Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  The LJ had achieved its wider aim. It had mobilized the entire country in a national purpose. Afghans from every ethnic group, tribe, and community had gathered under one roof in an atmosphere of discussion rather than conflict. Afghan women had come out of the shadows for the first time. The LJ legitimized a political process that no warlord could now question and showed the warlords that they were held in public contempt. It gave Karzai, the government, and the international community a base from which to start rebuilding state institutions. The danger now was that Afghan expectations would be pitched too high. “All the Afghans were speaking as though the LJ would solve all their problems,” Brahimi said later. “It was one step to empower people but it was crazy to think it could change the country overnight.”33

  Many Afghans later argued that neither Karzai nor the UN had tapped the true potential of the LJ. Karzai had failed to envisage a strategy for what he wanted out of the LJ, apart from his own election as president, and had failed to put together a team to exploit the positive public mood toward him and the international community. Most significant of all, the LJ had offered Karzai a chance to put the warlords in their place, but the United States, which depended on them, had vetoed any such idea. Karzai had succumbed to U.S. pressure and refused to do so. In forming the new cabinet of twenty-nine ministers, he endorsed the status quo. General Fahim remained defense minister and one of three vice presidents. The new Pashtun interior minister, Taj Mohammed Wardak, was eighty years old and could make no headway in reforming the police. The brilliant Pashtun technocrat Ashraf Ghani continued as finance minister, which offset Panjsheri power, as the Pashtun ministers now held the purse strings. From among the king’s supporters Zalmay Rasul became the new national security adviser, with the British pledging to fund and train Afghans for a national security council based on the American model.

  In the final tally, the Pashtuns had supported Karzai, even though many felt betrayed by Khalilzad and angry at the rising toll of civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing in the Pashtun south and east. In July, AC-130 gunships shot up four villages in Uruzghan province, killing fifty-four people while families were celebrating a wedding. That month, U.S. forces launched six raids into Uruzghan, but did not capture a single Taliban leader, although eighty civilians were killed. Global Exchange, a human rights organization run by Marla Ruzicka, a young, vivacious American who was later tragically killed in Iraq, listed 812 Afghan civilians killed by U.S. air strikes in June alone. Ruzicka said that most of the deaths were a result of faulty intelligence given to U.S. commanders and overreliance on air power due to the chronic shortage of U.S. troops on the ground.34

  The LJ also did little to end the conflicts between the warlords. During the summer months, there was severe fighting in the north between the militias of Dostum and Atta. In the west, Pashtun commander Amanullah Khan fought to oust Ismael Khan from Herat. There was also severe tension between Ismael Khan and Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Kandahar.

  Senior U.S. officials and generals, however, persisted in treating the warlords like heads of state, inflating their egos even further. In September alone, the U.S. Treasury secretary, John Taylor, visited Ismael Khan in Herat, Dov Zakheim met with Dostum and Atta in Mazar, while Lt.-Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of U.S.-led Coalition forces, met with them all. In retrospect, the new U.S. ambassador, Robert Finn, wondered if the United States could have done things differently: “None of these warlords were openly defying Karzai, but could the U.S. take the risk, without enough troops in the country to do something about them, that could prompt a civil war? However, we should have moved away from the warlords much earlier and we should have stopped visiting them. We should have supported the government more visibly. I stopped visiting Ismael Khan and Dostum, but Rumsfeld visited them several times.”35

  Unable to take a tough position against the warlords, Karzai spent much of his time trying to maintain a balance between them and hold on to his authority and that of the government while Afghan citizens demanding the warlords’ removal. Karzai told me in December, “The warlords know that they cannot survive without the center, and they are not strong enough to challenge the center—there may be acts of defiance, but no challenge. We call the shots, they don’t call the shots, but there is a huge disconnect between the central government authority and the lack of an administration—we need to fill that gap very quickly, and I need good, trained people, which I don’t have.”36

  Senior European officials now told U.S. diplomats that warlord power had to be curtailed, a new Afghan army had to be swiftly built up, and the United States had to force Fahim to agree to reforming the warlord-controlled defense ministry. At a conference in Spain, the Europeans asked the Americans for “a strategy that deals with the warlords that includes incentives and disincentives.”37 U.S. protection of the warlords had become a major constraint to Afghanistan’s ability to move forward and a growing bone of contention between Europe and the United States.

  At a commemorative meeting in Bonn on December 3, 2002, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Bonn Agreement, Karzai signed a decree formally inaugurating the new Afghan National Army, banning all militias and formalizing a program to disarm them. The warlords were given one year to surrender all heavy weapons. It was the start of something new but it would be extremely slow and difficult to implement. Then, just as the government tried to shift gears with the warlords, the Taliban ignited a slow-burning fuse in the south, reemerging to attack soft targets. Karzai escaped a Taliban assassin’s bullets by a hairsbreadth while driving through Kandahar on September 5. That same day, bomb blasts in Kabul killed 15 civilians and injured another 150. It was not a good time for the country to start looking fragile, as the rift in the international community over the U.S. intention to invade Iraq had begun to drive a deep wedge in joint efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Musharraf’s Lost Moment Political Expediency and Authoritarian Rule

  The war may have been fought and won in Afghanistan, but it left Pakistan confronting the fallout and the most dangerous political challenges. Musharraf faced near-war with India due to attacks by Kashmiri militants, anti-U.S. protests in Pakistan’s streets, the escape of thousands of al Qaeda and Taliban into Pakistan, an economic slump, and suicide bombings by terrorist groups targeting Shia and Christian minorities. Pakistan had become without doubt the front line in Bush’s global war on terrorism.

  The ensuing chaos was also a time of enormous opportunity, and the future of Pakistan would depend on how President Musharraf reacted. In Western capitals, there was a strong desire to see the pariah military regime brought in from the cold to act like a cooperative, acquiescent regime against the terrorists. Pakistanis hoped that Musharraf, who had made the right decision after 9/11, would now follow that up by restoring representative government and curbing jihadism across the board. Both hopes were to remain unfulfilled.

  The reality was that Musharraf lacked any political consensus from which to build democracy. The army’s pro-extremist policies in Kashmir and Afghanistan strengthened its ties to Islamic fundamentalist parties at home, making any real curtailing of fundamentalism impossible. Some generals viewed 9/11 as an opportunity to carve out a permanent role for the army in the political system. They were not about to yield power to a bunch of squabbling civilian politicians. In the post-9/11 era, Washington’s sole objective was to catch al Qaeda leaders, and it asked for the Pakistan army’s cooperation. That suited Musharraf fine. He was not being asked simultaneously to rein in militants at home, democratize, or rebuild national institutions that would turn Pakistan away from the legacy of jihad the army had cultivated for three decades. As in Afghanistan, the Bush regime was demanding of Pakistan the very minimum—far short of the kind of nation building that was required.

  For a brief moment Musharraf hinted that perhaps the army had seen the light and was cutting its umbilical cord with the Islamic extremists. “The writ of the government is being
challenged,” he said in what would become his famous speech of January 12, 2002. “Pakistan has been made a soft state where the supremacy of law is questioned. This situation cannot be tolerated any longer.”1 Minutes after he had spoken, an excited Wendy Chamberlain, the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, telephoned Colin Powell and told him that Musharraf had delivered everything the Americans had on their wish list. Powell immediately welcomed Musharraf’s “explicit statements against terrorism.”2 The army’s promised crackdown on militancy delighted most Pakistanis, and marked the highest point of Musharraf’s popularity. A poll by the U.S. State Department in February showed that 82 percent of Pakistanis supported the government’s decision to side with the United States, up from 64 percent in a poll taken after September 11. Seventy-nine percent of people voiced a good opinion of Musharraf, up from 57 percent in September.3

  After the January 12 speech, Pakistanis began to look at what they had gained from the present crisis. The army faced an unprecedented opportunity to reform the country—if it wanted to do so. The war in Afghanistan had been mercifully short, the threatened inundation by Afghan refugees had receded, the Islamic parties had failed to muster public support outside the Pashtun areas, and Pakistan’s support to the United States was being rewarded with unprecedented aid and debt relief by the international community. The potential repercussions for Pakistan during the war could have been much more severe, but now the rewards were turning out to be life-saving.

  Moreover, Pakistan’s Islamic groups were in disarray. Thousands of Pakistanis had been killed or wounded fighting for the Taliban, several thousand taken prisoner by the NA warlords and not to return home for another three years, while those who did return home alive were demoralized and disillusioned by their leaders. Senior clerics, retired ISI officers, and right-wing pundits who had filled the media with their predictions that the Americans would meet their Armageddon in Afghanistan, as had the former Soviet Union, were proved embarrassingly wrong. The ISI had told Musharraf that the Taliban would hang on until the spring of 2002 and then conduct guerrilla war from the mountains, but the Taliban had collapsed in just six weeks.

  The mullahs were bewildered and in a state of shock. None could explain to their followers why so many Islamists had died so uselessly in Afghanistan or how the hated Americans and the Northern Alliance had won so easily. Historically the jihadi groups had been committed to a regional strategy enforced by the ISI, which targeted India and supported the Taliban regime. Now the ISI’s regional strategy was in tatters.4 If Musharraf was serious about implementing even half the measures outlined in his January 12 speech, now was the moment to do so—but the chance passed. Instead, the army and the ISI, still obsessed with enemy India, were to resurrect the Islamists from defeat and demoralization. Taliban leaders were given refuge in Pakistan. Militant attacks in Indian Kashmir were encouraged in order to resuscitate morale among the jihadi groups and to show that the army had not abandoned them. By February 2002, the banned extremist groups were quietly encouraged by the ISI to reconstitute themselves with a change of name. Those militants arrested after January 12 were freed. The government abandoned its March 23 deadline for the madrassas to register themselves, and the promised disarming of the jihadi groups was put off indefinitely.

  The army did set about implementing the minimalist strategy desired by the Americans—to catch escaping al Qaeda leaders. Working closely with the CIA and U.S. SOF teams now based in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the military arrested hundreds of Arabs, but many were innocent civilians. The army carefully differentiated between Arabs and other foreigners, who were handed over to the United States, and the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani militants, who were left alone. Moreover, the CIA was offering large cash bonuses to any soldiers or police who handed over an Arab. Some four hundred alleged al Qaeda fighters were caught in the tribal agencies and the NWFP. There were several bloody incidents, such as on December 19, when fifteen people were killed after captured al Qaeda fighters overpowered their Pakistani guards while being transported from one town to another in the NWFP.

  Pakistani forces had failed to cordon off all the seven tribal agencies that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Afghan border. Troops were deployed in the Kurram agency but not farther south, in South and North Waziristan, from where bin Laden escaped into Pakistan. More al Qaeda escaped northward and crossed into Pakistan’s Dir and Chitral regions, which were also unguarded. Taliban escaping from Kandahar were able to cross into Balochistan province unmolested by any Pakistan army presence. Thousands of Taliban escaped in this direction.

  Several U.S. officers in Afghanistan later told me that they suspected that the army had deliberately left the Waziristan and Balochistan door open to allow fighters to escape. The CIA had intercepted communications between Pakistani officers not to harass any foreign fighters entering through Waziristan. Pakistani officials rejected these allegations, insisting that the tensions with India ruled out their having any spare troops to guard Waziristan. Whether the Waziristan door was left open deliberately or unintentionally, it would lead to major repercussions as Waziristan became not only a bolt-hole but a new base of operations for al Qaeda and the Taliban.

  It was not until May 2002 that Pakistan moved regular army units into South Waziristan, basing eight thousand troops in the administrative headquarters of Wana, but deploying none on the mountainous border. By now thousands of al Qaeda-linked militants—Central Asians, Chechens, Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghan Taliban, many with their families—had escaped Afghanistan and were living in South Waziristan under the protection of local tribesmen, who were paid handsomely for the sanctuary they offered. Other al Qaeda leaders were escorted by Pakistani jihadi groups to safe houses in large cities or taken to small ports on the coast, where they escaped by boat to the Arabian Gulf states. Soon, regrouped Arab fighters were crossing the unguarded border of South Waziristan to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By August 2002, al Qaeda felt confident enough to set up small mobile training camps in South Waziristan, where Pakistani militants could come to learn bomb making and other skills.

  In February 2002, when Musharraf visited Washington, he received another ringing endorsement from Bush and more aid. “President Musharraf is a leader with great courage and vision . . . I am proud to call him my friend,” Bush told a beaming Musharraf.5 The Pakistani leader certainly had reason to feel the glow of U.S. friendship. Since September 11 Pakistan had received $600 million in emergency aid and a moratorium on its debts to the United States. The military had received $500 million for its logistical support to U.S. forces, including the provision of fuel, food, and water. Finance minister Shaukat Aziz told the Americans that because of lost export orders after 9/11, Pakistan had suffered losses of $2 billion, rendering fifty thousand people jobless. Bush announced a further assistance package—canceling $1.0 billion of Pakistan’s $2.8 billion debt to the United States, rescheduling the remainder, and offering $100 million for educational reform. Musharraf again insisted that the Americans sell Pakistan F-16 aircraft, but with Indo-Pakistan tensions so high, Washington wisely declined.

  No one raised the issue of democracy with Musharraf. Officials at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council told me that Musharraf was indispensable and that the United States had no desire to see the return of civilian politicians. If Musharraf was slow in disarming the militants or reforming the madrassas, that was acceptable to Washington for the time being. In fact, Musharraf’s aides had adamantly told U.S. officials that any American criticism of Musharraf would undermine his position in the army and make it more difficult for him to help Washington.

  The army’s apparent willingness to go after al Qaeda yielded its first big catch at the end of March: Abu Zubaydah, the head of al Qaeda’s overseas operations, was captured in the industrial city of Faislabad. He was to provide the CIA with its best information to date about al Qaeda membership and operations in Western countries. Then, on th
e first anniversary of 9 /11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the leaders of the Hamburg cell that had planned the 9 /11 attacks, was arrested in Karachi. (I deal with these arrests in a later chapter.) These successes only further convinced Bush and Cheney that Musharraf should not be criticized for lapses on other fronts. There would therefore be no substantial U.S. pressure placed on him to carry out the reforms he was promising.

  Buoyed by the free hand Washington had given them, Musharraf and his generals chalked out their future political game plan. The army’s nine corps commanders, who together with the army chief collectively made all strategic decisions, held lengthy discussions. They knew that at this moment Musharraf and the army had the political power, popularity, and moral authority at home, plus massive international support, to do whatever they wished. For years the army’s alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist parties, dubbed the military-mullah alliance, which provided militants to fight the army’s wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir, had prevailed. Now would have been the time to break with the mullahs, work out a political consensus with the opposition parties, and hold elections, thus moving the country toward greater democracy. Some of Musharraf’s closest aides were later to admit that he should have implemented a power-sharing agreement with the exiled Benazir Bhutto and her PPP, still the most popular party in the country and one that was strongly anti-mullah.

  Instead, Musharraf and his aides worked on an altogether different strategy—determining how to legitimize his role as president and army chief, and introducing a new political system that would ensure the permanent dominance of the military. Musharraf first consolidated his grip on the army by promoting twenty-seven officers to the rank of major-general, the largest number ever appointed in the army’s history. In April 2002 he declared that he would hold a national referendum asking the people to give him five more years as president. “I am not power hungry but I don’t believe in power sharing,” he told the nation in a TV address on April 5. “I believe in unity of command because I am an army man. That’s the way democracy in Pakistan will function.”6