The Battle for Pakistan

by Shuja Nawaz

  0115–0130 Quick Reaction Force, mobile units and Police arrive at the scene

  0207 COAS Kayani speaks to Chief of Air Staff

  0216 Chinook exits, flying straight to Afghanistan

  0226 Black Hawk and refueller Chinook exit

  0250 F-16 gets airborne from Mushaf airbase (formerly Sargodha airbase)

  0300/0310 COAS speaks to the PM Yousaf Raza Gilani and Foreign Secretary

  0500 Admiral Mullen calls the COAS [Kayani and Pasha gave an earlier 3 a.m. time for this call]

  0645 COAS informs President Zardari

  Most of the initial decisions were made by the army, with the air force being drawn into the action by the COAS. (This disconnect between the services in formulating a joint and cohesive policy has been an abiding condition in Pakistan. The air force and navy are seen by the dominant army as merely support services.) The prime minister was informed later on via the Foreign Secretary, and finally the president was informed of the raid. The commission’s draft that was leaked to Al Jazeera gives a critical insight into the testimonies of senior civil and military officials. It reflects a state of disarray and lack of cooperation among various civil and military institutions at both the local and national level, especially on the counter-intelligence front. Even senior members of the air force sparred with each other on the issue of radar coverage of Pakistan’s western approaches.

  The ISI that launched its Counter Terrorism section and later expanded it to a ‘wing’ in 2007 had not originally been tasked for such work but had assumed it would fill the gap left by civilian inaction. It is not clear whether it was the DGCT or the DG, who headed the Directorate S that helped manage the Afghanistan operations, and was the lead agent in the Abbottabad inquiry. Steve Coll gives Directorate S a greater heft in such activities. 64 The DG-ISI reflected on the general lack of confidence in civil competence and the vulnerability of Pakistani officials and members of civil society (especially the media) to bribery and coercion by foreign powers, such as the US. He also, in effect, confirmed the emerging ISI role in policing or arresting individuals, both actions that were not in the agency’s original remit, when he responded to one question by the Commission by stating that only those people feared the ISI who had reason to fear it. 65

  The Commission also exposed the lack of development and growth of strategic thinking among the military, especially in the formulation of a current and effective defence policy. No wonder that the leak of the initial draft of the Commission’s report led to the sealing of its work and nothing more was seen or heard about it. No final report. Nor a hint of the dissenting report that was reportedly written by Amb. Qazi. Many years later, Justice Iqbal, the president of the Commission asked that the report be released. But too many skeletons were stuffed into that cupboard. Like many similar commissions of inquiry, the Abbottabad report was put into deep cold storage. Clearly, the Pakistani state and its military did not trust its general populace or its ability to face the truths that exposed their weaknesses.

  But the awful year, 2011, that produced such deep fissures in the US–Pakistan relationship, still had more surprises in store, even as Pakistan faced internal challenges of its own, produced by both man and Nature.

  5

  Internal Battles

  Even as Pakistan was reeling from the invasion of its territory by US Navy SEALS, three weeks later, on 22 May, roughly a dozen gunmen launched a brazen attack on PNS Mehran, a naval base in Karachi, ostensibly to avenge the killing of bin Laden. Some ten military personnel were killed and twenty wounded, and two US-supplied surveillance airplanes and a helicopter on the base were destroyed. A sixteen-hour battle ensued before Pakistani forces recaptured the base after killing four of the attackers, according to early reports. PNS Mehran had seen an earlier attack near its front gate when a bus carrying naval personnel was attacked on 28 April. So, security ought to have been at a higher level. Yet, the attackers not only managed to penetrate the base, they also took hostages and held the security forces at bay for a long time. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. 1

  Yet, five days later, Syed Saleem Shahzad, an intrepid bureau chief for Asia Times Online in Pakistan, wrote an article challenging the official story. Headlined ‘Al-Qaeda Had Warned of Pakistan Strike’, the article alleged that the attack was not by the TTP or its affiliates but by Al-Qaeda, and resulted from the failure of talks between the authorities and Al-Qaeda on the release of Al-Qaeda sympathizers whom the military had uncovered and taken into custody. He alleged that the military had been penetrated by such elements and cited an anonymous military source:

  ‘Islamic sentiments are common in the armed forces,’ a senior navy official told Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

  ‘We never felt threatened by that. All armed forces around the world, whether American, British or Indian, take some inspiration from religion to motivate their cadre against the enemy . . .,’ the official said.

  ‘Nonetheless, we observed an uneasy grouping on different naval bases in Karachi. While nobody can obstruct armed forces personnel for rendering religious rituals or studying Islam, the grouping [we observed] was against the discipline of the armed forces. That was the beginning of an intelligence operation in the navy to check for unscrupulous activities.’

  The official explained the grouping was against the leadership of the armed forces and opposed to its nexus with the US against Islamic militancy. When some messages were intercepted hinting at attacks on visiting American officials, intelligence had good reason to take action and after careful evaluation at least 10 people—mostly from the lower cadre—were arrested in a series of operations.

  ‘That was the beginning of huge trouble,’ the official said.

  Shahzad went on to report:

  Within a week, insiders at PNS Mehran provided maps, pictures of different exit and entry routes taken in daylight and at night, the location of hangers and details of likely reaction from external security forces.

  As a result, the militants were able to enter the heavily guarded facility where one group targeted the aircraft, a second group took on the first strike force and a third finally escaped with the others providing covering fire. Those who stayed behind were killed. 2

  This story and the release of Shahzad’s book, that detailed infiltration by the militants into the military and alleged links between the ISI and militant organizations, created a public furore and may have raised hackles inside the security services. Shahzad had earlier been approached by the ISI to retract a story on 25 March stating that bin Laden was on the move inside Pakistan and hinting at knowledge of Pakistani intelligence about his movement.

  The next morning, he got a phone call from an officer at the I.S.I., summoning him to the agency’s headquarters, in Aabpara, a neighbourhood in eastern Islamabad. When Shahzad showed up, he was met by three I.S.I. officers. The lead man, he said, was a naval officer, Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir, who serves as the head of the I.S.I.’s media division.

  ‘They were very polite,’ Shahzad told me. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘They don’t shout, they don’t threaten you. This is the way they operate. But they were very angry with me.’ The I.S.I. officers asked him to write a second story, retracting the first. He refused.

  And then Admiral Nazir made a remark so bizarre that Shahzad said he had thought about it every day since. ‘We want the world to believe that Osama is dead,’ Nazir said.

  Bin Laden was still alive, his whereabouts presumably unknown, when that conversation occurred. I pressed Shahzad. What did they mean by that?

  He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder again. ‘They were obviously trying to protect bin Laden,’ he said. ‘Do you think the I.S.I. was hiding bin Laden?’ I asked him.

  Shahzad shrugged again and said yes. But he hadn’t been able to prove it. (The I.S.I. calls this claim an ‘unsubstantiated accusation of a very serious nature.’) 3

  Nine days later Shahza
d disappeared. Two days after that, his badly tortured body was found in a canal near Jhelum. The New York Times reported, ‘Obama administration officials believe that Pakistan‘s powerful spy agency ordered the killing of a Pakistani journalist who had written scathing reports about the infiltration of militants in the country’s military.’ But the Times added: ‘In a statement the day after Mr. Shahzad’s waterlogged body was retrieved from a canal 60 miles from Islamabad, the ISI publicly denied accusations in the Pakistani news media that it had been responsible, calling them “totally unfounded”.’ 4

  The ISI said the journalist’s death was ‘unfortunate and tragic’ and should not be ‘used to target and malign the country’s security agency’. Much later, when I asked a senior Pakistani intelligence official about this murder, he said he had no idea who had done it. ‘Why did you not investigate it in that case, since the ISI was being blamed for it?’ I asked. His answer was a shrug.

  The government came under intense pressure from the journalist community to investigate Shahzad’s murder. On 16 June 2011, ‘the government accepted the demands of journalists and announced the formation of the commission. Headed by Justice Saqib Nisar, the Commission’s other members are Justice Agha Rafiq, Additional IG Punjab Investigation, President of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and the Deputy DIG Federal Police. The commission will complete its report in six weeks.’ 5 From the outset it was mired in controversy since only the Supreme Court Chief Justice can form and announce such a commission. Regardless, the Commission completed its work and issued a 146-page report in January 2012 that offered many suggestions on how to fix the ‘systemic causes of tensions between [intelligence] agencies and the media’, but failed to identify either the motive or the likely suspect behind the murder of Shahzad. Many journalists testified to receiving threats from or being harassed by intelligence agencies. However, both the ‘Military Intelligence [which normally operates only on military matters and is housed in army headquarters] and Intelligence Bureau’ simply notified the Commission that they had nothing to do with Shahzad’s murder and were not questioned further.

  The ISI’s written testimony and replies to the Commission’s questions pointed to Al-Qaeda as the likely suspect, and hinted at an American link given what they thought was undue interest in the case from ‘President Obama to every man worth a name in the US [who] felt disturbed. Was he [Shahzad] a pawn who could be used at appropriate time to further use the US Objectives and create a wedge between establishment [the euphemism in Pakistani parlance for the military and its intelligence agencies] and other segments of society?’ Brig. Zahid Mehmood Khan, of the ISI’s Sector Headquarters, central Islamabad, who delivered some of the ISI rebuttal against charges that his agency was implicated in the murder, also pointed to Shahzad’s contacts with other intelligence agencies from India and the UK. 6 Not surprisingly, the Commission was unable to implicate the ISI. This murder, like many other disappearances and highly public assassinations in Pakistan’s history, remained unsolved.

  It also left an unresolved issue in the fractured relationship between the US and Pakistan and reflected poorly on the lack of ability of the civilian administration in Islamabad at safeguarding the citizens of Pakistan. It also underlined the gap between the government and the autonomous military establishment to which the government had outsourced security issues. Indeed, the PPP government itself felt constantly threatened by the coercive potential power of the military, as other events in 2011 indicated.

  Memogate

  Compounding the difficulties for the Zardari government and especially in its awkward relationship with the military was the emergence of a newspaper column in October 2011 by a Pakistani American businessman, Mansoor Ijaz, that exposed a ‘plot’ involving the Zardari government’s envoy in Washington DC, Husain Haqqani. Ijaz alleged that ‘a senior Pakistani diplomat’ had asked him to convey a message to senior Obama administration national security officials in the form of a memorandum. The aim of the memorandum was to get the US government to intervene and prevent Pakistan’s military from moving against its civilian government in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden assassination. This was to become known in the media as Memogate, an issue that was not fully resolved in the Pakistani courts but provoked a debate that continues to this day.

  Nearly five months after the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden, and just weeks after Admiral Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the US JCS, had given his farewell testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Ijaz, who had been pronouncing on Pakistani and regional issues on broadcast and print media for some years, published an article in the Financial Times of London that alleged that fear of an impending coup by the army in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid led Zardari to send a message via the unsigned memorandum on 9 May to Mullen.

  The memorandum offered a change in Pakistan’s security structure and stance in return for a strong message from Mullen to Gen. Kayani to desist from any move to upend the Zardari government. Specifically, the memorandum, which Ijaz charged was the work of Haqqani, stated that Zardari was willing to offer his American counterparts, among other changes, ‘a new national security team that will eliminate Section S of the ISI [variously known as S Wing or S Directorate] charged with maintaining relations with the Taliban, Haqqani Network, etc. This will dramatically improve relations with Afghanistan.’ Ijaz’s opinion piece stated that ‘Pakistanis are not America’s enemies. Neither is their incompetent toothless civilian government . . . The enemy is the state organ that breeds hatred among Pakistan’s Islamist masses and then uses their thirst for jihad against Pakistan’s neighbours and allies to sate its hunger for power.’ His target was the ISI. 7 Haqqani stated to me that the first he knew of the memorandum was when the Ijaz article appeared in the media, something that Ijaz challenges.

  Ijaz used his friend Gen. Jim Jones, NSA to President Obama, as the conduit to pass on the message to Admiral Mullen. Gen. Jones confirmed this to me in an interview and recalled that he had come to know Ijaz in Europe when Jones was at NATO as SACEUR. He said he had even asked Ijaz to accompany ‘a very large delegation to Afghanistan . . . We became friends’. Jones recalls getting the Ijaz memo at the White House and since it was ‘mostly military, I sent it over to Mike Mullen with a note. Frankly I didn’t think twice about it until this thing blew up. Mike Mullen by then [when the note came to light] was retired. He called me and he said, “Do you remember anything about this?” I said, “Yeah. Mansoor gave me this message. It sounded very strange.”’ To refresh Mullen’s memory, Jones says he rummaged in his files and found the memo and sent it again to Mullen in his retirement home in Annapolis, Maryland. Mullen said that he had not acted on the memo.

  After the memo became public, and media frenzy ensued in Pakistan to understand its origins and authenticity, Ijaz claimed that Zardari’s ambassador, Husain Haqqani, in Washington DC, was the instigator of the memo and had planned to use Ijaz as the cut-out in conveying the message to the US military command. Jones defended Haqqani in his deposition during the subsequent Pakistani Supreme Court inquiry, saying that he believed the memo to have originated with Ijaz. That ended his relationship with Ijaz. 8 Haqqani challenged Ijaz’s veracity and credentials. He says he had known Ijaz since 2002 but had only met Ijaz twice before this Memogate affair. He also said that he was in regular contact with Mullen and others in the US government and did not need a conduit to relay messages to them.

  Ijaz offered me details of their long-standing correspondence dating back to July 2000 and frequent interactions by BlackBerry PIN-based messages, including inviting Haqqani to speak at an Afghan charity event he hosted in New York City, and Haqqani arranging a private one-on-one meeting for Ijaz with Zardari in May 2009 when the president visited Washington for the first time. Haqqani responded that most messages cited by Ijaz were from him to Haqqani and none referred to the memo. Ijaz’s email records showed that more than half of their eighty-two email exchanges (forty-fou
r) during the period July 2000—May 2011 were from Haqqani to Ijaz, the balance from Ijaz to Haqqani. According to Haqqani, official records of Zardari’s Washington visit did not show Ijaz as having met the president, nor did any of the Pakistani presidential staff, including military personnel, confirm such a meeting. Ijaz presented me an email from him to Haqqani of 6 May 2009 thanking him for arranging his meeting with Zardari and apologizing that ‘it was not my best briefing performance’. Haqqani responded from his BlackBerry the same day: ‘Do not worry. You have started a relationship. Will try and sched (sic) new meeting too.’

  The Commission set up by the Supreme Court insisted that Haqqani appear before it in person, which Haqqani refused to do, citing security concerns. Thus, the Commission depended primarily on Ijaz’s account. Ijaz provided the court with numerous friendly messages exchanged with Haqqani over an extended period of time that led the court to accept Ijaz’s contention of a long-standing friendship. Haqqani maintained that Ijaz had put forth unconnected emails and text messages exchanged over a decade as evidence of a close relationship that did not exist. Ijaz stated that he had in fact met Haqqani face-to-face at different events, times and places some seven or eight times since 2000. Ijaz’s BlackBerry was examined by forensic experts to back his claims of frequent communications with Haqqani. Haqqani’s BlackBerry was not made available for examination by forensic experts.