by Ronan Farrow
If the Raymond Davis incident brought the US-Pakistan relationship to its knees, this slammed it, face first, to the curb. The most wanted man in the world had been discovered not in a lawless safe haven on Pakistan’s border, but in a suburban town full of the summer homes of Islamabad’s elites. Bin Laden’s compound was just a few hundred yards from the military academy in Kakul—essentially Pakistan’s West Point. Either the Pakistanis were incompetent, or they knew he was there. The raid had happened without Pakistan’s consent, and they weren’t notified beforehand, at least at a leadership level. “We are still talking with the Pakistanis and trying to understand what they did know and what they didn’t know,” Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy said a few days later. It’s a debate that continues to this day. During the political maelstrom that ensued in Pakistan, General Pasha pled ignorance, standing before the country’s parliament and offering his resignation—which was, ultimately, not accepted. Petraeus, who took over the CIA a few months later, tended to buy Pasha’s claims. “It’s very possible some low-level guy knew, but I doubt even that,” he said. “People just don’t understand Pakistan or big walls or that people don’t know all their neighbors. It’s possible to hide somebody there.” But the ISI is a multifaceted organization, and how much its more obscure chapters, like the pro–al-Qaeda Directorate S, knew was anyone’s guess, according to several CIA analysts who worked the bin Laden case.
The Pakistanis, as usual, offered muted resignation in private and saber-rattling in public. Minutes after the raid was declared a success, Panetta had watched Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen call Pakistani army chief General Kayani outside the Situation Room. “The one moment they were most honest with us,” Panetta told me, “was the night of the raid, because they knew damn well what had happened. . . . General [Kayani] basically said, ‘I understand what’s happened here and you’d better announce it to the world.’ That was probably the frankest moment of that relationship. After that, politics took over and they were doing everything they could to make it appear that it wasn’t their fault that he was living where he was living.”
Publicly, Kayani loudly ordered the US military to scale back its presence in the country to the “minimum essential” and warned them against future raids. The White House gathered to debate how to get tougher with the Pakistanis. Pakistan remained important in the broader fight against extremism, but bin Laden had totemic significance. Without him, there was a shift in attitude, palpable even at State. We needed Pakistan, but how much? “People say, ‘Boy that bin Laden raid, that really queered your relationship with the ISI,’ ” General Hayden reflected. “It didn’t at all, it just pulled the veil back into how difficult the relationship was.”
The month after the raid, the president sent Panetta and National Security Advisor Jim Jones to Islamabad to deliver a searing condemnation of Pakistan’s double game. Panetta knew that elements within the ISI had been tipping off al-Qaeda fighters before American operations—and now there was political will to confront it. “It was something. Steve Kappes, who was my deputy at the time, had gone through this before, and laid out the intelligence we had on some of the double-dealings that were going on, and they said they would act to correct it but never did. So the president thought it was important to go to the highest levels . . . sit down and lay this out. Because I think he was very concerned about the United States being in a position where we were ignoring a lot of the behavior that they were engaged in, and he thought that if that ever got out—that we were simply ignoring it or accepting that kind of behavior—that it would undermine the position of the United States in that region.”
“Was he angry about it?” I asked.
“Yeah. I think you could say he was pissed,” Panetta said with another belly laugh.
Obama wasn’t alone. Admiral Mullen had invested years in building rapport with Kayani, and often counseled conciliation from his position as chairman of the joint chiefs. Sitting before a room of congressional representatives a month after Panetta’s explosive session with Pasha, he issued the United States’ most naked public condemnation yet. The militant Haqqani network “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” he said. “The support of terrorism is part of their national strategy.”
The hits kept coming. In the cold, small hours of November 26, 2011, American air support called in by Afghans conducting an operation against the Taliban opened fire on Pakistani troops stationed on the border between the two countries. General John Allen, who succeeded Petraeus as commander in Afghanistan, was one of the first to be notified. “We ended up killing twenty-four of their kids overnight,” he recalled. “Now lots of fingers are being pointed, I don’t want to get into that, but the bottom line is my people defended themselves, and twenty-four Pakistani border troops got killed.” The recriminations were vicious and swift. Two days later, Pakistan shut down the all-important “Ground Lines of Communication,” or GLOCs—the NATO routes used to deliver 80 percent of the supplies for US forces in Afghanistan. “Imagine a 150,000-person theater, with another 100,000 civilians, having 80 percent of my supplies cut off in one day,” Allen remembered. He was left with just sixty days of supplies and a problem with no elegant solution.
The incident was a stark reminder of the strategic realities that made Pakistan such an important proxy force to begin with. But it also illustrated the extent to which US attitudes were changing. With the relationship on ice, Allen simply worked around the Pakistanis. “I had to shift everything to air or coming out of central Asia from the North. . . . It was a Berlin Airlift–scale resupply by air. . . . No country other than the United States could do that. But we did it.” The maneuver cost the United States $100 million a month, but it worked. Ultimately, an apology from Hillary Clinton pacified the Pakistanis. The day she cleared the air with them, she emailed Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman: “How do you spell ‘relief’? ‘GLOCS’ . . .” Never one to under-use a good line, she emailed Deputy Secretary Bill Burns twenty minutes later: “How do you spell ‘relief’? ‘GLOCS’ . . .”
Allen said that nadir in US-Pakistan relations was a lost strategic opportunity that could never be regained. “We had no relationship with Pakistan after that for nine months . . . and in that period of time my numbers were coming down,” he said, referring to the dwindling count of American boots on the ground. “Our ability to have the Pakistanis on one side and us on the other side and have a real decisive effect on the safe havens was lost during those nine months. And looking back on how much we could have accomplished to get after the safe havens, it’s a sad state of affairs, frankly.”
Congress, which had little appetite for assistance to Pakistan after the bin Laden raid, refused to reimburse the Pakistani military for its activities during the long months the ground lines stood closed. It put the biggest dent in Holbrooke’s ambitious five-year assistance plan yet. A year after he went to his grave, the relationship he had desperately fought to transform followed him. Clinton cheerfully reflected in her campaign season State Department memoir that “the negotiations and eventual agreement over the supply lines offer lessons for how the United States and Pakistan can work together in the future to pursue shared interests.” One could just as reasonably conclude that the lesson was about the perils of leaning on a military junta with no strategic alignment with the United States.
IN FEBRUARY 2011, I’d watched Clinton take to the stage at the Asia Society, an organization with which Richard Holbrooke had a long history, and formally announce US support for a political settlement in Afghanistan, including talks with the Taliban. Frank Ruggiero was dispatched for a series of further meetings with A-Rod, the secret Taliban contact. As a confidence-building measure, the United States pressed the UN to separate the Taliban from al-Qaeda on its terrorist blacklists—another Holbrooke proposal. But Karzai’s government in Kabul derailed the attempted talks. A Taliban political office in Qatar, one of A-Rod’s first requests, ope
ned in 2013, then shut down a month later after it put up a flag for the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”—presenting the Taliban as a government in exile rather than a political faction. Karzai once again hit the roof. Talks were iced for years. It wasn’t until 2016 and 2017 that they once again began to show fitful signs of life, with the Afghans in the lead and at least one US official shadowing meetings. The future remains uncertain.
Several Obama administration officials sympathetic to Holbrooke said they felt that antipathy toward him and his campaign for diplomacy may have squandered the United States’ period of maximum potential in the region. When US troop deployments were high, both the Taliban and the Pakistanis had incentives to come to the table and respond to tough talk. Once we were leaving, there was little reason to cooperate. The lack of White House support for Holbrooke’s diplomatic overtures to Pakistan had, likewise, wasted openings to steel the relationship for the complete collapse that followed. Richard Olson, who took over as ambassador to Pakistan in 2012, called the year after Holbrooke’s death an “annus horribilis.” We lost the war, and this is when it happened.
15
THE MEMO
HUSAIN HAQQANI was trying to make a habit of not checking his phone first thing in the morning, “otherwise things would go bad.” Waking up early in the residential suite of the Pakistani embassy on October 10, 2011, he got dressed in the dawn light, then moved into the study next to his bedroom, which he had lined with books. Haqqani had a lot of those; he was a professor, after all. He sat down in an oversized office chair and thumbed through the papers. As he made his way through the salmon pink broadsheet of the Financial Times, an op-ed column caught his eye: “Time to take on Pakistan’s jihadist spies,” read the headline. It was by an acquaintance of his named Mansoor Ijaz.
“A week after U.S. Special Forces stormed the hideout of Osama bin Laden and killed him,” the column began, “a senior Pakistani diplomat telephoned me with an urgent request.” Ijaz claimed that the diplomat wanted to pass a message from Pakistan’s president, Zardari, to Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs—without the ISI finding out. “The embarrassment of bin Laden being found on Pakistani soil had humiliated Mr Zardari’s weak civilian government to such an extent that the president feared a military takeover was imminent,” Ijaz wrote. “He needed an American fist on his army chief’s desk to end any misguided notions of a coup—and fast.” Ijaz claimed that he drafted a memo according to the diplomat’s specifications, over the course of a series of phone calls. Its request: that the United States order Pakistan’s army chief, General Kayani, to “stand down the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment.” There was more: President Zardari was supposedly assembling a new national security team to take power and eliminate hardline elements within the ISI. Whatever its provenance, Ijaz did write a memo, and sent it to recently departed National Security Advisor Jim Jones, who passed it to Mullen.
The Raymond Davis incident and the bin Laden raid had revived whispers about Haqqani’s loyalties. The previous year, he had been responsible for unstopping the flow of visas. Now, as stories of uninvited spies and Navy SEALs roiled Pakistan, fingers pointed at him. “One of the things that the ISI held against me was that the people on the ground who had helped on the raid had probably been given visas by me behind their back,” Haqqani told me. “That’s how they thought, because they are so conspiratorial.” The narrative favored by the conspiracy theorists—that Haqqani colluded with the Americans to let in a secret network of spies—continues to have life in Pakistan. In March 2017, a copy of a letter from the prime minister’s office authorizing Haqqani to issue visas without notifying Islamabad surfaced in the press, giving credence to Haqqani’s claim that he wasn’t acting unilaterally. But that was swiftly followed by another leak, this time of a letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, allegedly warning Haqqani not to approve visas for CIA agents. In the eyes of some in the military establishment, Haqqani was a turncoat; the man who had opened up Pakistan’s borders to the interlopers.
Haqqani realized how the Financial Times op-ed would look to anyone with that view. It was hard to think of another “senior Pakistani diplomat” who so closely fit the pro-civilian, pro-American ideology described in the memo. When he got to the bottom of the column, Haqqani picked up his BlackBerry for the first time that morning and called Mansoor Ijaz on his London-area-code cell phone.
“What’s happening?” Haqqani asked.
“You’re not the only Pakistani official I know,” Ijaz replied, as both men remembered the conversation. Haqqani said that Ijaz laughed as he said it.
“This could provoke some sort of political crisis,” Haqqani said, less amused.
“Nah, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Ijaz said, according to Haqqani’s recollection. “The rest of the article’s more important.”
Haqqani shook his head at the memory. “The man was completely out of his depth,” he told me. Ijaz said there was another beat in the conversation: Haqqani telling him, shortly before hanging up: “You have just killed me.”
MANSOOR IJAZ WAS on his yacht when, according to his telling, he got the call from Husain Haqqani and flew into action to draft the memo. Ijaz had the biography of a supporting character in an Agatha Christie novel. Perhaps he planned it that way. A Pakistani-American businessman who made his fortune as a hedge-fund manager, he flitted around the French Riviera. He emphasized his rags-to-riches story when talking to the press: he was born in Florida; raised on a farm in Floyd County, Virginia; covered his tuition at UVA through a weight-lifting scholarship. He gave plenty of attention to the riches part too. “God gave me so much in this world, but if all I left in the world was a jet on the runway, a yacht in the harbor, 10 homes around the world, and my wife’s 5,000 pairs of shoes, I will not have done my job,” he told the Washington Post during the scandal. Ijaz’s father told him, “God gave you a great brain but a shit personality. You have to get into politics to teach you humility.” When Ijaz hit pay dirt in finance, he began donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats and built up as many contacts as possible. He wrote op-eds. He started projecting himself into international conflicts. In the 1990s, he approached the Clinton administration, saying he was negotiating with Sudan to secure the arrest of Osama bin Laden, who was sheltering there at the time. Clinton officials dismissed him as a “Walter Mitty” type, “living out a personal fantasy,” according to one report. Later, he surfaced as a Fox News commentator and made sensational claims that radical Iranian mullahs were smuggling chemical weapons into Iraq. He later admitted this was “erroneous.” A string of assertions, on air and in op-eds, was similarly colorful—and suspect.
But none had precipitated an international incident like this latest claim. A few days after the Financial Times op-ed ran, the first items began appearing in the Pakistani press. Zardari had made a deal with the devil, critics crowed. The civilian government was in cahoots with the Americans. Haqqani got a call from President Zardari. “What happened? The army is taking this seriously.” Haqqani, not explicitly named in the initial op-ed, became a fixture in subsequent coverage after the politician Imran Khan named him as the culprit. The ISI launched an investigation, with General Pasha rendezvousing with Ijaz in London and downloading evidence from his BlackBerry. Logs of his calls and messages later presented in court showed a flurry of exchanges between the two men, though the calls were brief and the messages often came from Ijaz, not Haqqani. Haqqani said he was a victim of his own politeness, and that perfunctory “thank you very much for sending” messages were being used against him. Two months after the op-ed ran, Zardari called again and ordered Haqqani back to Pakistan, where the ISI, and the public, wanted blood.
Haqqani fielded a flurry of warning calls from Americans: Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman; one of Doug Lute’s staffers; Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell. “Don’t go,” Haqqani remembered Morell saying. “The boys at the ISI have it in for you.” Haqqani was alre
ady boarding a flight to Doha, en route to Islamabad. “I had struggled too long for civilian government to let it fall on the basis of a false allegation against me,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let the military topple the elected government.” He told his wife and kids that, if he didn’t return, it would be because he paid the ultimate price for his beliefs. On his flight, they were playing a film about Harry Houdini. Haqqani decided this would be his frame of reference for his final showdown with the ISI: “They can tie me up, they can do anything, I’ll be Houdini and get out of it. Screw that, I’m going.”
On arrival, Haqqani’s passport was confiscated and he was whisked to the president’s palace, where Zardari had guaranteed his safety. He had packed three days of clothes. He ended up being there for more than two months. Kayani and Pasha, the all-powerful heads of Pakistan’s army and intelligence agency, questioned him.
“What do you say to all of this?” said Kayani.
“It’s all nonsense,” Haqqani replied. He had Admiral Mullen on speed dial, he pointed out. Why would he use a businessman in the Riviera as a go-between? Haqqani’s exchange with Kayani and Pasha was gleefully rendered by the media as a multihour interrogation. “What the fuck, I’m here,” Haqqani muttered to himself, watching the gruesome reports. But as the months wore on, he grew more worried. His case was handed not to the Parliament, which had pro-civilian voices, but to the Supreme Court, which was under the military’s thumb. The court issued a travel ban. At one point, Zardari suffered a stroke and was flown to Dubai. His protector gone, Haqqani was moved to the prime minister’s house, which is guarded by the army. In the middle of the night, he heard shuffling boots and thought, for a moment, that they might have finally decided to take him out. It turned out to be a routine changing of the guard.