by Ronan Farrow
There was little question, in Cheema’s mind, who was behind the attack. His night from hell was preceded by a series of meetings with the ISI—which had gotten in touch before and after his stories with ominous “advice.” The agency had a history of “dealing with” disobedient people, agents would remind him. Being a journalist in Pakistan can be a death wish. Reporters there are routinely beaten, and sometimes worse. The year after Umar Cheema’s beating, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who had been reporting on links between the ISI and Islamist militant groups, was beaten to death. His corpse was found floating in a canal outside of Islamabad. The CIA later intercepted telephone calls that suggested the killing was directly ordered by the ISI—likely by General Pasha himself. Since 1992, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented sixty murders of reporters with motives related to their work in Pakistan. Stories about human rights, the war in Afghanistan, and corruption are all dangerous, but the single most deadly beat, comprising 67 percent of deaths, is politics: often, stories about the ISI or the military. Pakistan was a paradox in this respect—the country had a sophisticated twenty-four-hour TV news cycle. It had spirited columnists and commentators. But the military and ISI still ruled with an iron fist. Countless reporters were even on intelligence payroll, paid to write favorable stories and as insurance that they wouldn’t write harsh ones.
The plight of the journalists, like the disappearances and extrajudicial killings they sometimes died covering, underscored the waning space for conversation in the US-Pakistan relationship. At the State Department, I found that raising the disappearing reporters and verboten stories was an uphill battle. It was another fight not worth picking at the height of counterterrorism cooperation. Such moral compromise was a familiar—some would say inevitable—feature of national-security-sensitive relationships. But the growing list of subjects that the United States appeared to be powerless to raise was alarming. This was the challenge Richard Holbrooke faced when he stepped into the job: a relationship in which no one talked about anything outside of tactics.
Cheema related his experience to several State Department officials, who were sympathetic, but not interested. “There was literally no word about these human rights violations, unless there are tensions going on between ISI and CIA,” he told me. “Washington has its own interests. Why would they bother if there is any problem as long as the ISI is cooperating with them?” The human rights issues threw the power imbalances of the American government into sharp relief. The bilateral relationship with Pakistan was almost entirely run between intelligence agencies and militaries. But neither of those entities felt it was within their mandate to raise human rights.
“It never entered into my conversations” with the Pakistanis, General Hayden said of the murders and disappearances. “When I went to Islamabad, I had very specific asks. I was going for a purpose. ‘We need to go to do this. I need your help to do this. Here’s what we’re going to offer. Can I count on your assistance here?’ ” Hayden sighed. “We already know that the ISI were apparently killing journalists. Alright? That may affect my overall view of ISI, but it doesn’t affect my working with ISI to try and capture an al-Qaeda operative in Wana or Mir Ali.” This was a common sentiment among intelligence and military leaders overseeing the Pakistan relationship. These kinds of broader conversations were, they felt, someone else’s problem. But because the power within the US policy process was so skewed away from civilian leadership, it was hard to know who could meaningfully raise such issues.
Hayden’s successor at the CIA, Leon Panetta, found his attempts to confront these issues frustrating. Panetta was a former politician and veteran of the executive branch but an outsider to the intelligence community when President Obama appointed him to the agency job. He was heavyset and bespectacled, with an avuncular manner and an easy laugh. He said he was conscious of the legal requirement to stop assistance to military units engaging in human rights abuses—the so-called Leahy Law. “When we found out that they were obviously implementing extrajudicial approaches,” he said, chuckling at the turn of phrase, “it raised some real concerns. So the approach that we decided on was to, rather than slam them down, try to see if there were ways to improve their own process.”
The Pakistanis tended to be less than receptive. “They kind of looked at me with a whimsical look as if to say, ‘You know you guys don’t get it’ ”—more laughter—“ ‘You’ve got all these nice laws and rules, but the fact is these people are killers, they’ve killed people, they’ve killed us, and our history is one of basically dealing with these people on the same basis.’ At the same time, you say, ‘Well look, you want F16s, you want the latest equipment, do you want to be able to get what we can provide? Then this is something you’re going to have to pay attention to . . . ’ They were kind of looking at you out of the side of their eye saying, you know, ‘We’ll play along with this joke but let’s not forget it is a joke.’ ” He laughed again. I have never seen anyone laugh so much during a conversation about extrajudicial killings.
The region’s counterterrorism imperatives and Pakistan’s nuclear capacity conspired to strip the United States of its power. “No matter how much you would bitch about what they were doing, and the games they were playing, and the difficulty in the relationship, the bottom line was, you were dealing with a nuclear-powered country,” Panetta recalled. “As a result of that, there was always the danger that if you got on their wrong side, either because of their own carelessness or just the way they operated . . . that at some point a terrorist group would get their hands on one of these weapons,” he added. “You were always walking on glass when you were dealing with the Pakistanis.”
And so, the dynamics of the relationship remained unaltered. Bald-faced lies were its bedrock—and within the confines of counterterrorism cooperation, those lies were tolerated, or even encouraged. The entire strategy of drone strikes used to take out al-Qaeda leadership was premised on a mutual understanding that the Pakistanis would lie to their people out of political necessity. The culture of deception in the relationship sometimes felt impossible to roll back. “It was a hard place to get your head around,” Ambassador Anne Patterson later told me in her subdued Southern drawl. “It was so weird. It was just downright nonlinear.”
The typical rhythm of the relationship went something like this: the ISI would plant negative items about the US in the Pakistani media, including conspiracy theories about Indian operatives in Congress or the White House. The stories whipped up a frenzy of anti-American sentiment. Then the ISI would come back to the Americans and insist that public opinion prevented them from changing their approach to terrorist safe havens, or to supporting Islamist militias. “Which is actually true,” Patterson reflected. “But it’s public opinion that they themselves have generated.” Patterson had a frank, straightforward manner and was one of the few diplomats to try to confront the layers of deception head on. In one meeting, she told Zardari: “I come here, Mr. President, and talk to you, and then there’s a press release and it says something we never even talked about.” He looked at Patterson like she’d lost her mind and said, “Well you really wouldn’t want us to put out what we actually talked about!” A similar cycle was repeated in other hot spots where the United States relied on difficult foreign militaries, like Egypt.
Panetta said that after his meetings with General Pasha and the ISI, colleagues would often remark, “You do understand he’s lying?” Panetta did. “Oh yeah, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know. . . . You had a pretty good sense . . . people often asked me why our operations were classified—the reason they were classified is because the Pakistanis wanted them to be classified so that they would never have to acknowledge what was happening!” Panetta was laughing again. General Pasha, in his curiously millennial manner, declined to respond to Panetta’s comments. “Sorry Ronan. I am not in it. Let Leon have his say!!!!”
ACCEPTING PAKISTAN’S DOUBLE GAME supposedly safeguarded cooperation, but even at a tactical level, the relat
ionship could be fraught—sometimes for both sides. One Pakistani army commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he now serves in a more prominent position in the military, told me that joint operations were rife with deadly miscommunication. He’d lived through one such operation when he was an infantry commander during the initial series of failed counterterrorism efforts in Swat valley in early 2009. It was still winter, and the air in the mountainous valley was freezing. He was leading his unit of thirty-five men through the difficult terrain, pursuing a “very important” terrorist target chosen by the Americans. (How important, he never learned. “When you’re operating in the field, commanding a unit, you do not have the ability to figure out if it is a high-value target,” the commander reflected. “You’re just concerned about taking him out before he takes me out.”) Overhead, he could see American drones shadowing him. “Very few people know that we had a US technical team with us, that would have a certain control of Predator drones, flying overhead,” he said. “Of course with the consent of Pakistan.”
One such American technical team was some distance away from the combat operations in Swat, monitoring through the drones. The Americans’ presence was a matter of strict secrecy. Even the men in the commander’s own unit weren’t informed of the specifics. But the commander had an open line of radio communication with American officers, and was told Predator strikes could be called in as a force multiplier.
According to the commander, on the first night of the operation, his unit closed in on its target, only to watch him escape into a “hostile zone” they had been ordered against entering. The commander radioed the coordinates to the Americans. The drones had been in close proximity for hours. But no strike came.
The following night, another unit, operating about thirty-five miles away, had a similar encounter with a target, and called in a strike. This time, it came—targeting not the terrorists they were pursuing, but the Pakistani unit itself. “Our own soldiers,” he told me, planting a fist on the table in front of him, “We lost thirty-one of our men. And it was attributed to operator error . . . We never called for a drone strike ever again.” The Pakistanis told the American technical team they wouldn’t cooperate; less than two weeks later, the Americans left.
The story reflected a sentiment that came up often in conversations with Pakistani military brass. “There was an absence of sincerity,” the commander said, born of the narrow scope of the relationship and lack of communication. He found it galling how little the Americans seemed to share about the overarching goals of the operations for which he was risking his life. “The United States has never shared with us, in formal terms, its end state in Afghanistan,” he grumbled. “That is the classic example of strategic interaction between the United States and Pakistan. We have been working on the operative issues. We have not been talking about the grand strategic issues that the two nations should be talking to each other about.” Another Pakistani military official who was present while we spoke nodded vigorously. “Nobody is asking questions of what makes Pakistan do what it does,” that second official added.
OPINIONS VARIED as to whether the compromises of the relationship were worth it. Anne Patterson was of the opinion that “we had an extraordinary degree of cooperation with ISI on some of these CT issues, really very unique in the world,” a sentiment echoed by many other State, Pentagon, and intelligence officials. On the other hand, just as many had serious misgivings. Petraeus, reflecting on his time as CIA director, told me “ISI was not one of the greatest sources of intel . . . the bottom line is that there was a very transactional relationship.”
That debate was pressurized each time deficiencies in Pakistan’s counterterrorism cooperation were revealed. When a terrorist narrowly failed to detonate a truck bomb in Times Square in 2010, the FBI learned that the culprit, a thirty-three-year-old Pakistani-American named Faisal Shahzad, had trained in one of Pakistan’s terrorist safe havens in Waziristan. They quickly realized that the ISI had done nothing to alert them of the threat. Furious White House officials dressed down the Pakistanis and demanded that they share more intelligence, including passenger data from flights out of Pakistan, and that they stop holding up visas for Americans. In a characteristic show of cognitive dissonance, the Pakistanis insisted they were already sharing everything, then refused to hand over the flight data.
The blocking of visas was a particular point of difficulty. When I arrived at State in 2009, the Pakistanis were years into brazenly strangling the flow of travel documents for US officials. The crackdown was a concession to anti-American sentiment within Pakistan, including fears that CIA agents were slipping into the country en masse. The cost to civilian assistance efforts was considerable. Often, State Department officials simply couldn’t get into the country. In one case, a day before I was scheduled to depart for a trip to Islamabad, I learned that my months-old visa request was still languishing. As was usually the case with Pakistan, the answer didn’t lie with the civilians. Instead, I secured a meeting with the military attaché, Lieutenant General Nazir Ahmed Butt. We met in his large office on the fourth floor of Pakistan’s embassy, with a view of China’s across the street. Butt, in full uniform with three stars on his collar, was distinguished looking, with a graying chevron moustache and, unusually for a Pakistani, electric blue eyes. He leaned back and listened intently as an assistant poured tea out of a china pot dusted with pink flowers and I spoke about the importance of working with Pakistani civil society, trying my best. An hour later, I walked out of the embassy with a multiple entry visa, good for a year. Not everyone was so lucky. At any given time, hundreds of applications were pending, requiring direct clearance by the Pakistani military or intelligence operatives.
The situation finally became so problematic that Hillary Clinton raised it with Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. Gilani quietly authorized Husain Haqqani to begin approving visas without going through Islamabad—making him, as Haqqani put it, “visa czar.” Over the course of the following year, he approved a wave of American visa requests, keeping the relationship from tilting into hostilities. He was, in his view, “papering over a lot of problems between Pakistan and the US.” Haqqani knew his efforts would draw suspicion from the Pakistani political establishment. For him, as was the case with Robin Raphel’s misunderstood diplomatic endeavors, talking to the other side was about to become a dangerous game.
10
FARMER HOLBROOKE
UNABLE TO MOVEM THE NEEDLE away from what he called “mil-think,” Richard Holbrooke set to work around its margins. He still felt that any hope for success depended on broadening America’s role, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, beyond tactics.
On the Afghan side of the border, he proposed a flood of new civilian-led assistance. Prompted by his agitation, the Obama administration requested from Congress $800 million more for reconstruction in 2009 than the Bush administration had the year before. Holbrooke commandeered control of USAID projects, insisting on signing off on many of them personally. He was able to secure that control because USAID reports to the State Department. His outsize influence was a source of bureaucratic rancor—especially when Holbrooke, always a whirling dervish of activity, would leave projects awaiting approval for months, unwilling to relinquish control. But he considered the move necessary. Afghanistan was full of expensive, embarrassing USAID boondoggles—from cobblestone roads that Afghans considered unusable as they hurt camels’ feet, to farming projects on land with groundwater too salty to sustain crops, to fertilizer handouts that inadvertently enhanced poppy cultivation and, in turn, Afghanistan’s drug economy. When Holbrooke was in Vietnam, USAID had a robust corps of technical specialists in areas like agriculture. By the Obama administration, decades of budget cuts had shrunk the size of the workforce and robbed it of such expertise. The funding USAID did receive was often mismanaged and misspent, with projects going to American mega-contractors with high overhead and little understanding of circumstances on the ground. This was one of the
symptoms of the imbalance that had bedeviled Holbrooke throughout his career. By the modern war on terror, almost all of the capacity and resources lay instead on the military side.
Holbrooke was convinced that the key was agriculture. The US military, which led many of the counternarcotics efforts in the region, had long contended that lucrative poppy cultivation for heroin sustained the Taliban. So the Bush administration had focused on crop eradication, slashing and burning its way through Afghanistan’s fields. Holbrooke was incensed by this. He pointed to intelligence assessments that showed support from Pakistan and the Gulf States was far more central to the Taliban’s livelihood. He argued that eradication pushed penniless farmers into the arms of the Taliban—often their only source of employment after their crops were wiped out.
He set out to refocus the United States on supporting Afghan farmers. “They need the kind of soup-to-nuts agricultural support that Roosevelt gave farmers during the great depression,” he said. He was a man possessed. Pomegranates, once a lucrative export for the Afghans, were a particular obsession. At Holbrooke’s request, I organized dozens of meetings focused on the fruit. Sometimes he’d cut me off in the middle of an unrelated sentence and say, from a faraway place, “Where are we on the pomegranates?” By the end of his first year on the job, Richard Holbrooke, a man who as far as I was aware had never so much as kept a potted cactus alive, could explain the pomegranate’s required levels of moisture, favorable types of soil, and ideal timeline for harvest. Hillary Clinton took to calling him Farmer Holbrooke.
But, despite Holbrooke’s efforts, civilian reconstruction remained dwarfed by an order of magnitude by the Pentagon’s programs in the same space. In the early years of George W. Bush’s administration, State reconstruction spending sometimes outweighed the Pentagon’s by a ratio of more than ten to one. By the time Holbrooke came to State, the situation had nearly reversed. The trend lines were hard to miss: From 2008 to 2010, State spending on reconstruction in Afghanistan jumped from $2.2 billion to $4.2 billion, while the Pentagon’s budget for similar efforts more than tripled from $3.4 billion to $10.4 billion. This included a sea of development projects conventionally associated with State and USAID, ranging from counternarcotics programs, to education, to the catchall Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which was primarily used for road building and repair. The Army Corps of Engineers, likewise, worked on infrastructure projects around the country, and USAID was sometimes the last to know.