At the end of the interview, when my notebook was closed and we were chatting before saying goodbye, the commander explained how the Taliban maintained its control over the rural population: “We just have to kill two people, and the village is in our hands.”
The Taliban’s capacity for ruthlessness was undimmed, but would it remain a winning formula, I wondered. It was clear to me that the surge had dealt a potentially fatal blow to the Taliban. It would take them years to regain the position they had held in Kandahar in 2010. Would the Taliban return from this setback, or would the Afghan government be able to hold them at bay this time? I asked the man who had helped to arrange the meeting, a trusted acquaintance who was from the area and knew the Taliban and the local people intimately. Would people start helping the Taliban again? I asked. “No,” he said. “It’s over.”
There remained, of course, the other great question mark, that of the other enemy, the one behind so much of the insurgents’ power. As the landowner from Sangesar, Mohammad Nabi, told me, it all depended on how strongly America wanted to defend Afghanistan. “If the Americans leave now it will be a big mistake. If in two years they leave and the Afghan security forces are not ready, we will see the Taliban back,” he told me. Above all, he worried that America was not putting pressure on Pakistan, and Pakistan was not giving up its support for the Taliban. When Taliban fighters escaped to Pakistan during the surge of 2010, Pakistan forced them to go back into Afghanistan to continue fighting. “Still now the Pakistanis are very serious.”
13
Osama’s Safe Haven
“In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog.”
—Ejaz Shah, former domestic intelligence chief
When he was about to deploy as the chief U.S. military representative to Pakistan in 2006, Major General James “Ron” Helmly called on a senior military officer for a chat. The officer explained to him that Pakistan was no conventional ally. If Osama bin Laden walked into President Musharraf’s office to give himself up, the officer told Helmly, the Pakistani leader would excuse himself and call the American ambassador and tell him, “Come quick, I am having a bad dream.” General Helmly’s face twisted when he told me that story several years later. It was hard for a military man to accept that your ally would rather not capture your enemy for you.
Pakistan had often complained that America was a fickle friend, showering it with financial assistance and military cooperation when it needed something but then cutting off the aid and slamming on sanctions when it did not. That is certainly true. The United States should have built a relationship with Pakistan for the long term that encouraged democratic and economic development. Pakistan was the junior partner in the relationship but no less fickle, even while receiving billions of dollars of aid and enjoying the status of major non-NATO ally. For surely the ultimate test of loyalty is this: Are you harboring my enemy? Are you trying to hurt me?
An extraordinary test of Pakistan’s relationship with America surfaced suddenly in public when the world learned where Osama bin Laden had been hiding. To the end of his life, bin Laden had been trying to organize plots against the United States, urging militant leaders not to attack Pakistani targets but rather focus their energies against America. So, did Pakistan knowingly shelter Osama bin Laden?
May 2011. The road was sealed off by the army, so we left the car and walked down a side street. The dirt road wound past several walled houses and a small village corner shop where we bought some cartons of fruit juice. It was early summer, but the weather in Pakistan was already hot. Police stopped us as the road opened out into fields, so we took another side street and crossed an open plot of land, walking a plank to pass over a stinking drainage ditch. We were in Bilal town, a neighborhood on the edge of Abbottabad, where new houses were going up piecemeal on agricultural land fringing the town. The roads were unpaved and houses were dotted unevenly among fields of young wheat and vegetables.
We walked along a track and there it was: Osama bin Laden’s house, not a palace as we had been told, but a utilitarian, three-story concrete building, mostly concealed behind a twelve-foot-high gray cement wall, topped with rusting strands of barbed wire. The upper floor was visible but gave away few secrets. There were only a few, tiny windows, and the top terrace was closed in with a cement wall. This was where bin Laden had been hiding for nearly six years, cloistered in seclusion with three of his four wives and over a dozen children and grandchildren. Here, in a top floor bedroom, U.S. Navy SEAL commandos had shot him dead thirty hours earlier.
A police officer stopped us from approaching the house. We stood around chatting with him. He was as intrigued as we were about the whole event. The police had received calls from people living near the compound on the night of May 2, he said. They reported explosions and shooting, but the commanders had ordered the police to stand down and let the army deal with it. Yet army and intelligence operatives arrived too late to catch the U.S. SEALs during their forty minutes on the ground. The officer said that if the police had acted on those first telephone calls, they could have reached the scene while the American commandos were still there.
We were pondering this when suddenly the cordon was lifted, and the officer led us up to the walls of the house. The compound was still out of bounds, but the people living in the surrounding houses had been allowed out of their homes for the first time since the raid. They were agog with the news of their notorious neighbor.
After ten years of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and tracking bin Laden, I was also fascinated to see where and how he had been hiding, just forty miles from the capital, Islamabad. He had dispensed with the large entourage of Arab bodyguards and mujahideen that had surrounded him in Afghanistan. For nearly eight years, living in the nearby town of Haripur and then Abbottabad, he had relied on just two trusted Pakistanis, Abrar and Ibrahim. American investigators described them as a courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and his brother. Both men lived in rooms in the same compound with their wives and children, providing the cover of a typical extended Pakistani family.
Inside these walls, bin Laden lived a strange life, cut off from his war comrades, surrounded with women and young children and only his adult son, Khalid, as a male companion. He had spent hours ensconced in a small room with computers and a television but no Internet or phone lines. He continued to lead al Qaeda but mostly at one remove, sending messages that were stored on flash drives and computer disks, carried out by his courier and passed on and disseminated by others. He followed world events on a satellite television and through information brought back on flash drives by the courier.
American officials released a video found in the house of bin Laden sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, a wool cap on his head, watching videos of himself on a small television set. The officials said that he seems to have spent hours on the computer reading news and information about the world outside, and drafting letters and directives to militant leaders around the world. A billionaire’s son, he had always tended toward the ascetic life, but he ended up living very modestly, with sixteen family members sharing ten cramped, cheaply furnished rooms. The man who had relished riding horses and hiking trails with the mujahideen in Afghanistan had been confined to pacing in the small kitchen garden planted with poplar trees. He was fifty-four at the time of his death. He had married five times and divorced once, in keeping with Islamic law that allows a man to have four wives at any one time.
Three of his wives were living with him in Abbottabad in 2011: Khairiah, Siham, both Saudi nationals, and Amal al-Sadah, a twenty-nine-year-old Yemeni, twenty-five years his junior, whom he married in the months before 9/11. His family had scattered after 9/11, but I was surprised at how many relatives bin Laden had around him. His first wife, his Syrian cousin Najwa, who bore him twelve children, had left him in the days before 9/11 and returned to Syria. His second wife, Khadijah, a well-educated Saudi, had requested a divorce in the mid-nineties when they had lived in Sudan.1 Three of his grown
children were also in the house, twenty-four-year-old Khalid who was killed in the raid, two daughters, and at least nine smaller children, five of them born to Amal in Pakistan since 9/11.2 They had lived frugally, and Pakistani investigators said the children were hungry and poorly clothed when they took them into custody after the raid.
The courier, al-Kuwaiti, had bought four adjoining plots of land in 2004 and 2005, and built the house over the next year. He chose well. Abbottabad is a quiet town, surrounded by green hills and favored by Pakistanis for retirement and vacation homes because of its pleasant climate. Founded by a Major Abbott in the time of the British Raj, it is home to the elite Kakul Military Academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, as well as several army battalions. Because of its military institutions and secret nuclear installations nearby, military security was always high in the town. The town was out of reach of U.S. drones, which were not permitted to fly beyond the immediate border areas.
Bin Laden and his couriers practiced careful operational security. The house had no communication lines that could be tapped, and he used no satellite or cell phone to contact al Qaeda members that could be traced through global positioning. Al-Kuwaiti only ever switched on his cell phone after driving an hour away from Abbottabad, to avoid being traced to the town, American intelligence officials later said. The family had other cell phones in the house for everyday use, however, and Pakistani intelligence picked up one phone call from the compound in 2004, which it passed on to U.S. investigators. At the time, the Pakistani officers thought it was connected to Abu Faraj al-Libi, al Qaeda’s operational chief, who they suspected was in the area. (They captured al-Libi in Mardan, a town not far away from Abbottabad, in 2005.) Two cell phone calls were made to Saudi Arabia from the house, which Pakistani officials appear to have ignored, Afghan intelligence officials told me. Afghan intelligence had also been tipped off about the house and alerted their American counterparts. They thought that Mullah Kabir, a prominent Afghan Taliban leader, lived there.
The courier and his brother provided good cover for the larger bin Laden family hidden inside. They were known to their neighbors as Arshad and Tareq Khan, and they often strolled along the street in the evening with their small children, chatting with neighbors. They were friendly and courteous. They attended the local mosque and funerals in the neighborhood, but otherwise kept to themselves behind the high compound walls. Their children rarely played outside, unusual in a country where children spend most of their time running around in the streets and neighborhoods unsupervised. Women living nearby told me that when neighborhood boys let a ball fly into the compound by mistake, the owners gave them fifty rupees, less than a dollar, to buy a new one rather than let them in to retrieve it. Even when the boys started throwing balls in on purpose, the owners kept paying, one young woman told me, laughing.
The strict seclusion of the family was accepted by the neighbors. Pashtuns, especially from the tribal areas, are known to guard their privacy fiercely, and often have mortal enemies from a family or tribal dispute. “We thought maybe they had killed someone back in their village or something like that and were therefore very cautious,” said a neighbor, an engineer who gave his name only as Zaheer. The brothers, both in their thirties, offered various explanations to the neighbors about their comparative wealth, once saying their uncle had a hotel in Dubai, another time that they worked in a foreign exchange business. They said they came from Charsadda, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier province.
The courier and his brother were in fact protégés and friends since childhood of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of bin Laden’s senior lieutenants and the chief plotter of 9/11. They were raised in the same Pakistani immigrant circle in Kuwait as he was. Originally from Shangla, high up in the Swat Valley, the family were members of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate Jamaat-e-Islami. Their father, a Muslim cleric known as Manjawor Khan, had emigrated to Kuwait in the 1970s. The brothers worked with bin Laden and Mohammed in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the years before 2001. When Ibrahim married a girl from Shangla in 2001, the wedding was held in Mohammed’s house in Karachi. The two brothers, and Abrar’s wife, were killed in the raid.
The house had a telling nickname. It was known as the Waziristan haveli, or Waziristan mansion, a house where people from the tribal region lived or congregated. It was said that wounded fighters were brought from Waziristan to recuperate there. I was told this by Musharraf’s former civilian intelligence chief, Ejaz Shah. Ejaz Shah himself has been accused of having a hand in hiding bin Laden in Abbottabad. He denied any involvement. But he did not absolve local intelligence agents who, he said, would have certainly checked the place in order to know who was inside and who was being treated there. All over the country, Pakistan’s various intelligence agencies, the ISI, the Intelligence Bureau, and Military Intelligence, keep safe houses for undercover operations. They use residential houses, often in quiet, secure neighborhoods, with discreet security, high walls, and armed guards, where they lodge people for interrogation, investigation, or just enforced seclusion. Detainees have been questioned by FBI officials in such places, and sometimes held for months. They are provided relative comfort compared to a jail cell: often a bedroom and attached bathroom but no legal rights or judicial procedure. Leaders of banned militant groups are often placed in protective custody in this way. Others, including the Afghan Taliban leaders who took refuge in Pakistan after the fall of their government in 2001, lived under a looser arrangement, in premises with their own guards but known to their Pakistani handlers, former Pakistani officials told me. Because of Pakistan’s long practice of covertly supporting militant groups, the police have learned to leave such safe houses well alone. Police officers were warned off or even demoted for getting in the way of ISI operations.
The ISI was also compartmentalized. I gained some insight when reporting on the ISI with a colleague, David Rohde, in 2007. A former senior intelligence official who had worked on tracking down al Qaeda members after 9/11 told us that one part of the ISI was engaged in hunting down militants, while another part continued to work with them. He described how, when arrests were requested, the police refused to carry them out in some cases until they received written orders, believing the militants were still protected by the ISI, as they had been for years.
The Waziristan haveli was not an ISI safe house as such—it would have had armed guards, and bin Laden would have been under strict control, a retired ISI official told me. Bin Laden’s house operated more like a militants’ safe house, with the inhabitants managing their own security inside but covertly protected. A signal from someone inside one of the intelligence services that it was a safe house, to be left alone, or simply the presumption that it was by police and local officials, would have been enough to prevent closer inspection.
Almost incredibly, bin Laden’s house stood within a few hundred yards of the brick perimeter walls of the Kakul Military Academy. Few in Pakistan therefore believed that the military did not know who was living in the house, or that the military could have slept through the raid on the night of May 2, 2011, and failed to apprehend the Americans during their forty minutes on the ground. The army chief attended officers’ graduation parades there twice a year. Military cadets used to pass near the house on regular marathon runs. Pakistani helicopters sometimes flew straight over the house. Militant attacks on military personnel, including on training facilities and a cadets’ parade ground, had grown so frequent that all the houses in the surrounding area were checked before each such event. Police and intelligence agencies have informers on every street in the vicinity of the military installations, people who watch for unusual comings and goings. A legislator from Abbottabad told me that the military would send plainclothes agents to check on every house before the visits of the army chief. Yet they would not usually enter houses and search them, unless there was reason to suspect anything untoward. They would rely on paid informers, or interview householders or their staff about who was inside or if the
re were new arrivals.
There can be no doubt that if there were local rumors about the Waziristan haveli, and if it housed wounded militants, local security officers would have had wind of it. That they did not check on the inmates was almost certainly because someone from within the security agencies vouched for the place. An ex-military officer once explained to me how to deal with the ISI: you just need to have one person inside the agency looking out for you, and that protected you from all others. Taliban and others who fought in Afghanistan, and in Kashmir, had always received protection and medical treatment in Pakistan with the tacit approval of Pakistani state agencies. There is a hospital, called the Imdad, in Quetta where wounded Taliban fighters are treated. It is a large, prominent building, known to everyone. The place is guarded by private guards. Members of the public are not permitted to enter. Men from Waziristan who had been wounded in Afghanistan would be afforded the same protection.
Still, in trying to prove that the ISI knew bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I initially struggled to do more than piece together circumstantial evidence and indirect suppositions from sources who had no direct knowledge. Only after badgering everyone I met did I finally uncover a bombshell. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle the al Qaeda leader. It was operated independently, headed by an officer who made his own decisions. He did not have to pass things by a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden. What he did was of course wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the ISI. Such is how super-secret intelligence units operate. But the top bosses knew about the desk, I was told.3
The Wrong Enemy Page 29