by Steve Coll
It would require C.I.A. mission managers several more years of intensive drone operations in the tribal areas before they reduced such mistakes to rarities. Because drones could dwell above a target for hours or days, multiple analysts usually had time to confirm that a target was appropriate. Yet the available record suggests that D’Andrea oversaw a relatively indiscriminate first season of strikes in F.A.T.A. before experience and improved technology reduced child and civilian deaths. The essential problem was that without reliable human agents reporting in real time on the ground from a village or town under surveillance, video imagery and fragmentary phone intercepts could not in every instance clarify the identities of the individuals being surveyed for death. And because the C.I.A.’s targeting rules had deliberately been loosened to allow drone strikes that more resembled conventional Air Force bombing, the risk of error expanded. Just as had been the case during the botched Mullah Mohammad Omar drone operation in the fall of 2001, secrecy rules meant pilots and sensor operators at Creech had no access to the details of C.I.A. intelligence. That left the pilots as trigger pullers following orders. The pilots could certainly object and hold off if they saw women and children in the target area, but where the imagery might be ambiguous they had to rely on superiors’ understanding of secret intelligence they could not access.22
The larger question involved the strategic impact of ramped-up Predator attacks. Steve Kappes and other C.I.A. operations veterans referred to armed drones as a “homeland security weapon.” They meant it could be effective as a tactic against terrorists identified as active plotters against American targets. They pointed out, however, that Predator strikes did not constitute a strategy to stop the sweep of terrorism or the attraction of dangerous numbers of young men to a jihadist cause larger than themselves.
In Pakistan, it soon became evident that the tactical punch of the C.I.A.’s secret air war had to be weighed against the boomerang effect on Pakistani political and public opinion. As evidence of civilian casualties mounted, Pakistani media publicized the strikes critically, perhaps encouraged by I.S.I.’s media wing. Of course, any country with free media would protest attacks on its territory that killed innocents, and when the attacking country was the United States—a hyperpower, seemingly unaccountable—the outrage and resistance within Pakistan was hardly surprising. The American attitude was We are not asking for permission. Patterson and the C.I.A. station briefed diverse Pakistani officials about the new American “strike policy.” The briefings were declarations—not requests for acquiescence—sweetened with pledges of cooperation and expressions of appreciation for Pakistan’s partnership.23
On November 19, C.I.A. drone operators strayed outside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the authorized flight corridors previously agreed with Kayani to unleash missiles on a compound in Bannu, in the “settled areas” of Pakistan. The strike reportedly killed a Saudi leader of Al Qaeda, another Arab, two Turkmen, and a local militant. Like the September Special Operations raid on Angoor Adda, the attack on mainland Pakistan visibly challenged the government’s sovereignty and stretched the tolerance even of sympathetic civilian Pakistani politicians, never mind nationalists like Pasha. GIVE U.S. AN INCH AND IT’LL TAKE A MILE blared a typical headline after the dead and wounded were hauled from the rubble. Zardari, normally cooperative, told visiting American generals that month that he “did not mind paying the price for high-value targets, but it did not appear that Osama Bin Laden had been in your sights lately.” The United States had never scored well in public opinion surveys in Pakistan, but its favorability ratings were sinking toward new lows, in the single digits, below India’s.24
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Lute presented the Afghan review’s findings to Bush and the National Security Council in late November, before Thanksgiving.
“Putting counterinsurgency in front of counterterrorism as a priority is a significant shift,” Gates observed. “That’s an entirely different ball game in terms of resources.” He worried that if too many U.S. troops poured into Afghanistan now, they would be seen as the Soviets were, provoking deeper resistance. “The Afghan Army must gain the ability and numbers” to do the job, he said.
“Is that realistic?” Bush asked.
“The Afghan Army is getting there,” Lute advised, “but the police are a long way off.”
Bush returned to the central logic problem: The review proposed new investments of American blood and treasure to stabilize Afghanistan, yet Al Qaeda was in Pakistan, as was the Taliban’s leadership.
“Targeting is ongoing in Waziristan,” Lute said, referring to the C.I.A.’s stepped-up drone program, but Quetta, where the Taliban leadership resided, “is going untouched.”
“Is Quetta a realistic goal?” Bush asked.
“We need to get Pakistani concurrence,” C.I.A. director Michael Hayden argued. “Quetta is considered part of Pakistan proper. What goes on in Waziristan and the other tribal areas is much more of a gray area. I make no apologies for them, but for the Pak Army, the Quetta Shura is a strategic hedge against our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and they aren’t likely to go after them anytime soon.”
“Can’t we get after them unilaterally?” Bush pressed.
“Sir, buildings blowing up in the midst of one of Pakistan’s major cities is a lot different than an isolated mud hut getting struck out in the mountains somewhere,” Hayden answered.
For American forces to go into Quetta on the ground, even with Pakistani cooperation, if it could somehow be obtained, “will be like taking on the Mafia on their home turf. Everyone will know you’re coming, and it won’t be pretty,” Hayden continued. They would have to accept that outside the F.A.T.A., they were dependent on Pakistan.25
Bush approved the report but told his cabinet that he wanted to identify only those recommendations that required immediate action. Steve Hadley checked with the incoming Obama team, and they signaled that they “preferred that we pass along our report quietly.” Lute briefed Obama’s transition team, but they were noncommittal about the recommendations for more troops and money. Of course, Lute did not expect Obama’s advisers to exclaim, “Thank God, Bush just gave us the answers.”26
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Peace be upon you.”
“How are you?” Sajid Mir, a commander in Lashkar-e-Taiba, the I.S.I.-nurtured force that sought the liberation of Kashmir from India, spoke by telephone from Karachi to a terrorist in the midst of a two-day assault on Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Sajid had grown up in Karachi. His father worked in Saudi Arabia, where he visited frequently. He was a worldly man who had traveled to Dubai, Qatar, Syria, Thailand, and Canada; he carried multiple passports and used several aliases.
“Doing well,” the commander’s fighter in Mumbai said.
“What are the conditions, brother?”
“It’s normal at our end for the time being.”
“Is there any firing?”
“No, not towards us . . .”
“Should they keep the hostages or kill them?” Sajid appeared to pose the question to a colleague with him in the Karachi command center.
“Kill them,” the colleague instructed.
“Okay, listen,” Sajid continued.
“Yes, yes.”
“Uh, get rid of them right now. Rid yourself of them, friend. . . . Do it, do it. I said, I’m listening, do it.”
“Should we open fire?”
“Yeah, do it. Make him sit, have him face the front and place it on the back side of his head, then shoot.”27
Ten heavily armed Pakistani citizens landed after dark on Mumbai’s Nariman Point on November 23, 2008, only hours after Bush approved the new Afghan war strategy review. The terrorists had been trained for three months at two Lashkar camps, one in Karachi and the other near Thatta, in Sindh Province. Trainers told the volunteers initially that they would fight their way to escape following their raid on Mumbai. L
ater, in September 2008, the plan changed. Now they would fight to the death. A Lashkar commander “thought this plan was better because it would cause the boys to fight harder.”
Hafez Saeed, the spiritual and political leader of Lashkar, which he had founded in the 1980s as the armed wing of a proselytizing movement, delivered motivational lectures to the ten boys, alongside Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Lashkar’s military commander. Lakhvi’s black beard fell to his chest; he had at least eight children by three wives, and one of his sons had died fighting in Kashmir. Saeed assured the boys “that being shot would feel like a pin prick, blood stains would be like rose petals, and that angels would come down to take their souls.”28
After two failed attempts, the squad departed Karachi by boat on November 22, hijacked an Indian fishing vessel, murdered four of the crew, and ordered the captain to navigate to Mumbai. Four miles offshore, they murdered the captain and loaded weapons into their dinghy. Onshore they split into five teams of two. Their initial targets included a synagogue, a café, a large railway station, and two seaside luxury hotels, the Oberoi-Trident Hotel and the Taj Mahal Hotel. They terrorized hostages before murdering them. The siege lasted more than forty-eight hours, the most dramatic and sophisticated televised terrorist attack worldwide since September 11. The raiding team killed at least 166 people, the great majority civilians, including 6 Americans, one of them a thirteen-year-old girl. Nine of the 10 terrorists died; Indian police arrested the survivor, Ajmal Kasab, whom they soon identified as a Pakistani from the Punjab.
American and allied spy services had run intercept coverage of the communications between the attackers and their handlers in Karachi. An international team of intelligence leaders specializing in South Asia, including the acting C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, arranged a meeting at I.S.I. and drove to the Pakistani service’s headquarters carrying maps and link charts depicting the calls between the attackers and phone numbers in Pakistan. The charts included some numbers associated with known I.S.I. officers. They met the major general who ran I.S.I.’s analysis directorate.29
The exchange unfolded along familiar lines. The I.S.I. general opened with denial and defensive accusations that India was inventing lies about the Mumbai evidence to besmirch Pakistan. “I’m surprised and disappointed that you believe this Indian propaganda” was the thrust of his initial argument. Then the visitors laid out their evidence. The general backed up to a secondary defense: “We will both have to investigate this.”30
Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, was away. Gerry Feierstein, her deputy, and the acting C.I.A. station chief soon met Kayani and Pasha. Kayani said that the government of Pakistan “had nothing to do with the matter.” He denounced India’s “rush to judgment about the details of the case” and said that as a former intelligence chief, “he would never have suggested that he could offer up an analysis of the events so quickly after they concluded.”31
Yet the evidence made it all but certain that Lashkar had been responsible, and Lashkar was effectively a paramilitary arm of the Pakistani state. It had been officially banned in 2002, under U.S. pressure, and had reorganized under a new name, but although some of its ranks had become so radical that they had joined violent jihad against Pakistan, the group remained cooperative with I.S.I. It had collaborated closely with Directorate S on training and cross-border attacks for more than a decade. Indian counterintelligence files in Kashmir brimmed with transcripts of cross-border communications during violent attacks. Lashkar had tens of thousands of members in Pakistan and its infrastructure in the country was open and unmolested—its successor after the ban maintained a large campus just outside Lahore, ran schools and hospitals, and maintained bank accounts as if it were a legitimate nongovernmental organization. The sophistication of the Mumbai assault required planning and resources that Lashkar possessed.
Pasha arrested Lakhvi, the Lashkar military chief, and interrogated him about the attack’s history. The Americans asked for direct access to the prisoner. Pasha held them at bay. Eventually, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. would document that several retired or active I.S.I. officers had planned and funded the Mumbai operation. They learned this primarily through the confessions of David Headley, a Pakistani American involved in the plot. He was arrested in the United States and cooperated.
Born Daood Gilani in Washington, D.C., Headley grew up in Pakistan and joined Lashkar after the September 11 attacks. At a mosque, he met Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, a retired Pakistani major. Syed, who went by “Pasha,” had once been active with Lashkar but disagreed with what he regarded as its relatively soft approach to jihad. He regarded Lakhvi as an I.S.I. puppet, and he joined debates among Lashkar cadres about whether it was permissible to assassinate Pervez Musharraf. Lakhvi told them that their loose talk had reached I.S.I., which was “annoyed.” Eventually, Pasha joined a more independent jihadi group led by Ilyas Kashmiri, an ambitious radical who operated out of the tribal areas. During this period, the Pakistani cells surveyed diverse targets inside India. Lakhvi plotted an extravagant attack on the Indian Military Academy at Dehradun. One squad would attack cadets during morning exercises and a second would go inside and recover the pistol surrendered to India by Pakistan’s commanding general at the end of the 1971 war. It was the terrorist equivalent of a fraternity raid, but Lakhvi thought it would thrill I.S.I. The plan fell apart when local conspirators were arrested.
In 2006, Headley traveled with his friend Pasha to Khyber Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He was stopped and interrogated by a Pakistani officer who identified himself as Major Ali. Headley explained to Ali that Lashkar had trained him for action. Ali asked for his cell phone number. Several days later, another officer, who described himself as Major Iqbal, telephoned. Headley became Iqbal’s espionage agent, on behalf of I.S.I. Iqbal gave Headley a total of about $30,000 for expenses and trained him in intelligence tradecraft, “including spotting and assessing people, recognizing Indian military insignia and movements, dead drops and pick up points, and clandestine photography.” Under Iqbal’s direction, Headley used his American passport to travel to Mumbai five times to survey targets by videotape and to mark potential landing zones with G.P.S. equipment. Headley eventually identified an I.S.I. colonel and an I.S.I. brigadier who worked the account out of Muzzafarabad, the capital of the section of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan.32
Even as it became fully evident that I.S.I. officers had cooked up the Mumbai attack, the scale of its provocation presented a puzzle. Directorate S’s strike on the Indian embassy in Kabul the previous summer might be rationalized as a warning or reprisal shot against an Indian government target. The Mumbai attack was a Hollywood-inspired terrorist extravaganza that would delegitimize Pakistan abroad and risked igniting a nuclear war. Who in the Pakistani establishment or in active command at I.S.I. could have thought that was a winning idea? Kayani was clearly responsible for the broad contours of I.S.I. covert policy in Afghanistan and Kashmir, but it was not easy to believe that he would have sat down, ticked through military and political calculations, and ordered an attack of this scale and character.
Kayani and Pasha had replaced General Akhtar at Directorate S just weeks before the Mumbai attack. The scale of the covert and militant networks I.S.I. sought to manage or influence was mind-boggling. American intelligence reporting put the total number of armed militants in Pakistan at about 100,000 and estimated that I.S.I. ran 128 different training camps and facilities.
London and Washington continued to hopefully regard Pasha as the “broom,” as British foreign secretary David Miliband put it that December, a modernizing leader who would sweep in reform at the spy service. The American hypothesis, too, was that Mumbai offered a perhaps constructive shock to the system Pasha had inherited. Zardari encouraged such thinking: The overreach of the Mumbai attack offered his civilian government a rare opportunity to seize control of I.S.I. and “strike at my enemies,” he told the Americans.33
An intelligence study of the Mumbai attack carried out by the United States and allied services concluded that the cabal of retired officers working with the Lashkar units and Hafez Saeed believed they had been given strategic direction from the top to pressure India. The purpose of such pressure, Indian officials firmly believed, was to undermine their booming economy, which was leading India to separate from Pakistan year by year in wealth and power. The Mumbai attack would make it appear to the world that India was not a rising power but a fragile state. Yet the retired I.S.I. officers had not cleared the audacious scale of the Mumbai operation with superiors, the analysis concluded. “The clearance rules have changed” was the sardonic line C.I.A. and British operations officers used with one another to explain what happens when a semiauthorized covert action goes wrong. That is, actions that might have been authorized if they had succeeded become unauthorized when they don’t.34