The Battle for Pakistan

by Shuja Nawaz

  14 Interview with Gen. James (Jim) L. Jones, Tyson’s Corner, VA, September 2016.

  15 He had requested the Center for Strategic and International Studies for a report on the FATA, because, as he told Arnaud de Borchgrave of CSIS, it is an area that would be important in his new Area of Responsibility at CENTCOM and that he did not know well. According to de Borchgrave, who brought me in to lead a team to conduct this study, Petraeus wanted a fresh look at the area and ideas for changing the situation on the ground. Our study, FATA: A Most Dangerous Place, came out in 2009.

  16 Interview with Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute on Skype, 28 July 2016, while he was on leave from his position as US ambassador to NATO in Brussels. We also spoke after he had retired from his diplomatic assignment. During his stint at the White House, he invited me regularly for discussions on the region and was always open to ideas and suggestions.

  17 Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

  18 Interview with Bruce Riedel, 27 October 2016. He consulted me during the review and subsequently, and was willing to accept a number of ideas, not all of which managed to pass through the sieve of the ‘bean counters’ and others who had final approval of the policies that emerged in due course.

  19 Vali Nasr, The Dispensable Nation (Doubleday, 2013), pp. 30–31. Nasr provides a deep and critical review of policymaking in the Obama administration, coloured heavily by his experience in the SRAP Office.

  20 Lute interview.

  21 Nasr, Dispensable Nation, pp. 82–83.

  22 Riedel interview.

  23 CPSU CC Politburo transcript (excerpt), 13 November 1986, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111599

  24 Riedel interview.

  25 A very senior White House official recalled to me how Zardari explained to him that he was grooming Bilawal to take over Zardari’s seat. This astounded the US official.

  26 Remarks by the president after trilateral meeting with President Karzai of Afghanistan and President Zardari of Pakistan, 6 May 2009, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-after-trilateral-meeting-with-president-karzai-afghanistan-and-pr

  27 Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 1 December 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan.

  28 Interview with General Stanley McChrystal, Alexandria, VA, 19 December 2016.

  29 Seymour Hersh, ‘The Getaway’, New Yorker, 28 January 2002, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/01/28/the-getaway-2

  30 McChrystal interview.

  31 Michael Hastings, ‘The Runaway General’, Rolling Stone, 22 June 2010.

  1 ‘Tense U.S.–Pakistan Relations Mark 2011’, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 29 December 2011.

  2 Admiral Mike Mullen, ‘Ashfaq Kayani’, TIME, 30 April 2009, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/ 0,29239,1894410_1893847_1894215,00.html#

  3 Shuja Nawaz, ‘Drone Attacks inside Pakistan: Wayang or Willing Suspension of Disbelief?’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 12, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2011): 79–87.

  4 European sources to author. In the French case, a French scholar, Mariam Abou Zahab, who knew FATA well, saw and spoke with persons whom the scholar knew from her academic work in FATA.

  5 Alan Kronstadt, Congressional Research Service.

  6 Interview with author.

  7 Abbottabad Commission report carried by Al Jazeera, p. 216, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/724833/aljazeera-bin-laden-dossier.pdf.

  8 Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013), p. 281.

  9 TIME, 21 April 2011, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2066367_2066369_2066316,00.html

  10 According to a leading employment agency in the United States, the average US Special Forces soldier makes some $67,326 a year. Indeed.com, ‘Soldier Salaries’, https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Military+Special+Forces+Soldier-Salaries. A Congressional Research Service report in 2006 calculated that it cost nearly $400,000 to keep a US soldier in the field in Iraq. Later, figures ran from $600,000 to $1.3 million a year. Civilian contractors ran around $200,000 or less. See: Raymond Davis and Storms Reback, The Contractor (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2017), p. 23.

  11 Confirmed by the Embassy of Pakistan, Washington DC.

  12 Interview with me.

  13 Images carried by Dawn TV and Dawn newspaper. And confirmation of passport numbers by the Pakistan embassy in Washington DC, https://www.dawn.com/news/607801/pakistan-intelligence-confirms-davis-is-cia-guy and 21 February 2011; https://www.google.com/search?q=DAWN+TV+and+DAWN+newspaper,+Raymond+Davis+passport+images&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS555US555&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiOvvjkr9rjAh UPtlkKHduiAXUQ_AUIEigC&biw=1544&bih=935#imgrc=1YFUuuhtWs4ymM:

  14 Davis and Reback, The Contractor, is the source of the description given by Davis himself of that day and its events.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Ibid., p. 90.

  17 President Barack Obama for the first time today stepped into the international firestorm surrounding the US official accused of shooting two men in Pakistan, calling Raymond Davis ‘our diplomat’ and urging his release on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. See: Jake Tapper and Lee Ferran, ‘President Barack Obama: Pakistan Should Honor Immunity for “Our Diplomat”’, abcnews, 15 February 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/raymond-davis-case-president-barack-obama-urges-pakistan/story?id=12922282

  18 Tapper and Ferran, ‘Pakistan Should Honor Immunity’.

  19 Craig Murray, ‘This CIA Agent Is No Diplomat’, Guardian, Opinion, 28 February 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/28/cia-agent-diplomat-pakistan-raymond-davis

  20 Author interview.

  21 Ms Conroy was at the Department of State when I wrote this book and agreed to answer written questions. According to her, she provided answers to the Department’s Press Office to clear and convey to me. Despite repeated exchanges with her and the Press Office over a period of many months, I was unable to obtain those answers.

  22 Syed Irfan Raza, ‘RAW Paid Raymond Davis to Write Anti-Pakistan Book, Says Rehman Malik’, Dawn, 7 July 2017, https://www.dawn.com/news/1343756.

  23 Dawn, ‘Court Releases Detailed Judgment in Davis Case’, Associated Press of Pakistan report in Dawn, Karachi, 19 March 2011, https://www.dawn.com/news/614440.

  1 https://www.strategypage.com/articles/tf58/planning.asp and also Goulding, Vincent, 2011, ‘Task Force 58: A Higher Level of Naval Operation.’ Marine Corps Gazette 95 (8): 38–41., https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2011/08/task-force-58-higher-level-naval-operation

  2 Michael Ray, ‘James Mattis’, Biography, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Mattis.

  3 Strategy Page, ‘Execution: 25 November to 25 December’, Strategypage.com, https://www.strategypage.com/articles/tf58/execution.asp. This was an agreement not with the government but with the military. The Foreign Office did not appear to have been consulted nor involved in the tactical details of the cooperation with TF 58.

  4 Email from Ambassador Rick Olson, 12 May 2019

  5 Op. cit. https://www.strategypage.com/articles/tf58/planning.asp and Goulding. See also https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/the-mattis-way-of-war.pdf

  6 Reportedly a nephew of Air Marshal Asghar Khan, a legendary former Pakistan air chief.

  7 https://www.strategypage.com/articles/tf58/planning.asp

  8 Strategy Page, ‘Planning: 6 November to 24 November 2001’, https://www.strategypage.com/articles/tf58/planning.asp

  9 Brig. Gen. Mattis letter to Maj. Gen. Farooq Ahmed of 22 February 2002.

  10 Letters from US officers to Maj. Gen. Farooq Ahmad Khan.

  11 Int
erview with Gen. Mattis, October 2016.

  12 Typically discreet, Mattis refused to divulge the identity of his superior or the exact language used with the officer in Tampa, citing it as a ‘classified communication’. Others identified the recipient of Mattis’s call as Gen. Tommy Franks.

  13 Gary Bernsten and Ralph Pezzulo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), pp. 75, 287.

  14 Ibid. Confirmed also by Duane Evans in an interview with the author.

  15 Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine Books, Presidio Press, 2006), p. 146.

  16 Duane Evans, Foxtrot in Kandahar: A Memoir of a CIA Officer in Afghanistan at the Inception of America’s Longest War (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2017), pp. 71–72.

  17 Ibid., pp. 142–43.

  18 Robert L. Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar—A CIA Diary (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).

  19 This was confirmed by a retired senior officer of the ISI. He spells his name as Eqbal but documents use the common spelling Iqbal.

  20 Information from a former colleague of Col. Saeed. One of Saeed’s names in his later life in the US was Bailey Khan.

  21 Azaz Syed, The Secrets of Pakistan’s Wars against Al Qaeda (Narratives, Pakistan 2015), pp. 137–38. My brother General Asif Nawaz was then the army chief.

  22 Ibid., p. 138.

  23 This information was confirmed by a senior army officer and a former DG-ISI. After the Abbottabad raid, Saeed and his immediate family disappeared. He relocated to the San Diego area in California. Attempts to reach his son were unsuccessful. See also, Syed, Secrets of Pakistan’s War.

  24 The Director General Military Operations at the time, Major General Javed Iqbal, later a three-star, was in charge of the Abbottabad Commission proceedings as a representative of GHQ Pakistan Army. In 2018, he was arrested, charged, and convicted for espionage for an unnamed country and sentenced in a secret military court to effectively fourteen years of rigorous imprisonment; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-military-spying/pakistani-army-general-given-life-sentence-on-spying-charges-idUSKCN1T021C. He had been very helpful to me as DGMO in understanding Pakistan’s counterinsurgency campaign and later in discussing Army Chief General Kayani’s paper for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 for the NATO meeting in Seville.

  25 A Pakistani journalist claims Col. Saeed’s wife was recovering from plastic surgery when his family was evacuated. Incidentally, the wife of Dr Shakeel Afridi had also planned plastic surgery, according to a US source, which was the reason why he demurred when he was offered to be evacuated following the Abbottabad operation. Ironically, the marriage did not survive his tribulations. US pressure continued to press for his release, possibly in exchange for some Pakistanis held for breaking US sanctions related to weapons systems or Dr Afia Siddiqui, another Pakistani prisoner in the US.

  26 The offices and cafeteria of this agency resemble a college campus: lots of young men and women, a virtual United Nations of national origins, in constant discussion, soaking up information from visiting scholars and think-tank experts and assessing photographic intelligence to add value to human intelligence from sites of interest.

  27 Anonymous, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, Washington DC, Brasssey’s Inc. 2004.

  28 We appeared together in a number of such forums, including on a programme with Fareed Zakariya for CNN. I always found Scheuer provocative and interesting, though his strong views on Israel and radical ideas to foment a Shia–Sunni war in the Muslim world alarmed and enraged many in the US establishment. In 2014, he reportedly married a woman named Alfreda, who is often mentioned as the inspiration for the female lead of the movie Zero Dark Thirty on the killing of bin Laden. Alfreda is reported to have worked for Scheuer at Alec Station in the early days of that unit.

  29 http://non-intervention.com/; Michael Scheuer’s website operates under the motto ‘Foreign Policy Independent of All, Under the Influence of None’.

  30 Shaukat Qadir, Operation Geronimo: The Betrayal and Execution of Osama Bin laden and Its Aftermath (Amazon Kindle. 2012). Qadir, a retired brigadier in the Pakistan Army, was given carefully monitored access to the bin Laden hideout in Abbottabad after the raid and access to some materials by the ISI.

  31 Syed, Secrets of Pakistan’s War, pp. 71–72.

  32 Robin Wright and Peter Baker, ‘Musharraf: Bin Laden’s Location Is Unknown’, Washington Post, 5 December 2004.

  33 Peter L. Bergen, Manhunt (Crown Publishers, New York. 2012), p. 88.

  34 Ibid., p. 110.

  35 Ibid., p. 116.

  36 Zazi’s indictment contained a prominent quotation from my report for CSIS, ‘FATA: A Most Dangerous Place’, to establish the role of that border region as a training ground for terrorists.

  37 Mark Landler, ‘Clinton Challenges Pakistanis on Al Qaeda’, New York Times, 29 October 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/world/asia/30clinton.html?mcubz=3

  38 Flynn later gained notoriety as a short-lived NSA for President Donald J. Trump, having severed ties to McChrystal in the meantime.

  39 McChrystal was often seen in the Kabul headquarters as he connected with the Friday Afghanistan Theatre Video Teleconferences at the Pentagon. I recall him asking me questions when I was invited to present at that forum.

  40 Bergen, Manhunt, p. 165.

  41 Ibid., p. 90.

  42 Syed, Secrets of Pakistan’s War, p. 114.

  43 Qadir, Operation Geronimo, p. 9.

  44 Qadir, Operation Geronimo, p. 13.

  45 Robert O’Neill, The Operator: Firing the Shots That Killed Osama Bin Laden (Scribner, New York. 2017), p. 290. This book was cleared by the CIA but it does not certify all the details as accurate in such clearances.

  46 Senior Obama administration official to author.

  47 Many years earlier, on 26 August 2008, the US principal officer in Peshawar, Lynne Tracy, had been targeted by gunmen as she drove out of her home. She managed to escape the attack and backed into her garage, unhurt. Tracy was a devoted diplomat who had chosen to extend her assignment in Peshawar, starting in 2006, beyond the normal one-year posting, and had established very powerful relationships with Pakistani society figures in Peshawar. She regularly wore local clothes (salwar-kameez and dupatta). I interviewed her for my report on COIN efforts of Pakistan in the border region. Later, she became a senior official at the NSC in the White House and then Deputy Chief of Mission in Moscow. See: Farhan Bokhari, ‘U.S. Diplomat Safe after Pakistan Attack’, CBSNews.com, 26 August 2008, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-diplomat-safe-after-pakistan-attack/; Tracy was given the Secretary’s Award for Heroism in 2009. See: U.S. Department of State, ‘Present Secretary’s Award for Heroism to Lynne Tracy’, 7 December 2009, https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2009a/12/133238.htm

  48 Cairo had been severely wounded in an operation in Afghanistan when he was shot by a Taliban fighter he had chased up a tree. Somehow he managed to survive and make it into the history books during the Abbottabad raid. See: O’Neill, The Operator, pp. 261–62.

  49 O’Neill, The Operator, p. 317.

  50 Marc Ambinder, ‘The Secret Team That Killed Osama bin Laden’, Atlantic, 2 May 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/the-secret-team-that-killed-osama-bin-laden/238163/

  51 Telephone conversation with Marc Ambinder, 28 February 2018.

  52 An interesting footnote related to the gifts that Bigelow passed on to her CIA contact, a woman who was given a ‘pair of Black Tahiti Pearl earrings’ that were handed over by the CIA officer. On examination by an expert it turned out they were not real pearls but painted objects and the metal was not precious. They were not even worth a formal appraisal, being valued at $60 or $70. Other ‘gifts’ included dinners and a bottle of Tequila. See: https://www.scribd.com/book/279621337/CIA-ZDT-wm

  53 Interview with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani
at his home in Rawalpindi, 26 February 2016.

  54 Mike Morell and Bill Harlow, The Great War of Our Time (New York, Boston: Twelve, 2015), p. 169. After President Obama spoke, Morell gave a press backgrounder on the intelligence that led to the conclusion that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Mike Vickers of the DoD briefed the journalists on the raid itself. This may have been the briefing that Marc Ambinder cited in his article on the raid for The Atlantic.

  55 Najam Sethi, ‘Operation Get OBL’, Friday Times, 6–12 May 2011.

  56 Interview with Hina Rabbani Khar, 21 February 2016.

  57 PR. NO.150/2011

  Date: 02/05/2011

  Death of Osama bin Laden

  In an intelligence driven operation, Osama Bin Ladin was killed in the surroundings of Abbottabad in the early hours of this morning. This operation was conducted by the US forces in accordance with declared US policy that Osama bin Laden will be eliminated in a direct action by the US forces, wherever found in the world.

  Earlier today, President Obama telephoned President Zardari on the successful US operation which resulted in killing of Osama bin Ladin . . .

  Pakistan has played a significant role in efforts to eliminate terrorism. We have had extremely effective intelligence sharing arrangements with several intelligence agencies including that of the US. We will continue to support international efforts against terrorism.

  It is Pakistan’s stated policy that it will not allow its soil to be used in terrorist attacks against any country. Pakistan’s political leadership, parliament, state institutions and the whole nation are fully united in their resolve to eliminate terrorism.

  Islamabad 02 May 2011

  58 Skype interview with Ambassador Cameron Munter, 15 July 2016.