by Ahmed Rashid
Along with Vendrell’s initiative, the experts group began to promote a new thesis. Led by Barnett Rubin, we wrote a joint paper that was circulated widely to international organizations and Western governments.41 We proposed using economic aid related to the reconstruction of Afghanistan as a tool to isolate the Taliban and create an alternative political infrastructure that could also become a lobby for peace inside the country. Similar thoughts were being advocated by other U.S. and European officials. In his last report to the UN Security Council before 9/11, Kofi Annan urged a new “comprehensive approach” to try to bring peace to Afghanistan, terming past attempts “fruitless endeavors.” He outlined the need for a plan to reconstruct the country.42 UN sanctions on the Taliban had failed, as they provided no incentives for ending the civil war, made no provisions for reconstruction, and demanded only that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. Most significantly, there was insufficient pressure from the Clinton administration to mobilize an international effort to end the conflict in Afghanistan.
When the Bush administration took office at the beginning of 2001, it was unclear what its policy would be—continuing to demand the extradition of bin Laden, or brokering an end to the Afghan civil war, or pressuring Musharraf to end support to the Taliban. In the nine months it was in power before 9/11, the administration took none of these issues seriously enough, although there was no shortage of warnings about the dangers of letting the problem fester. When Bush visited the White House on December 16, 2000, for the first time, Clinton had briefed him on “the biggest security problems” he would face. Of the six major threats Clinton listed, three involved al Qaeda and Pakistan. These were al Qaeda itself, nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan and nonproliferation, and “the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda.”43
Clinton’s terrorism tsar, Richard Clarke, gave a thirteen-page document to incoming national security advisor Condoleezza Rice outlining the al Qaeda threat. Clarke recommended arming the Northern Alliance, developing Uzbekistan’s capacity to attack al Qaeda, destroying terrorist camps, and sending in U.S. Special Operations Forces (U.S. SOF) to collect intelligence on bin Laden.44 CIA director George Tenet later said that it was the CIA that prepared the first paper presented to the Bush team. However, the CIA station chief in Islamabad refused to endorse arming the Northern Alliance because it would have infuriated the ISI.45
The Bush administration arrived in office pledging to challenge Clinton’s foreign policy, including his steps against al Qaeda that had been so ineffective. Rice ordered a policy review of al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan but set no timetable for its completion. The administration appeared to be least interested in Afghanistan. State Department officials told me that the new secretary of state, Colin Powell, was aloof from the entire policy review, showing little interest. Christina Rocca, the new assistant aecretary of state for South Asian Affairs, was far too timid and wary of the neoconservatives to offer her opinion. It had taken the administration four months to nominate her to the post, and she was confirmed only in June, five months after the administration took office. South Asia was clearly not a priority on Powell’s or Rice’s to-do list.
Rocca had spent fifteen years at the CIA (1982-1997) and then worked as foreign policy adviser to Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas.46 “She is a faithful implementer of what her bosses decide,” a senior U.S. diplomat told me at the time. The Pakistanis liked dealing with Rocca because they considered her so ineffective. “She had no ability to take decisions and she was not a risk-taker, so that suited us,” said a senior Pakistani diplomat. Early on she got rid of Alan Eastham, her deputy in the South Asia Department and the most knowledgeable person about the region.
Musharraf had written an effusive congratulatory letter to Bush upon his taking office, pointedly criticizing the Clinton administration and asking for a better relationship with him. In his reply in February 2001, Bush urged Musharraf to work with the United States to “address Afghanistan’s many problems—the most pressing of these is terrorism and it inhibits progress on all other issues.”47 The letter made little impact in Islamabad, and it was not until June that the Bush administration held its first substantive talks with Pakistan, when Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar visited Washington as well as London and Ottawa. In all three capitals, Sattar heard similar dire warnings that Pakistan’s failure to cease its support to the Taliban, and by extension to al Qaeda, would affect its relations with the West. However, nobody was threatening Islamabad with anything specific.
In Washington, on his own insistence, Sattar was accompanied by the ISI’s Maj.-Gen. Faiz Jilani, who explained Pakistan’s Afghan policy because U.S. officials knew that the Foreign Ministry had no say in Afghan policy. “Nobody from the Foreign Office ever went to Afghanistan. We were trying to influence the ISI, but we had no knowledge of what was going on or what Pakistan was giving to the Taliban,” Sattar told me.48 As Sattar arrived in Washington on June 1, twenty thousand Taliban troops, including thousands of Pakistani militants, launched another major offensive against the Northern Alliance. Condoleezza Rice gave Sattar an earful. “She told us that the Taliban were dead in the water and we should drop them. It was a very rough meeting,” said a Pakistani diplomat. Rice later admitted that “I delivered a very tough message, which was met with a rote, expressionless response.”49 However, there were still no specific threats or incentives for Pakistan to change policy. If the U.S. administration had decided to arm the Northern Alliance and informed Islamabad of that fact, it may well have made a difference in the military’s thinking, but so far there was no U.S. policy decision to speak off.
Instead, the Bush administration chose to improve relations with Islamabad. The new deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, encouraged the military regime. “I don’t want to see Pakistan only through the lens or the prism of Osama bin Laden,” he said. “We want to look at Pakistan and see what Pakistan thinks about Pakistan’s future.”50 Other U.S. officials echoed this sentiment. “It is in no one’s interest for declaring Pakistan as a failed state,” said Harry Thomas, the director for South Asia at the National Security Agency. “We don’t want Pakistan becoming another Afghanistan, ” he said just three weeks before September 11.51
Musharraf welcomed Washington’s conciliatory stance and hoped that unlike with Clinton, the Bush administration would put the issues of terrorism, nonproliferation, and restoration of democracy on the back burner. There was now even less incentive for Musharraf to change his policies toward the Taliban and there was no extraordinary U.S. pressure to go after al Qaeda. Dealing with Bush was going to be much easier than dealing with Clinton. Whereas Clinton resisted the wool being pulled over his eyes, the Bush administration simply closed their eyes themselves. Three years later Rice was to admit her failure:
America’s al Qaeda policy wasn’t working because our Afghanistan policy wasn’t working. And our Afghanistan policy wasn’t working because our Pakistan policy wasn’t working. We recognized that America’s counter-terrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies and to our overall foreign policy. . . . Al Qaeda was both a client of and a patron to the Taliban, which in turn was supported by Pakistan. Those relationships provided al Qaeda with a powerful umbrella of protection, and we had to sever that.52
In fact the Bush administration made no attempt to sever these relationships because the policy review kept getting delayed. Moreover, it seemed to lack all seriousness, according to U.S. diplomats at the Islamabad embassy, who were never consulted on it. In January, William Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, prepared two cables in order to brief the incoming Bush team about Pakistan and the threat from the Taliban and al Qaeda. His first cable reviewed current policy, while the second proposed options for a policy change. There was no response from Washington and no demand for further information—even though Milam was the U.S. point man for meetings with the Taliban leadership and had warned the Taliban that Washington would hold them respo
nsible for any al Qaeda attack on a U.S. target. In May, Milam met with Armitage in Washington, but nobody asked Milam for his views or mentioned the policy review. The Islamabad embassy was not consulted once about the review—which indicates how low a priority it was for the State Department.
“Al Qaeda was not on the radar screen in Washington,” said a senior U.S. diplomat at the time. “Nobody thought there was any urgency to the policy review. Papers were circulated, dates were made to meet, and were broken—it was the usual bureaucratic approach.”
Through the summer there was still no sense of urgency about the policy review, even though there were more than enough warnings about an al Qaeda threat. The FBI issued 216 internal threat warnings about the possibility of an attack by al Qaeda between January and September 2001, while the National Security Agency reported 33 intercepts indicating possible al Qaeda attacks.53 U.S. forces in the Arabian Gulf were placed on the highest state of alert on June 22—Threat Condition Delta. Richard Clarke wrote to Rice on June 28 saying that warnings of an imminent attack “had reached a crescendo.”54 On July 10, the CIA prepared a briefing paper for Bush that was emphatic: “We believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks . . . attack preparations have been made . . . and will occur with little or no warning,” the paper said.55
The first formal meeting of deputy heads of departments in the U.S. government to consider the policy review had taken place only on April 30.56 The meeting bogged down over a technicality: whether the Pentagon or the CIA was to pay for and run the program for the covert Predator drone that would fly over Afghanistan. The $3 million Predator, which was being tested, was now more lethal, as it had been armed with a Hellfire missile.57 It would take another five months for the Principals Committee to meet.
On August 6, the CIA’s daily brief to the president was headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research had tried to motivate Condi Rice and Colin Powell by sending them papers on the history of the fruitless attempts to persuade the Taliban and Pakistan to hand over bin Laden and, prophetically, a paper urging the overthrow of the Taliban regime—but there was silence from above. Other officials were angry and frustrated at Pakistan’s attitude. “The ISI is totally inflexible,” the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, then working at the National Security Council, told me when I visited Washington in the first week of July. “We wanted a joint project with them to change the Taliban leadership, but the ISI backed out. We don’t want to confront Pakistan, but we may have to.”58
At the UN, Russia and France presented intelligence dossiers to the UN Security Council showing that Pakistan continued to flout UN sanctions by providing fuel and other supplies to the Taliban. Up to thirty ISI trucks a day were still crossing into Afghanistan. Musharraf brazenly condemned UN sanctions, saying, “The Taliban are the dominant reality in Afghanistan. . . . The unilateral arms embargo on the Taliban government is unjustified, discriminatory and will further escalate the war.”59 U.S. officials continued to warn Pakistani diplomats of the possible consequences for both the Taliban and Pakistan of an al Qaeda attack anywhere.
I witnessed one such exchange at a conference organized by the British Foreign Office in July, at Weston Park, a mansion deep in the English countryside. A senior U.S. diplomat rounded on his Pakistani counterpart, telling him that “the Taliban and al Qaeda are one enterprise and we see Pakistan as backing that enterprise.” He went on: “Bush is very serious and could declare the Taliban a terrorist group in which case Pakistan would be directly held responsible for backing terrorism.” The American then counted off on his fingers the nine senior ISI officers directing military policy for the Taliban inside Afghanistan.
Finally, on September 4, nine months after Bush became president and a week before the 9 /11 attacks, the long-awaited interagency cabinet meeting of the principals took place in Washington. Those assembled agreed to provide the CIA with $125 million to arm Masud and the Northern Alliance. There was still disagreement over which agency would handle the Predator. The all-important issue of how to deal with Pakistan, especially once U.S. arms started to flow to Masud, was left unresolved. Powell argued for putting more pressure on Pakistan, but he outlined no strategy. The meeting ended with White House lawyers being tasked to finalize a “National Security Presidential Directive” that would call for the elimination of al Qaeda. Rice said any new strategy to topple the Taliban regime would take three years to work.60 A few days later, Mohammed Atta and his accomplices were saying their last prayers as they prepared to attack the American homeland.
CHAPTER FOUR
Attack! Retaliation and Invasion
The Bush administration was staggered by the attacks of September 11, and was initially at a loss as to what to do. The easy option of launching a blitz of cruise missiles, as Clinton had done in 1998, was ruled out, as al Qaeda personnel had abandoned their camps. In a prearranged plan, bin Laden had quickly sent many of his top managers out of Afghanistan. He himself left his home in Kandahar and disappeared. Al Qaeda was virtually dismantled, except for the fighters belonging to Brigade 555, some of whom remained on the front lines outside Kabul, while others retreated east into the mountains to await the U.S. attack.
There was enormous reluctance on the part of the U.S. military to invade Afghanistan, given the fate of the British and Soviet land armies in that country during the past two centuries. The U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which had responsibility for the Middle East region, had no ready-made plan to invade Afghanistan, and it would take weeks before it could prepare one. And how would U.S. troops arrive in the landlocked country? Iran and Pakistan, the two most critical neighbors of Afghanistan, were hostile to the United States, while the Central Asian neighbors were tied to Russia and did not have the necessary facilities or access to the Taliban-controlled south. “CENTCOM had not developed a plan for conventional ground operations in Afghanistan. Nor had diplomatic arrangements for basing, staging, overflight and access been made with Afghanistan’s neighbors,” admitted CENTCOM chief Gen. Tommy Franks.1
The ease with which the nineteen suicide bombers arrived in the United States undetected was a massive intelligence failure that was swiftly laid at the feet of CIA director George Tenet. With his agency demoralized, Tenet realized that he had better make himself indispensable in the run-up to the war in Afghanistan. If the Pentagon had no plans for an invasion, he would preempt Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. CIA planners quickly came up with an audacious plan, putting together a package that would see NA troops on the ground linking up with teams of CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces, who would combine NA ground operations with U.S. air power using sophisticated technology. The aim was to avoid a major deployment of American troops, although the CIA was taking an enormous risk by presuming that the Taliban could thus be defeated.
On September 15, Tenet and his aides presented the hypothesis at a meeting at Camp David. With no other options on the table and the Pentagon having no plans to mount a full-scale invasion, his idea was accepted. The CIA now liaised with the Pentagon to send joint teams into Afghanistan. On September 17, Bush signed an order giving enormous powers to the CIA, allowing it to conduct the war in Afghanistan and make foreign policy decisions using the help of foreign intelligence agencies, in order to capture or kill members of al Qaeda. Up to $900 million and perhaps more than $1 billion was allocated to the CIA for covert operations.2
Tenet insists in his autobiography that the CIA was ready for this moment because it had been preparing such a plan for years.3 The facts would suggest otherwise. For over a decade, CIA officers had made only five trips to the Panjsher Valley to meet with Masud, but Masud was now dead and the CIA had only a sketchy relationship with his successor, Gen. Mohammed Fahim. The CIA had provided only pocket money to Masud and had had nothing to do with the recent return of exiled warlords Rashid Dostum, Ismael Khan, and Karim Khalili, a
leader of the Hazara ethnic group who had opened new fronts against the Taliban after reconciling their differences with Masud. They had returned with the help of Turkey, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Iran—countries that before 9/11 were far more worried about a Taliban victory than the United States ever was.
Moreover, the CIA had shown no sense of urgency in supporting the Northern Alliance when many feared that the Taliban offensives in the summer of 2001 could wipe out Masud’s forces. Washington’s decision to arm Masud’s forces was made only one week before 9/11. Most critically, despite what Tenet and journalist Bob Woodward present in their books, the CIA had very few contacts with the Pashtun tribes in the south and had to go through the ISI every time they needed Pashtuns to monitor bin Laden.4 When the time came for the CIA to unleash anti-Taliban Pashtuns in October, the agency found it had none and fell back on Britain’s MI6 and the ISI to provide them. When Dick Cheney, frustrated by the CIA’s slowness in opening a southern front against the Taliban, visited the CIA, he found it had few contacts among the Pashtun.
MI6 reverted to what its forefathers had done a century earlier during the British Raj—passing out large sums of money to Pashtun exiles living in Pakistan with the aim of persuading them to move into Afghanistan. Much of this initial funding ended up in the purchase of fancy cars and new houses in Peshawar. Few Pashtun leaders in Peshawar believed that the Taliban could be defeated on its home turf in the south.