88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (7 page)

Pakistan’s brief existence had largely coincided with the Cold War. The fact that India quickly aligned itself in the mid-1950s with the Soviet Union, and became a major recipient of Soviet military hardware, further encouraged anti-Communist Muslim Pakistan to align itself with America. When at about the same time the United States organized what later became known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) to discourage Communist encroachment in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Pakistan became an enthusiastic member. Collaboration against the Soviets, particularly in the intelligence sphere, between Pakistan and the United States may have been discreet, but it was both important and effective. It is largely forgotten now, but when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane in 1960, precipitating a major diplomatic crisis, the airfield from which he took off was located in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Pakistani-American cooperation increased greatly after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when Pakistan’s intelligence service, a military organization known as the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, acted as a conduit for CIA-supplied money and weapons—eventually to include U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles—to the Afghan
mujahideen
, or Islamic resistance fighters. The joint program of support to the
mujahideen
was a signal success, and by 1989 mounting military losses forced the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan. In those days, CIA officers referred to the Afghan war as the “anti-Soviet
jihad.
” The term
jihad
, meaning “struggle,” had not yet become a pejorative.

The decade of the 1980s marked the zenith of U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation, and perhaps of U.S.-Pakistan relations more
generally. Partly by way of compensation for the important risks and expenses borne by Pakistan during the anti-Soviet
jihad
, America provided considerable military and economic assistance, including F-16 fighters and generous development programs.

But right from the start, hidden within this general regime of bonhomie and close cooperation were tensions and contradictions, which regularly came to the surface. For the United States, Pakistan was an important but problematic ally. Its development as a democracy was anything but smooth, and its regular military coups were an embarrassment for its American patrons. Its wars and near wars with India, and its brutal repression in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), were problematic, to say the least. More pointedly, as the
jihad
days of the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Pakistan was seen increasingly by some to be working against broader American policy in the areas of counterproliferation and counterterrorism. That period also saw a growing tendency in Congress to try to legislate foreign policy, to make it more difficult for the executive branch to favor short-term, expedient goals over what Congress saw as more important, longer-range American interests. In most administrations, after all, there is a great temptation to focus on the most immediate and tangible challenges, rather than speculating over the potential long-term unintended consequences of present policy. And so the administrations of the eighties and early nineties sought to preserve as much flexibility as possible in dealing with a long-term problem case like Pakistan; Congress, from the late 1970s onward, sought assiduously to curtail that flexibility.

In 1985, the so-called “Pressler Amendment,” introduced by Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota, mandated that the administration must certify, on a yearly basis, that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons in order for it to remain eligible for U.S. assistance of any kind. Desperate to preserve Pakistan’s help against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations certified Pakistan as a nuclear weapons–free state in the early years after the statute’s passage, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary; they probably violated U.S. law in the process. But when the Soviets evacuated Afghanistan in 1989, the administration’s motivation
to bend the law disappeared, and in 1990, Pakistan was sanctioned by the United States, losing virtually all of its U.S. military and economic assistance at a stroke.

The fact that the U.S. government had waited until Pakistan appeared no longer useful before deciding to enforce the Pressler Amendment was not lost on the Pakistanis. To them, the American measure was all the more galling because it was imposed selectively, at a time when they felt they had every legitimate right, and indeed a vital national security interest, in countering the perceived nuclear threat from India. New Delhi had tested a nuclear device as early as 1974. Pakistan, unlike India, was vulnerable to U.S. non-proliferation sanctions precisely because it had aligned itself with Washington; India had no corresponding fear of a Soviet version of the Pressler Amendment. For years, Washington and Islamabad had played a little diplomatic game: Islamabad would lie, denying its interest in developing nuclear weapons, while Washington would capitalize on the lie to maintain support for the Afghan
mujahideen
and bolster Pakistan as a regional ally. It all worked nicely, until Washington stopped playing.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s sponsorship of Islamic fighters, which had been useful to the United States when there were Soviet forces to be attacked in Afghanistan, began to seem much less so after the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistani patronage of the
mujahideen
had been part of a program pursued during the 1980s by Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to “Islamize” both foreign and domestic policy. General Zia died in a plane crash in 1988, but his policies survived him. Just as the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1989, Indian repression triggered a spontaneous popular uprising in Indian-held Kashmir. For the government of Pakistan, and particularly for the Pakistan Army, it was quite natural to encourage and support fundamentalist groups within Pakistan who had previously provided assistance to the Afghan
mujahideen,
and who now wished to infiltrate across the Line of Control to participate in the anti-Indian
jihad
in Kashmir. Within a few years, Pakistani militants, secretly supported by the Pakistan Army, had largely taken over the Kashmiri fight from the Kashmiris themselves. The fact that these militants frequently
employed terrorist tactics did not much concern the Pakistanis, who considered them freedom fighters; but it threatened to put Pakistan on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism List.

In yet another instance of congressional legislation of foreign policy, beginning in 1979 the secretary of state was mandated by statute every year to examine all available intelligence to determine which countries had provided material aid to terrorists. I commissioned the review on Pakistan in 1994, during the year I worked for the under secretary of state. For several years running during the nineties, Pakistan came very close to being placed on the State Sponsors List. Had that happened, Pakistan, a key U.S. ally just a few years before, would have been relegated to the status of a rogue state, joining the likes of Iran and North Korea. Fearing the long-term consequences of such a move, U.S. policymakers took refuge, barely, in the fact that the damning intelligence on Pakistan could not quite meet a legal standard.

In May 1998, India formally tested a series of nuclear warheads. Despite strenuous efforts by the United States, which offered a lifting of sanctions, access to weapons, and other blandishments, Pakistan followed suit within days, conducting five weapons tests of its own. Washington was deeply annoyed. In the summer of 1999, Pakistan brazenly infiltrated regular army troops across the Line of Control in the mountainous Kargil district of Kashmir, setting off a brief but sharp conflict with India. By the time I arrived in July 1999, U.S. relations with Pakistan were at an absolute low; it was hard to imagine how they could be worse. But within a few months, on October 12, General Pervaiz Musharraf, the chief of Army Staff, overthrew Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s democratically elected prime minister, in a bloodless coup. Under Sharif, corruption had been so rampant, and his systematic abuse of democratic institutions so egregious, that the U.S. Embassy judged at the time that his overthrow in a military coup
enhanced
the chances for positive democratic change in the country. Nonetheless, for having toppled an elected government, U.S. law imposed yet further American sanctions on the military regime of General Musharraf.

None of this might have mattered very much to most Americans; after all, the United States had largely washed its hands of South-
Central Asia after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. When the formerly Soviet-supported Afghan Communist government of Mohammed Najibullah finally fell in 1992, the many Afghan warlords formerly supported by the United States and Pakistan fell to fighting among themselves. Afghanistan descended into political anarchy, and Kabul was laid waste in fratricidal warfare. Thirteen years of continuous conflict had weakened traditional tribal structures throughout the country; warlords and petty strongmen commanding armed militias, free of the constraints and responsibilities of traditional tribal leadership, terrorized much of the country.

In the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the situation became particularly bad. By late autumn of 1994, the city was divided among rival warlords who ruled their fiefdoms with impunity. On the main highway passing through the area, drug-smoking criminal gangs set up roadblocks to extort travelers, sometimes seizing women from buses and raping them. A group of some thirty local clerics, all veterans of the
jihad
, and their students, or
talibs
, acting at the direction of an obscure former
mujahed
named Mullah Mohammed Omar whom they had sought out to lead them, openly declared themselves and ordered the criminal gangs to disperse. When they refused, Omar’s men attacked one of the most notorious of the criminal checkposts, where a pair of women from Herat recently had been raped, tortured, and killed, and drove them off. This caught both the attention and the imagination of the citizens of Kandahar, tired as they were of lawlessness and victimization, and a surprising dynamic quickly took hold. Local merchants provided the
talibs
—who called themselves the Taliban—with money, vehicles, and weapons.

The Taliban had begun as one of many small, independent militias fighting against the Soviet occupiers around Kandahar during the
jihad
of the 1980s. What distinguished them from other groups was their overtly religious rather than tribal orientation. Their members were drawn from a generation of young refugees from the Soviet war, many of them orphans, who had grown up in camps inside neighboring Pakistan and been educated in
madrassas
, or Quranic schools. When they and others of their background returned permanently to
Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, their estrangement from traditional Afghan life had left them with tenuous ties to tribe or place. Though many had fought against the Soviets or in the subsequent anarchy, they were of a younger generation than the discredited warlords. Following the mini-uprising against Kandahar’s criminal highwaymen, they flocked in large numbers to Omar’s movement. The Taliban quickly became a local political force to be reckoned with, and several of the principal warlords in the area joined, rather than fight them, setting a precedent for the future.

From its initial modest successes around Kandahar in 1994, the Taliban movement spread rapidly northward like a cleansing flame. The misogynistic, strictly fundamentalist brand of Islam absorbed by its members in the
madrassas
of Pakistan was intolerant and unforgiving, but it was seen by many Afghans, beset by crime, lawlessness, and anarchy, as precisely what the country needed. The Taliban may have been primitive, but they were righteous. Their string of military successes over the next two years was based not so much on their military prowess as on the political embrace of the Afghan Pashtun population, which in many places rose up against their warlord oppressors as the Taliban approached. Large areas came over to the movement without a fight. By the end of September 1996, Kabul had fallen to them.

But the Taliban’s attraction for Afghanistan’s Pashtun population did not extend to the other major ethnic groups, largely concentrated in the north of the country—the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, and the Hazaras. The Hazaras, religious Shiites, came in for especially brutal treatment at the hands of the Sunni Muslim Taliban. The ethnic minorities of the north banded together against the Taliban under the auspices of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (UIFSA)—popularly known as the Northern Alliance. By the time of my arrival, the Northern Alliance was locked in a bitter civil war with the Taliban and was being slowly pushed back into the far northern and northeastern reaches of the country.

It is often alleged that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, created the Taliban. That is certainly untrue. But Islamabad was quick to embrace the student movement, and to provide it with support primarily
through the ISI, seeing in it a means of unifying the fractious Afghans under the rule of Sunni Islamists with strong ties to Pakistan. The fact that the Taliban was willing to fight to the end against the Northern Alliance made it all the more worthy of support in Pakistani eyes, especially given the Alliance’s close ties to both Russia and India. Since the dawn of its existence, Pakistan has lived in pertpetual fear of being surrounded by hostile forces in thrall to India; in addition to its natural sympathy for their cause, Pakistan’s support of the Taliban was an obvious means of pursuing its larger geopolitical interests.

Neither the continuing strife in Afghanistan nor Pakistan’s support to the obscure Taliban movement would have been of much concern to the U.S. government, had it not been for yet another actor in this regional drama: Osama bin Laden. Son of a billionaire Saudi construction magnate, bin Laden had played a marginal role in the anti-Soviet
jihad
, bankrolling a modest number of Arab fighters who had come to help defend Afghan Muslims against the godless invading Soviets. Radicalized by his experience in the 1980s, bin Laden became more so in 1990 as a result of Saudi Arabia’s willingness to host American troops sent to drive Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the First Gulf War. His vocal opposition to the U.S. troop presence in his native country soon came to the unfavorable attention of the Saudi government, and bin Laden was forced to seek refuge in Sudan, where his efforts to organize violent Islamic extremists into a new organization that he called
al-Qa’ida
or “the base” first brought him to the attention of CIA and the U.S. intelligence community. In response to persistent American complaints, Sudan eventually prevailed upon bin Laden to go elsewhere; and in 1996, just as the Taliban was consolidating its hold on Kabul, bin Laden and a small number of followers pitched up in Afghanistan.