The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  The rhetoric from Washington had been unambiguous, and Musharraf knew it. A man who had spent his career in the military, he considered his options as if this were a war game. He later wrote in his memoir that if he had chosen to protect the Taliban, the United States would consider Pakistan a terrorist state and, for all he knew, would attack Pakistan, eviscerate Pakistan’s military, and seize the country’s nuclear arsenal. India had already offered its bases for the Afghan war, and Musharraf figured that soon enough the United States could be flying combat missions from a base in Amritsar, in northwestern India. The bombers would streak over Pakistani territory on their way into Afghanistan, and back again after they had delivered their deadly payloads. Even worse, the Indians could seize the opportunity to open an offensive in Kashmir, with America’s blessing. The strategic balance in South Asia, which had long aligned Pakistan with the United States against India and its historic ally Russia, would change permanently. Pakistan would be a crushed, impoverished outcast.

  On the evening of September 19, Musharraf told the people of Pakistan how he had answered Washington’s demands. He was dressed in a crisp military uniform, but his face was haggard and drawn, the toll of endless meetings with his generals, civilian politicians, religious leaders, and American diplomats. His televised speech was not a denunciation of al Qaeda or the Taliban, and at no time did Musharraf condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He instead framed his decision to help America in narrow, nationalistic terms. India had already pledged its full support to Washington, he said, and New Delhi was determined to ensure that “if and when the government in Afghanistan changes, it shall be an anti-Pakistan government.” He said that Pakistan had four priorities: the security of its borders; the Kashmir cause; the revival of its economy; and, finally, the protection of its “strategic assets.”

  That final item on the list was not just a reference to the nuclear arsenal that Pakistan had built to destroy India. Pakistan’s military had other “strategic assets” to consider. By 2001, groups like the Afghan Taliban and the militia network run by mujahedeen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani were considered critical elements of Pakistan’s defenses, and Musharraf made it clear in the speech that night that he still regarded the Taliban as an important bulwark against India. Even as he was leaning on Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden, he told the country that the tactic was a way to emerge from the crisis “without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban.”

  Things weren’t, in fact, black and white. One week after the September 11 attacks, and one night before President Bush in front of a joint session of Congress accused the Taliban of “aiding and abetting murder,” Musharraf was still hoping that the Taliban could remain in power. Washington had been comforted by the belief that Musharraf had pushed all of his poker chips to the center of the table on a bet on the Bush administration. In fact, he adopted a far more nuanced strategy—a strategy that even after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, many American officials would still have difficulty discerning.

  The ISI was still hoping that another bloody Afghan war could be avoided, especially one that might replace the Taliban with the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance. After General Ahmed returned to Islamabad, he implored American ambassador Wendy Chamberlin not to start a war out of revenge. A true victory in Afghanistan, Ahmed said, would come only by negotiating. “If the Taliban are eliminated,” he said, “Afghanistan will revert to warlordism.”

  To try to convince Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to give up bin Laden, General Ahmed flew to Kandahar on a plane loaned by the CIA. Omar, a former mujahedeen commander who had lost one eye during the Soviet war, mocked the Pakistani general as the Bush administration’s errand boy and rejected the demands. He issued a stinging rebuke to his longtime ISI benefactor. “You want to please the Americans, and I want to please God,” he said.

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  THE AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY had created divisions in the CIA from the beginning, with rifts opening between officers at Langley and those posted at the CIA station in Islamabad. Cofer Black, the CTC chief, pressed to immediately arm the Northern Alliance and begin a push south toward Kabul. But Robert Grenier, the Islamabad station chief, fought against the plan. He warned that any move to arm a militia backed by India and Russia could immediately destroy relations with Pakistan just as they were thawing after years of mistrust. These internal fights got a wider audience three weeks after the September 11 attacks, when CIA officers went to the Pentagon for a teleconference between Washington, Islamabad, and United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa.

  During the call, Grenier said that any ground offensive using the Northern Alliance ought to be put on hold to give the ISI more time to pressure the Taliban to release bin Laden. Backing the Northern Alliance could lead to another bloody Afghan civil war, Grenier said, adding that an air campaign could be enough for the time being to bring the Taliban to negotiations. But Hank Crumpton, a CTC officer who had been designated by Cofer Black to run the CIA’s war in Afghanistan, thought Grenier was being naive. He was merely reflecting the ISI’s position, Crumpton thought, and was displaying a bad case of “clientitis.” After the meeting, Crumpton told Rumsfeld he thought that Grenier was dead wrong.

  Grenier may have been channeling the concerns of the ISI, but they were hardly unreasonable worries. For weeks, ISI officials had been whispering to their CIA counterparts in Islamabad that a war in Afghanistan could spin wildly out of control. It would upset a delicate balance in the region, they said, perhaps even leading India and Pakistan toward a full-blown proxy war inside Afghanistan.

  As the negotiations dragged on and September turned to October, the CIA quietly began inserting paramilitary teams into Afghanistan to make contact with the warlord commanders who fought under the Northern Alliance banner. Meanwhile, a torrent of threat information continued to come into the agency’s Counterterrorist Center from CIA stations in the Middle East and South Asia. On October 5, two days before the United States dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan, Armitage sent an eyes-only cable to Ambassador Chamberlin demanding that she meet immediately with General Ahmed. He wanted a simple message delivered to Mullah Omar, and he wanted Ahmed to deliver it. If another attack was traced back to Afghanistan, Armitage wrote, the American response would be devastating:

  “Every pillar of the Taliban regime will be destroyed.”

  The day after America’s war in Afghanistan began, Musharraf replaced General Ahmed at the ISI. CIA leaders in Washington had been pressing for General Ahmed to be sacked, and his replacement was an uncontroversial choice. General Ehsan ul Haq, an urbane commander who at the time was leading the army’s corps in Peshawar, had been part of the cabal of military leaders who installed Musharraf in power in 1999, and unlike Ahmed, he had no obvious loyalties to the Taliban. Within weeks he was sitting by Musharraf’s side at the United Nations, where Musharraf and Bush met for the first time since the September 11 attacks to discuss America’s plans in Afghanistan.

  To prepare Bush for the meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote the president a memo that praised Musharraf and said unequivocally that Pakistan’s government had “abandoned the Taliban.” “President Musharraf’s decision to fully cooperate with the United States in the wake of September 11, at considerable political risk, abruptly turned our stalled relationship around,” the memo began. In hindsight, Powell’s analysis was naive—it was what American officials wanted to believe and chose to hear. Musharraf hadn’t fundamentally shifted Pakistan’s foreign policy as much as he had reprised a deal that General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s former president, had struck with the Americans during the 1980s. Musharraf would help the United States get what it wanted in Afghanistan, and Pakistan would be paid handsomely.

  Musharraf hadn’t managed to prevent the war, but he wanted it to be short and for the United States to leave his neighborhood as quickly as possible. This is the message he brought to Bush at the United Nations: Do what y
ou need to do to expel Osama bin Laden and his followers from Afghanistan, but the last thing the United States should do is stay in Afghanistan for years.

  As it turned out, the Pakistanis had misread the Americans just as badly as the Americans had misread the Pakistanis. In the months after the September 11 attacks a string of intelligence cables from ISI headquarters went out to Pakistan’s embassies in Washington and elsewhere. The spy service’s analysts concluded that the United States had no plans for a long-term commitment to Afghanistan beyond the defeat of al Qaeda there, a conclusion that had been informed by the knowledge that Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan after the last war as soon as the Soviets had withdrawn. This is how it appeared to Asad Durrani, a retired Pakistani lieutenant-general who had run the ISI during the 1990s. Durrani was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia in late 2001, when the ISI cables began arriving in the foreign embassies. America’s new war in Afghanistan, Durrani said years later, “seemed as if it was going to be a very short-term affair.”

  Pakistani spies were still trying to ensure that it was, and in November and December 2001 they held a series of secret meetings with Afghan tribal leaders to determine how many outer layers of the Taliban’s followers could be peeled away from the movement’s fanatical core. During one of these meetings, General Ehsan ul Haq, the new ISI chief, sat down with Jalaluddin Haqqani in Islamabad. General ul Haq had called Haqqani to the capital to gauge the loyalties of the wizened militia leader. Haqqani had once been the CIA’s greatest ally in Afghanistan, during the war against the Soviets, but in the years since had pledged loyalty to al Qaeda and had built up a sprawling criminal empire from his base in Miranshah, in North Waziristan.

  It became clear during the meeting that Haqqani wasn’t about to be turned. The American invasion of Afghanistan, Haqqani told General ul Haq, was no different from the Soviet war years earlier. With chilling prescience, he predicted that the new war would play out just as the last one had. Haqqani said that he could not stop American bombers, but eventually the United States would have to send in large numbers of ground troops. When that happened, Haqqani told the ISI chief, he would be on level ground with the Americans.

  They can occupy all the cities, but they can’t occupy all the mountains, the militia leader continued, as General ul Haq recalls the meeting. “So we will go to the mountains and we will resist. Just like we did against the Soviet Union.”

  News that the famous commander had been in Islamabad quickly spread to the American embassy, and CIA station chief Robert Grenier immediately visited General ul Haq to get more information. Not only had Haqqani been in the capital, ul Haq acknowledged, but he had met with him. He hadn’t bothered to tell the CIA chief, he said, because nothing productive came from the meeting.

  “I don’t think he is going to be helpful,” ul Haq said.

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  ALTHOUGH HE HAD INSTALLED a new general to lead the ISI, Musharraf’s purge of Islamists inside the military went only so far. At the same time General ul Haq took over the military spy service, Musharraf appointed Lt. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, a close friend and longtime Taliban sympathizer, to take over the army’s corps in Peshawar, the same job that ul Haq had just vacated.

  Peshawar, a bustling market city, is the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, a territory named by the British for its position at the outer edge of the “settled” lands.* The job in Peshawar also gave General Aurakzai oversight of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the harsh, mountainous lands ruled by wild men of the Wazir and Mehsud tribes and where the government’s writ meant little.

  The British had had little success taming the tribal lands that had been part of the British Raj, and eventually gave up. As a twenty-three-year-old journalist visiting India in 1897, Winston Churchill spent six weeks with Britain’s Malakand Field Force and sent dispatches to The Daily Telegraph describing the snowcapped mountains where “range after range is seen as the long surges of an Atlantic swell, and in the distance some glittering snow peak suggests a white-crested roller, higher than the rest.”

  “The drenching rains which fall each year,” Churchill continued, “have washed the soil from the sides of the hills until they have become strangely grooved by numberless water-courses, and the black primeval rock is everywhere exposed.” Just as the lands had changed little since Churchill’s time, the people of the tribal areas remained fiercely distrustful of outsiders. It is a place, Britain’s future prime minister observed, where “every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.”

  General Aurakzai had long ago proven his loyalty to Musharraf as another of the military conspirators behind the 1999 coup. According to some accounts it had been Aurakzai who showed up at former president Nawaz Sharif’s house, pointed a gun in his face, and told him that the military was taking charge in Pakistan. He was a commanding figure who had been raised in the tribal areas and had spent enough time in the mountains to know that regular Pakistani troops were not trained for the mission they were about to undertake. He told Musharraf he doubted there were many foreign al Qaeda operatives fleeing across the border into Pakistan.

  But CIA officers in Islamabad thought differently. Months after Pakistani soldiers moved into the tribal areas, CIA officers began feeding the ISI steady reports about the arrival of Arab fighters in the mountains, but General Aurakzai’s military patrols turned up nothing. Grenier, the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, said that Aurakzai and other Pakistani officials with whom he met worried that Pakistani troops rumbling through mountain villages could touch off a tribal uprising. The officials didn’t want to believe that al Qaeda had established a new base in Pakistan, less than a hundred miles from the bases in Afghanistan where the group had planned the September 11 attacks. It was “an inconvenient fact,” said Grenier.

  Aurakzai held the Peshawar command until his retirement in 2004 and for years continued to deny the presence of Arab fighters in the tribal areas. In 2005, he told a reporter that the notion that Osama bin Laden might be hiding in Pakistan was purely conjecture, and he never saw any evidence that Arab fighters had set up operations in the tribal areas. The hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda in Pakistan, he said, was pointless.

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  BUT OTHERS KNEW BETTER. Brigadier-General Asad Munir had just assumed his post as the ISI’s chief of station in Peshawar when the September 11 attacks occurred, and it wasn’t long before the Americans began arriving there. They came in small numbers at first, no more than a dozen, and set up at the fortified U.S. consulate inside the city. It was late 2001, and they had come to work with their Pakistani counterparts to hunt down al Qaeda operatives escaping the fighting in Afghanistan. They had come to work with Asad Munir.

  “I had never met a CIA man,” Munir recalled, taking long drags of a Benson & Hedges cigarette, the smoke sometimes obscuring a face with the rugged looks of an aging Bollywood leading man. His thoughts turned wistfully to the early years after the September 11 attacks when the spies of America and Pakistan seemed to be fighting the same enemy.

  “We were just like friends.”

  The Americans, led by a CIA officer named Keith, were at first suspicious of Munir and most everyone else from the ISI. But after two weeks, Munir said, the suspicions had dissolved. Peshawar was the westernmost city in which the CIA could establish a large base, and by the middle of 2002 the agency had turned the American consulate there into a hub for espionage operations. Antennas were erected on the roof, new computers were installed, clandestine officers arrived using thin covers. It was, in effect, a spy station posing as a diplomatic outpost.

  Munir also remembered the other men who arrived, the “technical people.” Munir wouldn’t have known, but the technical teams were part of a shadowy Pentagon unit called Gray Fox—officially the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, based at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia—which sent clandestine officers around the world with special equipment to intercept communications. With thei
r arrival, the database of suspicious cell-phone numbers that the U.S.–Pakistani team used to track down al Qaeda around Peshawar and in the tribal areas expanded dramatically. Twelve numbers turned into one hundred, one hundred into twelve hundred. Names of Algerians, Libyans, Saudis, and others that neither the CIA nor the ISI had heard before were added to the roster, and the “list grew like crazy,” Munir said. Most of the foreigners that Munir and the Americans were hunting had moved into Pakistan between December 2001 and April 2002, having escaped from the American bombing campaign at Tora Bora and the Shah-i-Kot Valley, in eastern Afghanistan. They were Arabs and Uzbeks and Chechens and natives of other Central Asian countries. Some were looking to make their way back to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Some were simply looking for a new home and began laying down roots by marrying local Pashtun women.

  Each day the ISI and CIA operatives in Peshawar would pore over a thick stack of transcripts from intercepted conversations and then use the intelligence to plan raids to capture militants in and around Peshawar. The intelligence from the intercepts went only so far, and with a soda-straw view of the war, the spies in Peshawar sometimes made arrests they would never have made if they’d had access to more information. Once, in June 2003, they traced the cell phone of an Algerian operative, Adil Hadi al Jaza’iri, to a large public swimming pool near Peshawar. When they arrived there they found more than a hundred men in the pool. Without a photograph of al Jaza’iri there was no way they could make the arrest. One of the ISI operatives called the phone number they suspected belonged to al Jaza’iri and watched as a bearded man swam to the side of the pool to pick up his ringing cell phone. A team of Peshawar policemen rushed to the man, dripping wet in his swimsuit.