The 9/11 Wars (64 page)

Richard Armitage had been right to talk to Lodhi and Ahmed about history but had been wrong to dismiss the past so lightly. Pakistani support for the Taliban had reached its peak in 1999 but had started in the early years of the movement. As stressed in previous chapters, the Taliban may have been an essentially Afghan movement with deep roots in elements of Afghan society, culture, history and politics, but assistance from the ISI was of great use at critical junctures. This support was not hidden from Pakistan’s civilian leaders. Indeed, it was under Benazir Bhutto’s second administration from 1993 to 1996 that the country’s intelligence services had shifted their support from Hekmatyar to the Taliban. Diplomatic as well as military assistance continued under the administration of Nawaz Sharif from 1996 to 1999.
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Such links became considerably more controversial after al-Qaeda’s bombing of American embassies in east Africa, organized from Afghanistan, in 1998. Already soured by messy battles around Mazar-e-Sharif during which widespread atrocities by both sides were widely reported and a war with Iran was nearly provoked, relations deteriorated as the Taliban refused the demands of the Sharif government to hand over Pakistani sectarian militants responsible for widespread violence in the prime minister’s native Punjab. Many in Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry began to express grave concerns about the diplomatic damage being done by their country’s support for their increasingly unpredictable and extreme supposed allies.
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But though these tensions continued to grow through 2000 and 2001, particularly after Pakistan’s failed bid to avert the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the Pakistan military as an institution continued to believe not only that they could manage a movement they saw as their protégés but also that, despite their faults, the Taliban remained the best available tool for the projection of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.

In the changed circumstances following the 9/11 attacks, the strategic calculation of many within the Pakistani security establishment was thus relatively straightforward. Though Musharraf promised a clean break, both in private communications to the American administration and explicitly in public speeches such as his televised address of February 2002, a perception of his nation’s strategic interests that had been reinforced over decades remained dominant. As seen in previous chapters, as the Taliban regime had collapsed, fighters and senior officials from the Taliban were thus allowed to cross into Pakistani territory and indeed were in some instances directed or even aided to locations where they would be safe. Only the foreign militants belonging to the international groups formerly based in Afghanistan were detained, imprisoned and turned over to American intelligence services in return for substantial payments.
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By spring 2002, memos were crossing Musharraf’s desk from senior officers attached to the ISI arguing that, as the West would inevitably be forced to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan, probably in between five and fifteen years, Pakistan needed to be positioned for the aftermath of the eventual pull-out.
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The twin objectives of strategic depth and a pro-Islamabad government in Kabul, constant for three decades or more, remained unchanged. The parallel with the Soviet invasion was indeed explicit. As during the 1980s, the strategy was not so much to fight against ‘foreign occupiers’ as to make sure that Pakistan had proxies who would be well placed to take power once the foreigners had gone. During 2003, it became clear that most of the dominant players in Kabul and in many major cities were from factions or ethnic groups known for their animosity towards Pakistan. It also became clear that India was making a major effort to extend its influence through a substantial aid programme that involved high-profile projects such as the building of the new Afghan parliament and key roads often located in critically sensitive border regions. The Pakistani sense of encirclement was thus further reinforced, and the idea that the Taliban, or at least elements within them, should be allowed to regenerate sufficient capacity to serve Pakistani interests in Afghanistan in the future gained further momentum. The key, naturally, was not to get caught, nor to provoke too much attention by spectacular attacks, nor to cause a precipitous collapse of the Afghan government. As it had been in the 1980s, the aim was once more to ‘make the water boil at the right temperature’.
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There was one crucial difference from the early period, however: before, there had been, at least initially, no refugee camps in the FATA and fewer and lighter weapons, a smaller overall population, much weaker political vehicles for the religious lobbies, around a fifth as many
medressas
and, crucially, a much lower level of ambient animosity towards the West. Twenty years later, all that anyone hoping to maintain and manage elements within the Afghan insurgents needed to do was simply to allow them to exploit the huge support networks that were already in place and sentiments that were already running high. When, in late 2003, Yusuf Pashtun, the then governor of Kandahar, listed the training camps he said had been set up across the border and around Quetta, every single place he mentioned was the site of an already extant refugee settlement, many of which had been home to senior Taliban figures for three decades.
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The new surge of anti-Western sentiment and religious fervour after 9/11, combined with cynical manipulation by the military government, meant too that, by 2002, the two provinces along the Afghan border and surrounding the FATA – the North West Frontier province and Baluchistan – were run wholly, in the case of the former, or partly, in the case of the latter, by the Deobandi hardliners of the Jamaat Ulema Islami party and the political Islamists of Jamaat Islami.
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The new governments of the two provinces embarked on a project of radical Islamization, imposing
sharia
law, banning of music and ‘obscene’ advertising and firing hundreds of female bureaucrats and medical staff. These measures not only created an atmosphere that encouraged further extremism but were accompanied by rhetoric which was explicitly pro-Taliban. Ministers regularly attended the funerals for slain Taliban fighters held in or around Quetta and other cities.
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Maulana Rahat Hussain, a senior cleric, JUI senator and junior minister in the NWFP provincial government, reeled off a list of his classmates at the Binoria
medressa
in Karachi who had all become senior figures among the insurgents. ‘They were and are and will for ever be my brothers,’ Hussain told the author. ‘They are fighting an occupying force and
inshallah
they will be victorious.’
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The evidence of continued ISI support for the Afghan Taliban naturally posed a dilemma for Western policy-makers. Western officials on the ground pointed to the string of senior figures connected with the Taliban or Haqqani who somehow learned at the very last minute of impending raids and the presence of senior Taliban figures in or around cities such as Quetta or Peshawar and reported constant communication between Taliban figures and Pakistani military officials, some, but not all, retired.
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One problem was diplomatic. Bush had repeatedly backed Musharraf as a key ally in the Global War on Terror and was unwilling to listen to criticism of a man in whom he had invested considerable political capital. Equally, even within intelligence services, no one was prepared to risk the continued and useful cooperation of the ISI in the hunt for senior al-Qaeda figures who posed a direct threat to the West. All were painfully aware that they were dependent on the Pakistani military and its intelligence services for any direct action against the international militants they were hunting. ‘We had no illusions about what was happening but we had no capacity either. So we couldn’t really be picky,’ said one senior CIA official. ‘The ISI was the only girl at the dance.’
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A gap opened up between those operatives working in Pakistan on the hunt for senior al-Qaeda figures – who tended to maintain that only retired or lower- and middle-ranking serving Pakistani intelligence officers, possibly ‘rogues’ acting with no authorization, were involved with the Taliban – and those in Kabul, whose job consisted of fighting Afghan insurgents, who were much more critical of the ISI. Through 2004, 2005 and the spring of 2006, policy drifted. Over time, and not least because of the increasing difficulty in hunting al-Qaeda figures as they moved from the cities into the remote tribal zones, the attitude of Western intelligence services and politicians hardened. When, in the summer of 2006, coalition troops became involved in bruising combat with fighters who had often recently arrived from Pakistan, lost men to suicide bombers from towns in the Punjab, saw Pakistani paramilitaries engaging Afghan troops on the frontier or artillery fire being used to cover the passage of insurgents across the border, a major covert operation was launched by both MI6 and the CIA to secure solid information on the ISI’s activities which could be used to confront Pakistani authorities.
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The point of the effort, which lasted several months and at one point even temporarily drew resources focused on Iraq back to the region, was to establish if there was any direct involvement by Pakistani intelligence services in instigating or even organizing attacks on Western troops or their allies, as many were beginning to say openly.
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But the intelligence obtained – much of which came from Afghan government sources with a clear agenda – was inconclusive, and no final report was ever compiled. It was left to individual commanders and institutions to try to influence public opinion and policy-makers. The split between those working within Pakistan, who needed to keep the ISI onside to continue operations against al-Qaeda, and those, inside and outside the intelligence community, in Afghanistan, who had no such concerns, widened. In early 2007, a frustrated General Sir David Richards, then the Commander of NATO-ISAF in Kabul, was openly saying that ‘infiltration [of insurgents] from Pakistan was a very serious problem’, and more junior NATO officers were explicit in their accusation that the ISI was aiding their enemy.
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But intelligence officials in Pakistan were still conservative in their criticism of their local counterparts. In October of that year, American defence officials in Islamabad insisted to the author they were ‘yet to see a smoking gun … [or] any solid evidence at all’ of ISI aid to the Taliban.
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Their British counterparts restricted themselves to drily commenting that, while it was clear that the ISI, ‘like any good intelligence service’, was talking to the militants on Pakistani soil, ‘no one really knew what they were saying to each other’.
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Pakistani military officials readily admitted there were contacts. ‘Of course we talk to them. That is what we should be doing. We need to learn about them and what they are doing,’ one ISI colonel told the author in early 2008.
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In presentations to the heads of foreign security services or governments, the ISI blamed their failure to move against the Taliban on the terrain, local animosity and, without fail, a lack of resources. The information provided by Western services about the location of senior Taliban figures on Pakistani soil was inaccurate, they said.
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Such arguments were rapidly becoming unsustainable, however. In the late spring of 2008, as Afghanistan plunged towards even greater depths of violence and chaos, a more aggressive and coherent Western position began to emerge. In January, Mike McConnell, the American director of national intelligence, sent an assessment to the White House in which he bluntly stated that ‘the Pakistani government regularly gives weapons and support [to insurgents] to go into Afghanistan and attack Afghan and coalition forces’.
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Key to McConnell’s assessment was an intercept of a telephone conversation in which General Kayani, the new head of the Pakistani armed forces, was apparently heard speaking of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Pakistan-based cross-frontier insurgent leader, as a ‘strategic asset’.
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In July there came the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, and further intercepts apparently showing ISI officers giving instructions to Haqqani’s men prior to the attack. American intelligence services, though they admitted the data were open to different interpretations, nonetheless saw them as clear proof of a new level of ISI involvement: the instigation and organization of strikes, not simply the manipulation or protection of insurgents on Pakistani soil. ‘It was sort of this “aha” moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof,’ one State Department official told the
New York Times
.
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Shortly afterwards, classified documents compiled to guide interrogation teams at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp categorized the ISI as a terrorist organization, listing it alongside Hamas, Hezbollah, the Chechen Martyrs Battalion and al-Qaeda.
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Publicly, British intelligence nonetheless went no further than saying that Pakistan was ‘at the very least tacitly allowing Taliban activities on their soil’. Sir John Scarlett, the then director of MI6, stressed to the author that this was, however, something with which ‘the UK’ had a ‘serious issue’. Scarlett described relationships with ISI counterparts as being ‘awkward’ and talked of ‘undiplomatic’ language used at ‘the highest levels’.
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