Hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban supporters across the border were starting a campaign of attacks against the Shkin area, he said. Their aim was to attack the American base—the compound had come under repeated rocket attacks in recent weeks, he said—but insurgents were also threatening any Afghans working with U.S. forces or the Karzai government. The death of the American soldier, killed when his night patrol surprised insurgents smuggling rockets across the border, was just one sign of the growing threat.
Engineer Amin’s concern was visible; shadows from sleeplessness ringed his eyes. He moved only with well-armed bodyguards. He did not want to meet us in his home, arranging instead for me to interview him in a house some distance from Shkin, out of sight. His home had come under rocket attack twice in previous weeks.
Fliers scattered in the bazaar had warned townspeople not to collaborate with the Americans. One letter named Engineer Amin as a key collaborator and offered a bounty of ten thousand dollars to anyone who killed him. The engineer’s father and brother, who opposed his work with Karzai’s government, had left for Pakistan after the first rocket attack, but his wife, children, and cousins remained at home, he said.
Over the next few days in Shkin, I met a number of people from Pakistan’s tribal regions of North and South Waziristan just over the border. The Wazir tribe, which gives its name to the two regions, lives on both sides of the border, and people move freely across the unmarked frontier. These men told me of their fears that war was brewing in their region. Hundreds of foreign fighters and al Qaeda members who had fled Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 had settled on the Pakistani side, guests of tribesmen who had fought in Afghanistan with the Taliban. No one questioned their presence at first. They were fellow Muslims, mujahideen, and esteemed as such.
But in recent months, they had started mobilizing for war and threatening those who got in their way, the tribesmen told me. I spoke to one tribal elder from South Waziristan who gave his name as Reghduanullah. He described Arabs, Africans, and Central Asians, men from Sudan, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Muslim regions of Russia and China. They would visit the central bazaar in his town, Wana. They were equipped with walkie-talkies, carried assault rifles and grenades, and were always accompanied by the armed Pashtuns who were hosting them, he said. To anyone who asked, they vowed to continue the fight against U.S. forces: “We swore we would fight against the Americans until they leave Afghanistan or we die. We will not give up our holy war against America.” The fighters were planning operations in Afghanistan, and more volunteers were arriving to join them to fight Americans, Reghduanullah said. The leaders were Taliban mullahs and were telling people if they killed an American, they would go to paradise, but if they so much as met with an American, they would be branded an infidel.
The tribesmen I interviewed told me of six men who had been recently murdered in South Waziristan because they were suspected American informants. One of them had been killed on the road from the border. His killers had daubed a message on a nearby bridge: “We have killed a spy of America, he had dollars, an expensive watch and a GPS reader.” No one dared bury the body. That alone was shocking in a culture that placed high importance on respect for the dead and performing a Muslim burial.
The men said that tribal elders and Pakistani government and intelligence officials were sympathetic to the foreign fighters. They were tipping them off ahead of government raids so they could avoid capture, and allowing them to cross the border on frequent incursions into Afghanistan. “Until all these refugees leave the place we will not have peace,” an elder from Shakai warned.
In the months that followed, the attacks around Shkin increased. Small groups of guerrillas, among them foreign fighters, would stage hit-and-run ambushes and then escape back across the border into Pakistan. Two U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush on August 31, 2003. Two months later, at the end of October, two CIA agents were killed in another attack in the same border area. Coalition forces clashed with militants around Shkin that same day and said they killed eighteen, among them foreign fighters. It prompted the U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan to describe Shkin as the “most evil place in Afghanistan.”2
It was no secret to anyone in the border region that Taliban and al Qaeda fighters had escaped into Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. By the end of 2003, Pakistan claimed to have captured no fewer than 450 al Qaeda members—almost half of whom were Yemenis and Saudis. By 2006, the official count would grow to 709, although the numbers were impossible to verify since the government never showed the detainees to journalists or independent observers.3 Rarely mentioned was the huge number still at large in the tribal areas who were settling down to stay. Officials denied their existence. Few people dared talk about them. One former legislator and Pashtun nationalist leader, Mahmood Khan Achakzai, a longtime opponent of Islamists in the Pakistan military establishment, did speak out. “This regime has handed over the entire tribal belt to al Qaeda,” he told me in 2003.4
By the beginning of that year, reports started to trickle out that militant training camps were forming along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Afghan security forces were capturing poorly trained insurgents who talked of receiving only a week or so of preparation. An Iraqi with a suicide vest, caught trying to blow up the vice president’s motorcade, said he had been in a training camp in Pakistan-administered Kashmir for four months. The United Nations reported that al Qaeda was operating mobile training camps in eastern Afghanistan. In February 2003, I traveled east to the province of Khost, which borders Pakistan and serves as one of the main crossing points from Pakistan’s tribal regions into Afghanistan. Police on the border told me that they were hearing from informants that there was a camp for insurgents called Dewabi, just across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and another called Ettebad, near the capital, Islamabad. According to their informants, anyone who went there for training to fight in Afghanistan was promised Pakistani citizenship. It reminded me of ethnic Uighurs from China whom I had once met on a bus to Kashgar in 1990. They were Muslims from China’s western province of Xinjiang sent by their parents to obtain a religious education in Pakistan since such study was restricted in China. This group was returning home after months in various madrassas in Pakistan, topped off with a month’s “jihad” training in Afghanistan. They had been issued brand-new Pakistani passports, which they proudly showed me. They were part of a covert Pakistani government-sanctioned program that was creating an army of mujahideen and spreading Islamist ideology to Central Asia and beyond. Figures in Saudi Arabia had long encouraged and funded the spread of their brand of Sunni Islamist teaching; this was proof Pakistan was doing the same.
In the police station in Zazi-Maidan, a nineteenth-century mud-brick fort with thick, white-washed walls, the district commander told me that militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had been moving covertly through the district to garner support for an insurgency. Hekmatyar told his recruits that al Qaeda was with him. The official showed me the fliers he had left behind.
Publicly Pakistani officials denied that foreign militants were sheltering in the tribal areas in the same way that they denied Taliban members were hiding in Quetta. Foreign journalists were soon banned from traveling to Pakistan’s tribal areas—ostensibly for our safety but almost certainly to prevent us from reporting. We had to rely on secondhand accounts. Pakistani journalists were able to report from the region but had to tread carefully. A growing number of journalists lost their lives over the years covering the tribal areas, as both the military and militants sought to control the flow of information. Pakistani officials undoubtedly knew about the foreign fighters. A former senior ISI official who served in the North West Frontier province and the tribal areas told me years later that his agency had estimated there was a minimum of a thousand foreign fighters in the Waziristan area in the spring of 2002.5 Yet in internal discussions, officials had often played down the threat, whether out of sympathy for the Islamist fighters or from a reluctance to confront the probl
em.
By 2004, Musharraf had a personal incentive to go after foreign militants in the tribal areas. In December 2003, he narrowly escaped two assassination attempts. Both attacks tried to blow up his motorcade near his military headquarters in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, first with a bomb under a bridge and eleven days later with two suicide attackers driving truck bombs. Musharraf survived only thanks to electronic jammers and his armor-plated car.
The investigation into the attacks revealed that the instigator was a Libyan member of al Qaeda operating from Pakistan’s tribal areas. Al Qaeda was opposed to Musharraf for cooperating with the United States against it. Two important findings should have set alarm bells ringing for Pakistan’s generals. One was that al Qaeda had spread its tentacles into the Pakistani armed forces, even recruiting conspirators from army special forces as well as the air force. The second was that al Qaeda had maintained its operational expertise. The two assassination attempts were run by separate cells, unknown to each other, and planning was decentralized.
In early 2004, Musharraf ordered a large military operation to root out militants in a fifty-square-mile area of South Waziristan. What happened next astounded the Pakistani public and broke wide open the scale and ambition of the foreign militants in the tribal areas.
Two thousand troops moved into an area west of Wana in South Waziristan to conduct a sweep for foreign fighters reported to be sheltering there. The particular target was a twenty-six-year-old tribesman, Nek Mohammad, and his uncles, who had gained renown fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviets. The family were the main hosts of al Qaeda in the tribal areas after 2001. The Frontier Corps, the tribal paramilitary force that polices the border areas, spearheaded the operation with support from the army. On March 16, 2004, a group of three hundred men from the South Waziristan Scouts regiment went to Kaloosha, a village in Asam Warsak near the Afghan border. Nek Mohammad was thought to be housing up to twenty-five foreign militants in a large, mud-walled farmstead. Villages in the green Wana Valley are spread out, and farmhouses stand alone, or in small clusters, among fields and apple orchards against a backdrop of bare, craggy mountains. As in Afghanistan, the houses consist of a series of rooms and outbuildings around courtyards, surrounded by strong outer walls creating large, protected compounds.
The scouts moved toward the compound at 6:30 in the morning. Their plan was to set up a cordon, then call on the tribesmen and ask their cooperation in handing over any foreigners. As they were approaching, a motorcyclist came out of the compound, spotted them, and zipped back inside. A few minutes later, a pickup truck of armed fighters roared out of the compound and barreled through the government cordon, shooting as they went. At the same moment, gunmen opened fire from positions behind the scouts’ lines. The pickup truck crashed into a nearby building, but its riders escaped as gunfire erupted from all sides. Tribesmen rallied from all around when they heard government troops were attacking a family of their own community. The fighting grew so ferocious that the scouts were nearly overwhelmed and had to call for reinforcements. They took refuge in the village mosque, and the commander of the unit, a Pakistani colonel, had to be protected by village elders.
Fighting erupted in three different places that day in reaction to the military operation. The militants had prepared fortifications. They ran through trenches and tunnels between compounds—one tunnel was a mile long—and used radios to coordinate. At one point, some of them were heard calling for help in a foreign language to evacuate their wounded leader, whom they called the Sheikh. The Pakistani army struggled to gain the upper hand over the next few days, and resorted to artillery and airstrikes. One airborne assault unit, dropped in by helicopter, was surrounded and cut down as soon as it landed. A supply convoy was attacked and burned east of Wana as it traveled toward the battle area.
The scouts had stumbled upon one of the most experienced and motivated groups of foreign fighters: the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They were members of the same organization that had precipitated the prisoner uprising at Qala-i-Janghi in 2001, and that had shot down U.S. helicopters in the mountains of Shahikot during Operation Anaconda. Fearful of capture and deportation home, where they faced torture or death, they were fighting for survival.
Their leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was a charismatic Muslim preacher who had cofounded the movement. (His cofounder, Juma Namangani, had been killed in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 as were hundreds of followers.) The remnants of the group made their way to Pakistan and regrouped in South Waziristan in 2002. Yuldashev soon became a well-known figure among the tribesmen of Waziristan. He gave fiery speeches in local mosques and was respected for his religious learning. When news spread that day in 2004 that Yuldashev was wounded, many local tribesmen rushed to his defense.
The government forces could barely manage the ferocity of the resistance. Although the militants lost more men—thirty-two, twenty-seven of whom were foreigners, compared to sixteen for the government—Pakistani forces took an unexpected mauling over the next ten days, losing fifty-four more men by the operation’s end. Another twenty soldiers and two government officials were taken hostage. The militants threatened to execute them if the army did not withdraw from the area. Soon, militants left eight of those soldiers in a ditch, shot in the head with their hands tied. To compound the army’s humiliation, the deputy head of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, released an audio message to the Arabic television station Al Jazeera calling on members of the Pakistani army to turn against Musharraf and refuse orders to fight.
After two weeks, the military claimed it had captured seventy-three foreigners and killed over fifty militants across an area of fifty square miles. Yet in the end it decided to sue for peace and withdraw its forces, in return for the twelve soldiers still being held hostage. A month later, on April 24, 2004, Lieutenant General Safdar Hussain, the overall commander for the tribal areas, embraced the militant leader Nek Mohammad at a peace ceremony before hundreds of tribesmen from the Shakai area, the untamed mountains stretching toward Afghanistan. The agreement was a capitulation by the government: Nek Mohammad and his group agreed to curb attacks in their area, and the army agreed not to pursue them. The foreign fighters, still estimated to number three to four hundred, would be allowed to remain in South Waziristan with only a fig-leaf concession: they were supposed to register with the authorities within a week.
Even that weak agreement failed to hold. It was the first of half a dozen peace agreements over the next three years between the Pakistani government and the armed fighters and their respective tribes. Each time, the military seemed to be wooing the militants, and the fighters only became bolder. They soon clashed again with the Pakistani army and the Frontier Corps.
It was clear already then that the influx of foreign fighters was radicalizing the Pashtun tribesmen among whom they lived, and was drawing them into confrontation with the Pakistani state. The foreign fighters and al Qaeda wanted the tribal areas for themselves as a free zone where they could train fighters and plan operations. Yet instead of removing the foreigners or containing their extremist influence, Pakistan’s generals sought to use them and direct their zeal across the border against the American and NATO presence in Afghanistan. General Hussain, the man who had entered the first agreement with the militants, had told the Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain a year before the Kaloosha operation that he expected, and wanted, to see American forces bogged down in a guerrilla war in Afghanistan.6
By 2004, General Musharraf was walking an increasingly difficult tightrope between the demands of Washington and Western countries for action against terrorism and the generals and religious groups at home who were pushing back against his pro-American agenda. Musharraf had demanded economic and political concessions from the United States in return for his cooperation after 9/11. On the economic side, Musharraf got what he wanted. He received large amounts of financial assistance including a lifting of sanctions, debt relief, and reimbursements for the cost of military operations
along the Afghan border. From 2001 to 2013, Pakistan received nearly $26 billion in assistance from the United States, a large portion of it defense-related, which helped to provide handsome assistance and equipment for the army.
Yet on Afghanistan, Musharraf’s demands were not heeded. He had wanted to keep the Northern Alliance from gaining any power, since they were no friend of Pakistan’s, but with the Taliban gone, they were the strongest force in the country and took power in Kabul. The Bush administration and British troops in Kabul accepted them as a reality. Karzai understood where local power lay and worked with the main Northern Alliance leaders since they possessed military muscle and political networks, which meant in due course they could deliver votes in elections. For Pakistan, it was the worst possible scenario. Islamabad had supported the Taliban regime in order to maintain influence in Afghanistan. Overnight, Islamabad lost what it had worked for over two decades to build.
The Wrong Enemy Page 11