The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  Helicopters evacuated Trahan and the other wounded from Shkin. Trahan endured multiple surgeries, but one painful memory from the ambush stayed with him long after the fighting ended: Pakistan’s unofficial hostile role in the war.

  When all hell broke loose on the hilltop, the Pakistani border guards positioned at the checkpoint a mile away jumped into the fight by firing rocket-propelled grenades, treating the insurgents as friends and the U.S. forces as foes. “I think the Pakistanis thought we were shooting at them—and they started firing into our formation,” Trahan said.

  The question of whose side Pakistan was on would bedevil the Americans for two decades. No matter how many troops the Pentagon sent to Afghanistan, or how many firebases it built, the flow of insurgents and weapons from Pakistan into the war zone kept rising. The Af-Pak border, which stretched as far as the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, was impossible to seal off. The terrain was a smuggler’s paradise, with the Hindu Kush mountains soaring higher than the Rockies.

  Beyond the geographic challenges, U.S. military analysts and the CIA had great difficulty discerning the organizational roots of the insurgency inside Pakistan and determining who, exactly, was providing the Taliban with money, weapons and training. But the supply of fighters crossing the border never dried up and the Pakistani government was unable—or unwilling—to stop it.

  “If we were there to kill or capture remnants of the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda, then the biggest challenge was getting timely, accurate intelligence,” Trahan said. Intelligence reports from military headquarters, he added, “inevitably said that they thought there was an area where guys were coming back and forth across the border. Well, guys don’t just do that. They’re funded in some way, they get equipment somehow, they have to eat. In other words, it’s a system. How are we going to attack that system? I don’t think we ever got answers to those questions.”

  In the case of the April 2003 firefight that wounded Trahan and killed two U.S. troops, answers about who was responsible took nearly a decade to emerge, and then only by happenstance.

  In 2011, Italian authorities arrested a refugee from North Africa with a peripatetic past who admitted that he was an al-Qaeda operative. Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Harun, 40, had traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks and passed through a chain of al-Qaeda training camps. After the American invasion, he moved across the Pakistani border into Waziristan, where he reported to Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, a senior deputy to bin Laden, and helped lead the ambush against the U.S. troops near Shkin. Harun was wounded in the attack and escaped back to Pakistan. But he abandoned a pocket-sized Koran and a journal on the hilltop. Investigators later confirmed that fingerprints on the holy book matched his.

  Italy extradited Harun to the United States in 2012. His federal trial in New York City in 2017 revealed fresh details about how al-Qaeda’s core leadership had taken refuge in Pakistan and rebuilt their operations there. Jurors heard testimony about how al-Qaeda commanders rewarded Harun for the success of the Shkin ambush by giving him a more ambitious mission: to build al-Qaeda’s network in West Africa and bomb the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. The embassy plot failed, but the jury convicted Harun of several terrorism-related crimes, including conspiring to murder Americans at Shkin. He was sentenced to life in prison.I

  Along the border, suspicions about Pakistan’s role in the insurgency intensified after Trahan’s company and other units with the 82nd Airborne Division rotated out of Afghanistan in 2003 and were replaced by the 10th Mountain Division.

  In August 2003, two more U.S. soldiers were killed near Shkin during a gun battle with insurgents who had slipped across the border. In September, another U.S. soldier was killed during a twelve-hour firefight with dozens of al-Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas; once again, Pakistani government forces guarding the border jumped into the fray by firing rockets at the Americans. In October, two contractors working for the CIA were killed in an ambush near Shkin by yet another group of fighters that had crossed over from Pakistan.

  Pakistan’s military and its powerful spy agency—the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI—had an extensive history of supporting insurgents in Afghanistan.

  During the 1980s, the ISI teamed up with the CIA on the covert operation that funneled weapons to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Army. After the Russians withdrew in defeat, the ISI continued to back many of the same guerrillas during Afghanistan’s civil war and helped lift the Taliban into power. By the time of the 9/11 hijackings, Pakistan was one of only three countries—along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—that maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban-led government in Kabul.

  After the terrorist attacks on the United States, Washington coerced Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to sever ties with the Taliban. On the surface, Musharraf pirouetted swiftly and became a critical ally to the Bush administration.

  He permitted the U.S. military to use Pakistani seaports, land routes and airspace to reach Afghanistan. Under his direction, the ISI worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to apprehend several al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, including 9/11 plotters Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In exchange for U.S. bounties, Pakistan also detained and handed over hundreds of suspected Taliban members. Though many had been rounded up for dubious reasons, the Americans transported them en masse to the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

  U.S. officials knew Musharraf was facing pressures at home to limit his cooperation but thought they could sway him with money. “If we are going to get the Paks to really fight the war on terror where it is, which is in their country, don’t you think we ought to get a chunk of money, so that we can ease Musharraf’s transition from where he is to where we need him,” Rumsfeld wrote in a June 25, 2002, snowflake to Doug Feith, the Pentagon policy chief.

  To Islamabad’s delight, the chunk of money turned out to be generous: about $10 billion in aid over six years, much of it in the form of military and counterterrorism assistance.

  Yet the Bush administration was slow to recognize that Musharraf and the ISI were playing both sides. In Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. officials said Bush invested too much personal trust in Musharraf. They said Bush glossed over persistent evidence that the Pakistani military under Musharraf still supported the Taliban, using the same covert channels and tactics it had developed to help anti-Soviet guerrillas during the 1980s.

  While Pakistan did not want to alienate Washington, its military establishment was determined to influence Afghanistan over the long term and—because of regional politics and ethnic factors—saw the Taliban as its best vehicle to exert control.

  The Taliban was comprised mostly of Afghan Pashtuns who shared cultural, religious and economic ties with 28 million fellow Pashtuns living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In contrast, Islamabad distrusted the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara warlords who composed Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance because of their tight relationship with archrival India.

  “Because of people’s personal confidence in Musharraf and because of things he was continuing to do in helping police up a bunch of the al-Qaeda in Pakistan, there was a failure to perceive the double game that he starts to play by late 2002, early 2003,” Marin Strmecki, the civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “You are seeing the security incidents start to go up and it is out of the safe havens. I think that the Afghans, and Karzai himself, are bringing this up constantly even in the earlier parts of 2002. They are meeting unsympathetic ears because of the belief that Pakistan was helping us so much on al-Qaeda.”

  Other U.S. officials admitted they were blind to Pakistani intentions because they mistakenly assumed the Taliban had been defeated for good. “That turned out to be wrong largely because it discounted the likelihood that Pakistan would continue to see the Taliban as a useful surrogate and would essentially help resuscitate it,” said James Dobbins, the U.S. diplomat who helped organize the Bonn conference in 2001. “I think that wasn’t spotted by anybody at
the time. The Pakistani role wasn’t really recognized in Washington for seven or eight years.”

  Pakistani officials argued that they were making great sacrifices on behalf of Washington and putting the stability of their country at risk to do so. In December 2003, Musharraf dodged two assassination attempts that Pakistan blamed on al-Qaeda. Around the same time, bowing to American pressure, he sent 80,000 troops into the tribal areas to guard the border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers were killed in clashes with militants, triggering a domestic political backlash. While Musharraf’s sacrifices and challenges were real, they also made it easy for him and his military leadership to swat away suggestions that they were being duplicitous or not providing enough help to the United States.

  Everybody had a theory about who was to blame for the cross-border insurgency. Maj. Gen. Eric Olson served in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 as the commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division. In an Army oral-history interview, he explained that there were two “schools of thought.” One, he said, “was that all problems in Afghanistan are linked to Pakistan and their inability to control the frontier provinces. The other is that all the problems in Pakistan originate with the Taliban that we allowed to get out of Afghanistan.”

  Maj. Stuart Farris, a Special Forces officer who deployed three times to Afghanistan during the 2000s, regularly attended tripartite talks with American, Afghan and Pakistani military officials to discuss security problems along the border.

  “The American and Afghan perception was that the Pakistanis weren’t doing enough in their country to go after and attack these terrorists—the Taliban and al-Qaeda who we claim are over there,” Farris said in an Army oral-history interview. In response, “the Pakistanis would say, ‘They’re not hiding in our country. They’re hiding in Afghanistan.’ I think we all know the truth about that. That was a challenge.”

  The Pakistani commanders were career military men whose professional bearing and manner usually gave them an air of believability. Many had attended military exchange programs in the United States and spoke British-accented English that, to American ears, sounded suave and sophisticated. In that regard, they were a contrast to the unschooled, inexperienced Afghan officers whom the Americans partnered with on a daily basis.

  “You’d have these well-educated Pakistani generals who were nicely dressed and very articulate, and then you’d have his [Afghan] counterpart in a uniform that was three sizes too big, a pair of boots that were too big and gloves that didn’t fit,” Farris said. “We used to get together once a month. There would be this feeling that we were all great friends and everyone would be patting each other on the back, telling each other that we were really going to make things happen. After everyone left, though, it would just go back to the status quo and it would never happen. It left me feeling like the whole process was just a waste of time and a lot of cheap talk with no action.”

  Despite doubts from their troops in the field, senior U.S. military commanders lavished praise on the Pakistanis in public. “I would give a strong commendation to the ongoing aggressive efforts of the Pakistani government and military to eliminate terrorist sanctuaries,” General Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told reporters in June 2004.

  Seven months later, in an interview with National Public Radio, Barno downplayed the possibility that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, let alone that officials there might be sheltering him. “I think that’s pretty speculative in terms of estimating where he might be, but I can tell you that the Pakistani government has proven to be great allies here,” he said.

  Rumsfeld was even more effusive. In an August 2004 speech in Phoenix, the defense secretary lauded Musharraf, calling the military dictator “courageous,” “thoughtful” and “a superb partner in this global war on terror.” He said Washington was “so fortunate” and “so grateful” that Musharraf was in power, adding: “He has, without question, one of the most difficult tasks of any governmental leader that I can think of.”

  In private, Rumsfeld’s advisers cautioned him to be less credulous. In June 2006, the defense secretary received a memo from retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan. McCaffrey reported that intrigue over Islamabad’s true motives was running wild.

  “The central question seems to be—are the Pakistanis playing a giant double-cross in which they absorb one billion dollars a year from the U.S. while pretending to support U.S. objectives to create a stable Afghanistan—while in fact actively supporting cross-border operations of the Taliban (that they created),” McCaffrey wrote in the memo.

  The general failed to definitively answer his own question. But he indicated that he was inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Musharraf. “The web of paranoia and innuendo on both sides of the border is difficult to assess,” McCaffrey added. “However, I do not believe that President Musharaff [sic] is playing a deliberate double-game.”

  Others disagreed. Two months after McCaffrey’s report, Rumsfeld received a forty-page classified memo from Strmecki, who had just returned from his own visit to Afghanistan to assess the state of the war. In his report, Strmecki pulled fewer punches about Pakistan.

  “President Pervez Musharraf has not made the strategic choice to cooperate fully with the United States and Afghanistan to suppress the Taliban,” he wrote. “Since 2002, the Taliban has enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan that has enabled recruitment, training, finance, equipping, and infiltrating of fighters. Pakistan’s ISI provides some operational support to the Taliban, though the level at which this assistance is authorized within the Pakistani government remains unclear.”

  In most official meetings, Pakistan continued to deny complicity with the Taliban. But occasionally, some Pakistani leaders let their mask slip.

  Ryan Crocker, who had served briefly as the top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan in 2002, returned to the region two years later to become ambassador to Pakistan. In a Lessons Learned interview, he said his Pakistani interlocutors habitually complained that Washington had abandoned the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, leaving Islamabad to deal with the civil war that broke out next door. That history, they told Crocker, explained why Pakistan had backed the Taliban in the past, though they reassured him those days were over.

  But on one occasion, Crocker had an unusually frank conversation with the head of the ISI: Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani. A chain-smoker with dark, hooded eyes who tended to mumble, the Pakistani spymaster had been well-known to the Americans since early in his career, when he attended the U.S. Army’s infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and its staff college at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as an exchange officer.

  Crocker recalled prodding Kayani, as he often did, to crack down against Taliban leaders who were believed to have taken refuge in Pakistan. Instead of denying their presence, Kayani for once gave an unvarnished reply.

  “He says, ‘You know, I know you think we’re hedging our bets, you’re right, we are because one day you’ll be gone again, it’ll be like Afghanistan the first time, you’ll be done with us, but we’re still going to be here because we can’t actually move the country. And the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we’re hedging our bets.’ ”

  I. The trial also highlighted the strain on U.S. troops who served multiple combat tours. The Army sent Trahan to Iraq just five months after he was wounded at Shkin. Sgt. First Class Conrad Reed, who survived a direct hit from a grenade at Shkin, later deployed three times to Iraq and told jurors he was preparing to return to Afghanistan in 2018. According to Pentagon statistics, more than 28,000 troops have deployed to Afghanistan five or more times.

  PART THREE THE TALIBAN COMES BACK

  2006–2008

  CHAPTER EIGHT Lies and Spin

  The suicide bomber arrived at Bagram Air Base in a Toyota Corolla late in the morning on February 27, 2007. He maneuvered past the Afghan poli
ce at the first checkpoint. The bomber continued a quarter mile down the road toward the main gate and approached the second checkpoint, this one staffed by U.S. soldiers. Amid mud puddles and a jumble of pedestrians and vehicle traffic, he triggered his vest of explosives.

  The blast killed two Americans and a South Korean assigned to the international military coalition: U.S. Army Private First Class Daniel Zizumbo, a 27-year-old from Chicago with a fondness for lollipops; Staff Sgt. Yoon Jang-Ho, the first South Korean soldier to die in a foreign conflict since Vietnam; and Geraldine Marquez, an American contractor for Lockheed Martin who had just celebrated her 31st birthday. The explosion also claimed the lives of twenty Afghan laborers who came to the base that day looking for work.

  Unharmed in the explosion was a VIP guest at Bagram who had been trying to keep a low profile—Vice President Dick Cheney.

  Cheney had slipped into the war zone the day before on an unannounced trip to the region. Arriving on Air Force Two from Islamabad, he intended to spend only a few hours in Afghanistan to see President Hamid Karzai. But bad weather prevented him from reaching Kabul so he spent the night at Bagram, about thirty miles from the capital. The base itself illustrated his administration’s deepening footprint in Afghanistan: Since 2001, it had mushroomed into a major installation with 9,000 troops, contractors and other personnel.

  Within hours of the bombing, the Taliban called journalists to claim responsibility and to say Cheney was the target. U.S. military officials scoffed and accused the insurgents of spreading lies as part of a psychological warfare campaign. The vice president, they said, was a mile away at the other end of the base and never in danger. They insisted the Taliban could not have planned an attack against Cheney on short notice, given that his visit was not publicized in advance and his travel plans had changed at the last minute.