Descent Into Chaos (26 page)

India immediately began large-scale troop movements to the Pakistan border, and within days war fever built up on both sides of the frontier. “Our anxieties are mounting not only by the day, but by the hour as we receive information about the movement of Indian forces on the border,” said Pakistan’s foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, on December 30. “Pakistan does not want war, local or general, conventional or nuclear. The decision lies with India,” he said.
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Colin Powell was on the telephone to Musharraf almost every day, urging him to take steps to rein in the jihadis. On December 30, Bush got involved, telling Musharraf “to take additional strong and decisive measures to eliminate the extremists who seek to harm India.”
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On January 1, 2002, India announced it had begun the largest war games in the past fifteen years on the Pakistan border. Pakistan retaliated with its own war games and began to move troops from the Afghan border to the eastern front, abandoning the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
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U.S. commanders in Kabul were furious but could do nothing. In dense winter fog, I watched as massive Pakistan army convoys stretching for twenty-five miles lumbered across Punjab province, returning sixty thousand troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border. Fighter aircraft and missiles were moved to small secret air bases around the country. India began to rip up the electrified fence along the border so that its tanks would not be impeded. A Pakistani general told me that 80 percent of India’s one-million-strong army had been mobilized in an offensive posture. The United States became concerned about its own bases in Pakistan. If there was a war, all U.S. forces would have to be evacuated from the country.
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What came as a shock to the generals was that there was little Pakistani public support for war with India. During the Kargil crisis, most Pakistanis had reacted negatively to what they saw as the military’s adventurism, and they regarded this buildup the same way.

Realizing that the Indians would not budge, Bush made it plain to Musharraf what he expected if Pakistan was to remain a U.S. ally, delivering an ultimatum in the same blunt words that had been used by Richard Armitage after September 11: “I think it’s very important for President Musharraf to make a clear statement to the world that he intends to crack down on terror.” Bush said. “And I believe if he does that . . . it’ll provide relief . . . on a situation that’s still serious.”
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The world watched with bated breath as the government announced that Musharraf would address the nation on television on January 12. U.S. diplomats in Islamabad told me that Washington had provided Musharraf with a wish list to include in his speech. Musharraf had no option but to offer a significant climbdown. His January 12 speech was dubbed a U-turn as significant as the one he had made after 9 /11. Musharraf told his countrymen that “Pakistan rejects and condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. Pakistan will not allow its territory to be used for any terrorist activity anywhere in the world. . . . No organization will be allowed to indulge in terrorism in the name of Kashmir.”

However, he said that Pakistan would never surrender its claim to Kashmir. “Kashmir runs in our blood,” he insisted. For the first time he spoke out against jihad, saying it should be waged only against poverty and hunger. “We are not the custodians of taking jihad all over the world,” he said after announcing a ban on five extremist groups. The reaction from the jihadi groups was hostile as hundreds of militants were rounded up. The Jamiat-e-Islami did not hesitate to take a blatant dig at the ISI. “Will Musharraf care to explain who has been patronizing jihad for all those 25 years in Afghanistan and 12 years in Kashmir,” said Jamiat leader Munawar Hussain.

Yet public and media cynicism was widespread. Ayaz Amir, the renowned columnist, wrote, “By joining America’s war effort we thought that we had neutralized the threat from India and indeed left India out in the cold. Now it turns out that it is we who were caught in a bind. Helpless then, helpless now but justifying every turnaround by reference to that mystical entity, the national interest.”
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Colin Powell visited India and Pakistan to ask both countries to deescalate tensions, but the Vajpayee government faced a political crisis and rising unpopularity at home, and India prepared for war again in May.
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Stock markets in both countries crashed, and foreigners started to pack up and leave. Musharraf had once again badly miscalculated by refusing to shut down the militant attacks. “By March it was clear to us that Musharraf was not going to implement his promises of January 12. All the arrested militants were freed, and the military had no intention of imposing any curbs on their activities,” a U.S. diplomat in Islamabad told me. In Washington there were differences of approach between the State and Defense departments. Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, handled South Asia. Powell liked Musharraf enormously and had developed a close relationship with him—he telephoned the Pakistani leader eleven times in eight weeks—but that did not stop Armitage from getting tough with Musharraf when it was needed.

Donald Rumsfeld, however, was less willing to put pressure on Pakistan, fearing that Musharraf would cut off assistance to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and stop cooperating in the hunt for al Qaeda. Throughout the crisis, Rumsfeld did not criticize Musharraf once, and General Franks made no bones about how much he trusted Musharraf as one soldier to another. Referring to a visit to Islamabad back in January 2001, Franks wrote, “As we spoke, it struck me that it was appropriate we both wore uniforms.” The United States had for years “hectored soldier-politicians such as Pervez Musharraf about human rights and representative government. Of course I believed in these issues with equal conviction, but at this point in history we needed to establish priorities. Stopping al Qaeda was such a priority.”
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Again the United States issued an ultimatum. On May 25, Bush warned Musharraf to stop infiltration into Indian Kashmir and to live up to the commitments he had made on January 12. “It’s very important for President Musharraf to do what he said he was going to do and that is stop the incursions across the border,” Bush said.
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Musharraf continued to deny support for the militants. Bush reiterated his demands on May 29. For an administration that preferred conducting its foreign policy in the shadows rather than in public, Bush’s interventions were highly unusual and demonstrated how serious the confrontation between India and Pakistan had become.

After receiving messages from Islamabad that it was prepared to rein in the militants if India de-escalated on the border, Washington began to use coercive diplomacy against India for the first time. On June 1, in an unprecedented coordinated move, the United States, Britain, and Germany advised all their nationals to leave India on a voluntary basis because of the danger of war. With sixty thousand American and twenty thousand British citizens in India—many of them business executives—the warning came as a rude shock. New Delhi had not contemplated the fallout of a war on its booming economy. A senior U.S. official later told me that “it was a calculated move carried out by Armitage to shock India into seeing the consequences of even a limited incursion across the [Line of Control].”
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U.S. intelligence had learned that India planned for a brigade-level commando raid across the LOC to attack militants’ training camps, which would certainly have resulted in all-out war.

Now Armitage met with a positive response when he arrived in Islamabad. Musharraf promised that the infiltration of militants would cease, and Armitage conveyed the message to a still-skeptical Indian leadership.
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U.S. intelligence knew that Musharraf and senior ISI officers had met with Kashmiri extremists to tell them that their entry into Indian Kashmir was now forbidden. By late June, Indian officials were admitting that infiltration was much reduced, while artillery guns on both sides of the LOC had fallen silent.

India still delayed withdrawing its forces from the border, largely because the government had no idea how to explain such a climbdown to its own people. By July, attacks in Indian Kashmir had resumed. India now demanded that Pakistan dismantle all terrorist training camps and that the United States monitor the process. The United States weighed in once again with a visit to the region at the end of July by Powell, who admitted that “we still do not have evidence whether infiltration has been stopped on a permanent basis or not.”
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In September, elections for the state assembly in Indian Kashmir turned into a bloodbath, with militants gunning down twenty-three political activists and two candidates in the space of two weeks. Over the two-month campaign period, more than eight hundred soldiers and civilians were killed.
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However, India termed the elections a triumph, as the international community endorsed them as free and fair. That claim of success gave India the excuse to move its troops back from the border.

The possibility of the Indian-Pakistan conflict quickly escalating into all-out conventional war and then turning into a nuclear exchange was a persistent worry for the White House, but of even greater concern was the potential of an al Qaeda attack using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the first months after 9/11, the CIA was deeply fearful of a follow-up nuclear or biological weapons attack on the American mainland by al Qaeda. In 1998, bin Laden had said that obtaining nuclear weapons was “a religious duty,” and he spoke frequently about creating an American Hiroshima.
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The discovery at al Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan of computer disks, laboratories, and even a crude diagram of a nuclear bomb, showing that al Qaeda was experimenting with biological and nuclear warfare, only confirmed the worst about al Qaeda’s intentions.

Another intelligence failure by the CIA would have been catastrophic, and now to err on the side of a heightened threat perception was preferable to ignoring the danger. As al Qaeda fighters were captured, there was an urgent demand from Washington for “instant actionable intelligence,” about what prisoners could reveal about possible WMD attacks. Right after the war ended, several U.S. officials told me that the fear of a WMD attack and the lack of intelligence about how well prepared al Qaeda was to launch one haunted the CIA and the Pentagon. “The kind of warnings and threat perceptions that passed across my desk every morning would not let me to sleep at night,” one U.S. intelligence official told me. “It was without doubt the scariest time of our lives—there was a real fear that al Qaeda had a follow-up plan to 9/11 which involved WMD,” said a State Department official.”
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Due to the penetration of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment by Britain’s MI6, the CIA learned astonishing information about contact between Pakistani nuclear scientists and al Qaeda. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, two retired nuclear scientists from the stable run by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri several times—the last time just a few weeks before 9 /11. According to journalist Ron Suskind, at first the CIA was uncertain of the extent to which it could trust the ISI with this information. The uncertainty prompted Dick Cheney to lay out a guiding principle for the administration that was later to justify many of the half-truths stated as the reasons for invading Iraq. Cheney said, “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapons, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”
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One reason for the stepped-up fear was that neither MI6 nor the CIA had a complete picture of the extent of contacts between Pakistani scientists and al Qaeda on WMD. Before 9 /11 several retired ISI officers had boasted that one of the key reasons for Pakistan’s support to the Taliban regime was to gain access to vast former Soviet underground storage bunkers built at major airfields such as Bagram. Here Pakistan could stash away conventional and nuclear-tipped missiles in order to enhance its second-strike capability against India in case of war. After U.S. forces searched these Soviet-era airfields it became clear that no such bunkers existed.

With so many scary stories floating around, the U.S. administration imagined the worst when it heard about the two scientists’ possible ties to al Qaeda. In fact, Mahmood was a bit of a crackpot. He had been part of the nuclear program since 1974, and had helped A. Q. Khan set up his global clandestine network to purchase nuclear parts. Later, though, he had written a book called
Cosmology and Human Destiny,
in which he tried to connect major historical events to sunspots, while suggesting that the power of “jinns”—mythical beings who are a cross between humans and angels—could be harnessed to generate energy. After retiring, he had established Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Rebuilding the Ummah), an Islamic aid agency that attracted Islamic fundamentalist technocrats and former ISI officers and ostensibly provided medical care in Afghanistan.

At the CIA’s behest, the ISI arrested Mahmood, Majid, and four others. Mahmood later admitted to meeting bin Laden. “I met Mullah Omar, members of his council of ministers as well as Osama bin Laden only to seek their cooperation in pursuing the goals of my organization,” he said.
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The CIA was not satisfied and George Tenet secretly visited Islamabad on December 1 to insist that Musharraf allow the CIA to interrogate the scientists. Tenet also asked Musharraf to carry out a more extensive purge of officers from the ISI whom the CIA considered closet extremists.
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Musharraf was already in the dock concerning nuclear proliferation. A few months before 9 /11, suspicions that Dr. Khan had sold nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran had led the United States and Britain to force Musharraf to remove Khan as head of Khan Research Laboratories, one of the key atomic weapons centers in the country. However, Khan was considered a true local hero, especially by the army, and Musharraf made him his special adviser, a perfunctory post with no powers. At a dinner in Khan’s honor held on March 27, 2001, in Islamabad, Musharraf described him as “a giant of a man,” “our national hero,” “imbued with supreme patriotism and a sense of destiny.” Yet Musharraf failed to root out the criminal actions in the sale of nuclear technology that Khan had begun, which would lead to a far bigger scandal in 2005, when Khan was caught red-handed selling nuclear plans to Libya.
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