Intel Wars (19 page)

Five days later, on September 8, 2008, a CIA drone attack on a building in the town of Dande Darpa Khel in northern Pakistan killed twenty-three people, but not its intended targets. The missiles were supposed to kill the leader of the Haqqani Network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Siraj, who ran the day-to-day operations of the organization. Neither man was at the headquarters complex at the time of the attack. Instead, the missiles killed one of Jalaluddin Haqqani's wives, one of his sisters, his sister-in-law, two nieces, and eight grandchildren.

The one factor that has done the most to poison the U.S. intelligence community's relationship with Pakistan is that for almost a decade the Pakistani military and ISI have not only protected all three major factions of the Afghan Taliban but also secretly provided them with military hardware, training, and financial support. According to an American military intelligence analyst who formerly served on the ISAF intelligence staff in Kabul, “We know that the Pakistanis help the Taliban. We know it. And they know we know it. But we put up with it in the hope that one day the Taliban will bite the hand that feeds it,” a reference to the Pakistani government.

Only in the past three years has the U.S. intelligence community somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that the Pakistani government's unwillingness to help the United States combat the Taliban was a deliberate act of national policy. It took an extraordinarily long time for the U.S. intelligence community to reach this conclusion.

The first inkling that there was a problem surfaced in 2002, shortly after the Battle of Tora Bora, when, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, the ISI began to refuse to share any intelligence information about the Afghan Taliban presence in Pakistan. And when the CIA and the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS, gave the ISI information concerning the whereabouts of senior Taliban officials hiding in Pakistan, the ISI refused to do anything about it. According to a recently retired CIA official, “I held regular meetings in Islamabad with the ISI and gave them the latest intelligence we had on the whereabouts of senior Taliban commanders in his country. And at every meeting they found new ways of politely telling me that their hands were tied … No matter what I said, they just would not budge.”

Over the next four years (2002 to 2005), the U.S. intelligence community came to believe, based on low-level clandestine agent reporting, that certain “rogue elements” of the ISI were secretly collaborating with the Taliban, but the belief was that this relationship was conducted without the knowledge or consent of President Musharaf. As late as 2005, there were still lingering doubts about the nature and extent of the ISI-Taliban relationship, with a 2005 paper sent to Vice President Dick Cheney reporting that the Taliban
“
may
still enjoy support from the lower echelons of the ISI.”

By the end of 2006, all doubts had been cast aside, with a Pentagon report stating unequivocally that
“Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) elements have an ongoing relationship with the Taliban.”
The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan was also quite clear in its judgment. According to a copy of the estimate shown to the author, the report stated that “available evidence strongly suggests that the Pakistani intelligence service maintains an active and ongoing relationship with certain elements of the Taliban.”

According to a former DNI official, at some point in 2006 the intelligence community got its first “hard” evidence from what were deemed to be reliable clandestine sources (there were also some incriminating radio intercepts) that the ISI was providing material and financial support to two of the top Afghan Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan: Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose Haqqani Network was based in North Waziristan in the FATA; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose forces operated from a series of Afghan refugee camps situated around the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

The consensus opinion within the intelligence community at the time was
that the principal form of assistance that the Pakistani military and ISI were providing to the Taliban was training, which according to American military intelligence analysts helped to explain the dramatic improvement in the Taliban's fighting skills in 2006.
But a restricted-access 2008 Marine Corps intelligence briefing concluded that Pakistani support
for the Taliban went far beyond training. According to the briefing papers, the ISI was providing the Taliban not only with training but also with money and logistical support; while the Pakistani military was providing the Taliban with communications equipment and advanced combat training.

Proof of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban came in July 2008, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, went to Islamabad to try to pressure the Pakistani government to go after the Taliban in their country. The Pakistani reaction was to arrest a single Taliban commander in Quetta named Mullah Rahim, who was picked up because he was leading such a lavish lifestyle that even local newspapermen knew where to find him. But when it came to going after the “big fish” Taliban leaders living out in the open, the Pakistanis followed form and did nothing. And when the Americans complained that the ISI was refusing to go after the top Taliban commanders, the Pakistanis still refused to fire ISI director Nadeem Taj, whom the CIA widely suspected of being “pro-Taliban.”

The city of Quetta in northwestern Pakistan, located only fifty miles from the Afghan border, is widely believed to be the headquarters-in-exile and military command center for Mullah Mohammed Omar and his fellow Taliban commanders.
Despite ten years of fierce denials
from senior Pakistani government officials, it is clear from declassified documents and interviews that the Taliban remain omnipresent in Quetta's sprawling Pashtun slums of Pashtunabad, Satellite Town, Kharotabad, Nawakili, Kachlogh, and Eastern Bypass. The city's Gulshan District, home to tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, remains a hub of Taliban activity, with one major thoroughfare in the neighborhood being dubbed “Taliban Road” by local merchants and taxi drivers. Even lowly reporters have been able to periodically interview senior Taliban officials in Quetta, with the Qasr-e-Gul Hotel downtown being the preferred venue for these assignations.

According to intelligence sources, Quetta serves many other important roles in facilitating the Taliban insurgency inside Afghanistan. It is where senior Taliban field commanders in Afghanistan go once a year for rest and recuperation, as well as to meet with Mullah Omar to plot strategy for the coming year. Money and weapons destined for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are clandestinely transported to Quetta, then sent across the border via infiltration routes known as “ratlines.” In years past, ambulances openly ferried Taliban fighters wounded in Afghanistan from the border crossing at Chaman to a number of hospitals and private clinics in Quetta. The slums in and around Quetta remain an important source of recruits for the Taliban. Taliban officials used to openly recruit volunteers and solicit donations in the local mosques and the eight major religious schools (
madrassas
) in Quetta without any interference from Pakistani police or security officials.

How the Pakistani military and police have over the past decade failed to even accidentally discover the Taliban's substantial presence in Quetta is a mystery, given the fact that some of the Taliban's training and recruitment centers in the city operate literally within steps of Pakistani military facilities and police stations. One building widely reputed by local government officials and journalists to be the Taliban's ex officio headquarters in Quetta is less than a mile from the headquarters compound of the Pakistani Army's XII Corps.

The reason, according to a well-informed Pakistani opposition political leader in Quetta, is that the military, intelligence services, and police have standing orders to look the other way. On those rare occasions when Pakistani security forces do arrest a Taliban official inside Pakistan, the Pakistani military and ISI have historically tried to cover up the event. According to a CIA clandestine service case officer who was stationed in Islamabad from 2007 to 2009, the ISI repeatedly denied him access to several high-ranking Afghan Taliban officials who had been captured by Pakistani security forces. To make matters worse, during his tour the ISI, without explanation, released dozens of Afghan Taliban officials and fighters who had been arrested inside Pakistan.

By late 2008, there was widespread agreement within the U.S. intelligence community that the Pakistani government had secretly given all three major Afghan Taliban factions de facto sanctuary inside northern Pakistan since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. For example, the Taliban's top spokesman, Dr. Mohammed Hanif, who was arrested in Pakistan on January 15, 2007, told his interrogators that
“Mullah Omar is under Pakistani protection.”
The November 2008 National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan
, issued by the office of the DNI, concluded that the Pakistanis “permit the Quetta Taliban Shura (the Taliban leadership council) to operate unfettered in Baluchistan province. Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) provides intelligence and financial support to insurgent groups—especially the Jalaluddin Haqqani network out of Miram Shah, North Waziristan—to conduct attacks in Afghanistan against Afghan government, ISAF, and Indian targets.”

The question that gets asked over and over again in Washington is: why has the Pakistani government permitted its military and intelligence service to covertly support the Taliban over the past decade? Opinions vary widely within the intelligence community on this question. According to a 2009 study done for the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, “
The Pakistani military, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in particular, sees the Taliban
as a means of pursuing its own strategic interests inside Afghanistan—such as undermining the Karzai government (which can be hostile to Islamabad), putting more conservative Pashtun leaders in power who have connections to Pakistan, and countering India's influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan is also hesitant to move against insurgent groups for fear of a larger backlash.”

But there may be another more Machiavellian rationale, which explains why the Pakistanis have secretly thrown their money and support behind the Taliban. According to Dr. Peter Lavoy, a former national intelligence officer for South Asia,
“Pakistan believes the Taliban will prevail in the long term.”

Pakistan has been a near-perpetual source of angst and frustration for Barack Obama since even before he took office. According to a senior White House official, Pakistan in January 2009 was “a mess and getting worse by the day.”

Just after New Year's Day 2009, more than three weeks before Obama was to be inaugurated, intelligence reports and dispatches from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad began arriving in Washington that painted a disturbing picture of what was taking place in northern Pakistan. Without any warning hundreds of Pakistani Taliban fighters had surged out of their mountain strongholds along the Afghan-Pakistani border and captured 80 percent of the picturesque and heavily populated Swat Valley, just ninety miles north of Islamabad, including the district's two largest towns, Mingora and Saidu Sharif.
Instead of standing and fighting, the Pakistani Army and police forces in the Swat Valley had abandoned their posts and fled
, leaving the residents, according to a cable from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, “to their fate.”

Pakistani government officials claimed that the valley had been lost because they had been forced to withdraw the bulk of their army troops from Swat in order to bolster their forces along the Indian border in the face of “threatening moves” by the Indian Army. American intelligence analysts at DNI headquarters outside Washington were baffled by this claim. Although it was true that the Pakistani military had moved five thousand to seven thousand troops from the FATA to the Indian border in November 2008, no troops had been moved from the Swat Valley. Moreover, all the data they were looking at from their spy satellites and SIGINT sensors showed that the Indian military was doing nothing other than sitting idly in its barracks. The truth came out a few days later when sources inside Pakistan reported that “
the decision to pull troops out of Swat was less about needed troops on the border with India
as alleged in the press and more about a decision by the GOP [government of Pakistan] to give up on Swat for now.”

This information flummoxed U.S. intelligence officials. It defied rational explanation. On the surface, it seemed as if the Pakistani military had deliberately surrendered the Swat Valley to the Taliban without a fight in order to counter a threat from India that did not exist. Both the CIA station and the U.S. embassy in Islamabad concluded that the loss of Swat was a sign of how bad things had become inside Pakistan. Senior U.S. government and intelligence officials concluded that the Pakistani government, wracked by indecision and internal dissension, was falling apart at the seams; and the Pakistani military was paralyzed, refusing to accept that the Taliban were anything more than a nuisance in their backyard, with a leaked February 2009 State Department cable concluding, “
The militant takeover of Swat in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) is the most striking example
of how far and how fast the government is losing control over its territory.”

If American intelligence officers who have served in Pakistan over the past three years are to be believed, their work sometimes bordered on the darker scenes from Francis Ford Coppola's epic film
Apocalypse Now
. “Imagine the worst place you have ever been in your life,” a recently retired senior CIA official said over a beer in suburban Virginia, “then multiply it by ten and you got Pakistan.”