The Longest War (47 page)

By the summer of 2007 the Bush administration had wearied of Musharraf’s dictatorial ways and inability to roll back the militants, and put its weight behind the return of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto from a decade of exile. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was one of the two leading political parties in the country and Bhutto was its most popular politician. In the months before the election that was scheduled for early 2008, Musharraf and Bhutto cut a deal that allowed her to return to Pakistan to campaign for the PPP, while Musharraf
dropped the corruption charges
that he had used to chase her out of the country in the first place.

Bhutto’s life was the stuff of Shakespeare: her father, a former prime minister, had been executed; one of her brothers was poisoned in France, while another brother was killed in a shoot-out with police outside her Karachi home; her husband was jailed for eight years without charge under Musharraf; and she had endured decades of house arrest and exile. She was also a rather complex political character despite the widespread impression in the West that she was a liberal, based on her years of study at Oxford and Harvard. She was the first female prime minister of a Muslim country, yet her government was instrumental in the rise of the Taliban. And both Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, were
widely believed to have looted
the country while in office.

In fairness to Bhutto, the handsome, self-assured, and charming
woman who returned
to Pakistan at age fifty-four was very different from the woman who had first become prime minister at the age of thirty-five. Callow and inexperienced no longer, but rather a politician who had matured dramatically in her years in exile, Bhutto had put the Taliban and al-Qaeda on notice many times before her return to her beloved Pakistan that she would crack down on them hard once she was in a position of power again.

The threats Bhutto had made against the Taliban and al-Qaeda certainly got the attention of the militants, and on October 19 two suicide bombers
targeted the former prime minister in Karachi
as she made her triumphant return from exile mobbed by hundreds of thousands of supporters. The bombings, the most deadly in Pakistani history, killed some 140 bystanders and almost succeeded in killing her.

On December 27, Bhutto’s enemies struck again, this time deploying a gunman to finish the job. In the minutes before Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi, she was standing up through the sunroof of her armored vehicle—a
sunroof that she had installed despite the pleas of many others. A videotape of the attack shows a clean-shaven young man, wearing a dark jacket, tie, and rimless black shades, stepping toward the vehicle. Using only one hand, the gunman shoots three times in Bhutto’s direction. Bhutto’s back is toward the camera. Her head scarf billows slightly, and she starts to drop inside the vehicle; the assassin detonated a bomb and the screen goes black.

The government quickly fingered Baitullah Mehsud as the mastermind, an all-too-plausible candidate since he was the head of the Pakistani Taliban. Shortly after the Bhutto hit, the Pakistani government released a transcript of a phone call in which Mehsud yukked it up with a mullah crony, crowing: “Congratulations to you.
Were they our men
?” To which the mullah replied, “Yes, they were ours.” Through a spokesman, Mehsud later disavowed any role in the attack. (U.S. officials, using voice match technology,
authenticated that it was Mehsud’s voice
on the tape.)

Several months after Bhutto’s assassination, in late May 2008, some forty Pakistani journalists received a summons to an unusual
press conference
given by the man who had ordered her death. Reporters were given twenty-four hours’ notice about the event, which was held in a high school in South Waziristan on Pakistan’s western border with Afghanistan. Surrounded by a posse of heavily armed Taliban guards, Mehsud boasted that he had hundreds of trained suicide bombers ready for martyrdom and that he would continue to wage his jihad against American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Over the course of the three-hour meeting, which climaxed with a lavish lunch of lamb and goat meat, reporters called in news about the press conference on their satellite phones. For a man who was supposedly on the run it was an extraordinarily public performance and it was emblematic of Pakistan’s inability to clamp down on leading militants on its territory.

On February 18, 2008, Pakistanis went to the polls and overwhelmingly rejected Musharraf’s political party, installing a civilian government led by Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who then maneuvered Musharraf into retirement and himself assumed the presidency. To signal their contempt for Pakistan’s new civilian government, militants detonated a truck bomb outside Islamabad’s Marriott hotel, long a gathering place for the capital’s elite,
killing about fifty-five
on September 20, 2008, just hours after Zardari had made his first speech as president in the Parliament. The attack was likely
masterminded by an al-Qaeda leader
in Pakistan, Osama al-Kini. It was the deadliest terrorist atrocity in the capital’s history, turning the Marriott into a giant
fireball, and may have been planned to take out the entire Pakistani cabinet, which reportedly had been scheduled to eat dinner there following Zardari’s speech. The venue for the dinner was changed
at the last minute
.

There were some promising signs that the Pakistani establishment began to wake up to its domestic militant threat in the waning days of the second Bush administration. In July 2008, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told reporters in Lahore, “Pakistan is not fighting the war of any other country. The war on terror is in our own interests.” When Gilani made this comment, the government had just launched an operation against Mangal Bagh, a former bus driver, who had turned himself into an Islamist capo in the Khyber tribal agency.

Despite years of hysterical analysis by the commentariat in the United States, as the Obama administration came into office Pakistan was not poised for an Islamist takeover similar to what had happened in the Shah’s Iran. There was no major religious figure around whom opposition to the Pakistani government could form, and the alliance of pro-Taliban parties known as the MMA, which had come to power in two of Pakistan’s four provinces in 2002 and had implemented some window-dressing measures such as banning the sale of alcohol to non-Muslims, did nothing to govern effectively. In the election in 2008 it was annihilated at the polls. Ordinary Pakistanis were also increasingly fed up with the tactics used by the militants. Between 2005 and 2008, Pakistani
support for suicide attacks
dropped from 33 percent to 5 percent.

Despite American criticisms that the Pakistanis could do more to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Pakistan’s officer class felt strongly that their country was doing as much as it could to combat the militants, citing as evidence the
nearly 3,000
Pakistani soldiers and police who had died fighting the militants between 2001 and the start of 2010, a number that outweighed the some 1,500 NATO and U.S. forces who had died during the same time period fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan.

While there was no doubt that elements of the Pakistani army had done much to combat the militants, suspicions lingered about the military intelligence agency ISI, which had been instrumental both in the rise of the Taliban and in a number of the Kashmiri militant groups. The most dramatic evidence of the continued links that some in ISI maintained with terrorists was the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008, which killed more than fifty, the worst attack in the capital since the fall of
the Taliban seven years earlier. Both the U.S. and Afghan governments said the bombing was
aided by elements of the ISI
, an assertion they based on intercepted phone calls between the plotters and phone numbers in Pakistan.

The Mumbai attacks in late November 2008 also underlined how little things had really changed inside Pakistan’s jihadi culture since 9/11. The Pakistani group that carried out the attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), had, as we have seen, been officially banned in January 2002, but that did not prevent it from organizing the sixty-hour attack on Mumbai, much of it carried live by news channels around the world. The series of assaults was often described as “India’s 9/11.” LeT dispatched ten militants armed with assault rifles and grenades from Karachi on a boat out to sea, where they hijacked an Indian trawler for the five-hundred-mile trip to the oceanfront city of Mumbai. Once in Mumbai the terrorists sprayed gunfire at passengers at the central train station, took hostages, and executed guests at two five-star hotels, the Taj and the Oberoi, and attacked residents of the Nariman House Jewish center, leaving some 170 dead in their wake.

The Mumbai attacks also demonstrated the fact that Pakistan had lost control of its jihadists, who sought to undermine the
creeping rapprochement
between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue, something that Musharraf had, to his credit, pushed forward in the years after LeT’s attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. The steps toward peace between the two countries were small but symbolic—restored bus and flight services between them and joint cricket matches—but these “confidence building measures” were exactly the kinds of steps toward a deal over Kashmir that LeT and the Mumbai attackers sought to sabotage.

What was worrying as Pakistan headed into the second decade of the twenty-first century was the fact that its economy was in free fall, a plunge that had preceded the global financial crisis. And the high Pakistani fertility rate put the country on track to become the
fifth-largest country
in the world by 2015 with a population of almost 200 million. The combination of a sharply rising population with not enough jobs will likely play into the hands of the militants, who often recruit young men with time on their hands. Unless Pakistan can change that equation the plague of the militant groups will only continue.

Just because you invade a country stupidly
doesn’t mean you have to leave it stupidly.

—Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency adviser to
General David Petraeus

Security may be ten percent
of the problem, or it may be ninety percent, but whichever it is, it’s the first ten percent or the first ninety percent. Without security, nothing else we do will last.

—John Paul Vann, one of the leading proponents of
counterinsurgency warfare during the Vietnam War

I
n the summer of 2006
, Sterling Jensen, a lanky, intense twenty-eight-year-old Mormon with a talent for languages, wasn’t in Utah anymore; he was living in Ramadi, perhaps the most dangerous city in what was then perhaps the most dangerous country on the planet. Jensen had volunteered to go to Iraq to work as an interpreter with the U.S. military and was assigned to the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which took over responsibility for Ramadi in June 2006.

But there wasn’t much of anything to take over. Al-Qaeda had made Ramadi the capital of its soon-to-be-named “Islamic State of Iraq,” presiding over Mogadishu levels of violence while banning smoking, music, and television. The group’s enforcers killed anyone who didn’t follow their dictates to the letter and local tribal sheikhs who did not bend to their will. In the
city of some three hundred thousand
there were no public services and only one hundred cops would dare to show up for work. Ramadi and much of the surrounding Anbar province had become a
nightmarish mash-up
of the Taliban and al-Qaeda’s appallingly violent leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose signature execution method was the televised beheading.

Even Saddam Hussein had left the staunchly independent Sunni tribes of Anbar pretty much to their own devices—mostly small-bore smuggling rackets—and the tribes did not appreciate al-Qaeda muscling into their turf, nor did they subscribe to its vision of a Taliban-style utopia. In the summer of 2006, masked Anbar tribesmen began a covert campaign of killing al-Qaeda members. Jensen remembers: “We were finding
dead people with signs
on them saying, ‘This was what you get when you work with al-Qaeda.’” American commanders were pleasantly surprised by the dead al-Qaeda foot soldiers who were showing up in the streets of Ramadi but were puzzled as to who might be engineering the killings.

On September 9, 2006, a number of Anbar tribal sheikhs went public with their plan to destroy al-Qaeda. They named their movement
Sahwa
, meaning “Awakening.” Colonel Sean MacFarland, the U.S. brigade commander in Ramadi,
met with
the Awakening leader, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, and his tribal allies at the charismatic sheikh’s house. Abdul Sattar had good reason to loathe al-Qaeda, members of which had
killed his father and three of his brothers
, acts that demanded revenge in the tribal code. And Abdul Sattar was also quietly making good money working as a contractor for the Americans.