by Steve Coll
In the summer of 2012, Hamid Karzai informed Nabil that he had decided that N.D.S. directors should limit their service to two years. (This would prevent spy chiefs from becoming too powerful.) Nabil accepted the decision. Karzai appointed Asadullah Khalid, the longtime C.I.A. ally, as his successor. Khalid had overseen torture and rough detention for a decade in various posts, going back to his tour as governor of Ghazni Province in 2002, according to various published reports. He had diverse enemies. In December, a suicide bomber met him at a guesthouse in Kabul and detonated his explosives. Khalid was seriously wounded but survived. The N.D.S. eventually concluded that the attack stemmed from a long-term dispute with an Afghan family, dating to Khalid’s service as governor in Ghazni. Hamid Karzai was reluctant to remove Khalid from N.D.S. leadership while he recovered from his wounds, but by the summer of 2013, the lack of active leadership at the service had become a problem. Even healthy, Khalid remained a rough “one-man band,” as the American embassy had once described him. The Afghan security forces were preparing in late 2013 to take charge of the war from N.A.T.O. Preparations had started for a presidential election in 2014 that would inevitably take place in the midst of violence. N.D.S. needed a devoted, round-the-clock leader. Eventually, Karzai asked Nabil to return as “acting” director.3
After the fiasco concerning the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, the Obama administration essentially abandoned peace negotiations with the enemy and turned attention to a different field of Afghan politics, the election contest to succeed Hamid Karzai. In October, the Afghan government announced eleven candidates who had qualified to run for president. These included three Pashtuns who had served Karzai at the Arg. Two of them were technocrats who had returned to Afghanistan from the West after 2001 and had worked as ministers: Zalmai Rassoul and Ashraf Ghani. The third was Gul Agha Sherzai, the Barakzai strongman. Also in the field was the runner-up from 2009, Abdullah Abdullah, the eye doctor who had been close to Ahmad Shah Massoud. Abdullah had swallowed his ire about electoral fraud in 2009 in the hope that his time would come in 2014. Yet the intensification of ethnic divisions among Afghanistan’s elites meant that Abdullah, who was of mixed family heritage but was identified with the Northern Alliance, would inevitably face a Pashtun rival. The question was whether this rival would be Rassoul, Ghani, or Sherzai.
Hamid Karzai had been reelected in 2009 while his network of Pashtun supporters in the war-ravaged south rigged ballot boxes there. The problems that had given rise to fraud in 2009 had not been solved since then. Election supervisors were politicized and allied with Karzai. The systems to prevent fraud schemes from the process of voter registration right through to counting ballots remained vulnerable. And the map of Afghanistan’s violence meant that voters in Pashtun areas, where the Taliban had the greatest influence, would have more trouble getting to the polls than citizens in non-Pashtun areas. During 2009, violence and voter alienation produced turnout rates of 10 percent or less in some districts of Kandahar and Helmand. The likelihood that this would be repeated in 2014 provided a motivation for Pashtun leaders to embrace fraud schemes to counterbalance the problems of Pashtun access to the polls. It seemed clear that Karzai or his network could mobilize a fraud campaign similar to the one carried out in 2009 on behalf of any successor Karzai designated. Skillfully, late in 2013 and into 2014, Karzai withheld his endorsement. He stated that he planned to leave politics and retire in Kabul after his successor’s election but Afghan politicians took it for granted that Karzai would remain active and influential, not least to protect his family’s interests and his own. This logic suggested that the final choice would come down to Rassoul or Ghani. (Karzai had pushed Gul Agha Sherzai out of the race in 2009 and he remained a wild card, an independent power.) Karzai hinted to numerous visitors that he would back Rassoul, and several candidates who dropped out early in 2014 endorsed Rassoul, but in the end Karzai appeared to shift his support to Ghani.4
On April 5, 2014, millions of Afghans cast their ballots. Election officials reported 6.6 million votes, a turnout better than in 2009 yet well below 50 percent, even before accounting for the likelihood that, as in 2009, a million or more votes were fraudulent. Abdullah won 45 percent, just under the 50-plus-1 percent he required to avoid a second round of voting. Ghani finished second with 31 percent; Rassoul was third with 11 percent. Abdullah had reason to be encouraged. Although he drew his greatest support from Tajik and Hazara areas, the distribution of his votes showed that he had national, cross-ethnic appeal. Yet Pashtun voters had split their support among several candidates. In the second round, if they united around Ghani, the remaining Pashtun candidate, they might overtake Abdullah’s advantage.
At N.D.S., after receiving tips about wrongdoing, Nabil’s intelligence officers listened to the telephone conversations and monitored the text messages of the election’s supervisors and those of powerful Afghan politicians. The intelligence officers could clearly hear these election officials and politicians organizing fraud on a large scale. Nabil brought the evidence to Karzai. The president told him to eavesdrop further, to document what Karzai assumed to be an American conspiracy to interfere with the vote. Karzai didn’t know what Washington was trying to accomplish with its intrigues, but after his experience with Holbrooke and other officials in 2009, he readily assumed that the Obama administration was manipulating Afghan politics. Karzai wanted to know “how the U.S. is interfering, whom they are contacting, who is contacting them, and what they are saying.”5
When N.D.S. officers tapped the phone of Ziaul Haq Amarkhel, the secretary of the Independent Election Commission, which was supposed to organize a clean vote, the officers heard him talking not to American diplomats, but to colleagues in various provinces, apparently instructing them to organize fraud at Abdullah’s expense, as Nabil interpreted it. In one conversation, Amarkhel allegedly told provincial officials to “take sheep to the mountains, stuff them, and bring them back,” which N.D.S. interpreted as code for ballot stuffing. Later police found Amarkhel traveling with thousands of blank election ballots.6
Nabil worried that if the election collapsed amid fraud allegations, Karzai would blame him and N.D.S. for not warning him. At a National Security Council meeting, Nabil decided to show his hand. “Mr. President,” he said in front of Karzai and aides, “I have almost five thousand SIGINT” conversations on file of election officials and allies that show patterns of fraud. Karzai asked for specifics. Nabil retrieved a dozen audio files and transcripts as examples. Karzai seemed to worry about whether Nabil might be part of the American conspiracy that he perceived. In any event, he told the N.D.S. director to take his evidence to Amarkhel’s boss, Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, the chief of the Independent Election Commission. But the matter stalled. Finally, a Tajik N.D.S. officer involved in the eavesdropping, deeply offended by the ethnic slurs he overheard, decided to act on his own. He copied some of the evidence and leaked it to Abdullah.7
On June 14, Afghans voted in the second round. Four days later, Abdullah went public with his fraud evidence and demanded that the Independent Election Commission stop counting ballots. He withdrew his observers from the vote-counting process. Amarkhel resigned, without admitting wrongdoing, but that decision was not enough to settle the matter.
“From today onward, we reject all the decisions and activities of the Independent Election Commission,” Abdullah announced. “They have no intention to assess the fraudulent votes and separate the dirty votes from the clean votes.”8
Abdullah’s rejection of the constitutional process carried an unsubtle warning that his northern backers might seize power in Kabul by force. The campaign devolved day by day toward the incitement of a new round of ethnic civil war, a rerun of the 1990s. Former allies of Ahmad Shah Massoud aligned with Abdullah stoked the flames. Amrullah Saleh publicly called the Independent Election Commission and the Election Complaints Commission “biased, racist, corrupt.” Atta Mohammad Noor, the governor of Balkh Province a
nd perhaps the most powerful officeholder in Abdullah’s camp, prepared to declare “our own legitimate government” led by Abdullah. Facebook and other social media platforms became cauldrons of ethnic slander. Germany warned N.A.T.O. allies that Abdullah’s supporters intended to violently seize government centers in several provinces and that they might then march on the Arg Palace to occupy it by force.9
After thirteen years, the loss of more than a thousand lives, and the expenditure of unfathomable sums of money, the entire American project in Afghanistan looked as if it might terminate in a coup d’état, followed by civil war. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry telephoned Abdullah to urge him to stand down and to wait for Kerry to fly to Kabul to try to sort out a peaceful solution. Kerry issued a public statement warning that “any action to take power by extralegal means will cost Afghanistan the financial and security support of the United States and the international community.” Ján Kubiš, the United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, negotiated with Ghani and Abdullah on a plan to audit suspicious votes. Kerry landed on July 11. The next night, after whirlwind negotiations at the American embassy, Kerry stood between the two contenders at a press conference as they announced agreement on a new vote-counting plan. They also announced a vague plan to share power in a unity government after the count was completed.10
Kerry’s Band-Aid diplomacy barely stuck. The two sides squabbled over the vote-counting process. In mid-August, Governor Noor announced that he would not accept any result short of Abdullah’s victory and vowed to lead a “civil uprising” if the recount did not ratify Abdullah’s election. The C.I.A. quietly arranged, through former officers close to him, for Amrullah Saleh to visit the United States with his family—a cooling-off period during which Saleh could give some private seminars. But the Afghan government continued to crack from within.11
Nabil was among those who feared civil war remained imminent. There were posters in Tajik areas of Kabul declaring Abdullah president. Commanders mobilized armed militias openly in the capital. Nabil assured the American embassy that he would try to keep N.D.S. neutral. He wondered how his service might defend the government from violent collapse if Abdullah’s supporters attempted a coup or if Ghani tried to preempt Abdullah’s supporters violently. Nabil; Rangin Spanta, the national security adviser; Bismillah Khan, the minister of defense; and Umer Daudzai, the minister of interior; discussed the situation. They drafted a statement and discussed holding a press conference where they would declare an interim government, to buy time for the election mess to be sorted out peacefully. Their main concern was to prevent the Afghan army or other security forces from allowing anyone to interfere with the election or push the country toward chaos. Of course, the quartet’s intervention would be a kind of coup d’état as well. Yet if they acted together, they might present a powerful, stabilizing, multiethnic group of technocrats who favored a peaceful resolution: the current head of the military, the head of the police, the head of intelligence, and the government’s senior national security adviser. They agreed that they would not act yet, but would prepare a statement and proceed only “if the situation is getting out of hand,” as Nabil put it, in which case they would “call on people that we should save our country.” As a kind of warning shot, some in the group talked about their plan with Matthew Rosenberg, a reporter for The New York Times.12
“A coterie of powerful Afghan government ministers and officials with strong ties to the security forces are threatening to seize power if an election impasse that has paralyzed the country is not resolved soon,” Rosenberg wrote on August 18. Furious, Karzai expelled Rosenberg from the country, informing him that he had been declared a spy with “secret relations.” Police escorted the journalist onto a plane. I.S.A.F.’s new commanding general, Joseph Dunford, warned the quartet that if they followed through on their plan, the United States would treat them no differently than the Taliban—as enemies of the state.13
Day after day, in four prefabricated warehouses off the highway from Kabul to Jalalabad, the Independent Election Commission oversaw the ballot audit Kerry had negotiated. Ballot boxes stacked six high lined the walls of the Quonset huts. At long plastic tables sat observers from the Abdullah campaign, the Ghani campaign, the international community, and Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission. Each plastic box of ballots had a sticker on it indicating its origins. The ballots themselves were blue, four inches by five inches, with pictures of the candidates and the visual symbols they had chosen to represent them in a still largely illiterate society. (Ghani chose a Koran, Abdullah an image of pen and paper.) Many of the ballot reviews went smoothly, but heated arguments, even fistfights, erupted periodically at the compound. On August 19, protesters swarmed the site, and thugs battled with knives and brass knuckles outside.14
The more time passed, the more evident it became that the ballot audit would not resolve the crisis. Ghani’s surge of votes in the second round from Pashtun areas racked by violence was inherently suspect. Some analysts guessed that if all the fraud could be identified accurately, Abdullah would have won the election, but not every international analyst agreed. Yet the full audit showed that Ghani had won. It was not released for fear that it would touch off violence, a decision Ghani accepted. In late August, Abdullah again threatened to withdraw from the process. On September 6, Obama again called both candidates to urge them to honor the agreement to finish the count and then form a unity government in which Ghani and Abdullah would share power. The president of the United States was holding Afghanistan together by sheer willpower, one phone call and threat at a time, but the political sand castle his administration had helped to construct in Kabul still appeared to be crumbling.
That same day, September 6, across the border in Pakistan, another mutiny erupted, against the Pakistani military. Thirteen years earlier, on the eve of the American-led attack on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Vice President Dick Cheney had warned that a new war in South Asia might lead to such instability that the Pakistan Army could lose control over the country’s nuclear weapons. Then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had called this the “nightmare scenario.” Now the scenario appeared to be drawing closer to reality.15
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Zeeshan Rafiq joined the Pakistan Navy as a lieutenant in 2008. He first went to sea two years later, as part of Combined Task Force 150, a twenty-five-nation sea patrol operation that deployed ships from Karachi into the Arabian Sea on counterterrorism and antipiracy missions. The coalition’s participants included Pakistan, the United States, and N.A.T.O. navies. Rafiq chose his country’s navy after “listening to patriotic songs,” and he was motivated to serve. But after a few years, he came to think that the Pakistani military had become “the right hand of these infidel forces” and that his country’s generals and admirals “follow American diktats. One signal from America and the entire Pakistan Army prostrates before them,” he reflected.16
Rafiq once watched an American soldier board a Pakistan Navy ship. Everyone addressed him as “sir” and he was accorded the protocol of an officer even though he was just an enlisted man. In the war between the Muslim faithful and the infidels, Rafiq wondered, “Which side is Pakistan’s army on?” The generals who ran his country assisted in the “carpet bombing” of Afghanistan. They turned air bases over to the C.I.A. for drone attacks against Muslims. Rafiq read Inspire, Anwar Al-Awlaki’s English-language Internet magazine. He studied the biographies of Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, and Nidal Hasan, the major who went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. He wanted to do something to remind “mujahids around the world” that it was important to “break the grip of infidels over our seas.”17
Rafiq discovered that another serving Pakistan Navy lieutenant based in Karachi, Owais Jakhrani, who was from Baluchistan, felt similarly. Jakhrani’s father was a senior officer in Pakistan’s national police. The son nonetheless came to believe that his country had become a slave state of
America. Jakhrani’s radicalization manifested itself as complaints to navy officers that the service was insufficiently Islamic; an internal investigation of him led to his dismissal.18
Sometime during 2014, Jakhrani and Rafiq made contact with Al Qaeda in Waziristan. After Osama Bin Laden’s death, his longtime Egyptian deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, succeeded him. Zawahiri issued occasional pronouncements but kept a low profile, to avoid Bin Laden’s fate. Al Qaeda’s local network increasingly consisted of Pakistani militants who had drifted toward the organization and its brand name from other violent groups based in Punjab and Kashmir. One of the leaders of this less Arab, more subcontinent-focused Al Qaeda fought under the name Asim Umar. His real name, according to the investigations of Indian police and intelligence agencies, was Asim Sanaullah Haq, originally an Indian citizen in the state of Uttar Pradesh. He left there in the mid-1990s and ended up in Pakistan, where he joined Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin before moving toward Al Qaeda. During 2014, Rafiq and Jakhrani met him and explained that they could mobilize a sizable group of sympathizers and seize control of an armed Pakistan Navy ship, and then use it to attack the enemies of Islam.
The Pakistan Navy was not merely a conventional surface fleet; it was part of the country’s systems of nuclear deterrence. In 2012, Pakistan launched a Naval Strategic Forces Command, meaning a command focused on the deployment of nuclear weapons at sea. The country’s military leadership sought to develop a nuclear “triad,” akin to that deployed by the United States: that is, systems that would allow the firing of nuclear arms from aircraft, from land bases, or from the sea. The advantage of a triad is that it makes it difficult for an adversary that also has nuclear arms to launch a preemptive strike, because at least some of the targeted country’s dispersed nukes and delivery systems would likely survive and could be used in retaliation. While developing their triads, the United States, Russia, Britain, and France placed special emphasis on submarines armed with nuclear missiles because these stealthy undersea vessels would be particularly hard for an enemy to locate and destroy during a first strike. Pakistan had not yet acquired and deployed enough high-quality submarines to place the sea leg of its nuclear triad only with those vessels. Analysts assumed that Pakistan would also consider placing nuclear weapons aboard navy ships that carried cruise missiles with enough range to reach India, which of course was by far the most likely adversary to enter into a nuclear war with Pakistan.19