Descent Into Chaos (68 page)

As pressure on Pakistan increased from the U.S. Congress, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, gave a startling assessment in January 2007 to the Senate, stating that al Qaeda “are cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ secure hideout in Pakistan, to affiliates in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.”
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Whereas previously U.S. intelligence officials spoke of al Qaeda as being based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, now the United States was admitting—six years after 9/11—that the group was based solely in Pakistan.

The Taliban’s summer offensive created major problems within the NATO alliance. Thirty-seven countries now contributed troops to the NATO force in Afghanistan, and criticism mounted from those countries doing the fighting against those who refused to fight. In 2006, NATO forces in Afghanistan had grown from thirty-two thousand to forty-five thousand troops, but only one third were available for fighting. The issue blew up on November 28, 2006, at NATO’s annual summit at Riga. Bush, Tony Blair, and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper demanded that all NATO countries give up their caveats and provide fighting troops. They demanded that Germany, Spain, and Italy, who jointly had seven thousand troops in Afghanistan, send troops to the front line in the south. German chancellor Angela Merkel took the lead in declining, but she offered to send Tornado reconnaissance aircraft to the south. A poor compromise was reached in which all countries promised to help each other “in extremis”—that is, if help was needed on a battlefront. Only Poland offered a much-needed strategic reserve of one thousand troops, but there were still insufficient soldiers and helicopters for the NATO force.

As al Qaeda opened new fronts in North Africa and threatened to carry out suicide attacks on mainland Europe, there were fears of an even larger Taliban offensive in 2007, and European governments anticipated greater opposition from their publics toward their troop deployments in Afghanistan. In Italy, Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s government fell on February 21, 2007, on account of the left’s opposition to Italy’s deployment in Afghanistan. Prodi was reinstated a week later but with a wafer-thin parliamentary majority of five. In Germany and Britain there were demands for a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan, and in Canada in April, the ruling Conservative Party narrowly defeated an opposition motion to pull out Canadian troops, by 150 votes to 134. Fifty-four Canadians had been killed in Afghanistan—the third-highest casualty rate, after American and British losses. Nine Canadians were killed in the ten days preceding the vote.

NATO had bet a great deal on its mission in Afghanistan: that it would find meaning for its continued existence and re-create the unity that Western Europe showed during the cold war. Yet NATO had arrived with little understanding of the Afghan conflict, a lack of realism regarding public opposition at home, a complete lack of transparency in dealing with the public, and an overreliance on U.S. leadership and analysis of the conflict. General Richards was later to admit that “probably we all underestimated the potential for a [Taliban] resurgence.”
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Increasingly NATO officers blamed the Bush administration for refusing to get tough with Pakistan. Above all, NATO had addressed Afghanistan as though it were a classic post-conflict peacekeeping operation confined to the country’s borders, whereas it was actually an insurgency that was a cross-border phenomenon, as the Taliban were also present in the neighboring countries.

Moreover, NATO’s counterinsurgency effort required the close integration of civil and military objectives, but NATO was unable to get it right, as it failed to provide adequate reconstruction efforts in the war zone. By 2007, NATO had established PRTs in almost every province, but they were too small to be effective, too cut off from the people because of the PRTs’ own security concerns, while their quick-impact projects made no dent in the rebuilding of infrastructure that was desperately needed to get the economy moving and to provide jobs for people.

All the PRTs operated under different mandates and caveats, decided upon by the home government rather than by the needs on the ground. In 2006 a large proportion of international aid was being delivered to just four opium-growing and insurgency-hit provinces in the south, leaving the rest of the country bereft and angry. USAID, the largest donor, directed half of its aid for 2006—some $119 million—to these four provinces but had little to show because the lack of security there prevented aid workers from venturing out. Britain’s development agency DFID and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) had enormous funds at their disposal but were unable to deploy in Helmand or Kandahar.

Karzai’s indecisiveness and his apparent unwillingness to improve the performance of his government angered NATO countries. The ease with which some Afghan officials continued to benefit themselves contrasted sharply with the self-sacrifice espoused by the Taliban. The European governments wanted the Americans to put more pressure on Karzai. NATO’s Scheffer warned Karzai that " ’parliamentary and public support’ in NATO countries for their troops in Afghanistan depends on the respect for universal values demonstrated by the Karzai government.”
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In Kabul, deep disillusionment set in, which resulted in the best and brightest of the Western-trained Afghans, who had come to work for the government, beginning to leave.

The divisions in NATO, its recourse to intensified aerial bombing, which only increased civilian casualties, and the continued refusal of many European countries to fight the Taliban left Afghans asking how committed the international community really was to Afghanistan. Before the world’s eyes in the summer of 2006, East Timor, a once-failed state that had received the most aid money per capita in the world and had been administered by the UN, fell apart through riots and mayhem. There was no guarantee that the same thing could not happen in Afghanistan. There was a lesson here, said Kofi Annan.
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International aid, money, and troops did not guarantee a quick fix or a solution to failing states unless the entire package was welded together with a coherent nation-building strategy that everyone agreed upon. NATO had bet its future role on bringing peace to Afghanistan, but every day the risks of failure and the fear of a geostrategic meltdown seemed to increase. “In committing the alliance to sustained ground combat operations in Afghanistan . . . NATO has bet its future,” said Gen. James Jones, the former NATO chief. “If NATO were to fail, alliance cohesion will be at grave risk. A moribund or unraveled NATO would have a profoundly negative geostrategic impact.”
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Conclusion
The Death of an Icon and a Fragile Future

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.

—American diplomat George Kennan, October 2002
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In the last few moments of her life, Benazir Bhutto, a youthful and still beautiful fifty-four, stood up on the backseat of her bulletproof Toyota Land Cruiser and popped her head through the sunroof. She waved to the crowd surrounding the vehicle as it slowly edged out of the rally ground in Rawalpindi, where she had just finished delivering a stirring election speech in the late afternoon of December 27, 2007. Elections were due on January 8, 2008. Hundreds of police patrolled the ground, but only one was anywhere near Bhutto’s vehicle. A young, thin man wearing a black waistcoat and sunglasses standing to the vehicle’s left suddenly pulled out a Chinese-made pistol and fired at Bhutto at close range. We will never know the exact cause of death, as no autopsy was carried out, but Bhutto dropped down through the sunroof as the vehicle picked up speed. She may have been shot by the assassin or hit her head on the latch of the sunroof as she ducked. Seconds later a suicide bomber, probably the shooter or another man standing just behind him, detonated explosives strapped to his body.

The massive explosion tore through the crowd, killing the bomber and twenty-one others—many of them Bhutto’s young bodyguards. The blast shook Bhutto’s vehicle and blew out its tires but injured no one inside. Naheed Khan, Bhutto’s devoted friend and secretary, who was sitting next to the former prime minister, thought Bhutto had just slumped in her seat, until Khan noticed blood forming a thick pool on the plastic floor mat. The explosion, the blood flowing from Bhutto’s wounds, the bumpy ride, numb eardrums, and the shock of the blast had affected all the vehicle’s occupants, but the driver had the wherewithal to stop and transfer Bhutto into another vehicle, which rushed her to a hospital. Doctors there tried to revive her for nearly forty minutes, but it was too late. She was already dead. She’d loved her country and in the end gave her life for it.

A few moments earlier she had been onstage in Liaquat Gardens—the site of the assassination in 1951 of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan—giving the speech of her life. “Wake up, my brothers!” she shouted. “This country faces great dangers. This is your country! My country! We have to save it,” she implored.
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Ultimately she was unable to save herself from the very extremists whom she cursed in her final speech.

After eight years of self-imposed political exile in London and Dubai, Bhutto had returned home only two months earlier, on October 18, to a large bomb blast—one that tore through her convoy as she traveled from Karachi airport to her home. She barely escaped with her life, but 179 of her supporters and bodyguards were killed and more than 600 injured. It was the single largest terrorist attack in Pakistan’s history, and Bhutto was distraught at the staggering loss of life. Afghan intelligence had privately warned her that there was a plot by extremists to assassinate her. It was clear that somebody was out to get her, but she refused to falter in her campaign or to stop appearing in public. The security promised by Pakistan’s government never materialized, and it was certainly not there on that terrible December day.

Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), whose green, black, and red flags could be seen from the Karakorum Mountains to the Arabian Sea, came the closest of any party in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to espousing a secular, democratic, antimilitary political culture. Election results proved that the PPP, the country’s only national party, consistently commanded the loyalty of about one-third of the electorate, a faction mostly against military rule and Islamic extremism. Bhutto’s longest-running battle was with the army, whose generals never trusted her. Gen. Zia ul-Haq had hanged her father, former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and placed Benazir in jail for nearly five years while she was still in her twenties. She was forced into exile by Musharraf as the government launched one corruption case after another against her.

Under Musharraf, Pakistan’s democratic politics had regressed and Islamic extremism became ever stronger. Bhutto’s promise to restore civilian rule and democracy while combating extremism was a breath of fresh air for millions of Pakistanis, and vital if Pakistan was to avoid becoming a failed state. Her past mistakes, her inability to deliver on her promises to the people even though she had been prime minister twice, the allegations of corruption against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were all forgotten as Pakistanis now pinned their hopes on Bhutto’s ending military rule.

The Bhutto family had lived through many tragedies. After Benazir’s father was hanged, her two brothers were hounded into exile. Her youngest brother, Shahnawaz, died from poisoning under mysterious circumstances in Cannes in 1985. In 1996 her other brother, Murtaza, was killed by police in Karachi, an incident that appeared to be an assassination. What made his death doubly troubling for Benazir was that she was prime minister at the time. That year she was deposed from power, losing the elections to Nawaz Sharif, and went into exile.

For eight years the U.S. State Department studiously ignored Bhutto, with even junior U.S. officials declining to meet with her lest their doing so anger Musharraf. Yet, over the twelve months preceding her death, the State Department and London’s Foreign Office had quietly tried to tie up an agreement between Musharraf and Bhutto, one that would allow her to return home after all corruption charges against her had been withdrawn, to contest free and fair elections, and, if she was elected prime minister, to share power with President Musharraf. The aim was to use Bhutto to revive Musharraf’s flagging fortunes, cover him with a varnish of legitimacy, bolster Pakistan’s dwindling fight against extremism, and mobilize the masses. The Taliban’s expansion into Pakistan demanded a new political dispensation.

The “deal,” as it was dubbed by the Pakistani media, proved to be immensely unpopular in the PPP and among the opposition leaders, including Nawaz Sharif, who were banking on Bhutto to lead a movement in the streets to topple Musharraf rather than to bail him out. To fulfill her side of the bargain, Bhutto was to overrule her party, courting major criticism and leaving many wondering if she was a front for the Americans or just hungry for power. Bhutto had calculated that this was the only chance for her to make a comeback, enjoy the full support of the international community, and cleanse her reputation. She knew that in the army, only Musharraf, who was an Urdu-speaking Muhajir, now irrevocably weakened, could be persuaded to accept her. The next army chief and the majority of generals were Punjabis, who would prefer to deal with fellow Punjabi Nawaz Sharif, who satisfied their political preferences: he was sufficiently right-wing, anti-American, and close to the Islamic parties. Moreover, Bhutto knew that no matter how weak he was, Musharraf was solidly backed by the army and the Americans; confrontation would not remove him, but a slow, steady inching into the spaces he provided just might.