutto’s party allowed Musharraf’s election to another term as president, and he signed an order to drop all corruption cases against Bhutto and her close associates. Elections were set for early 2008.
Ahead of her return, Bhutto showed her mettle. She spoke out more than any other Pakistani politician about the dangers of militant extremism. She blamed foreign militants for annexing part of Pakistan’s territory, and called for military operations into North and South Waziristan. She supported Musharraf’s action against the militants in the Red Mosque, and she declared suicide bombing un-Islamic. She seemed to be challenging any suicide bomber that thought of targeting her. “I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman they will burn in hell,” she said in Dubai on the eve of her return. “Secondly, Islam forbids suicide bombing.”10 Religious leaders had been killed for making that sort of declaration in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and usually politicians avoided offering such overt challenges. She also promised greater cooperation with Afghanistan and the United States in combating terrorism, and even suggested in an interview that she would give American officials access to the man behind Pakistan’s program of nuclear proliferation, A. Q. Khan. Such promises would have alarmed many in the military establishment.
Bhutto was taking on two battles in returning to Pakistan, one against extremist Islamism, the other against the military dictatorship in Pakistan. Her opposition to the military went much deeper than the persona of General Musharraf. Bhutto’s own father, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had been overthrown and executed by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1979, and she had been imprisoned. In later years, she blamed the military for the murder of her two brothers, and Musharraf for the imprisonment of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, on corruption charges. Many in the military despised the political class in Pakistan, in particular the socialist Pakistan People’s Party and its leaders, the Bhutto family, whom they often criticized as feudalistic, corrupt, and careless of Pakistan’s strategic interests.
Powerful figures including Ejaz Shah, the head of the
domestic Intelligence Bureau, had voiced the opinion at a government meeting that her return would not be good for Pakistan.11 Afghan President Karzai and his intelligence service had also warned Bhutto in the months before her return that it had learned of militant plots to have her killed. The Afghans told Bhutto that the Pakistani military knew of the plots but did not intend to do anything to prevent them. The Afghans had learned indirectly through informants that a meeting of the army corps commanders—the army chief, Musharraf, and his ten most powerful generals—had discussed a militant plot to have Bhutto killed. The generals had evidence of a planned wave of suicide attacks on high-level figures, not just Bhutto but also Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Sherpao. “They knew there was going to be an attack against her,” a senior Afghan government official told me. The army had decided not to let Bhutto back into power in Pakistan, he said. “They were disgusted at the idea of her coming back.” Although Musharraf had agreed to Bhutto’s return, he was in on the decision to let the militants remove her, according to the official. The information was circumstantial, but the Afghans thought the discussion at such a high-level meeting was so important that they sent word to Dubai to warn Bhutto. “Pakistan has no interest in seeing you alive,” she was told by the government official. Karzai urged Bhutto to take extra precautions for her security.
That same month, September 2007, one of the ISI’s most favored Pakistani militants, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, was released from three years of ISI protective custody. He was a close associate of bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and had been implicated in a coup attempt against Bhutto in 1995. “On a fine September morning of 2007, a car took him out of the safe house and dropped him near Islamabad motorway,” according to a Pakistani intelligence source. One of the most dangerous militants, who was known to hate Bhutto, had just been let loose.
The Wrong Enemy Page 21
