Descent Into Chaos (43 page)

The engineered success of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), the alliance of five Islamic parties in the 2002 elections, their control of the two key provinces bordering Afghanistan, and the growing anti-Americanism in the country were all used to persuade the international community not to push the regime too hard on a return to civilian rule and democracy. At the time of 9/11 there were more than forty extremist groups in the country who all had links with the ISI and the mainstream Islamic parties. Some of these groups, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, had been directly set up by the ISI. Before 9/11 these groups had also forged close links with al Qaeda, providing it with support, transport, and communication links. Al Qaeda in turn offered them an international agenda of global jihad, an alternative to being tied to the anti-India agenda dictated by the ISI. Many of these groups were to abandon the ISI because they saw their true calling as fighters for al Qaeda.
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For them, Pakistan was a battlefield for global jihad and Musharraf a prime target. Yet until the assassination attempts on him in December 2003, the ISI ignored these changes within their own proxies.

The ISI gave refuge to the Taliban leadership after it fled Afghanistan and to its allies, such as Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, the leader of the Hizb-e-Islami Party, who arrived from exile in Iran and operated freely in the NWFP under ISI protection. Hikmetyar opened an office in the Shamshatoo Camp for Afghan refugees, near Peshawar, which was swiftly turned into a Hizb-e-Islami base. Jalaluddin Haqqani, whom the ISI had promoted as a possible “moderate” Taliban, was given sanctuary in North Waziristan, where he rebuilt his network on both sides of the border. The remnants of other foreign groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), settled in South Waziristan.

The Pakistan army believed that Karzai’s interim government was profoundly anti-Pakistan, as it was dominated by pro-Indian NA leaders at the expense of Pashtuns. Yet even as the two Loya Jirgas reestablished Pashtun preeminence and as Karzai brought more Pashtuns into the cabinet at the expense of the Northern Alliance, Islamabad considered his efforts as too little too late. To maintain its influence among the Taliban and Afghan Pashtuns, the ISI developed a two-track policy of protecting the Taliban while handing over al Qaeda Arabs and other non-Afghans to the United States.

The CIA remained extremely suspicious of the ISI, maintaining the profiles of all ISI personnel and where they were stationed and requesting the removal of officers it did not trust. Musharraf purged ISI officers after 9/11 and ordered the ISI to open up its headquarters in Aabpara, in downtown Islamabad, to wider cooperation with the CIA. In turn, the CIA trained ISI personnel on new equipment and technology, which it provided. Frequent visits by CIA director George Tenet and heads of European intelligence agencies secured greater ISI cooperation.

Under the glare of Western agencies it was impossible for the ISI to both help the CIA and run the Taliban, whom the ISI had given sanctuary. Running a two-track policy was proving to be an institutional difficulty for the ISI, a difficulty that was resolved with the creation of a new clandestine organization that would operate outside the military and intelligence structure, in the civilian sphere. Former ISI trainers of the Taliban, retired Pashtun officers from the army and especially the Frontier Corps, were rehired on contract. They set up offices in private houses in Peshawar, Quetta, and other cities and maintained no links with the local ISI station chief or the army. Most of these agents held down regular jobs, working undercover as coordinators for Afghan refugees, bureaucrats, researchers at universities, teachers at colleges, and even aid workers. Others set up NGOs ostensibly to work with Afghan refugees.

Retired intelligence officials told me that this clandestine organization was modeled on the principle of an NGO, with a minimum of hierarchy and expense, casual working hours with frequent returns to civilian life, and an untraceable system of command and control. There were no records, and logistics and expenses came through not the ISI but the less scrutinized offices of the Frontier Corps. The close-knit bond and camaraderie between former ISI and army officers who had served clandestinely in Afghanistan over the past twenty years provided just the platform needed for such an organization. Meanwhile, senior retired ISI officers in the public eye, such as former ISI chief Lt.-Gen. Hameed Gul, played an equally important role in mobilizing public support for the Taliban in the media and for political platforms.

After Taliban attacks in Afghanistan intensified in 2003, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 tried to unearth how the ISI was continuing to provide assistance to the Taliban—were these rogue operations conducted by a few ISI officers or did they have official clearance from the army and Musharraf? CIA and U.S. military officials in Islamabad first thought the attacks the work of a group of retired officers, perhaps headed by Hameed Gul. The CIA asked the ISI to place Gul under surveillance and drew up a list of retired officers friendly to him. Surveillance of Gul’s group yielded little information. The CIA was unwilling to push too hard, fearing that the Pakistanis might end all intelligence cooperation. Likewise the ISI knew that the Americans were unwilling to draw any abrupt conclusions and put the blame on Musharraf. If Washington had determined that support to the Taliban came from the top rather than from a few rogues, the United States would have had to take Musharraf to task, and neither Bush nor Cheney was prepared to do that. The most U.S. and European intelligence officials in Islamabad would admit was that Pakistani support to the Taliban was being carried out by a few out-of-control ISI officers.

Over time evidence slowly collected by U.S. and NATO intelligence officers on the ground showed a systematic and pervasive system of ISI collusion. By 2004 they had confirmed reports of the ISI running training camps for Taliban recruits north of Quetta, funds and arms shipments arriving from the Gulf countries, and shopping sprees in Quetta and Karachi in which the Taliban bought hundreds of motorbikes, pickup trucks, and satellite phones. In 2003 and 2004, American soldiers at firebases along the border in eastern Afghanistan and U.S. drones in the skies watched as army trucks delivered Taliban fighters to the border at night to infiltrate Afghanistan and then recovered them on their return a few days later. Pakistani artillery gave covering fire to Taliban infiltrators crossing into Afghanistan, and medical facilities were set up close to the border by the army for wounded Taliban.

Most damning of all was the extensive monitoring at the U.S. base at Bagram of wireless communications between Taliban commanders and Pakistan army officers on the border. The Taliban would speak to officers at border checkpoints, asking for safe passage as they came out of Afghanistan. The ISI’s activities emerged in the open when NATO troops deployed in southern Afghanistan in late 2005 and were faced with a full-blown Taliban offensive being run out of Quetta. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, which had been reorganized by the CIA and MI6, developed excellent sources in Quetta and Peshawar.
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When the first NATO troops deployed in the south in late 2005, they discovered that the Americans had not monitored Taliban activity in four southern provinces—Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Nimroz—or across the border in Quetta. In 2006 a senior U.S. commander in Kabul admitted to me that the U.S. military’s “biggest mistake for which NATO troops were now paying the price was the lack of a lookdown satellite capability” in the south and a shortage of intelligence manpower, because the Iraq war had drained away resources. Thus for four years, Mullah Omar and his commanders were able to operate freely in Balochistan and southern Afghanistan without being monitored by U.S. intelligence. In Balochistan, a pure Afghan Taliban movement was left undisturbed and allowed to take root. The ISI had made sure that American interest in Quetta would be minimal, as the Taliban did not have any Arabs coming or going or fighting for them. Until the spring of 2006 the Americans were to ignore the Balochistan base of the Taliban and focus solely on the northwest corner of the NWFP, where al Qaeda and its affiliates were settled.

After 9/11, hundreds of non-Afghan al Qaeda fighters and leaders came through the mountains along the border into Pakistan’s tribal belt. Some were captured by the Pakistan army; those who evaded arrest or walked through the unguarded border into North and South Waziristan were to stay on unmolested for the next three years. Some mid-level al Qaeda officials made their way down to Karachi, from where they escaped to the Arab Gulf states by boat. The arrest in Karachi in July 2002 of Sheikh Ahmed Saleem, a planner of the 1998 bombings in East Africa, provided information as to how members of al Qaeda were being smuggled out on boats from fishing villages along the Makran coast. The anti-Shia extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi had provided Saleem with false passports, tickets, and money and had helped him smuggle al Qaeda gold out of the country. Naval forces from the U.S.-led Coalition that patrolled the Arabian Gulf had boarded 180 ships in the first ten months after 9/11 but did not apprehend any fugitives.
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Senior al Qaeda leaders gravitated to Punjab, where they felt safe and could reorganize the movement with the help of Pakistani militants from Jaish-e-Mohammed and other groups who looked after their safety. The first important al Qaeda leader to be arrested by the Pakistanis as he tried to escape from Afghanistan was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who ran the al Qaeda training camp at Khalden, in Afghanistan. He provided the first information about who was directly behind the 9/11 attacks.

Abu Zubaydah was caught during a raid of a house in the industrial city of Faislabad, near Lahore, on March 28, 2002. The intelligence breakthrough had come a week earlier, after the arrest in Peshawar of four Arab militants and their Pakistani driver from Faislabad. The Saudi-born Palestinian, age thirty-one, was asleep when one hundred security officials stormed the three-story house. He ran up to the roof and attempted to escape, but was shot in the groin. One of his companions was killed and another wounded in a shootout that also left three Pakistani police officers wounded. Over the next few days police arrested twenty-seven other foreign and Pakistani militants from nine houses in Lahore and Faislabad. Abu Zubaydah was treated by CIA doctors and then incarcerated in a secret CIA jail in Thailand—one of a number of “black sites” that were soon to be created around the world.

U.S. officials said that Zubaydah had planned major al Qaeda plots before 9/11.
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He had been promoted as al Qaeda’s head of military operations after Mohammed Atef was killed by a U.S. missile strike in Kabul in November 2001. He was planning new terrorist strikes in Pakistan and abroad when he was caught. Since 1997 he had lived openly in Peshawar, with the full knowledge of the ISI, running a guesthouse for al Qaeda called the House of Martyrs, where all foreign recruits were interviewed before being sent for training to Afghanistan. He knew the identities of thousands of recruits. The Clinton administration had repeatedly asked Musharraf to extradite him, but the ISI denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. In fact, before 9/11 Abu Zubaydah had worked with the ISI, vetting Kashmiri militants for training in al Qaeda camps. President Bush claimed in September 2006 that Zubaydah had revealed only “nominal” information until the CIA interrogated him more harshly, which resulted in intelligence that led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, according to lawyers and experts, that interrogation program amounted to torture.
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On April 30, 2002, Khalid al-Attash, a Yemeni wanted for the bombing of USS
Cole,
was arrested along with five Pakistani militants in a Karachi safe house. Fortuitously for the government, the next round of arrests occurred on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, just as Musharraf was due to address the UN General Assembly in New York. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a leader of the Hamburg cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks, was arrested in Karachi when three apartments were raided.
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Eight Arab men, an Arab woman, and children were arrested. In one of the apartments two suspects were killed, including a Pakistani militant who before he died inscribed “Allahu Akbar” (God Is Great) on the walls in his own blood. The police who dragged bin al-Shibh out of one house did not recognize him until FBI agents waiting in a car outside confirmed his identity.

For several days there was intense media speculation that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, as he was called, al Qaeda’s third in line and a planner of 9/11, had also been killed in the raid. A few weeks earlier, bin al-Shibh and KSM had given an interview in Karachi to Yosri Fouda, a journalist for Al Jazeera TV network, claiming responsibility for 9/11.
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KSM’s wife and children had been arrested in the raid. A year after 9/11, the Bush administration said that twenty-seven hundred suspected members of al Qaeda had been arrested in sixty countries; nearly five hundred of them had been caught in Pakistan alone.

It took another six months to capture KSM. An informer walked into the CIA office in Islamabad with news of his whereabouts.
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On March 1, 2003, twelve heavily armed ISI agents broke down the front door of a house in Westridge, in the military cantonment area of Rawalpindi, a few minutes’ drive from the army’s general headquarters. They found KSM, al Qaeda’s chief operational planner, still groggy with sleep. Also captured was Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. A Saudi, he was al Qaeda’s chief financial officer and fund-raiser, who had set up thirty-five bank accounts in the United States for the 9/11 hijackers. The raiders seized a computer, files, and computer disks. Within hours both men were on their way to a “black site” prison run by the CIA in Kabul and later to one in Poland. “It is hard to overstate how significant this is,” said an elated Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary. “[He is] the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.”
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