Descent Into Chaos (52 page)

As Pakistani forces now rarely moved beyond their garrisons or checkpoints, increasingly U.S. forces carried out missile strikes in FATA, often without Pakistan’s permission. On January 13, 2006, U.S. missiles targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri in the village of Damadola in Bajaur agency. Al-Zawahiri was reputed to have a Mohmand wife whom he visited on occasion. The missile attack killed five senior al Qaeda figures but generated enormous public anger as politicians accused Musharraf of allowing Washington to undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty. Musharraf was forced to issue a sharp rejoinder to the United States that such strikes “must not be repeated.”
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President Bush’s visit to Islamabad in March 2006 prompted another short offensive by the army in North Waziristan. In retaliation, some 1,500 Taliban tried to overwhelm the military garrison in Miram Shah and capture the town. Bloody fighting lasted for three days and the army had to use heavy artillery to drive off the Taliban, destroying the town and killing more than 150 people. The crisis in FATA dominated the talks between Musharraf and Bush, who urged Pakistan’s leader to do more. Further U.S. missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in FATA led to the first suicide attacks on the Pakistan army—a trend that had already escalated in Afghanistan. On November 8, after a U.S. missile strike against a madrassa in Bajaur agency that killed eighty people, a suicide bomber blew himself up at an army training camp in Dargai, in the NWFP, killing thirty-five soldiers and wounding forty. It was the single most devastating attack against the army and it shook public and military morale.
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Starting in South Waziristan in 2002, the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda had progressively occupied one agency after another, moving to North Waziristan, Bajaur, and Mohmand. Each army attack led them to find new territory to occupy and to spread their message. In each agency they introduced their harsh code, killing or driving out tribesmen who opposed them. In May 2006, Musharraf had appointed the now-retired lieutenant-general Orakzai as the new governor of the NWFP and tasked him with striking peace deals in FATA that would stop the militants from attacking the army. The government enlisted the help of Maulana Fazlur Rehman and other leaders of the JUI Party and covertly asked Afghan Taliban leaders Mullah Dadullah and Jalaluddin Haqqani to help persuade the Pakistani Taliban to agree.

General Orakzai was a slippery character for Musharraf to embrace so closely. As corps commander in Peshawar from 2001 to 2004, he had allowed al Qaeda and the Taliban to settle down in FATA undisturbed and was now advocating peace deals with them.
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A tribesman from FATA who boasted of his inside knowledge of the tribal mind, in fact Orakzai appeared totally insensitive to tribal needs. Posing as an enlightened general, he was opposed to any democratic reforms in FATA and disliked the Americans and NATO intensely, while demonstrating a grudging sympathy, if not admiration, for the Taliban. He enlarged on the myth, advocated frequently by Musharraf and the ISI, that the Taliban were just Pashtun nationalists opposed to foreign occupying armies but with no connections to al Qaeda.

On September 5, 2006, Orakzai signed an agreement with seven Pakistani Taliban leaders in North Waziristan—although the government insisted that the agreement was signed with tribal elders and not the Taliban. The agreement, which was to become immensely controversial in Kabul and Washington, stipulated that all Taliban attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan army would cease. In return the army would pull out its garrisons and checkpoints, release all prisoners, return captured equipment and vehicles, and compensate those tribesmen who had suffered losses. The army quickly fulfilled its side of the bargain, thereby legitimizing Taliban control of North Waziristan. The agreement turned into a capitulation by the army because there was no mechanism for its enforcement. The Pakistanis had no means to challenge or punish the Taliban if they continued their attacks across the border—which they did. Thus, while the Taliban stopped attacking Pakistani troops, they stepped up their attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which immediately aroused suspicions in Kabul that this was Islamabad’s intention all along.

Two days later Orakzai accompanied Musharraf to the White House to convince Bush about the workability of the agreement. Bush naïvely supported the deal, saying it would not create safe havens for the Taliban and could even offer “alternatives to violence and terror.” He reiterated his implacable trust in Musharraf, adding only one cautionary note: “You know we are watching this very carefully, obviously,” he said.
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Buoyed by Bush’s approval of what was a dubious agreement, Musharraf now urged NATO forces in Afghanistan to strike similar deals with the Taliban.

Musharraf’s most vocal critic was Karzai. In the United States for the UN General Assembly, both men fought a bruising battle, each heaping abuse on the other in media interviews. When Bush attempted to heal the rift between the two men by hosting a dinner for both of them at the White House, they refused to shake each other’s hand. The dinner failed as Karzai again insisted that Musharraf arrest Taliban leaders living in Pakistan and stop striking deals with terrorists, while Bush refused to take sides.

By November, Lieutenant-General Eikenberry, the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was telling me that the number of Taliban attacks emanating out of North Waziristan had gone up three times since the September agreement was signed. Eikenberry was clear that Pakistan’s aim was to stop attacks on its own soldiers while doing little to stop the Taliban from attacking U.S. forces.
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By the end of December the State Department agreed with his analysis, saying the deal had failed. “The Taliban have been able to use these areas [FATA] for sanctuary and for command and control and for regrouping and supply,” said the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Richard Boucher, on December 26.
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With the population terrorized and under the influence of the Taliban, FATA was now out of the army’s control. More than 120 tribal elders who opposed the Taliban were executed by them in 2006. Since 2004 the army had signed three agreements with the militants in FATA, and all three had failed.
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Now Taliban influence was spreading to the settled areas of the NWFP, as all entertainment in small towns was shut down, and men were forced to grow beards and pray five times a day.
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FATA had become terrorism central, providing training and manpower for the insurgency in Afghanistan and pushing forward the Talibanization of the NWFP, while guarding the sanctuaries of al Qaeda where international terrorists were trained. Al Qaeda was so well protected that it set up a media production arm called As Sahab (The Clouds), which produced fifty-eight audio and videotapes in 2006, triple the number in 2005. Ayman al-Zawahiri described his concept of a post-9/11 base area in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq: “Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate over as much territory as you can to spread its power such as in Iraq.”
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Almost all latter-day al Qaeda terrorist plots around the world had a FATA connection. The four suicide bombers—three of them of Pakistani origin—who carried out the July 7, 2005, attacks on the London Underground that killed fifty-six people and injured seven hundred were connected to FATA. The ringleader, Mohammed Siddique Khan, visited FATA in 2003 and 2004, when he had “some contact with al Qaeda figures and some relevant training,” according to a British government report.
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As Sahab released a video showing another one of the bombers making his martyrdom speech. Five of the twenty-four terrorists arrested in England in August 2006 for plotting to blow up nine aircraft flying out of Heathrow with liquid explosives had allegedly trained in FATA. Subsequent terrorist plots unearthed in Denmark and Germany in September 2007 also appeared to have links to FATA.

The 2005 London plot was investigated with the assistance of the ISI working closely with Britain’s MI6, but Musharraf remained in denial about al Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan and instead castigated Tony Blair for allowing radical mullahs to preach in Britain. Musharraf insisted: “Our . . . law enforcement agencies have completely shattered al Qaeda’s vertical and horizontal links and smashed its communications and propaganda setup. . . . It no longer has any command, communication and program structure in Pakistan. Therefore it is absolutely baseless to say that al Qaeda has its headquarters in Pakistan and that terror attacks in other parts of the world in any way originate from our country.”
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The British government was less sanguine. In October 2005 it banned fifteen Islamic extremist groups, half of which were based in Pakistan. Britain had seen a spate of al Qaeda plots, starting with Britain’s first plot, uncovered in November 2000, and further plots in 2003 and 2004. In the latter, seven men, six of them British-born Pakistanis, were arrested with half a ton of chemicals ready to be turned into bombs. At their trial they testified that they had trained in Kashmir and in Kohat, in the NWFP.
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In November 2006 Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director-general of Britain’s MI5, said that her organization was watching sixteen hundred people involved in thirty plots. The plotters, she said, “often have links back to al Qaeda in Pakistan and through those links al Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here....”
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British Pakistanis, who were legally allowed to hold both Pakistani and British passports, were now the most closely watched group of people in the world.

By working closely with the British government on Britain’s terrorism problems, the ISI gained sympathy from London for its efforts in FATA. Tony Blair declined to criticize Musharraf’s policies or publicly pressure Pakistan about any clandestine support to the Taliban—even though British troops in Helmand province faced the brunt of Taliban attacks in 2006. Britain’s attitude created severe differences with NATO and U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, who wanted to forge a common diplomatic front to force Pakistan to do more in curbing the Taliban. Instead, while on a visit to Islamabad in November 2006, Blair heaped praise on Musharraf’s role in standing up to terrorism. However, by now Musharraf was being harshly criticized by the U.S. Congress and media for failing in FATA and in the hunt for bin Laden. The increasing estrangement in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship was sarcastically summed up by veteran columnist Jim Hoagland: “We’ve got Musharraf right where he wants us. Washington and Islamabad are condemned to such strategic ambivalence. Each is unable to do without the other, while wishing it could.”
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Washington had lavishly aided Pakistan’s military, and U.S. legislators now asked where were the results of that aid. Between 2002 and 2007, the Bush administration had provided Pakistan with $3.5 billion in aid, more than half of that for the military. Between 2002 and 2005 the military had received another $3.6 billion in payments for use of its facilities and services by the U.S. Defense Department, while the United States had forgiven Pakistani debt worth over $3.0 billion.
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The CIA had paid large secret sums to the ISI in order to improve its performance and provide reward money for catching al Qaeda leaders. The army received another $30 to $40 million to improve border security. Washington provided for the computerization of all international passenger traffic at the country’s airports, the creation of an air wing for the army to monitor FATA, the building of access roads in FATA, and police training in several fields, including crime scene analysis and a centralized fingerprint ID system. Officially, by 2007, the United States had provided $10 billion in aid to Islamabad, and unofficially the figure was much higher, yet FATA and indeed Pakistan were now greater threats than ever before. With terrorism on the increase, U.S. legislators were asking the Bush administration where the money had gone.

By the summer of 2005, Washington maintained that bin Laden was no longer hiding “along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” but in FATA. Porter Goss, the director of the CIA, had made a tantalizing comment in June 2005 that rocked Pakistan. Asked about the whereabouts of bin Laden, he replied, “I have an excellent idea where he is . . . in the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links.”
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Pakistanis took his comment to mean that bin Laden was in Pakistan, while the “weak link” was Islamabad. Bin Laden was said to be protected by several rings of security lookouts with radios to alert one another if helicopters approached. The United States had spent more than $57 million in payouts to informants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, but there were no leads on bin Laden.
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Of the 37 senior al Qaeda leaders identified by the CIA in 2002, only 15 had been captured or killed, although some 3,000 suspects had been arrested in 90 countries, of which 650 were in U.S. custody. Two senior figures were killed in 2005 in North Waziristan, while another two were killed in April 2006, also in FATA.
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However, al Qaeda had shown an uncanny ability to replace leadership figures so that its hierarchy of command and control was never too disturbed.

It was clear that after 2004 the army had stopped looking for bin Laden and acted only when U.S. intelligence provided information. On several occasions Musharraf said that he hoped bin Laden would be found and killed in Afghanistan rather than in Pakistan.

The United States was equally to blame for failing to provide sufficient resources and manpower to the hunt for bin Laden. American officials admitted in late 2006 that they had received no credible lead on his whereabouts for two years and that the trail had gone “stone cold.”
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None of the intelligence agencies seemed to be capable of carrying out the simplest of procedures, such as intercepting the couriers who delivered the dozens of video and audiotapes sent by al Qaeda to be aired on Al Jazeera. No courier was ever arrested.