Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  Moreover, in its support of the Taliban, Pakistan was indirectly strengthening al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Pakistani militants were providing manpower for both the Taliban and al Qaeda and running a vast logistics, communication, and transit network in Pakistan on behalf of al Qaeda. Most of the thirty thousand foreign militants trained at al Qaeda camps had traveled to Afghanistan and returned home with the help of this network. No U.S. plan to capture bin Laden could work without Pakistani cooperation and a reversal of Islamabad’s foreign policy. However, Mehmood was telling Goss—who in 2004 would head the CIA for a disastrously short spell—that any CIA-ISI cooperation would depend on a more positive U.S. attitude toward Pakistan.

  Mehmood had been in Washington before, as had other ISI officers who continued to insist that the Americans misunderstood the Taliban.1 He knew that his American interlocutors remained deeply skeptical of what they had heard so far, and his visit was critical to ensuring that the Bush policy review on al Qaeda and Afghanistan not blame Pakistan. The Pakistanis were hopeful. The State Department had signaled that it wanted to engage with Pakistan rather than isolate it. While the Clinton administration had taken a tough, uncompromising line with Islamabad, and slapped more sanctions on the military regime while befriending rival India, the Bush administration seemed much more encouraging.

  Mehmood had little new to offer. The ISI’s bottom line was that unless the United States lifted the multiple sanctions on Pakistan and improved relations, Pakistan would neither turn on the Taliban nor provide the intelligence or military support needed to snatch bin Laden. “If you need our help you need to address our problems and lift U.S. sanctions,” Mehmood said.2

  Mehmood’s analysis only further obscured the reality on the ground. The Taliban’s response to greater international isolation was to become more extreme and threatening. Such extremist policies were openly encouraged by al Qaeda, who wished to make the Taliban leadership more dependent on them. Meanwhile, the ISI continued to pump money, arms, and advisers into Afghanistan to help the Taliban achieve victory over the Northern Alliance, even though the ISI’s influence over the Taliban leadership was waning. The ISI had proved powerless in persuading Mullah Omar to stop the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas or save the UN agencies on the ground in Afghanistan from humiliation.3 It was absurd for Mehmood to insist now that the Americans engage with the Taliban when Islamabad’s own influence over them was declining and al Qaeda’s was increasing.

  As the breakfast meeting between Goss and Mehmood wore on, Zamir Akram, an accompanying Pakistani diplomat, left the room for a break. Outside in the hallway, a group of congressional aides were gathered around a TV set. As Akram walked up to them, he saw the second plane scream into the World Trade Center. He ran back to the meeting even as a congressional aide bounded in to tell those assembled that Capitol Hill was being evacuated. “There is a plane heading this way,” the aide said.

  General Mehmood, Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi, and Zamir Akram left the building as the town was overtaken by sirens, rushing people, panic, and smoke rising from the Pentagon across the Potomac. Accompanied by a CIA escort car, their vehicle took three hours to travel the handful of blocks back to the Pakistan embassy in the gridlocked Washington traffic. Mehmood and the ambassador assumed the worst—that al Qaeda had perpetrated the attacks—and now they concentrated on the implications of this for Pakistan. Along with everyone else around the world, they spent the rest of the day watching television. Lodhi had served before in Washington, as the ambassador in the early 1990s. A polished, highly educated former newspaper editor who was close to the military, she had been reappointed to Washington by Musharraf after the 1999 coup to improve relations with the United States, a task she had found difficult as the bin Laden issue loomed over every attempt she made to better relations. For some months now, she and other liberal Pakistani ambassadors had been arguing with the military for a change of policy on the Taliban. Now she knew that everything would change.

  The next morning, September 12, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage summoned Mehmood and Lodhi to his office. Armitage was direct but polite, saying he had just come from a cabinet meeting with President Bush, who was about to make a TV address. In that address he would deliver a blunt message to the world, saying, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Armitage then asked, “Where would Pakistan stand?” Mehmood replied without hesitation that “we have always been with you,” but it was the United States that had always let Pakistan down. Armitage cut him short: “The past is the past. Let’s discuss the future.” The deputy secretary of state said he would soon have a list of what the United States wanted from Pakistan. Mehmood made an unequivocal commitment that Pakistan would stand by the United States.4

  Musharraf heard about the attack on the Twin Towers while attending a military briefing in Karachi. He immediately ordered a meeting of his generals and a few key civilian cabinet ministers when he returned to Islamabad the next evening, on September 12. The meeting took place in a secure bunker—the Operations Room of the Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters in Chaklala, a suburb of Rawalpindi, where the army’s general headquarters (GHQ) were located. The bunker’s walls were covered with maps of the region. The map of Afghanistan showed the areas under Taliban control. Musharraf’s first words were ominous: “The U.S. will react like a wounded bear and it will attack Afghanistan,” he said. He told those assembled that Pakistan could not oppose American demands and could no longer support the Taliban, but it would not take part in any U.S. attack on Afghanistan. Bush had already said that the United States would punish not just the perpetrators of the attack but also any states that harbored terrorists.

  Musharraf asked for other views, but there was no disagreement. “We agreed that we would unequivocally accept all U.S. demands, but then later we would express our private reservations to the U.S. and we would not necessarily agree with all the details,” said Abdul Sattar, who as foreign minister attended the meeting.5 That night the policy that Pakistan would adopt toward Washington was summed up in the phrase “First say yes and later say but . . .” It was a policy Musharraf was to follow consistently for the next few years.

  On September 13, Armitage handed Mehmood a one-page list of seven U.S. demands. Pakistan was asked to agree to blanket overflights of its territory and landing rights for all U.S. aircraft; give the United States access to naval bases, airports, and borders for operations against al Qaeda; provide immediate intelligence sharing and cooperation; stop al Qaeda operatives on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and intercept all arms shipments through Pakistan while ending all logistical support for bin Laden; cut all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop Pakistani fighters from joining the Taliban; publicly condemn the terrorist acts; and end support for the Taliban, breaking diplomatic relations with them.6 Armitage said the demands were nonnegotiable. Mehmood promptly replied that Pakistan would do whatever the Americans asked of it. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to Musharraf by telephone, telling him that although the United States did not have a war plan yet, he expected an early reply on the U.S. demands. That same day, a cabinet meeting in Washington concluded that if Pakistan did not help the United States, “it would be at risk of attack.”7

  The next day Musharraf summoned his nine corps commanders based around the country and a dozen staff officers to discuss the U.S. ultimatum. The corps commanders were the real kitchen cabinet of the army and the regime. Each general commanded around sixty thousand troops, and Musharraf could not be assured of the army’s support without first winning over these men. Musharraf told them Pakistan had no choice but to accept the demands or face being declared a terrorist state by the United States. Several generals protested. Many Pakistanis considered Musharraf a prisoner of three hard-line generals who had carried out the 1999 coup. These were Mehmood Ahmad, who at the time of the coup was the corps commander of the Rawalpindi garrison and was now ISI chief; Lt.-Gen. Mohammed Aziz, a former director of the ISI wh
o had been chief of general staff during the coup—an invaluable position for getting commanders around the country to support the takeover—and was now the Lahore corps commander; and Lt.-Gen. Muzaffar Usmani, who had been corps commander in Karachi at the time of the coup and was now deputy chief of army staff.

  All three men were considered ardent supporters of the Islamic fundamentalist parties, the Taliban, and Kashmiri militants. Aziz, born a Kashmiri, was immensely popular among Islamist officers in the army and the leaders of the Islamic parties. As director of covert operations in the ISI in the late 1990s, he had been the principal organizer behind the Taliban’s spate of victories against the Northern Alliance and had run the covert Kashmir insurgency programs. Even though he was now corps commander in Lahore, he continued to travel frequently to Peshawar to monitor ISI’s covert support to the Taliban, which was run out of the Peshawar corps headquarters. The three generals raised serious objections to the U.S. demands, pointing out that Pakistan was getting nothing in return, and that there would be a dangerous domestic fallout from their dumping the Taliban, an act that would send a negative message to the Kashmiris.8 They thought saying yes to the Americans on all counts would not allow Pakistan any future leverage over the United States. The officers knew they were discussing the most historic policy decisions Pakistan had ever had to face.

  The meeting lasted an excruciating seven hours—the longest Musharraf had ever convened with his generals. He finally clinched their acceptance by playing a vital card, one he knew they could not oppose. If Pakistan only partially accepted U.S. demands, Musharraf told his generals, India would immediately step into the vacuum and offer bases and support to the United States. India had spent the past five years trying to persuade the Americans to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism because of its support to Kashmiri militants. Pakistan could be faced with a hostile India allied to the U.S. military, while hostile U.S. forces in Afghanistan could target Pakistan’s nuclear weapons under the guise of preventing them from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists.

  Musharraf used words similar to those he later used publicly: “We were on the borderline of being or not being declared a terrorist state—in that situation, what would have happened to the Kashmir cause?”9 Pakistan would lose on all fronts, and its very existence would be threatened. The three generals were silenced. “Musharraf came out of that meeting exhausted and angry, convinced that he would have to replace the three generals who had raised the objections,” a senior military adviser to Musharraf later recalled. Late that night Musharraf summoned Wendy Chamberlain, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, and told her he accepted all the U.S. demands. He then telephoned Colin Powell and warned him that the domestic fallout from his decision could be unpredictable, and he expected the United States to be patient and understanding. Chamberlain cabled Washington that “to counterbalance” acceptance of the U.S. demands, Musharraf “needed to show that Pakistan was benefiting from his decision”—a strong hint that Pakistan needed immediate economic relief and an end to sanctions.10

  Powell later recalled the sequence of events: “Three days later [after 9/11] I called President Musharraf after we had suggested to him it was time to make a strategic decision to move away from that and we gave him some things we hoped he would do. . . . And he reversed the direction in which Pakistan was moving.”11 Getting Pakistan on board so swiftly was an enormous success for Powell and Armitage. Bush later said it was the most important thing Powell did after 9/11. “He single-handedly got Musharraf on board.”12

  Mehmood, stranded in Washington because of the shutdown of all air traffic over the United States, spent the next few days at CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, discussing the details. He persuaded Tenet not to insist on Pakistan’s breaking diplomatic relations with the Taliban until the ISI could have one last chance at persuading them to hand over bin Laden, and he pleaded that the CIA not depend solely on the Northern Alliance for its war plans, which would alienate the Pashtun population in the south. He also asked that U.S. forces not use Indian military bases. “The ISI was keen to help shape the U.S. war plan, so that the fallout on Pakistan itself would be minimum and not provoke a domestic crisis,” said a Pakistani diplomat then based in Washington.

  The 9/11 attacks had shocked most Pakistanis, although there was satisfaction among some Islamists that the Americans had gotten what they deserved. People were glued to their TV sets for days, and as the American pressure became apparent, the country became deeply polarized. Islamic parties and their supporters among the elite denounced the United States for blaming al Qaeda without any evidence and insisted that there was an “Israeli-U.S.-Indian” plot to defame Pakistan and the Taliban. Unwilling to accept that Muslims could have been responsible for such carnage, they railed against President Bush for launching a campaign against Islam. The more outrageous the stories and rumors in the Urdu-language media— such as the claims that no Jews had been killed in the Twin Towers or that four thousand Jews did not go to work that day because Israel had warned them not to—the more certain many people became of American perfidy.13

  The majority of the urban and educated population, however, hoped for a kind of salvation, convinced that the military regime now had an opportunity to crack down on the Taliban, Islamic extremists, and the gangs carrying out Sunni-Shia sectarian killings inside Pakistan. The country could end its pariah status and reenter the international market, which would lead to foreign investment, jobs, and economic revival. When the terrorists struck, Pakistan was facing its fourth year of a severe recession— in 2000 the growth rate was just 2.6 percent, down substantially from the average 6.0 percent growth it had experienced in the 1980s and ’90s. Momentarily, 9/11 had led to a crash in business confidence. Pakistan’s three stock exchanges were shut down for five successive days, after hemorrhaging massive losses in the first three days after the 9 /11 attacks. The Karachi stock exchange, the largest in the country, lost 9.5 percent of its total value.

  Musharraf now asked the United States for urgent economic support. As a result of its nuclear program and the military coup, Pakistan faced three layers of U.S. sanctions dating back to 1990. All of them had to be removed by the U.S. Congress before aid could flow.14 The Pakistani government put in a request to Washington for the removal of all U.S. sanctions, forgiveness of its $3 billion debt to the United States—just a fraction of Pakistan’s $32 billion total foreign debt—the resumption of military supplies, and quick disbursement of loans from the United States and the World Bank. Bush responded swiftly, lifting all U.S. sanctions and allowing aid to flow.

  When Musharraf addressed the nation on television on September 19, he said the decision to side with the United States was in line with the wishes of the international community and the Islamic world, but also in defense of Pakistan’s national interests. “Pakistan comes first, and everything else is secondary,” he said. “Where national interests are at stake, the decision should be taken with wisdom and sagacity . . . it was not a question of cowardice or bravery.” A wrong decision could spell disaster for the country’s existence, he said, jeopardize the Kashmir cause, and endanger Pakistan’s nuclear installations. If Pakistan had refused the U.S. demands, India would “want to enter into an alliance with the U.S. and get Pakistan declared a terrorist state.”15

  He said he now had leverage with the Americans and would try to persuade Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden “without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban.” At no point in his speech did Musharraf condemn the Taliban or al Qaeda or blame them for the 9/11 attacks—a clear refusal to accede to one of Washington’s demands. And by claiming to have saved Pakistan’s Kashmir policy from U.S. interference, he signaled to the fundamentalists that the insurgency in Kashmir would continue. The military had wrongly surmised that the “global war on terrorism” would not include U.S. pressure to clamp down on militants in Kashmir. The army’s faulty conclusions would have profound implications for Pakistan in the months ahead. The ne
xt day (September 20), Bush addressed the U.S. Congress and sent an uncompromising message: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”16

  From Washington’s perspective, Pakistan had over the years become intractable and unstable, settling into a permanent state of political crisis—a nation on the verge of becoming a failed state. Its long-running conflict with India was destabilizing the region, and since both countries had become nuclear powers in 1998, the problems Pakistan posed had only been magnified. Since 1999, when Musharraf as army chief had ordered Pakistani troops into Indian Kashmir, nearly provoking a nuclear conflict, he was viewed in the West as rash, unpredictable, and easily manipulated by extremist generals. The army’s support for the Taliban had turned Pakistan into an international pariah.