Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  By the time that Musharraf left Pakistan, Bush was leaving the White House. His record in dealing with South Asia was very mixed. His India policy had been a great success. Indians genuinely appreciated his efforts to defuse the 2001–02 Twin Peaks crisis, and the nuclear deal was well received in India once it was clearly explained and understood. Pakistanis have a different view. They believe that Bush shortchanged democracy in their country. Although Pakistan received more aid from Bush than any previous president had provided, approval ratings for the United States were at an all-time low when he left office.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OBAMA AND SOUTH ASIA

  THE PRINCIPALS COMMITTEE of the National Security Council is chaired by the president. On March 20, 2009, in the White House Situation Room, Barack Obama was chairing the committee’s last meeting on his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan; later he was to give a nationally televised speech laying out his thinking to the American people. As the chairman of the strategic review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, a job that the president had personally asked me to do, I opened the meeting with a few key points that summarized my thoughts on the issue. Obama sat at one end of the long table in the Sit Room; I sat at the other end. Around the table were Vice President Joe Biden; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Secretary of Defense Bob Gates; Jim Jones, national security adviser; Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence; Leon Panetta, director of central intelligence; Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Jim Steinberg, deputy secretary of state; Tom Donilon, deputy national security adviser; Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense. Aides sat along the back.

  I had already spent hours with the president and the principals going over the details of the 40-page top secret review, its 20 principal recommendations, and its more than 140 sub-recommendations. During the previous two days I had been traveling to and from California with the president on Air Force One so that he and I could discuss the review and the options together, in depth. This meeting was the last chance to present the big picture and emphasize the most critical points for the president and his cabinet.

  Obama had inherited a disaster in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Due to the failure of the Bush administration to provide adequate resources for conducting the war in Afghanistan and its misplaced faith in the U.S. alliance with Musharraf, the war against the Taliban was being lost and al Qaeda was under little or no pressure in Pakistan. The United States and its NATO allies and non-NATO partners in Afghanistan faced the real possibility of catastrophic defeat. In the summer of 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s new commander in Afghanistan, conducted an intensive review of the war effort. The resulting report was devastating. It concluded, as did my report, that the war was being lost, but because the McChrystal report was done in the field, it provided far more detail on just how badly the situation was deteriorating. The report was leaked to the media and widely disseminated. At the same time, a new study came out that showed how thoroughly the Afghan war had been under-resourced for seven years. It was written by Dov Zakheim, who had been in charge of resource management at the Pentagon during the Bush administration.1

  The dust had barely settled in Mumbai from what had been the worst terrorist attack since 9/11, and the United States and its European partners now faced the danger of a revived al Qaeda. Obama was also confronted with the worst economic crisis in the country’s history since 1929, a collapsing automobile industry, and a banking system that was on the verge of failure. And America was still bogged down in an unnecessary war in Iraq that consumed resources, including drones, that were needed in Afghanistan.

  My message to the NSC principals could be summarized in three points. First, the threat of al Qaeda was real and urgent. Al Qaeda’s core group in Pakistan—al Qaeda al Umm, or Mother al Qaeda—was under little or no pressure from the Pakistani authorities; it was deeply embedded in a syndicate of like-minded jihadist groups such as Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) and the Taliban; and it was intent on striking America and its allies, including Europe, Israel, and Australia. Al Qaeda and its sympathizers were exploiting Pakistan’s weaknesses and its ambivalence about the global jihad. Our urgent goal, therefore, had to be to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy al Qaeda.

  Second, Pakistan was the key to attaining our objectives in South Asia, and it was thwarting achievement of our goals. Its behavior—or, more specifically, the behavior and policies of the Pakistani army and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate—was our biggest problem. The complex relationship that the army had with terrorist groups was a difficult and critical challenge to our interests (Admiral Mullen interjected that this was the “heart of the matter”). However, there was no easy or simple solution to the question of how to change Pakistani behavior. Pakistan’s polices were rooted in its obsession with India, which went back six decades, and Pakistan, with the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world, had considerable leverage in Afghanistan due to geography, demography, and history. Only the synergy produced by both pressure and inducements would have a chance of changing Pakistani behavior in the right direction, and even then it might not succeed. We had to try to change Pakistani behavior, but we also had to unilaterally protect our interests in spite of Pakistani obstruction of our efforts.

  Third and most important, the game changer in South Asia for the United States was the Pakistani-Indian relationship. The rivalry between the two big powers in the subcontinent was the most important driver in the region’s politics and security, and managing that rivalry was the key to U.S. success in the region. Failure to get it right could lead to disaster—a war between two nuclear states. Getting it right, nurturing rapprochement between Islamabad and New Delhi, could open the door to fundamental change in the entire region, producing a self-fulfilling virtuous circle of peace and prosperity. Significant improvement in relations between the two main players in the subcontinent would erode the power of both the Pakistani hard-liners in the army and the ISI and their jihadist partners and free Pakistani politics from the dysfunctional paralysis that has stymied the development of the country’s democracy. To succeed, the administration needed to put its emphasis on this aspect of the problem, as the president and I had agreed two days before. All the key principals around the table also agreed on this approach. Most of the conversation then focused on how to provide the resources necessary for waging the war in Afghanistan. At the request of the White House press spokesman, after Obama announced his new strategy on the evening of March 27, 2009, I repeated virtually all of my points on national television when Charlie Rose interviewed me on his program late that night. My father was thrilled; he was a big fan of the show.

  Unfortunately, Obama had already made a serious error in addressing the challenge in South Asia in the weeks between his election and inauguration. Rather than crafting an approach to the region as a whole, an integrated South Asian policy, he had agreed to a proposal from Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to appoint a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan as the administration’s point person for the region. AFPAK, as Holbrooke called his new strategy, was designed to recognize that Pakistan was essential to any Afghanistan policy and to resolving the war; what it failed to do was to recognize that India was the key to any change in Pakistan. Holbrooke had been appointed special representative in order to give him a key role in the administration; he wanted to be secretary of state, but Hillary Clinton got that job and this was his consolation prize. He could have been made assistant secretary for South Asia, but he had already been an assistant secretary years before and that would have seemed too small a role for one of America’s most successful diplomats. Appointing a special representative was an understandable rookie mistake; with little experience in the executive branch of government, the president did not realize that bad organization would inevitably bring poor p
olicy implementation and incoherent policy analysis.

  During the transition the president had briefly flirted with the idea of a bigger bureaucratic role for a special representative that would include Kashmir, and he hinted at that in a press interview. The Indians hated the idea, which to them suggested a crude trade of their interests in Kashmir for Pakistani help with Afghanistan and counterterrorism efforts. That was never Obama’s intention. But the Indians made clear in public and in private that they did not want to be part of AFPAK or Holbrooke’s agenda. When Holbrooke later tried to involve the Indians in his diplomacy, they were suspicious and kept him at arm’s length.

  Shortly after his inauguration and Holbooke’s appointment, the president had called to ask me to chair an urgent review of U.S. policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a special emphasis on the al Qaeda threat. He needed the complete review before the next NATO summit, scheduled for early April 2009 in Strasbourg, France—only sixty days away. In Washington, two months is very little time to coordinate any interagency undertaking; most of the time would be spent in high-level meetings to review the proposed strategy for dealing with Pakistan and Afghanistan, which would have to be conceived and articulated quickly by a small group of experts. Fortunately, we were able to draw on several reviews of the situation that had been done at the end of the Bush administration, and I was fortunate in having excellent aides to draft the paper. The president met his deadline, and he presented the results of the review in a speech to the nation on March 27, 2009. He did not talk about the centrality of the India-Pakistan issue for diplomatic reasons—it would not go down well in New Delhi—but it was at the heart of the review’s conclusions. However, it was not built into the bureaucracy now tasked with seeking to implement the strategy, which was a serious design flaw.

  It might have worked better if the president and Holbrooke had gotten along; unfortunately, they didn’t. Holbrooke had a long-standing reputation for being strong willed and difficult to work with, and the president found him to be pompous and self-absorbed. He did not invite Holbrooke on Air Force One to Los Angeles in March and—much more important—he did not invite him on Air Force One the following December, when Obama made his first visit to Afghanistan as president. The second omission sent a message to everyone: the president did not have confidence in his special representative. Early on Holbrooke was tasked with managing the Afghan presidential election in 2009 to ensure that it was a credible process; instead, President Hamid Karzai had engaged in massive vote fraud, counting more than a million false ballots in his favor. Karzai got away with it. Rightly or wrongly, Holbrooke was blamed in the White House for the debacle. Holbrooke also was an enthusiastic supporter of nation building in Afghanistan and Pakistan, encouraging a surge of civilian experts to come to both countries to undertake projects that Obama increasingly began to doubt would work.

  Within months of his inauguration, Obama’s South Asia team was riven by internal rivalries and backstabbing. Obama’s first two commanders on the ground in Afghanistan were removed before their tour of duty was over. The second, Stanley McChrystal, was fired for an interview that his staff had given to Rolling Stone magazine during a night of drinking in Paris in which they disparaged Holbrooke, Biden, and the administration. Rumors that Holbrooke would be fired kept appearing until his death in December 2010. It was a sad end to a very distinguished career, and it distracted attention from the many important contributions that he had made to American diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Much of the infighting and squabbling was reported in the media, especially by one of Washington’s most famous journalists, Bob Woodward, in his book Obama’s Wars in 2010.2 It was no way to fight a war.

  PAKISTAN AND AL QAEDA

  Despite all the self-inflicted damage from poor organization and personality differences, the Obama team did have considerable success in working toward its principal goal in South Asia, which Obama announced in his March 27, 2009, speech: the destruction of al Qaeda in Pakistan. There the White House was focused and organized. Obama recognized immediately after taking office that the hunt for Osama bin Laden had gone stale; the trail was cold as a glacier. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who had opposed the Holbrooke appointment, asked me on my second day of conducting the White House review of policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan why we did not know where bin Laden was hiding. I told him that we didn’t know because no one was in charge of finding him. The Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball in searching for bin Laden in late 2001, and the hunt had never recovered.3 Obama gave the job to Leon Panetta, his director of central intelligence. In the White House, the overall counterterrorism mission was given to John Brennan, a friend and colleague of mine from the CIA who had been a great help to me when I was writing my first book, The Search for Al Qaeda, in 2008. The president, who had rightly decided that he needed a good sheriff to lead the posse, picked two, one inside the White House and one at the CIA.

  The threat was indeed urgent. Al Qaeda had planned an attack in September 2009 on the New York City subway system, the nation’s largest, which is used by more than 5 million riders every day. The successful al Qaeda attacks on metro systems in Europe—in Madrid in 2003 and London in 2005—were to be out-done by three suicide bombers blowing themselves up during rush hour on the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Three American citizens, Najibullah Zazi, Zarein Ahmedzay, and Adis Medunjanin, had traveled to Pakistan in 2008 to join the Afghan Taliban and fight in Afghanistan. The Taliban instead gave them over to al Qaeda, which persuaded them to conduct a “martyrdom” mission in New York and taught them how to make the explosives needed for the attack. Their al Qaeda trainer was Rashid Rauf, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, who had been a key player in the attack on the British underground in July 2005. He was also deeply involved in a plot in 2006 to blow up several passenger jets en route from Heathrow Airport near London to cities in the United States and Canada; that plot was foiled by British intelligence. Briefly arrested in Pakistan after the plot was detected, he escaped from an ISI prison, almost certainly with inside help. He then trained Zazi and his team. Fortunately, the FBI and the New York Police Department were tracking the three would-be terrorists in a joint counterterrorism mission code-named Operation Highrise, and they were arrested before they could conduct their attack. They have since been convicted of attempted murder.4

  In December 2009 another al Qaeda attack was narrowly averted. A Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab approached al Qaeda’s cell in Yemen, where he was recruited to conduct a martyrdom operation by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen of Yemeni descent. A Saudi bomb maker for al Qaeda named Ibrahim al-Asiri built a bomb that could be concealed in a terrorist’s underwear to thwart airport security measures. Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam on Christmas Day but failed to detonate the bomb as the plane descended over Ontario into Detroit. Osama bin Laden issued an audio message a few days later from his hideout in Abbottabad, promising that more such attacks would follow until America ceased all aid to Israel.5 Obama told his staff, “We dodged a bullet, but just barely.”6

  Then, in May 2010, a Pakistani named Faisal Shahzad left a car bomb in the heart of Times Square in New York City with the fuse set to blow up. Shahzad was a naturalized American citizen who came from a prominent family in Pakistan; his father was an air vice marshal in the Pakistani air force. He had been trained to build the bomb by al Qaeda’s ally in Pakistan, the Taliban, but proved to be a poor student. His bomb did not explode, and he was arrested at JFK Airport trying to escape to Pakistan. He later made clear that he was inspired to try to attack America by reading Abdullah Azzam’s books and by his hero Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

  By 2010 Obama had already ordered a significant escalation in drone attacks on al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a largely ungoverned space in the border region whose autonomy dated from the Raj. The Bush administration had begun dro
ne attacks in the FATA in 2007, and at first it provided the ISI with advance warning of the attacks and their targets. However, every lethal mission failed to achieve its goal, so the decision was made not to give the ISI advance notice any longer. By the end of the Bush administration, there had been forty lethal drone attacks, almost all in Pakistan. Within the first three and a half years of the Obama administration, there had been more than 300 attacks, 85 percent in Pakistan.7 Drone attacks in Pakistan increased from 7 in 2007 to 33 in 2008, 54 in 2009, 118 in 2010, 70 in 2011, and at least 50 in the first nine months of 2012.8 Significant al Qaeda figures were killed in the operations, including Rashid Rauf, Ilyas Kashmiri, and many more.

  At first the drones flew from air bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Musharraf had allowed use of a Pakistani base, but it was closed down in 2011 when Pakistanis demanded an end to the use of their soil for drone attacks inside their territory. So the base in Afghanistan became the only one close enough to the targets, in effect making it crucial for American intelligence operations against al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan. In addition to the many lethal drone operations in the FATA, there were many more nonlethal intelligence collection missions to monitor activity both inside and outside the FATA—for example, in Abbottabad.