The Battle for Pakistan

by Shuja Nawaz

  Kayani had a plan, but the cautious general played his cards characteristically close to his chest. He kept Mullen and the Americans stringing along on a promise to move against the Taliban ensconced in North Waziristan and other parts of FATA. He frequently hinted at impending operations to visitors from the US (including me). Among US military circles there was reference to ‘real time’ and ‘Kayani time’; the latter had a built-in lag. Kayani certainly had some valid concerns: he did not have enough troops initially. That constraint ended after the Swat operations when he was able to redirect substantially more troops to North Waziristan. He was also cautious about moving against the Haqqani Network that his own intelligence field operatives favoured due to their past connections and obligations. He also feared that moving against the Haqqanis might force them into alliances with other insurgents in FATA. Finally, he feared extending a front from the Western border into the Punjab hinterland. Many of the Punjabi Taliban continued to infiltrate into Afghanistan, according to some reports, via North Waziristan, and were also franchisees of Al-Qaeda. But Kayani also had some valid grievances. The US kept moving the goal posts of its game in Afghanistan. And for some reason, Mullen and some others operated under the mistaken belief that Kayani might act in response to their request and pressure even if it went against Pakistan’s interests.

  Kayani felt that he needed a more organized and powerful force on the Afghan side of the border to help squeeze the Taliban. He and his officers often referred to the more than 1,000 Pakistani posts along that border, while the Afghan posts, they maintained, numbered close to 100. These numbers were not verifiable. As recently as January 2018, Pakistani officers visiting Washington were citing over 900 Pakistani posts compared with 250 Afghan posts. Finally, Kayani bemoaned the lack of US resolve to enhance its presence in the east of Afghanistan rather than shifting its focus to Helmand and Kandahar in the south.

  Cooperation continued with the US on other fronts. The search for Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan continued, quite successfully. The Ground Line of Communication (GLOC) with Afghanistan was kept operational, though from time to time, for political reasons, it would be interrupted. Throughout this period the Air Line of Communication (ALOC) was never interrupted, allowing the US to use Pakistani air space to fly battlefield and logistical support missions to forces in Afghanistan from aircraft carriers and bases in the Gulf. Unbeknownst to his compatriots, Kayani also sought and received drone support for surveillance and other purposes.

  US drones used Shamsi Base in Balochistan as one launch site. Al Jazeera English obtained photographs of US and Pakistani officers with drones being readied for launch at an airbase in Pakistan. I was shown these photographs and managed to use Google to match the runway alignment and buildings to identify the base as Shamsi. The legality of US drones crossing the border from launch sites in Afghanistan was another open question. The US never acknowledged the drone operations till late in the Obama period. I recall receiving an email in 2009 from an air force office in the Pentagon that mentioned the drone programme and immediately getting another message asking that the previous message be deleted. A replacement message was sent out minus the reference to the drone programme! The US position was that drone operations against militants were preventive actions, and that FATA was ‘ungoverned space’, hence attacks inside FATA were legal. The Pakistani government and military from the president downwards played along with this charade. 3 Indeed, a senior military officer confirmed to me during a visit to Pakistan Army headquarters the presence of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) personnel inside North Waziristan to assist in targeting Afghan militants inside Pakistani territory.

  The Americans were not totally relying on Pakistan’s alliance and support, though such support was not 100 per cent. Through an active programme to recruit both witting and unwitting assets inside the Pakistani establishment, civil and military, they penetrated into the state structures to gather information, influence decision making and to infiltrate operatives into Pakistan not only to track Afghan terrorists but also to track Pakistan’s own nuclear programme and assets and its intelligence apparatus. The nuclear programme created nightmares for US decision makers who feared that Pakistan might willingly or accidentally allow other countries or non-state actors to gain access to nuclear technology or weapons, with uncontrollable consequences for regional or global security.

  A particular target of their operations against non-state actors were the militant jihadi outfits that were based in the Punjab and that had been allied with Pakistani intelligence in their operations against India. In FATA, British, French and German efforts continued to identify and counter jihadi and terror networks and training operations. At one point, the German intelligence agency, known by its initials BND, was reported to have ‘lost’ track of 200 native Germans somewhere in FATA. The French defence ministry arranged for selected young men from FATA to come to Paris for training before being re-infiltrated back into FATA. 4 Western agencies worked together in their quest for Al-Qaeda and against terror networks that might operate in the West.

  The year 2010 witnessed the height of US financial flows to Pakistan, overt and covert. In that fiscal year, overt US appropriations for Pakistan totalled $4.3 billion. Of this amount, including security assistance, economic assistance, and Coalition Support Fund (CSF) reimbursements. Covert help and assistance in kind added to the amounts received by Pakistan from the US. 5 Those were heady days of the partnership between the US and its non-NATO ally Pakistan. But mistrust lay below the surface. The financial flows began diminishing after 2010.

  Well-targeted efforts by US intelligence agencies helped create a network of local assets as well as American male and female agents in place through cover appointments at the US embassy and other offices inside Pakistan. Pakistani intelligence acted as a break against the issuance of visas, especially from the embassy in Washington DC, where President Zardari had sent his close ally Husain Haqqani as ambassador. After the US complained about delays in issuing visas, Amb. Haqqani was given special permission to issue visas speedily without resorting to clearance by the ISI. Amb. Haqqani insists that despite that presidential authority, he kept the Defence Attaché, then Brig. Nazir Butt, in the loop, since the DA was the principal link to the ISI. 6 The military and its supporters in Pakistan insist that more than 2,000 visas were issued in a relatively short period by Ambassador Haqqani. He provided figures that indicated a downward trend from 3,784 in 2009 to 3,555 in 2010. But the Abbottabad Commission on the death of Osama bin Laden provided data from the Pakistan embassy in Washington DC that contradicted the Haqqani figures and showed an increase in visas issued during his tenure, from 3,242 visas issued by the embassy in 2009 to 4,422 issued in 2010. 7 The contention of the commission and many in official Pakistan was that the US government was creating a huge embassy in Islamabad and using that expansion as an excuse for sending spies into the country. According to Pakistani officials, they would delay sending lists to the Embassy of US officials needing visas and then would amend lists at the last minute to insert new names after agreement in principle had been obtained for issuance of visas.

  In fact, the infiltration of US spies had begun much earlier under the CIA’s Art Keller. ‘During the “surge” of CIA officers into Pakistan beginning in 2005 and 2006, when Art Keller was deployed to the tribal areas, American spies arrived in Pakistan in a desperate search for clues about Osama bin Laden and stretched the normally accepted rules of international spycraft.’ 8 As a former US intelligence officer told me, the US had penetrated many Pakistani agencies. The normally paranoid Pakistanis were justified in their suspicions about their allies. Some Americans understood this situation very well.

  Early in the spring of 2011, I was sharing a cab ride from an event at the US Institute of Peace with former CIA Director Michael Hayden. He told me that he had been asked to write a piece on Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI, for TIME magazine’s annual issue of 100 most influential persons. �
��What should I write?’ he asked. Noticing our Pakistani driver, I evaded the question during the short ride. When we got out downtown near our respective offices off K Street, I told him not to write what Admiral Mullen had written for TIME about Gen. Kayani. Surprisingly, he said he had not read that piece. I recall saying to him that Pasha saw himself as a super patriot and he would do whatever he could to preserve Pakistan’s secrets and its objectives regardless of US wishes. Pasha, as DG military operations (DGMO), had been the architect of the army’s strategy against the Pakistani Taliban and he was very committed to his approach to fighting terrorism that affected Pakistan directly. He also relied heavily on his operatives inside FATA, who were from the area and in many cases ambivalent about their loyalties to their tribal kin and their ISI superiors in Islamabad. Pasha had no significant prior intelligence experience but became a hands-on spymaster, which put him at the centre of a number of controversial events in 2011 and beyond. Perhaps too much of a hands-on guy and too ready to leap into action himself.

  This is what the astute Gen. Hayden produced for TIME magazine:

  Within weeks of Lieut. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha’s becoming head of Pakistan’s top intelligence agency, ISI, in 2008, terrorist attacks in Mumbai seriously roiled already stressed US–Pakistani relations. Pasha, 59, has grown progressively more suspicious of US motives and staying power. The arrest of a US government contractor in Lahore has led to acrimony. And larger changes in Pakistan—the growth of fundamentalism, nationalism and anti-Americanism—have squeezed the space in which any ISI chief can cooperate with the US. Pasha, a Pakistani patriot and American partner, now must find these two roles even more difficult to reconcile—and at a time when much of US counterterrorism success depends on exactly that. 9

  That paradoxical situation was exactly what challenged Pasha as 2011 dawned.

  The Raymond Davis Affair

  The ‘US Government contractor’ that Hayden alluded to was Raymond Davis, thirty-six, who had hit the headlines after killing two persons on 27 January 2011 on a busy street in Lahore, the bustling provincial capital. Davis was kept in custody in Lahore awaiting trial and a verdict, after admitting that he acted in self-defence. Meanwhile, the US and Pakistan sparred over the nature and role of Davis’s assignment in Pakistan. He was released on 16 March 2011 after a murky deal for payment of ‘blood money’ to the families of the persons he had killed. His story was a fascinating saga of a mercenary spy, one of many contractors who followed the money trail into America’s wars abroad, driven by a mixture of patriotism and the lure of relatively high ‘danger money’ compared with regular soldiers. 10

  Born in the coal country of South West Virginia in a ‘blink and you miss it’ small town named Big Stone Gap, Davis had a hard-scrabble existence. His coal-miner father was badly injured when a 700-lb rock broke his back in three places. After graduation, Davis tried unsuccessfully to join the Marines. Finally, an army recruiter tested him and suggested he become an army field medic. At eighteen, he made it to Fort Benning, Georgia, to be trained. Some four years later, he got into training to become a member of the elite Special Forces, but an injury to his lung sidelined him and forced him on to a disability temporary retirement list. He then moved to Lexington, Kentucky, with his girlfriend and fellow 82nd Airborne Division soldier, Rebecca, and enrolled in a course at Eastern Kentucky University entitled ‘Asset Protection and Security’. By the time he healed from his injury, the Special Forces did not want him back in its active ranks, so he quit and entered the world of security contractors.

  Davis’s first overseas assignment was in 2004 with DynCorp International, a major US government contractor, in Afghanistan, serving, among other things, with a team of bodyguards for President Hamid Karzai at a salary of $600 a day, earning himself the sobriquet of ‘Crossbones’. This was his call sign when he landed up as a security ‘contractor’ in Pakistan, at the US Consulate in Peshawar, the embassy in Islamabad and then in the consulate at Lahore over the period 2009–2011.

  Davis was originally issued a short-term visa to enter Pakistan in 2008 by the embassy in Washington on passport number 910013853. 11 This was a single-entry three-month visa. Amb. Haqqani states the visa was issued in 2008 before he was appointed ambassador. In the routine, the Department of State was the one sending lists of US officials for whom visas were requested. ‘His first visa was issued in 2008 before I took over. Last was a renewal issued in Islamabad. When we checked after his case came to light in January 2011—there was no record of his visa application in the embassy. Someone felt embarrassed enough to remove the record,’ stated Haqqani in his exchange with me. 12 (The embassy confirmed to me that it does not keep paper records of visa applications for more than five years. However, electronic materials are retained.) He also said, based on what he was told but could not confirm, that Davis travelled on two different passports, and his first visa was issued in 2008 on a separate passport. He was right. The final visa was issued on 14 June 2010 and was a two-year ‘Official Multiple Entry’ visa on passport number 910105240, different from the one he had used for his first visa in 2008. 13 This visa was issued by the Government of Pakistan in Islamabad, not by the embassy in Washington. It may be that Davis got visas extended or reissued in Pakistan by the Ministry of Interior after he got his first visas in Washington DC, using the earlier passport. The ministry failed to catch his use of different passports for different visas.

  Another earlier visa, in fact, was issued on 15 September 2009 by the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington DC, and was for a single visit for the period ending 15 December 2009. The passport number is the same as the one on which the last two-year visa was issued in Islamabad, presumably by the Ministry of Interior. A page in the same passport indicates that Davis had entered the country on 18 October 2009. He exited Pakistan on 15 December 2010. Clearly, the Americans were doing what they did best. Try one source in Pakistan, and if that failed, try another. People were always ready to oblige them.

  Pakistan remained a divided country. The civilians and the military were unable to coordinate or agree on how to handle the American influx of staff for their growing embassy and consulates. To facilitate their visas, the prime minister of Pakistan reaffirmed the ‘existing visa policy for official US visitors to Pakistan’ in a note from the principal secretary to the prime minister, Nargis Sethi, a secret memorandum dated 14 July 2010 and copied to the Secretary Interior. Under this policy,

  . . . the ambassador is empowered to issue entry visas for restricted periods to US officials, who have been recommended in writing by the concerned US authority, i.e. the Department of State and [on] whose duly completed applications forms, it is clearly indicated for what purposes they intend to travel to Pakistan.

  Going beyond that authority, the prime minister decided that ‘the ambassador to Washington will be empowered, with immediate effect, to issue visas valid up to one year without the embassy having to refer each such aforementioned application to the concerned authorities in Pakistan’. The ambassador was instructed to issue such visas ‘under intimation to the prime minister’s office in Islamabad’. In effect, the ambassador would bypass the normal channel of the ISI and the JCS directorate. This note was clearly issued a month after Davis’s first visa was issued in Washington DC.

  On the same passport, Davis entered the country on 14 August 2010, exited on 31 August 2010, returned on 26 September 2010, exiting on 15 December 2010, and finally re-entered on 20 January 2011, a week before that fateful day in Lahore. There are no explanations available from Washington for the reason for these frequent and short visits.

  During his ninth and last trip to Pakistan, on 27 January 2011, Davis left the US Consulate’s guest house in Lahore’s Scotch Corner that lies just off the Mall Road, near the crossing of Canal Bank Road and before Aitchison College, where he lived with his team. He headed out into the city, by his own account, ‘to survey the route I’d be taking someone three days later’. 14 He drove down The Mall, the main
thoroughfare that connected the military cantonment to the City Centre, then got on to Jail Road, heading to Ferozepur Road. Nearing Mozang Chowk, a major intersection, he came to a stop in heavy traffic. After a few minutes, he says he noted a motorcycle pull up about 10 feet ahead of him. On it were two young men identified later as Faizan Haider, the driver, and Mohammad Faheem, the pillion. Davis recalls that he saw Faheem turn and draw a pistol from his waistband. Davis’s training kicked in immediately. ‘As soon as I saw the gun’s muzzle moving in my direction, I unclicked my seatbelt and started to draw the gun I was carrying in a waistband beneath the front of my shirt,’ wrote Davis in his book about the incident. 15 He gripped his brand-new Glock 17 and began firing shots rapidly through the windshield at Faheem and Haider, killing both in a matter of seconds. Then he holstered his weapon, got out of the car, fetched his camera from the ‘go bag’ where he kept his tools and began taking photographs of the men he had just shot. He says he did not run to avoid shattering the apparent calm around him, despite the shooting. Plus the consulate was 3 miles away. And his car was stuck in traffic. Davis identified the weapon that Faheem had tried to use as a Soviet Tokarev, a deadly weapon that is quite common in Pakistan. He then went back into his car, locked its doors and radioed his base to seek assistance.

  The US Consulate staff had tried to reach the scene of the incident, but missed Davis who had moved on to the police station in the meantime. In their rush to get there, they had taken a one-way street in the wrong direction, running over a motorcyclist and killing him in the process. They scrambled back to the diplomatic anonymity and immunity of the consulate and were never traced or brought to trial. Davis was caught by the police and handed over to the military who took him to Lahore’s military cantonment.