by Shuja Nawaz
In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear. America is also providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development. We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting. And going forward, the Pakistan people must know America will remain a strong supporter of Pakistan’s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent, so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed. 27
Pakistan had changed dramatically. Its population had grown enormously, it was largely youthful, with the vast majority below twenty-five years of age, fairly literate, and had a politically active civil society that was well connected with the globe. Afghanistan too was urbanizing rapidly and the cell phone revolution had produced its own challenges for a government that attempted to rule by fiat.
The Surge
During the West Point speech, Obama spoke about the completion of a second review of Afghanistan, based on the experience since his inauguration and the surge of 30,000 troops. But, he also announced that eighteen months later, US troops would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan while attempting to build up the capacity of the Afghan forces. This statement of intent negated the surge of troops that Obama announced. As a US Special Forces major from the post at Khost told me later, ‘We had convinced a number of local chiefs to come over to our side. The day after the speech, they came in and said to us, “You are leaving!” No amount of explanations by us could persuade them to remain on our side!’
Hidden in the words addressed by Obama to Pakistan was a threat that the US would not tolerate threats from ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan. The surge itself was a validation of the plan of the new commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In a sixty-six-page report to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, McChrystal had presented a range of 30,000–40,000 troops needed to ‘win’ the battle in Afghanistan. This report, which was leaked in September, had put the president in a difficult position with his new commander. McChrystal was the tenth commander of the forces in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001, a fact that in itself reflected the difficulty of prosecuting a coherent and cohesive strategy of war against the Taliban when the leadership kept changing. (Indeed, the average tenure of the seventeen-odd commanders of forces in Afghanistan up to the appointment of Gen. Mick Nicholson was thirteen months, according to Joseph Collins of the National Defense University, Washington DC.) But Obama conceded the military’s request and then stayed the course till the end of his tenure. McChrystal had succeeded Gen. David D. McKiernan who had spent barely one year as commander of ISAF, but lost the confidence of the Pentagon and the president in being unable to turn the tide of the war or to introduce innovative tactics.
McChrystal brought to the regional war a well-honed skill as a special operations leader in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had begun in Afghanistan in 2002 as chief of staff to Joint Task Force 180, then spent a year at the Pentagon before becoming commander of Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC focused primarily on operations in Iraq. He transformed JSOC into a highly efficient and effective force that led among other things to the tracking and death of Abu Musaab Al Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda commander in Iraq. Between 2002 and 2008, he spent part of the time in Afghanistan and kept up with developments there till he was appointed head of ISAF in June 2009. He thought the war effort initially was incoherent because it was a new effort. By the time he took over as ISAF commander, he thought it was ‘incoherent’ on several levels.
‘First, I thought that the progress that you would have expected by the government of Afghanistan was not as good as it should have been. They had deep political divisions but maybe more damaging below the national [level], the competence of the technocrats to deliver governance was very, very low. Almost nonexistent. [And] high levels of corruption.’ He found the coalition of forty-six nations that was aiding them adding to the confusion. ‘Many had come to do peacekeeping and then found that it had gone more violent so that there was at least differing views on what the mission was and how it should be prosecuted.
‘There were five division-equivalent areas, regional commands, and they were all fighting in a different world with a different strategy, [with] really very little connection. Then in the external relationship, the relationship of the US particularly, with Pakistan, with Iran, there were all the players coming at it with their own interests at hand. As a consequence, there was very little confidence on anybody’s part of the direction that this was going to take. Many people were playing [with] a cautious wait-and-see attitude, and that uncertainty . . . just pervaded everything.’ 28 He discerned a visceral hatred for Pakistan among the Afghans. And the Pakistanis, civilian and military leadership, wanting Afghanistan to succeed, but at the same time ‘there was also a contradictory effort to stop them. It was simultaneous, dialectic,’ said McChrystal.
Though he got along very well with the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Kayani, McChrystal felt that it was important that two persons who were key to making the cooperation work across borders had to connect better than they had in the past. These two were Kayani and Karzai.
‘I asked both of them if they’d be willing to meet, and they said that they would be willing to meet with me there and without other Americans there. That was uncomfortable for me because I had to go back up my chain of command because I wasn’t a diplomat, and there was a possible perception that I was overstepping my bounds, but I got approval from Secretary Gates and support from the White House to bring [them] together [in] a meeting.’
Kayani came to Kabul for the meeting and McChrystal recalls both Karzai and Kayani tried hard to make the relationship work. The rapport was ‘tentative and cautious’, but McChrystal felt they had committed to changing the relationship in that first and then a second meeting.
But like his predecessors and others who followed him, there was deep distrust with the Pakistanis, stemming largely from the inability of Pakistan to staunch the infiltration of Afghan Taliban, particularly the Haqqani Network, into Afghanistan from Pakistani territory. The Americans presented evidence of these infiltrations to the Pakistanis, and were met with blank stares. A senior American officer explained this: ‘It was frustrating because we would present evidence, clear evidence, and they would simply deny the evidence or just ignore it. Just as it was laid out they would just ignore it, and so on the one hand we had this constant growing case that said that the ISI and parts of the Pakistani military were clearly facilitating [the Afghan Taliban.]’ A senior Pakistani Army officer, now retired, explained one reason why the Pakistanis loyally stuck to the Haqqani Network: They had facilitated the evacuation of ISI personnel and their ‘friends’ from Kunduz in the north of Afghanistan soon after the American invasion. Ironically, the US is reported to have agreed to the airlift to support Musharraf. 29 It is unclear exactly what role the Haqqanis could have played in this airlift. But ISI field operatives reportedly used this alleged debt owed to the Haqqanis in convincing successive DGs of the ISI to continue to shelter the Haqqani leadership inside Pakistan, even when the Haqqanis had established sanctuaries inside Afghanistan. The ambivalence of these field operatives continued to bedevil the US–Pakistan relationship.
All this while there were attempts at coordinated actions on both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border with parallel operations to clear territory and prevent the escape of militants from one side to the other. Such operations took place in Bajaur and Mohmand, for example. But they were the exception, not the rule, and they rested on the ability of local commanders to communicate and collaborate. They were not a part of an
ingrained or well-established policy.
At the same time, Pakistan made the case that it was losing large numbers of their military in the fighting inside FATA. McChrystal recalls, ‘General Kayani took me to a wall, and he showed me the Pakistani general officers who’d been killed in the fights against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and it was real. It wasn’t trumped up. He asked me how many American generals had been killed, and of course I knew the answer was zero. The point he was making was Pakistan had lost more soldiers, more generals.’ That part of the Pakistani case was real.
On his part, Kayani had a counter-narrative for the lack of ability to move, especially against the Haqqani Network in North Waziristan. To his mind, the Americans had promised that they would move troops into the east, and then they shifted their focus to the south. He recalled ‘losing his cool’ with Gen. John Allen at one point when instead of US forces on the Afghan side Allen promised to provide Afghan forces that were still being trained. Thus, he really did not have the American anvil to the Pakistani hammer. Although there were smaller operations in the north, in Mohmand, for example, where there were parallel and successful activities, the big effort in North Waziristan never materialized. For him, the Pakistan operation was a question of ‘not if but when’. And he kept waiting for more troops. Kayani was also worried about opening up a long front deep into the hinterland since the Taliban had had links with the Punjabi Taliban and other jihadi groups. After the completion of military operations in Swat and Malakand, the Pakistan Army did have a substantial force of close to 40,000 collected in North Waziristan but they did not move to clear the territory till much later, by which time Kayani had retired. His successor Raheel Sharif had little hesitation in acting against the militants in FATA including foreigners who had made FATA their global training ground and headquarters.
The reality was the lack of a clear aim in moving Pakistani forces into FATA and the inability to recognize the sentiments that gave birth to the TTP. Pakistan also failed to prevent the nexus of its Punjabi militants with both Al-Qaeda and the TTP and Afghan Taliban.
A Pakistan argument to counter the US complaints was that the Coalition could have stopped the Haqqanis and other infiltrators once they crossed into Afghanistan. Why didn’t they do that? McChrystal’s response was that the attacks did not simply emanate from North Waziristan alone but were a network effort all over Afghanistan. He did confirm a key element of the debate that had earlier been presented to me by a senior US official in the White House—that only some 10 per cent of all attacks inside Afghanistan were by the Haqqani group, 90 per cent were from other sources.
McChrystal recalls arguing with Karzai to go after the insurgency to which Karzai responded: ‘“We don’t have an insurgency.” I said, “I think you do.” He goes, “No. We’ve got external terrorism.” I said, “No, you don’t. You’ve got a little of that.” But he said, “If we say it’s an insurgency, the West will leave us. They’ll say it’s an internal Afghan problem, and we need the West to stay.” That was an interesting perspective, but I think that the 90/10 number’s actually about right.’ He then added: ‘Having said that, the fact that Pakistan offered a sanctuary cannot be overstated as value’ to the insurgency. 30
Unfortunately, McChrystal did not have the time to alter radically the situation on the ground, nor the mindset of the chief Afghan and Pakistani protagonists. He left the country abruptly and under a cloud, following a story in the Rolling Stone magazine where he and his staff were portrayed as being disrespectful of their civilian higher command, including the president and vice-president. Obama fired him. 31
The US continued to prosecute the war on a short-term basis, attuned to domestic considerations. It changed commanders too quickly, and it failed to convince its Pakistani allies of the importance of helping seal the border on a regular basis. It also failed to adequately equip the Pakistanis with the equipment that would afford their troops protection as well as mobility to conduct operations in difficult terrain against a highly mobile enemy. The Pakistanis and Afghans failed to connect, or coordinate their actions. Distrust marked that relationship too.
At the higher level of command, the White House was struggling to find rapid solutions for a conflict that demanded patience and a longer-term investment in the economic and political stability of Afghanistan. Rotation of the military leadership became the norm. The Afghan theatre of war was fast becoming the Graveyard of Commanders. And the US–Pakistan marriage was heading towards Divorce Court.
3
2011: A Most Horrible Year!
As 2011 dawned, the bleak domestic situation began mirroring Pakistan’s external relationships. Specifically, US–Pakistan relations suffered enormously after the 2010 floods despite the massive US help in the recovery efforts, and despite the infusion of $500 million from the KLB funds for Pakistan’s flood relief at the insistence of Amb. Richard Holbrooke. A high-level strategic dialogue involving the civil and military leadership of Pakistan had begun with the US. A number of groups were working to find solutions to problems at the sectoral level, well beyond the battlefield. But the basis of a strong partnership had yet to be laid. And the disunity on both sides in terms of relations with the other country began to be reflected in the responses to mini-crises.
The year 2011 produced a convergence of negative events that magnified these problems. ‘The drone wars, the outing of two CIA chiefs of station by the Pakistani intelligence, the death of Osama Bin Laden and . . . a scandal called “Memogate” about US–Pakistan relations which threaten(ed) to bring down the Zardari government. And the bad news is there’s no floor in sight.’ That was the summary description by Bruce Riedel, a leading US intelligence analyst and adviser to President Obama on his Af–Pak policy.
Riedel, JCS Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and I were on a report by Jackie Northam for National Public Radio’s programme ‘All Things Considered’ in December 2011, which reflected on that watershed year. The programme carried a segment from Admiral Mullen’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he declared unequivocally, ‘The Haqqani network [of the Afghan Taliban operating out of sanctuary in North Waziristan], for one acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency.’ Mullen had till that point been Kayani’s principal interlocutor and advocate in the US. He made a total of twenty-six trips to Pakistan and treated Kayani as a friend. Yet his despondence and sense of betrayal, reflected in Kayani’s unkept promise to launch operations against Afghan Taliban in Pakistani territory, led to a break in that relationship. Pakistan also lost support on Capitol Hill. However, this did not change, as I added in that programme, the underlying reality of ‘co-dependency [with Pakistan], particularly for the next two years for the US in Afghanistan. But in the longer run too, the United States cannot afford to alienate a country of 185 million at such a strategic location.’ As the host Robert Siegel declared, ‘The two countries are nominal allies, but the events of 2011 has [sic] severely frayed ties between Washington and Islamabad.’ 1
One reason for the disconnect was the difference in the declared and undeclared strategic aims of the US and Pakistan in the region. The other was a basic flaw in US calculations that assumed that Kayani, under pressure or by force of US argumentation, would forsake his own country’s perceived interests in favour of what he saw as US short-term interests. Kayani feared the possibility of opening a domestic front against the network of Afghan Taliban and local militants that would extend all the way into the hinterland, particularly into the Punjab. Although his successor was to launch a major clean-up campaign in FATA later, the Afghan Taliban were never a major target of those operations, though depots and training sites of the Taliban and other foreign fighters were eliminated by the Pakistani military operations. The US and some Pakistani sources maintained that leaders of the Afghan Taliban were evacuated and relocated first into the settled areas and then other parts of FATA in advance of the clean-up operations in North Waziristan. There was also no ope
ration against the Afghan Taliban in the borderlands of Balochistan.
Mullen had invested heavily in the Kayani relationship. A studious man with an ability to connect to others, Mullen relied heavily on his ability to measure and persuade his partners in the war against terrorism across the globe. He was not wont to hyperbole. Yet, when he was asked to contribute to a profile of Kayani in TIME magazine’s list of 100 most influential persons in 2011, he wrote a gushy paean that would haunt his reputation in later years:
I don’t remember all the details of my first meeting with General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan Army’s Chief of Staff. But I do remember thinking, Here is a man with a plan, a leader who knows where he wants to go. He seemed to understand the nature of the extremist threat inside Pakistan, recognized that his army wasn’t ready to meet that threat and had already started working up solutions.
So far he’s done everything he told me he would do. He said he would provide the Frontier Corps with material support and strong leaders. He did it. He said he would send more Pakistani army troops to the northwest border region. He sent nearly 2,000. He said he would use those troops to go after alQaeda and extremist groups in Bajaur and the Swat Valley. They have mounted several operations in just the past few months.
There’s much more to do, of course. But I also think it’s important to look at what Kayani hasn’t done. For starters, he hasn’t let the army meddle in politics. Kayani helped foster a peaceful outcome to last year’s constitutional crisis, but he did it in a way that was totally in keeping with his military responsibilities. He also hasn’t let tension over the involvement of Pakistan-based militants in the Mumbai terrorist attacks spin out of control.
General Kayani, 57, commands an army with troops fighting in what President Barack Obama has rightly called the ‘most dangerous place in the world’. He’s lost more than 1,000 soldiers in that fight. He knows the stakes. He’s got a plan. 2
