Daniel S Markey
Page 25
organization/166839.pdf.
23 For more on this program, see David E. Sanger, The Inheritance (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), pp. 215–20.
24 Greg Miller, “CIA Pays for Support in Pakistan,” Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/15/world/fg-cia-pakistan15.
25 Quoted in Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 86, from James Carney and John F. Dickerson, “Inside the War Room,” Time, December 31, 2001, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,1001573,00.html.
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No Exit from Pakistan
Later, at the end of 2007 when Musharraf’s grip on power was slipping,
Bush appears to have recalled that initial pledge. “I don’t want anyone pulling
the rug out from under him. The United States isn’t going to be in a position of
trying to bring him down,” he told his secretary of state, in full recognition that
remaining true to Musharraf would cost Washington dearly with the Pakistani
public who had long since soured on their undemocratic leader.26
The deal with Musharraf was essential for the opening phase of America’s
response to al-Qaeda. Pakistan’s ports and airstrips made it far easier for
the United States to launch an invasion of Afghanistan. Very soon, the fight
against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan became equally significant. Musharraf purged
Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers from official roles in the army’s leadership.
At Washington’s forceful urging, he also helped to shut down and investigate
nascent links between a small group of Pakistani nuclear scientists and al-
Qaeda.27 Overall, cooperation between the CIA and ISI led to the arrest of
hundreds of al-Qaeda members, including the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, in March 2003. Over those first few years after 9/11, CIA
counterterror operations in Pakistani cities grew sufficiently sophisticated that
remaining al-Qaeda operatives began to flee the cities for the remote tribal areas
along the Afghan border.28 In short, Musharraf took some very important steps
in return for America’s largesse and in response to American pressure.
Early Frustrations
But Musharraf’s game with the United States was a lot more complicated
than that. He worked overtime to minimize stresses on himself, his army,
and his state (in roughly that order) while maximizing the flow of assistance
and reimbursements from Washington. He and his top generals drew distinc-
tions between different types of militants and terrorists, fighting some, such
as al-Qaeda and various Pakistani sectarian extremist groups, while aiding
and abetting others, such as anti-Indian terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-
Taiba and the fleeing Afghan Taliban leadership.29 U.S. officials were reluctant
to criticize Musharraf publicly, lest they jeopardize what help Pakistan was
already providing. But despite this public American embrace, there was never
any doubt in Washington that Musharraf was a less-than-ideal partner and
Pakistan a difficult ally. Over time, American frustrations mounted.
One of the most significant problems with Pakistan became apparent mere
months after 9/11, when on December 13, 2001, Pakistani terrorists launched
26 Rice, No Higher Honor, p. 610.
27 George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 261–8.
28 Bergen, The Longest War (New York: Free Press, 2011), p. 254.
29 Ashley Tellis discusses the distinctions Pakistan drew in its relationships with extremist and terrorist groups in Pakistan and the War on Terror (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008), http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/tellis_pakistan_final
.pdf.
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U-Turn to Drift
115
an audacious raid on India’s parliament in New Delhi. Fortunately, the attack-
ers failed in their primary goal of killing India’s top politicians, but they nearly
succeeded in sparking a war between India and Pakistan. Both countries mobi-
lized hundreds of thousands of troops along their shared border until late
2002.30
Analysts call this period the “Twin Peaks crisis” because there were two
high points of Indo-Pakistani tension, the first after the parliament attack and
the second in May 2002 when Pakistani terrorists massacred several dozen
Indians, including women and children, at an army camp in Kashmir. With
troops at the ready and patience near the breaking point, it looked like nuclear-
armed India and Pakistan would go to war. In early June 2002, Armitage flew
into action with a diplomatic mission to avert that disastrous outcome. In
Islamabad, he elicited a quiet promise from Musharraf to end the movement
of terrorists across the Kashmir divide. Armitage then shuttled to India where
he publicly revealed Musharraf’s pledge. By playing the intermediary role,
Armitage effectively made the United States a guarantor of that pledge.
As a short-term fix, the gambit worked. But the affair exposed the reality
that Musharraf’s promises to crack down on all Pakistani-based militants could
not be taken seriously. During his meeting with the Pakistani president in
Islamabad, Armitage had shared evidence of terrorist training camps on the
Pakistani side of the border. Musharraf became red-faced with surprise, either
because he had been caught in the act or because his orders to disband the
camps had not been followed. Neither Americans nor Indians honestly believed
that Musharraf’s pledge would end terrorist infiltration once and for all, but
Armitage’s intervention was welcomed as a politically expedient means to
defuse a war.
American diplomacy did little, however, to address the persistent threat
posed by terrorist safe havens on Pakistani soil.31 This was equally true on
Pakistan’s western front, where Pakistanis, including members of the ISI, were
welcoming fleeing Afghan fighters back into the same places that many of
them had called home during the civil wars of the 1990s and the anti-Soviet
campaigns of the 1980s.
In time, Pakistan’s safe haven enabled a ragtag band of defeated refugees
to regroup into an Afghan insurgency that challenges NATO and the Kabul
government to this day. America’s own failure to close the Afghan border
and bottle up al-Qaeda in the mountain redoubt of Tora Bora in December
2001 was immediately recognized as a blunder.32 But it was not until at least
2005 or 2006 that American officials in Washington fully appreciated the
30 For a thorough study of this episode, see Polly Nayak and Michael Krepon, U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia’s Twin Peaks Crisis (Washington: Stimson Center, 2006), http://www
.stimson.org/books-reports/us-crisis-management-in-south-asias-twin-peaks-crisis/.
31 This is one of the many insightful observations in Nayak and Krepon, U.S. Crisis Management.
32 Ga
ry Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker (New York: Crown, 2005).
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No Exit from Pakistan
ramifications of the Taliban safe haven in Pakistan for what was by then a
stalemated war in Afghanistan.
American mistakes in Afghanistan and Washington’s distraction by the Iraq
war had by then convinced Islamabad that the United States was not seriously
interested in ridding Afghanistan of Taliban influence. From a Pakistani per-
spective, Washington was either unaware of or resigned to the fact that the
Taliban were gradually reasserting their influence in Afghanistan. As a conse-
quence, Pakistanis – many already sympathetic to the Afghan Taliban cause –
chose to maintain and even to enhance their ties with the militants and to see
them as political allies for that inevitable day when the Americans would pack
up and leave Afghanistan once again.
Washington’s tightly constrained definition of its post-9/11 mission in Pak-
istan was also made clear along a very different front. In 1999, Musharraf had
grabbed power by toppling the civilian government of Nawaz Sharif. During
his first couple of years he faced U.S. criticism, but riding high on American
post-9/11 support, he believed the time was ripe to cement his political author-
ity. To accomplish this, the army and ISI cynically rigged a 2002 national
referendum and parliamentary elections. These moves sidelined Musharraf’s
political opponents and installed a pliant “king’s party” in Islamabad. The
entire exercise provided only the thinnest democratic veneer to Musharraf’s
regime, and the ham-handed manipulation of the polls really only undercut his
claims of popularity and legitimacy.33 His determination to invoke a constitu-
tionally derived authority for his rule also set the tone for future conflicts with
political opponents.
Musharraf’s political shenanigans stirred no public rebuke from the Bush
administration. The Pakistani general’s anti-democratic practices were thor-
oughly at odds with what would later, especially after President Bush’s second
inaugural speech, be called the “freedom agenda.”34 Underpinning that agenda
was the notion that the repressive politics of undemocratic regimes in the Mus-
lim world were at least partially to blame for the Islamist terrorism of the
early twenty-first century. Musharraf’s version of authoritarianism in Pakistan
looked rather tame next to that of Egypt or Saudi Arabia, but the essential
logic of the freedom agenda could be applied just as readily.
America’s hypocritical policy in Pakistan was, however, entirely consis-
tent with the defining features of Washington’s post-9/11 relationship with
Musharraf. The first of these was Bush’s pledge not to pressure him in ways
that were politically uncomfortable. The pledge was buttressed by a view in
other corners of the administration, including the State Department, that it was
simply unrealistic to demand very much from Pakistan. America was having a
hard enough time with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and near-war between India and
Pakistan. Could it simultaneously demand democratic reform by a country that
33 For more on this episode, see Rashid, Descent into Chaos, pp. 149–51, 156–61.
34 Rice, No Higher Honor, pp. 324–9.
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U-Turn to Drift
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had seen too little capable leadership – civilian or military – over the course
of its independent history, and which lacked some of the basic building blocks
for effective democratic rule? No; Powell and Armitage judged it was wiser to
curb American ambitions and focus on the immediate problems at hand. Better
to recognize that Pakistan would remain, at least for the foreseeable future, a
rusty old Volvo.
drift and distraction
By crafting a narrow deal with Musharraf after 9/11, the Bush administration
got what it needed to launch its opening salvo in the campaign to punish al-
Qaeda and its allies. That was a big deal. But when that salvo failed to find and
finish al-Qaeda in short order, Washington found itself with too little leverage
in its relationship with Islamabad. The United States needed to renegotiate
terms with Pakistan, but that would have to wait until both Presidents Bush
and Musharraf left the scene.
From about 2003 until 2007, the relationship stayed stuck in first gear,
routinely buffeted by crises and, after 2003, increasingly a victim of the massive
distractions caused by the U.S. war in Iraq. In American policy debates, it is
now commonplace to argue that if not for Iraq, Washington might have kept its
focus on Afghanistan and finished the job it started after 9/11.35 This critique
is fair. It is equally applicable to U.S. policy in Pakistan.
The Iraq war reconfigured U.S. priorities globally, including in South Asia.
For instance, on joining the policy planning staff at the State Department in
2003, I was tasked to determine whether South Asian countries might con-
tribute troops for the war in Iraq. Today, it seems more than a little quixotic
that Washington could have cajoled Pakistan, Bangladesh, or India (among
other states) into sending their soldiers into the quicksand of Iraq. But in
June 2003, undoubtedly out of a desire to curry favor with the United States,
Musharraf had in fact accepted “in principle” a U.S. request to contribute
peacekeepers to an anticipated Iraqi stabilization force.36 There were similarly
lukewarm responses from other potential contributing nations.
The fact that global troop solicitations occupied a good part of America’s
diplomatic agenda provides an accurate reflection of Washington’s priori-
ties during that period. The war in Iraq redirected American money, troops,
weapons, intelligence assets, and the attention of senior administration offi-
cials away from South Asia. Afghanistan turned into an “economy of force”
35 This point won easy and bipartisan support among the members of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force I directed in 2010. See Independent Task Force on U.S. Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Task Force Report No. 65, Council on Foreign Relations (November 2010), http://www.cfr.org/pakistan/us-strategy-pakistan-afghanistan/p23253?co=C007305.
36 See K. Alan Kronstadt, “Pakistan: Chronology of Events,” Congressional Research Service, August 4, 2003, http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/crs/23387.pdf.
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No Exit from Pakistan
operation.37 According to David D. McKiernan, the U.S. general in charge of
the mission in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009, “There was a saying when I
got
there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it. If you’re in
Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.”38 In short,
U.S. troops in Afghanistan were too few and lacked too much of what they
needed to do their jobs.
Pakistan was also an afterthought. Even setting aside everything other than
the fight against al-Qaeda, the initial burst of post-9/11 counterterror successes
gradually slowed to a trickle. By 2007, it was clear that Washington’s coun-
terterror effort in Pakistan was failing. Such was the frightening judgment of
a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released that summer, in which the U.S.
intelligence community concluded that al-Qaeda “has protected or regenerated
key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the
Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants,
and its top leadership.”39
A Musharraf-Centric Strategy
Washington might have been captivated by Iraq, but there were regular
reminders of how dangerous the situation in Pakistan could be. For a time,
it felt like just keeping Musharraf alive was a major accomplishment. Over
a two-week period at the end of 2003, the general-turned-president narrowly
escaped being blown up in two separate attacks. In both cases, extremist sympa-
thizers within the Pakistani military tipped off the terrorists about Musharraf’s
travel plans.
Musharraf opens his 2006 memoir with a description of the gruesome scene
during one of those attacks.40 It is horrifying for what it says about the levels
of violence in Pakistan. Most striking to U.S. officials at the time was the sense
that Musharraf faced enemies within his own military who were in league with
the terrorists and who might, with a lucky bomb or bullet, send Pakistan into
even deeper turmoil than it already faced.
The assassination attempts undoubtedly reinforced a sense among senior
U.S. officials that Musharraf’s life was on the line because he had cast his lot
on America’s side in the war against the terrorists. This was only partially true.
Musharraf’s alliance was in fact grudging and incomplete. Persistent differences