Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  After Taliban attacks in Afghanistan intensified in 2003, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 tried to unearth how the ISI was continuing to provide assistance to the Taliban—were these rogue operations conducted by a few ISI officers or did they have official clearance from the army and Musharraf? CIA and U.S. military officials in Islamabad first thought the attacks the work of a group of retired officers, perhaps headed by Hameed Gul. The CIA asked the ISI to place Gul under surveillance and drew up a list of retired officers friendly to him. Surveillance of Gul’s group yielded little information. The CIA was unwilling to push too hard, fearing that the Pakistanis might end all intelligence cooperation. Likewise the ISI knew that the Americans were unwilling to draw any abrupt conclusions and put the blame on Musharraf. If Washington had determined that support to the Taliban came from the top rather than from a few rogues, the United States would have had to take Musharraf to task, and neither Bush nor Cheney was prepared to do that. The most U.S. and European intelligence officials in Islamabad would admit was that Pakistani support to the Taliban was being carried out by a few out-of-control ISI officers.

  Over time evidence slowly collected by U.S. and NATO intelligence officers on the ground showed a systematic and pervasive system of ISI collusion. By 2004 they had confirmed reports of the ISI running training camps for Taliban recruits north of Quetta, funds and arms shipments arriving from the Gulf countries, and shopping sprees in Quetta and Karachi in which the Taliban bought hundreds of motorbikes, pickup trucks, and satellite phones. In 2003 and 2004, American soldiers at firebases along the border in eastern Afghanistan and U.S. drones in the skies watched as army trucks delivered Taliban fighters to the border at night to infiltrate Afghanistan and then recovered them on their return a few days later. Pakistani artillery gave covering fire to Taliban infiltrators crossing into Afghanistan, and medical facilities were set up close to the border by the army for wounded Taliban.

  Most damning of all was the extensive monitoring at the U.S. base at Bagram of wireless communications between Taliban commanders and Pakistan army officers on the border. The Taliban would speak to officers at border checkpoints, asking for safe passage as they came out of Afghanistan. The ISI’s activities emerged in the open when NATO troops deployed in southern Afghanistan in late 2005 and were faced with a full-blown Taliban offensive being run out of Quetta. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, which had been reorganized by the CIA and MI6, developed excellent sources in Quetta and Peshawar.2

  When the first NATO troops deployed in the south in late 2005, they discovered that the Americans had not monitored Taliban activity in four southern provinces—Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Nimroz—or across the border in Quetta. In 2006 a senior U.S. commander in Kabul admitted to me that the U.S. military’s “biggest mistake for which NATO troops were now paying the price was the lack of a lookdown satellite capability” in the south and a shortage of intelligence manpower, because the Iraq war had drained away resources. Thus for four years, Mullah Omar and his commanders were able to operate freely in Balochistan and southern Afghanistan without being monitored by U.S. intelligence. In Balochistan, a pure Afghan Taliban movement was left undisturbed and allowed to take root. The ISI had made sure that American interest in Quetta would be minimal, as the Taliban did not have any Arabs coming or going or fighting for them. Until the spring of 2006 the Americans were to ignore the Balochistan base of the Taliban and focus solely on the northwest corner of the NWFP, where al Qaeda and its affiliates were settled.

  After 9/11, hundreds of non-Afghan al Qaeda fighters and leaders came through the mountains along the border into Pakistan’s tribal belt. Some were captured by the Pakistan army; those who evaded arrest or walked through the unguarded border into North and South Waziristan were to stay on unmolested for the next three years. Some mid-level al Qaeda officials made their way down to Karachi, from where they escaped to the Arab Gulf states by boat. The arrest in Karachi in July 2002 of Sheikh Ahmed Saleem, a planner of the 1998 bombings in East Africa, provided information as to how members of al Qaeda were being smuggled out on boats from fishing villages along the Makran coast. The anti-Shia extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi had provided Saleem with false passports, tickets, and money and had helped him smuggle al Qaeda gold out of the country. Naval forces from the U.S.-led Coalition that patrolled the Arabian Gulf had boarded 180 ships in the first ten months after 9/11 but did not apprehend any fugitives.3

  Senior al Qaeda leaders gravitated to Punjab, where they felt safe and could reorganize the movement with the help of Pakistani militants from Jaish-e-Mohammed and other groups who looked after their safety. The first important al Qaeda leader to be arrested by the Pakistanis as he tried to escape from Afghanistan was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who ran the al Qaeda training camp at Khalden, in Afghanistan. He provided the first information about who was directly behind the 9/11 attacks.

  Abu Zubaydah was caught during a raid of a house in the industrial city of Faislabad, near Lahore, on March 28, 2002. The intelligence breakthrough had come a week earlier, after the arrest in Peshawar of four Arab militants and their Pakistani driver from Faislabad. The Saudi-born Palestinian, age thirty-one, was asleep when one hundred security officials stormed the three-story house. He ran up to the roof and attempted to escape, but was shot in the groin. One of his companions was killed and another wounded in a shootout that also left three Pakistani police officers wounded. Over the next few days police arrested twenty-seven other foreign and Pakistani militants from nine houses in Lahore and Faislabad. Abu Zubaydah was treated by CIA doctors and then incarcerated in a secret CIA jail in Thailand—one of a number of “black sites” that were soon to be created around the world.

  U.S. officials said that Zubaydah had planned major al Qaeda plots before 9/11.4 He had been promoted as al Qaeda’s head of military operations after Mohammed Atef was killed by a U.S. missile strike in Kabul in November 2001. He was planning new terrorist strikes in Pakistan and abroad when he was caught. Since 1997 he had lived openly in Peshawar, with the full knowledge of the ISI, running a guesthouse for al Qaeda called the House of Martyrs, where all foreign recruits were interviewed before being sent for training to Afghanistan. He knew the identities of thousands of recruits. The Clinton administration had repeatedly asked Musharraf to extradite him, but the ISI denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. In fact, before 9/11 Abu Zubaydah had worked with the ISI, vetting Kashmiri militants for training in al Qaeda camps. President Bush claimed in September 2006 that Zubaydah had revealed only “nominal” information until the CIA interrogated him more harshly, which resulted in intelligence that led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, according to lawyers and experts, that interrogation program amounted to torture.5

  On April 30, 2002, Khalid al-Attash, a Yemeni wanted for the bombing of USS Cole, was arrested along with five Pakistani militants in a Karachi safe house. Fortuitously for the government, the next round of arrests occurred on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, just as Musharraf was due to address the UN General Assembly in New York. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a leader of the Hamburg cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks, was arrested in Karachi when three apartments were raided.6 Eight Arab men, an Arab woman, and children were arrested. In one of the apartments two suspects were killed, including a Pakistani militant who before he died inscribed “Allahu Akbar” (God Is Great) on the walls in his own blood. The police who dragged bin al-Shibh out of one house did not recognize him until FBI agents waiting in a car outside confirmed his identity.

  For several days there was intense media speculation that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, as he was called, al Qaeda’s third in line and a planner of 9/11, had also been killed in the raid. A few weeks earlier, bin al-Shibh and KSM had given an interview in Karachi to Yosri Fouda, a journalist for Al Jazeera TV network, claiming responsibility for 9/11.7 KSM’s wife and children had been arrested in the raid. A year after 9/11, the Bush administration said that twenty-seven hundre
d suspected members of al Qaeda had been arrested in sixty countries; nearly five hundred of them had been caught in Pakistan alone.

  It took another six months to capture KSM. An informer walked into the CIA office in Islamabad with news of his whereabouts.8 On March 1, 2003, twelve heavily armed ISI agents broke down the front door of a house in Westridge, in the military cantonment area of Rawalpindi, a few minutes’ drive from the army’s general headquarters. They found KSM, al Qaeda’s chief operational planner, still groggy with sleep. Also captured was Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. A Saudi, he was al Qaeda’s chief financial officer and fund-raiser, who had set up thirty-five bank accounts in the United States for the 9/11 hijackers. The raiders seized a computer, files, and computer disks. Within hours both men were on their way to a “black site” prison run by the CIA in Kabul and later to one in Poland. “It is hard to overstate how significant this is,” said an elated Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary. “[He is] the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.”9

  KSM had narrowly evaded capture several times.10 A Pakistani Baloch who had grown up in Kuwait and studied mechanical engineering in North Carolina, in the 1980s he arrived in Peshawar to join the anti-Soviet war and became private secretary to the Wahhabi Mujahedin leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, now allied to Karzai. A master of disguises who held twenty different passports and spoke four languages, KSM had been the first to suggest the idea of the 9/11 plot to Osama bin Laden. He had built up extensive links with Pakistani extremists, who now provided al Qaeda with a support network. In July 2004, Pakistani extremists murdered Raja Saqlain, the police officer who arrested KSM in 2003.11

  After 9/11 KSM had ordered his operatives to go after soft Western targets. A Jewish synagogue in Tunisia was bombed in April 2002. Twenty-one people, including fourteen German tourists, were killed. There were the lethal bombings on the island of Bali in October 2002, which killed 190 people. After his capture, the CIA raced to make him talk quickly, and within days there were red alerts in several countries, including one at Heathrow Airport, near London. His capture led to suspicions of his links within the Pakistan army because he had stayed in a secure military housing estate in Rawalpindi. His host there was Ahmed Abdul Qadoos, whose mother was an activist of the Jamiat-e-Islami and whose brother was a major serving in Kohat, close to the Afghan border; Qadoos was swiftly arrested.

  The Jamiat connection with al Qaeda proved deeply contentious. The Jamiat is Pakistan’s most ideological Islamic party, with close links to the army and the ISI. On behalf of the ISI it had spawned numerous extremist groups to fight in Kashmir and had twice helped the military undermine the government of Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s. Opposition politicians alleged that the Jamiat was protecting al Qaeda militants. Several alleged militants had been arrested from Jamiat members’ homes in Karachi and Lahore, while the Jamiat leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, denied that al Qaeda even existed.

  With its closest political ally under withering media criticism, on March 12 the ISI gave an unprecedented briefing to Pakistani newspaper editors, telling them that the Jamiat had no links with al Qaeda and that they should stop writing about such allegations. There was silence from Washington.

  To this day none of the Islamic parties making up the MMA acknowledge the existence of al Qaeda and they maintain that 9 /11 was carried out by the CIA and Israel. MMA leaders go unquestioned by Musharraf and the military when they insist that the “war on terrorism” is an American fiction created by Bush because he hates Muslims. Al Qaeda’s attacks after 9/11 in Pakistan and abroad would have been impossible without the support network provided by Pakistani extremist groups and individual militants from mainstream Islamic parties such as the Jamiat-e-Islami. Even Musharraf acknowledges the links in his biography. “Al’ Qaeda provided the money, weapons and equipment and the local organizations provided the manpower and motivation to actually execute the attacks,” Musharraf writes.12

  The Pakistani government also made no attempt to contain the inflammatory jihadi literature that flooded the country after 9/11. Some forty publications with a circulation of over one million were published by extremist groups. Lashkar-e-Tayyaba claimed that its weekly newspaper had a print run of more than one hundred thousand copies and it continued to publish gory accounts of suicide bombers killed in Kashmir.13 Other publications by Sunni extremist groups spewed hatred against Shias, claiming they were apostates. The two main Sunni extremist groups, Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet) and its splinter Lashkar-e -Jhangvi (the Army of Jhangvi), launched a bloody sectarian war against the minority Shia population. These two Sunni groups who had fought for the Taliban and carried out massacres of Afghan Shias became a mainstay of al Qaeda planning in Pakistan.

  Sipah-e-Sahaba was founded in 1985 with the aim of turning Pakistan into a Sunni state. Several splinter groups broke away from it, each more vicious than the one before. The last to do so was Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which was set up in 1996 by Riaz Basra, who was based in Taliban-controlled Kabul. Although the military regime had declared war on all sectarian groups, the ISI still pursued a dual-track policy. In 2002 Sipah’s leader, Maulana Azam Tariq, was freed from jail, where he had faced multiple murder charges, and allowed to contest the general elections on the condition that he would support the regime—which he did until he was assassinated two years later.14

  The bloodiest sectarian attacks took place in Quetta, where Taliban leaders now lived and where Pakistani Shia Hazaras were recruited as interpreters by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. On June 8, 2003, eleven Hazara policemen were shot dead by gunmen believed to be from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The same group was responsible for the March 2, 2004, massacre of a procession for the Muslim holy day of Ashura in Quetta, which left 47 people dead and 150 wounded.15 On the same day in Iraq, 180 Shias were killed by Sunni extremists in another Ashura procession. In May 2004 a massive bomb explosion in a Shia mosque in Karachi killed 16 worshippers. The blast followed the assassination of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai by suspected Shia militants in an escalating tit-for-tat war. Shamzai had headed the Deobandi madrassa in Binori Town, made famous by the Taliban leaders who had studied there, and was the notorious figure who had gone to Kandahar with the ISI chief after 9/11 and urged Mullah Omar to resist the U.S. invasion.16

  The marginalization of mainstream political parties and the boost to religious parties given by military rule had fueled sectarianism in Pakistan. 17 Although the army had banned all sectarian groups after 9/11, Musharraf had legitimized Sunni extremism by endorsing Azam Tariq. Other Islamic groups banned by the government or named as terrorist organizations by the United States, Britain, and the UN continued to be granted special favors. In March 2003 the government allowed the banned Lashkar-e-Tayyaba to organize the Defense of the Ummah Conference in Islamabad, in which speakers called for jihad. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba leader Hafiz Saeed condoned suicide bombings and urged fighters to go to Iraq—where at least seven Lashkar members were killed in 2003. Hafiz Saeed told his followers, “The powerful Western world is terrorizing the Muslims. We are being invaded, humiliated, manipulated and looted. How else can we respond but through jihad? . . . We must fight against the evil trio, America, Israel and India. Suicide missions are in accordance with Islam. In fact a suicide attack is the best form of jihad.”18

  Most Pakistanis were appalled at these double standards being carried out by the military. There was increasing cynicism among them when Musharraf toured world capitals and lectured Western leaders about the need for a moderate and enlightened Islam when just the opposite was happening at home. A senior official of the Interior Ministry complained to me in May 2003 that some five thousand militants were operating in FATA—Federally Administered Tribal Areas, adjacent to Afghanistan— but the ISI had told the ministry to ignore them. A UN report to the UN Security Council described militants streaming into new training camps in Waziristan: “Particularly disturbing about this trend is the fact that new volunteers are making their way to these camps, increasing
the number of would-be terrorists and the long-term capabilities of the network,” said the report.19

  By the summer of 2003, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were becoming deeply frustrated. “Pakistani border troops have been given orders to allow extremists to cross into Afghanistan and then help them return home by giving them covering fire,” a U.S. military officer told me in Bagram. Maj.-Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned, “Hot pursuit would probably be my last resort.”20 Karzai was frustrated with the Americans because no senior U.S. official was criticizing Islamabad for allowing the Taliban to operate out of Pakistan. On a visit to Islamabad in April 2003, Karzai gave Musharraf a list of Taliban commanders allegedly living openly in Quetta. Musharraf was furious and denied that there was such a list.

  Meanwhile, Islamabad stepped up criticism of the Kabul regime for allowing Indian influence to grow in Afghanistan, asking why Kabul had allowed Indian consulates to be opened in Kandahar and Jalalabad, adjacent to the Pakistan border. New Delhi said it had reopened only the four consulates it had before 1979, including those in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, just as Pakistan and Iran had reopened their consulates in the same cities. However, Musharraf was blunt in his accusations: “India’s motivation in Afghanistan is very clear, nothing further than upsetting Pakistan. Why should they have consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar, what is their interest? There is no interest other than disturbing Pakistan, doing something against Pakistan.”21