The Way of the Knife (14 page)

Nek Muhammad had just humbled Pakistani troops, and the CIA was following him. He had emerged as the undisputed rock star of Pakistan’s tribal areas, a brash member of the Wazir tribe who had raised an army to fight government forces in the spring of 2004 and brought Islamabad to the negotiating table. His rise had taken Pakistan’s leaders by surprise, and now they wanted him dead.

Nek Muhammad, age twenty-nine, was part of a second generation of Pakistani mujahedeen who saw no cause for loyalty to the ISI that had given succor to their fathers during the war against the Soviets. Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed President Musharraf’s alliance with Washington after the September 11 attacks with disdain, and saw the Pakistani military as no different from the Americans—whom they believed had launched a war of aggression in Afghanistan
just like the Soviets had years earlier
. Nek Muhammad gave Pakistan’s government its first taste of what would be a growing problem in the coming years: a militancy that extended its reach beyond the western mountains and into the settled areas of the country, near Pakistan’s biggest and most important cities. It was militancy that Islamabad eventually would be unable to control.

Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Nek Muhammad was sent at an early age to one of the religious seminaries that had sprung up in the area during the 1980s to educate
the illiterate youth
of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He dropped out after five years and spent the early 1990s surviving as a petty car thief and a shopkeeper in the Wana bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, when he was recruited to fight alongside the Afghan Taliban and against Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance in the civil war then raging in Afghanistan.

He rose quickly through the Taliban’s military hierarchy, winning a reputation for never conceding in battle,
even when his commanders
ordered him to pull back. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield, with his long, thin face and unkempt beard brushing the top of his collarbones and his black hair flowing from his white turban. He looked less like a typically scruffy tribal militant and more like a Pashtun version of Che Guevara.

Nek Muhammad seized an opportunity to become a host for the Arab and Chechen al Qaeda fighters who moved into Pakistan to escape the barrage of American bombs in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. Local tribesmen considered it their religious duty to shelter the fighters, but some also saw the potential for profit, charging the foreigners inflated rents to stay in the protected dwellings of Wana and Shakai, a farming region of large shade trees and steep river valleys. For Nek Muhammad, it was partly a get-rich scheme, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani Frontier Corps installations and
American firebases across the border
in Afghanistan.

CIA officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesmen to hand over the Arab and Chechen fighters, but Pashtun tribal custom prohibited such treachery. Reluctantly, Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to hunt down the foreigners and deliver rough justice to Nek Muhammad’s men. It wasn’t the military’s first foray into Waziristan, but for Musharraf there was a new urgency: In late 2003, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a fatwa ordering the Pakistani president’s killing for helping the Americans. On two occasions in December 2003, assassins came close to fulfilling the order, and Musharraf thought that a quick, punishing military campaign in the mountains might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil.

But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery bludgeoned Wana and the surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreigners. One tribesman told a reporter that when Pakistani troops looted his house, they took
not only his clothes but his pillow covers
and his shoe polish. Lt. General Safdar Hussain, the commander who led the battle, declared the operation an unqualified success. It had destroyed a militant base, he said, and a network of tunnels containing sophisticated communications equipment.

But for Pakistan’s government, the game hadn’t been worth the candle. Military casualties were higher than anticipated. During one battle, on March 16, when troops laid siege to a fortress belonging to Nek Muhammad and two other senior militants, fifteen Frontier Corps troops and one Pakistani regular-army soldier were killed. Fourteen other soldiers were taken hostage, and dozens of army trucks, artillery pieces, and armored personnel carriers were destroyed. In Islamabad, clerics of the influential mosque Lal Masjid issued a message calling for the people of South Waziristan to resist the army’s offensive and for Pakistani troops to be denied Islamic burials. Obeying the order,
some parents refused to accept
the bodies of their slain sons. In Waziristan, tribesmen who already opposed the military’s deployment into the mountains were furious about the indiscriminate assault on Wana. Attacks against Frontier Corps posts increased, and Islamabad began looking for a way out.

On April 24, 2004, Pashtun tribesmen danced in a circle and banged drums as President Musharraf’s military envoys arrived at the madrassa school in Shakai, near Wana, where Nek Muhammad’s men were waiting for them. General Hussain came in person, a sign of just how desperate Musharraf was to sue for peace. Tribesmen presented AK-47s to the military men, a traditional gesture of peace, and General Hussain hugged Nek Muhammad and hung a garland of bright flowers around his neck. The two men sat next to each other and sipped tea as photographers and television cameramen recorded the event.

When the formalities were finished, the general addressed the hundreds of men sitting cross-legged in the dirt, dressed in flowing shalwar kameez and wearing flat woolen pakul hats. The general told the crowd that the United States had been foolish to make war in Afghanistan. “When America’s World Trade Center was hit by a plane, how many Afghan pilots were involved?” the general asked. “Since there were no Afghan pilots, why is there this situation in Afghanistan?”

He suggested that the government of Pakistan, by brokering the peace deal, was protecting the people of South Waziristan from the American bombs.

“If the Pakistan government had not made such a wise choice, then just like America invaded Iraq and invaded Afghanistan, they also would have invaded the tribal areas,” he said.
The crowd cheered wildly
.

Nek Muhammad also spoke of peace. “
Whatever happened
, happened,” he said before a bank of microphones
.
“Be it our fault or the army’s, we will not fight each other again.”

There was little doubt which side was negotiating from strength. Nek Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrassa rather than in a public location, where tribal meetings were traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “
That should make it clear
who surrendered to whom.”

Judging by the terms of the truce, he was right. The government agreed to pay reparations for the carnage in South Waziristan and to free all the prisoners who had been captured during the offensive. The foreign fighters in the mountains were granted amnesty as long as they pledged to give up attacks on Pakistani troops and raids into Afghanistan—a provision that was essentially unenforceable. Nek Muhammad and his followers also promised not to attack Pakistani troops but did not renounce attacks into Afghanistan. Later, Nek Muhammad said that he would not give up jihad in Afghanistan until the country was free from foreign occupation.

Not everyone in Pakistan’s government thought that the peace deal was a wise move. By 2004, Asad Munir had retired from the ISI and taken a job as a civilian administrator in Peshawar, overseeing security and development in the tribal areas. The former station chief who had worked closely with the CIA in 2002 and 2003 watched as Pakistani generals debated whether to negotiate with Nek Muhammad. He warned that appeasing the tribal militants would only expand their reach into the settled parts of Pakistan. The peace deals that were brokered in the tribal areas beginning in 2004, Munir now believes, led to the rise of a powerful, deadly group in the country, a group that came to be known as the Pakistani Taliban.

“
If [Pakistani troops
] had just carried through with the operation in 2004, both in South and North Waziristan, the Taliban would not have spread” to areas much closer to Islamabad, he said. “With every peace deal, they gained strength and controlled more areas, and people started to take them as the rulers because the state was not interfering.”

Nevertheless, government officials in Islamabad boasted that the peace deal had driven a wedge between Pakistani militants and al Qaeda fighters. Nek Muhammad continued to deny publicly that there were any al Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas. “
There is no al Qaeda here
,” he said. “Had there been a single al Qaeda fighter here, the government would have caught one by now.”

The Shakai peace arrangement propelled Nek Muhammad to new fame. He was the man who had brought the government to its knees, and he began comparing himself to famous Wazir tribesmen who had repelled British forces from the mountains. Within weeks, the truce was exposed as a sham and Nek Muhammad resumed attacks against Pakistani troops. Musharraf once again ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

CIA officials in Islamabad had been lobbying the Pakistanis for months to allow Predator flights in the tribal areas, and Nek Muhammad’s repeated humiliation of Pakistani troops presented an opportunity. The CIA’s station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to General Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the CIA killed Nek Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular drone flights over the tribal areas? “
Nek Muhammad really pissed off
the Pakistanis,” recalled the former station chief. “They said, ‘If you guys can find him, go get him.’”

But the access came with limits. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they approve each drone strike before it happened, giving them tight control over the killing list. After tense discussions about where exactly the drones could fly, Pakistani spies insisted that the drones be restricted to narrow “flight boxes” in the tribal areas, knowing that more extensive access would allow the CIA to spy in places where Islamabad didn’t want the Americans to go: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and
mountain camps where Kashmiri
militant groups were trained for attacks against India.

The ISI also insisted that all drone flights in Pakistan operate under the CIA’s covert-action authority—meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and Pakistan would either take credit for individual kills or remain silent. President Musharraf didn’t think it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. During the negotiations he told one CIA operative, “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”

Even if the CIA had not been constrained, the agency at that time would not have been able to carry out a more extensive killing campaign in the tribal areas. The Americans had hardly any intelligence sources in the area and precious little information about where bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders might be hiding. CIA analysts suspected that bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were somewhere in the tribal areas, but vague suspicions and sketchy third-hand reports were hardly enough to make effective use of the Predator. The ISI wasn’t much better connected. The Pakistani spy service had extensive source networks in the cities to help track down al Qaeda leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but in South Waziristan and the other tribal agencies the ISI did not have reliable contacts.

Lucky for both the American and Pakistani spies, Nek Muhammad wasn’t exactly in deep hiding. He gave regular interviews to the Pashto channels of Western news outlets, bragging about humbling the mighty Pakistani military. These interviews, by satellite phone, made him an easy mark for American eavesdroppers, and by mid-June 2004 the Americans were regularly tracking his movements. On June 18, one day after Nek Muhammad spoke to the BBC and wondered aloud about the strange bird that was following him, a Predator fixed on his position and fired a Hellfire missile at the compound where he had been resting. The blast severed Nek Muhammad’s left leg and left hand, and he died almost instantly. Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain visited the village days later and saw the mud grave at Shakai that was already becoming a pilgrimage site. A sign on the grave read,
HE LIVED AND DIED LIKE A TRUE PASHTUN
.

After a discussion between CIA and ISI officials about how to handle news of the strike, they decided that Pakistan would take credit for killing the man who had humiliated its military. One day after Nek Muhammad was killed, a charade began that would go on for years. Major General Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told Voice of America that “al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other militants had been killed during a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

—

FOUR MONTHS
after the drone strike, a general with sad, hollow eyes and stooped shoulders took control of Pakistan’s ISI. Beyond the basics of his biography, American spies knew little about the phlegmatic, chain-smoking Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. He was born into a military family and raised in Jhelum, an arid region of Punjab. He received his army commission in 1971, the year Pakistani forces were defeated during a thirteen-day war with India that led to Pakistan losing the territory that would eventually become Bangladesh. Like most Pakistani officers, Kayani believed that Pakistan fought a daily struggle for its own survival and that the country could make no military decisions without determining first how those decisions would affect its ability to defend itself against India.