The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Then the army chief set off around the country, visiting six garrisons in a week to dispel doubts about the state of the army and his leadership. The top brass was alarmed that the raid had revealed the weaknesses of Pakistan’s armed forces, which might inspire its rival, India. Internally, the strain in the army was showing. After ten years, the military’s dual policy of supporting the United States in the war on terror while trying to keep Taliban and Kashmiri militants in the wings and loyal had confused and angered many in the lower ranks of the army. They were fighting, and dying, in campaigns against Islamist militants, apparently at the request of America, but at the same time they were being fed a constant flow of anti-American and pro-Taliban propaganda, peddled by the military, which considered the Islamist forces as critical to Pakistan’s strategic interests. Those years of propaganda were showing results. Junior officers increasingly questioned Pakistan’s alliance with the United States in the war on terror and saw the raid on Abbottabad as the action of an aggressor.

  Three weeks after the bin Laden raid, the armed forces suffered a further embarrassment. Pakistani militants armed with suicide vests and rocket-propelled grenades breached the perimeter of Pakistani Naval Station–Mehran outside Karachi, blowing up two highly valuable P-3C Orion surveillance planes bought from the United States. Fitted with banks of computers, listening equipment, and cameras, these planes are the sort used to intercept pirates in the Indian Ocean, militants in the tribal areas, and bin Laden in Abbottabad. At least ten servicemen were killed. There were undoubtedly sympathizers inside the naval base who had helped to plan the attack.

  In the aftermath, American officials pushed for greater cooperation from Pakistan to prove its loyalty in the war on terror. They wanted the government to move against other militant leaders in Pakistan, including Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani. General Pasha was forced to consider the idea in the days after bin Laden’s death. But the anger and embarrassment over the raid was too great. It drove Pakistani military leaders to take a more nationalistic stance. The nation’s media outlets were told by the ISI’s chief, Major General Athar Abbas, to focus on the violation of Pakistani sovereignty by U.S. forces, rather than the presence of bin Laden in Pakistan and the failings of Pakistani military and intelligence.

  U.S.-Pakistani relations had already reached a breaking point by May 2010. A few months earlier, a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, had shot dead two petty thieves in broad daylight at a busy intersection in the city of Lahore. He was arrested by police—and saved from a near lynching by the crowd—but his case turned into an angry wrangle between the U.S. and Pakistani governments. Pakistan was unhappy about the United States’ growing network of CIA spies who were working independently of Pakistani institutions, especially the ISI. The United States had developed its own web of agents and informers in the tribal areas to track militant leaders and pinpoint targets for drone strikes. The strategy had improved the accuracy of drone strikes but infuriated the ISI, which was losing control of the program.

  Raymond Davis’s behavior encapsulated everything Pakistanis hated about the overbearing American behavior toward them. Yet Pakistani military and intelligence chiefs were more worried that they were no longer directing the fight against militancy inside Pakistan nor able to keep particular protégés safe. The bin Laden raid showed America’s determination to work alone when it had to.

  So Pakistan decided to make its own way.

  Someone, almost certainly from the ISI, leaked the name of the American CIA station chief in Islamabad to the Pakistani media one week after the Abbottabad raid. The ISI had done the same thing a year earlier, forcing the then CIA station chief to be pulled out of the country. Then on May 29, in a particularly ugly suppression of the truth, a journalist for the Asia Times Online, Saleem Shahzad, was abducted and killed by ISI agents in Islamabad. His badly beaten body was found in an irrigation stream miles from the city. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told American reporters that Shahzad had been killed on the orders of the two most powerful men in the Pakistani army, Generals Kayani and Pasha.13 The ISI vehemently denied any involvement in Shahzad’s abduction, but the United States had intercepted another revealing phone conversation.

  Far from pursuing other Taliban or al Qaeda members, Pakistan continued to back the Taliban and let militancy flourish in Afghanistan. On June 28, eight gunmen sent by the Haqqani network stormed the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul, a landmark built in the 1970s in the heyday of Afghan development. It featured a swimming pool and popular restaurant on the top of a wooded hill overlooking the city. The gunmen battled Afghan commandos for hours through the night, killing eleven civilians and two policemen. NATO helicopters ended the siege, striking the last gunmen when they reached the hotel rooftop. They were in constant cell phone contact with Badruddin Haqqani, the younger brother of Sirajuddin, who had become the operational manager of most of the complex attacks in Afghanistan. He repeatedly urged them on from his safe haven in Pakistan.

  A few months later in September came two of the worst complex attacks by Haqqani fighters up to that point. A massive truck bomb barreled into an American base in Wardak province, south of Kabul, on September 10, killing five Afghans and wounding ninety-six people, seventy-seven of them American soldiers. Three days later, gunmen seized a tall building under construction on the edge of the diplomatic area of Kabul, and laid siege to the U.S. embassy and several other embassies around it for nineteen hours. It was the most serious armed assault they had ever mounted in the capital. Mortars and rocket-propelled grenades rained down on the embassy and surrounding areas. Visitors to the U.S. consulate on the south side of the compound were hit by the missiles. Sixteen people, including six children, died in the attack. The U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker, was pinned down in a bunker, along with all his staff, for twenty-four hours.

  Pakistan’s continued support and protection for the Haqqanis exasperated the Obama administration. On September 20, the veteran mujahideen leader and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was heading Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and pursuing Karzai’s aim to woo the Taliban to make peace with Kabul and join the government, was killed by a suicide bomber who carried a bomb in his turban. The man had claimed to be carrying a special message from the Taliban leadership, and Karzai had urged Rabbani to see him. Afghan investigators suspected the ISI of being behind the attack. They caught the bomber’s Afghan accomplice in Kabul before he could escape. Under interrogation, he revealed that two Pakistani men in Quetta, whom he knew only as Mahmoud and Ahmed, had plotted the attack and sent him in with the suicide bomber. “Almost certainly they were ISI. They proposed this plan,” a senior Afghan security official told me.

  For Admiral Mullen, the string of attacks by Haqqani fighters, culminating in the assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, was the last straw. Mullen, despite dedicating many hours and air-miles on his relationship with Kayani, realized that the army chief had no intention of reining in Pakistan’s proxies and had been deceiving him all the way. About to retire, Mullen decided to speak frankly in testimony before a U.S. Senate panel. Pakistan was aiding terrorism and deserved sanction. He described the Haqqani network as “a veritable arm” of the ISI.14 Pakistan was supporting the Quetta shura and Haqqani network, he said. “The actions by the Pakistani government to support them—actively and passively—represent a growing problem that is undermining U.S. interests and may violate international norms, potentially warranting sanction.

  “They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power,” he continued. “But in reality, they have already lost that bet. By exporting violence, they’ve eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being.”

  “Mike said what everybody else was thinking,” a retired senior official told me.15 It was the most damming critiqu
e yet of Pakistan’s behavior.

  Pasha and Kayani carried on regardless. They continued pushing back against their critics and against the United States. In November, when U.S. airstrikes killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers manning posts on the Afghan-Pakistan border—U.S. forces say they struck militant firing positions—Pakistan closed its borders to NATO supply convoys. Pakistan had blocked the border on short occasions before, in protest of U.S. military actions, but this time it did so for seven months, costing the United States and NATO millions of dollars by forcing them to reroute supplies through northern Afghanistan. A Pakistani journalist told me that the generals’ whole behavior since the bin Laden raid was typical of his compatriots. Caught doing something wrong, their attitude was “Screw you,” he told me.

  The government of President Zardari, members of which were only too happy for bin Laden to have been caught and killed, acted carefully in the aftermath. The military was like an angry animal that could easily bite its owner. In a scandal known as Memogate, a memorandum written to Admiral Mullen asking for U.S. intervention to prevent a military coup in Pakistan after the bin Laden raid was leaked to the press. The Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, was accused of composing the memo. He came under formal investigation and was indicted for treason. The case later collapsed, but Haqqani was forced to resign amid considerable threats to his person. He had long irked the military, opposed ISI control of foreign policy, and argued for cooperation with the United States.

  It took more than a year for the anger over the bin Laden raid to subside enough for cooperative relations to resume between the United States and Pakistan. For some in the region, there was relief that Pakistan’s subterfuge was finally revealed. The Afghans felt vindicated, their constant warnings proved true. Admiral Mullen said he had always told General Kayani that if they had intelligence on bin Laden, the United States would act on it. The Americans, it seemed, had finally drawn a line.

  Yet vis-à-vis Afghanistan, nothing much changed. Pakistan remained obdurate in its support of its proxies, which continued to conduct high-profile attacks on the Afghan capital. The U.S. government, if more circumspect now about Pakistan’s motives, fell back into its mode of careful diplomacy, mollifying Pakistani leaders in public and keeping any stronger talk private. “Everybody now is kind of walking on eggs and hoping that ultimately the relationship can become stabilized,” the former official told me.16

  The Pakistani military was weakened, battered from all sides. For the first time ever, senior generals were arraigned in court for corruption. Politicians appeared bolder, demanding to inspect the military budget, previously secret. They also pushed back on the military’s meddling in politics. Nawaz Sharif, victim of the military coup in 1999, won the 2013 election, vowing among other things to impose civilian control over the military. His first six months in office witnessed a spasm of violence, however. Pakistan’s militants, and their masters, the military, seemed to be warning him or testing his resolve. His plans to improve relations with India and Afghanistan, and to curb the military, were going to be mammoth tasks, even with Sharif’s strong political mandate.

  A month after Sharif took office, someone leaked the report of the Pakistani Commission of Inquiry into the Abbottabad raid to Al Jazeera television. The commission did not offer any new evidence of Pakistani complicity in hiding bin Laden, but it did not rule it out. Overall, it blamed incompetence rather than complicity, often the excuse Pakistani officials fall back on, but it added that key government officials had not always provided satisfactory testimony and questions remained unanswered. It was blisteringly critical of almost every institution involved: the police, intelligence agencies, armed forces, and civilian government. It reserved its harshest comments for the ISI, which it found both overbearing in its usurpation of authority and incompetent. Individual security lapses were understandable, but “taken together suggested the possibility of something more sinister,” the report said.17

  General Musharraf meanwhile refused to go quietly. He had gone into exile in London after stepping down as president in 2008 but kept busy with speech tours and television interviews. In 2013, he chose to return to Pakistan to gather political support and run for parliament. He miscalculated, however, and was barred from running for office because of pending court cases charging him with complicity in the murder of Benazir Bhutto and treason for violating the constitution and ordering the arrest of judges during the 2007 state of emergency. Within days he was ordered to appear in court and arrested. He was allowed to remain under house arrest at his spacious farmhouse villa, yet his star, and that of the Pakistani army, had been brought to a new low.

  If allowed to proceed, the court cases may unravel some of the remaining mysteries of the Musharraf era. One day as he sat at home in Islamabad, the retired general Talat Masood was watching an interview with Musharraf on television. Masood was struck by something the general said. Musharraf was talking about bin Laden and, as was often the case, he was talking too much. It dawned on Masood that the former army chief had known about bin Laden and where he was hiding. “It was a statement he made in the interview,” he told me. “I got a feeling that he knew.”

  14

  Springtime in Zangabad

  “They are finished. Finished. You are witnessing yourself. This was ungoverned territory, and now the whole area is full of Afghan flags.”

  —Abdul Wudood, leader of a popular uprising against the Taliban in Zangabad

  February 2013. It happened one day of its own accord. The people of Panjwayi, Afghanistan, stood up and turned against the Taliban. Residents joined police to run them out of a small cluster of villages in Zangabad. Their success set off a popular uprising that spread through dozens of villages. Within days, hundreds of villagers rallied to support the government, and Afghan flags were flying from rooftops across the district. As security forces closed in on the last Taliban bases on the edge of the desert, villagers came forward with information, vowing to keep the Taliban out and offering their sons for a local defense force. It was the most significant popular turning against the insurgents in years of fighting, and it happened right in the Taliban heartland, where the movement had first begun nearly twenty years earlier.

  At first there was little reporting of it. So in mid-February, ten days after the uprising began, I went out with the Afghan police to Zangabad to see for myself. We drove in an armored Humvee donated by the U.S. government, along the new, asphalt road built by Canadian troops, and dipped south on a dirt track for a mile or so to the village of Pishin Gan Sayedan. We headed to the home of Abdul Wudood, a former mujahideen commander and farmer who had led the uprising. This had long been hostile territory. Zangabad had been a base of Taliban operations for most of the last decade, and even since the surge was still a hotbed of the insurgency. The previous year, an American soldier had walked out of a special forces base near this village and massacred sixteen Afghan civilians in their homes. The Afghan intelligence chief Asadullah Khaled was attacked by the Taliban when he visited the scene of the massacre to offer condolences to the victims’ families. One Afghan soldier was killed in that attack.

  Yet I was not too worried about my safety. I had learned that the safest way to visit a village in Afghanistan is with people from the area, and the local police were accompanying us. It flashed through my mind that the local police had been the main culprits in numerous insider attacks, turning their guns on their American mentors or their own Afghan colleagues. But police chief Sultan Mohammad had confidence in them and dispatched us with a few swift orders. The men turned out to be relatives of the police chief. The driver stopped on the way to greet an elder standing by the road, his uncle.

  It was a warm, sunny day, one to lift the spirits. The fields and trees were still bare from the winter, but a pale pink blur of almond blossom, the first herald of spring in Afghanistan, brought a hint of color to the muddy brown landscape. The Afghan flag flew above two raisin barns on the edge of the
village where police manned positions overlooking the serried banks of the vineyards. Wudood was waiting for us and took us into his guesthouse.

  He sent word around the village, and soon fifty or more elders downed tools and congregated at his house. They were poor farmers with weather-beaten faces and gnarled hands. They slipped off their muddied galoshes and sat cross-legged on the floor of a deep verandah, sipping green tea as Wudood recounted his story of the uprising. As I looked around at the gathering of elders, I realized what I was witnessing: the end of the road for the Taliban in this area. Some of these men, perhaps most of them, had long given support to the Taliban. They had given them shelter and food, and tipped them off with information, whether willingly or under duress. But now they had switched sides, en masse, and there was no turning back once you declared the Taliban your enemy. If the people of Zangabad had turned, the Taliban would struggle throughout Kandahar.

  “First it was only us and two other villages, and now more people are joining,” Wudood said. “The whole area was fed up with the Taliban and now you see all the people are supporting me and we are together.” With the villagers against them, the Taliban would not be able to come back. “They are finished. Finished. You are witnessing yourself. This was ungoverned territory, and now the whole area is full of Afghan flags.”