A few weeks later, on October 18, 2007, Bhutto flew into Karachi. I was one of a crowd of journalists traveling with her. She wore religious amulets on her arm and round her neck, and offered prayers as she stepped onto Pakistani soil. She was trusting in God. Hours later, as Bhutto processed in an open-topped bus through streets of flag-waving, chanting supporters, two huge bombs exploded close to her vehicle, tearing police vans, bodyguards, and party followers into shreds. Bhutto survived the blast, but 149 died, and some 400 were injured. The explosions were set off by two suicide bombers mingling in the center of the celebrations. The bombs were filled with ball bearings and spewed lethal shrapnel into the crowd. Each tiny ball was as deadly as a bullet, a senior Karachi policeman said afterward. One of his officers was slain by a single ball bearing in the head. Bhutto put Musharraf on notice after that attack. She accused people in his government and the militant leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar of being behind it. She told people that Musharraf had threatened her directly. She demanded better security. Karzai again urged Bhutto to take more precautions and asked his intelligence service to arrange for her an armored vehicle with jammers to block cell phone signals, often used to detonate bombs. They started working on it, but the Afghans did not have left-hand-drive vehicles for Pakistan nor time to train vehicle operators. Undaunted, Bhutto pressed on with a busy schedule of campaigning ahead of elections in January. She insisted on greeting waving crowds of supporters from an open-topped car.
Bhutto had ruffled Musharraf. The Supreme Court was also threatening him as it adjudicated on the legality of his election to the presidency. Musharraf made a last startling lunge to hold on to power, declaring martial law on November 3, suspending the constitution, and placing most of the Supreme Court justices under arrest. Yet his grip on power was unraveling. Despite their agreement, Bhutto began campaigning against Musharraf. The Bush administration made it clear it felt let down by Musharraf’s dictatorial turn. The general was forced to allow his greatest enemy, Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf had ousted from power in 1999, to return from exile on November 25 for the election campaign. Under the combination of diplomatic pressure and growing protests in the streets, Musharraf resigned from the post of army chief on December 3. Without the army position, his power withered, and he was forced out of the presidency eight months later. General Kayani, the former ISI chief, was now the man in charge.
It would make no difference for Bhutto. A group of militants, including two teenage boys trained and primed to commit suicide bombings, arrived at the Haqqania madrassa in Akora Khattak in late December. The madrassa stands near the famous Moghul fort of Attock, where the two great watercourses join, the Kabul River from Afghanistan and Indus River descending from the Himalayas. Attock is the point where the Pashtun lands end and the Punjab begins. It was a good staging place for the travelers, halfway between the tribal areas and their destination, Rawalpindi. The Haqqania madrassa is a notorious establishment; it follows the fundamentalist Deobandi sect and is often described as the alma mater of the Afghan jihad since it has trained generations of students over three decades for war in Afghanistan. It is run by Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, head of his own religious party and close supporter of Zia-ul-Haq. The madrassa houses three thousand religious students from Pashtun areas, Afghans and Pakistanis, in large, white-washed residence blocks built around a series of courtyards. Ninety-five percent of the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan had passed through its classrooms, a spokesman for the madrassa, Syed Mohammad Yousuf Shah, proudly told me.12
Their most famous graduate is Jalaluddin Haqqani, the veteran Afghan mujahideen commander, who took his name from the madrassa and won renown as a ferocious warrior against the Soviet occupation. During that time, he forged strong ties with Arab groups, including bin Laden’s, and the ISI. He served as a minister in the mujahideen and Taliban governments, and remained an important ally to Pakistan, with control of a large section of eastern Afghanistan. That did not change after 9/11. He continued to head a network of commanders known as the Haqqani network and became the main protector of al Qaeda in North Waziristan. His long and close ties to the ISI and to Arab groups has been the critical element in creating a safe haven in the tribal areas for the Taliban and foreign militants. It is Haqqani who is the linchpin for the entire ISI operation in the tribal areas. He is the most powerful commander who oversees all the other groups. Now elderly, he has passed daily operations to his son, Sirajuddin. Born of an Arab mother, Sirajuddin Haqqani is known as the Khalifa, or Caliph, to his followers although he does not have a high religious standing. He derives his power from his military clout and mafia businesses. His network has become the main instrument for ISI-directed attacks in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.
The visitors who stopped for a night at the Haqqania madrassa in late December included two young followers of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban and the country’s most wanted man by this time. They stayed with a cleric who was resident at the madrassa. Among the small group that met that night was a student of the madrassa who had been reconnoitering the election rally venue at Liaquat Bagh, a park in Rawalpindi where Bhutto was due to speak. He escorted the teenagers to Rawalpindi and handed them on to another cell in the city.
Bhutto had already changed her schedule in Peshawar to avert one threatened attack on December 26. The next day, December 27, she attended the rally in Liaquat Bagh. As her motorcade left the park, it slowed so she could greet supporters in the street. From the crowd a suicide bomber fired a pistol at her, and then detonated his vest of explosives. Bhutto was standing in the roof opening of an armored SUV. She ducked into the car at the sound of the gunfire but not in time. The power of the blast threw the car forward, slamming the hatch opening into the back of her head with lethal force. Bhutto slumped down into the car, mortally wounded, and fell into the lap of her confidante and constant chaperone, Naheed Khan. The bomber was one of the two teenagers, younger than sixteen years old, a Mehsud tribesman from South Waziristan named Bilal. The other teenager, Ikramullah, was waiting at the second entrance to the park in case Bhutto’s convoy had exited by that gate. He left the scene without detonating his explosives.
The bombers were part of a small cell that had formed to avenge the Red Mosque siege. The two leading figures in the cell were a taxi driver and his cousin, both from Rawalpindi. The taxi driver, educated in a madrassa, had lost a close friend in the siege. The group had planned several attacks in and around Rawalpindi, including hits on a minister in Musharraf’s cabinet, a colonel working at the military General Headquarters, and Tariq Aziz, Musharraf’s chief civilian aide. When they failed to reach those targets, the group was assigned the task of assassinating Bhutto.
It was another terrifying blast amid a crowd of Bhutto’s supporters. Twenty-four others were killed in the bombing and over ninety wounded. Political mistrust was running so high at the time that few of Bhutto’s supporters accepted the theory, put forward by the Musharraf government, that the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was behind her assassination. Several subsequent investigations, including one ordered by Bhutto’s own party once it took power, found, however, that he did play a role.
Baitullah was a flamboyant, long-haired Pashtun tribesman. Only thirty-three, he was already the most successful leader of the Pakistani Taliban, having united militant groups the length of the tribal areas. By 2007, he commanded thousands of tribesmen, ran training camps, and mounted cross-border operations into Afghanistan. He had an off-again-on-again relationship with the Pakistani military, entering several peace agreements with them then breaking them off in spectacular fashion, kidnapping soldiers or staging splashy attacks. Baitullah was officially branded a dangerous outlaw, yet the ISI maintained contacts with him throughout and worked with him on projects that suited their agenda, American and Pakistani officials told me. American officials noticed that the Pakistani military never moved aggressively against the Pakistani Taliban and never sought to kill or capture Baitullah. His was
another proxy force that the ISI tolerated and used for its own purposes, for leverage against Afghanistan or India, to keep some kind of order over the thousands of militants in the tribal areas, and even to use against its own people. The relationship was such that it is not inconceivable that Baitullah could be tasked with arranging attacks on Bhutto and others inside Pakistan, these officials told me.
As Bhutto had long warned, a conglomeration of opponents wanted her dead, and were all linked in some way. They were the same forces behind the insurgency in Afghanistan: Taliban and Pakistani militant groups, al Qaeda, and the Pakistan military establishment, which included top generals Musharraf and Kayani. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry into the circumstances of Bhutto’s death found each group had a motive and merited investigation.13
Pakistani prosecutors later indicted Musharraf for being part of a wider conspiracy to remove Bhutto from the political scene. There was “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that he did not provide her with adequate security because he wanted to ensure her death in an almost inevitable assassination attempt, the chief state prosecutor in her murder trial, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, told me.14 Musharraf had directly threatened Bhutto during a telephone conversation, he added. A hard-working, hard-charging man, Chaudhry succeeded in having Musharraf arrested and was pushing to speed up the trial when he was gunned down on his way to work in May 2013. His friends said he had begun receiving threats as he pressed the Musharraf case.
For Afghan security officials watching from Kabul, Musharraf’s failure to provide security was beside the point: “If your intelligence service wants to get rid of you, no amount of security will protect you,” a senior Afghan security official told me.15
Chaudhry had no doubts that the mastermind of the plot to kill Bhutto was al Qaeda, which he told me included Baitullah Mehsud. “It was because she was pro-American, because she was a strong leader and a nationalist,” he said. A Pakistani security official who interviewed some of the suspects in the Bhutto case and other militants detained in Pakistan’s prisons came to the same conclusion. The decision to assassinate Bhutto was made at a meeting of the top council of al Qaeda, the official told me. Mehsud was present at the meeting, as was Abu Ubaydah al-Misri, the operational chief of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the time.
The morning after the assassination, Pakistani authorities intercepted a telephone call between Baitullah and a senior cleric from his tribe. Baitullah used to make calls from a public phone in Kaniguram, a town in South Waziristan, and the Pakistani authorities had a permanent tap on the phone, the security official told me. A transcript released by the government reveals the two men discussing the bombing and congratulating each other over it. The cleric, just back from a trip, confirms that two of their men, Bilal and Ikramullah, did the deed. Baitullah thanks him for the news. “Great job done. They were brave boys that killed her.”
10
The Taliban Close Their Grip
“The Taliban, when they say something, they do it. They threaten to kill people and they do it. But when we say we will protect you, we often do not.”
—Jelani Popal, Afghan government official
August 2008. A container truck lay on its side, burning. Its cab was empty, the driver nowhere to be seen. Further ahead, the rest of the convoy was pulled up at the side of the road. Armed men stood in the road, assault rifles in one hand, walkie-talkies in the other. Their commander wore sunglasses and a checkered scarf tied untidily around his head. He shouted a stream of orders at his men and into his cell phone in one breath. One of his men stood guard, a heavy machine gun with a tripod slung across his body, a ribbon of bullets looped around his shoulders. The men were agitated, high on drugs or adrenaline.
They were members of a private security company guarding a convoy carrying food, water, and other supplies to a string of U.S. military bases south of Kabul. I was out reporting with the Afghan National Army when we came across them. The next stretch of road would be the most dangerous, they told us, where they often came under ambush from the Taliban.
This was Highway One, the main Kabul-Kandahar road that links the Afghan capital to the south. Restoring it had been a prize project of the Bush administration, demonstrating America’s commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan and helping it get back on its feet. In 2001, the road was a rutted, dusty track, pockmarked with craters and blown-out bridges. The journey to Kandahar took us sixteen hours by car in those days. I would travel with a small team, a driver, translator or local reporter, sometimes a photographer too. We would stop in a teahouse for the night to break up the journey. By the end, the sinews in my neck ached from holding my head straight in the constant jarring.
President Karzai saw the road as a critical artery that literally would hold the country together, tying the restive south to the commercial north, uniting the Pashtuns, who had largely made up the Taliban, with the northern tribes that had opposed them. Karzai had lobbied Bush personally to have the road rebuilt. It took two years and cost roughly $1 million a mile—making it one of the most expensive pieces of road anywhere in the world—and spawned multiple security problems, including repeated attacks and kidnappings of construction engineers. By the end of 2003, all three hundred miles from Kabul to Kandahar were asphalted, cutting driving time to six hours and bringing the prices of goods down dramatically.
Yet within months highwaymen and insurgents began plaguing passengers on the road. In the ensuing years, as the insurgency advanced up the country, government officials, assistance organizations, and foreign workers risked kidnap and death traveling on Highway One.
By 2008, the road had become an example of the government’s and America’s failure to thwart the Taliban. The rejuvenated Taliban were closing in on the provinces around Kabul, trying to enforce a stranglehold on the capital by targeting strategic roads and districts, undercutting the country’s economy and communications. Highway One had become a dangerous gauntlet of mines, roadside bombs, and ambushes. The U.S. military contracted Afghan security firms to ferry their nonlethal supplies around the country, and we had come across such a group in Wardak province, fifty miles south of Kabul.
The convoy could not risk delays or being split up so when a truck broke down, the drivers abandoned it and set it on fire. The men were gathering themselves for the drive through the most dangerous stretch of road south of Saydebad and into Ghazni province. Taliban gunmen always opened fire in the town of Salar, where houses climbed the hills on either side of the road. The governor of Ghazni had been ambushed there just a few days earlier.
The worst attack had occurred on June 24 at Salar, when fifty fuel tankers and food trucks were ambushed. Insurgents knocked out the lead vehicles, blocking the way, and then set the convoy on fire, the convoy commander told me. Seven drivers were dragged out and beheaded. The insurgents singled out the drivers of the refrigerated trucks because the vehicles looked more obviously foreign, he said. Troops from FOB Airborne, the American forward operating base in Wardak, responded when they saw the attack. “There were multiple plumes of smoke for five to six kilometers down the road,” an American officer serving in the area told me later. It took eight days of operations to recover all the burned vehicles. They had to lift some of the wrecks with cranes where they had burned holes through the asphalt.
Wardak is a hard-bitten place. The men are as obdurate as the stony hillsides. But the fighting in Wardak degenerated in the summer of 2008 into something vicious. There were reports of foreign fighters in the province, training local men to make roadside bombs and undertake suicide attacks. Two days after the drivers were beheaded, on June 26 a small convoy of American soldiers was bumping along a dirt road through the Tangi Valley, a narrow verdant line running east from the highway. They were in three armored Humvees, part of a reconnaissance team from the New York National Guard, heading back to their base in the adjoining province of Logar. A marine from special operations command was along on the patrol with them, as was an Afghan int
erpreter.
As they approached Tangi village, forty minutes from the main highway, one of the vehicles hit a mine or roadside bomb. The others tried to drive through the ambush but came under fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. A second truck was hit and disabled. One Humvee caught fire and burned so ferociously that the trees along the floor of the valley caught fire. The Afghan interpreter never managed to get out of his seat. He died in the vehicle, his body burned beyond recognition. Taliban were firing from tall cornfields below the road, hidden from view by thick vegetation. The soldiers tried to fend off the ambush from behind the cover of the vehicles. One of them sent a text message on his cell phone back to FOB Airborne. It was an SOS, sent in the last few minutes of his life.
Troops on Highway One rushed to help the men at Tangi but hit another mine on the way. They pushed on, found the ambushed vehicles still on fire, and began a search for survivors. There was no one around; the villagers had fled or hid. Bullet casings were scattered all around the vehicles where the men had made a last defense. A military rucksack lay ripped open, its belongings scattered about.
One Humvee had made it out with survivors, but three men were dead at the scene and two more were missing. Search parties scoured the area for the rest of the day. Just before dark they came across the remains of one of the men. He had been dragged nearly a mile from the ambush site, and his body had been mutilated. His arms had been cut off, and someone had tried to carve out his heart. The search went on through the next day, but the units only ever found parts of the other soldier.
The Wrong Enemy Page 22
