A Rope and a Prayer (26 page)

After the convoy disappears, Badruddin seems amused.

“Do you know who that was?” he asks me.

“No,” I say, playing dumb.

“That was the Pakistani army,” he responds.

Badruddin explains that under a cease-fire agreement between the Taliban and the Pakistani army, all civilians are required to get out of their cars when an army convoy approaches. For Taliban vehicles, though, only the driver has to get out. The practice, I realize, allows the Taliban to hide kidnapping victims and foreign militants from army convoys.

As we continue our journey, we pass a half dozen government checkpoints that have been abandoned by the Frontier Corps, a tribal militia that is supposed to police the tribal areas. Badruddin says that under the cease-fire agreement, only unarmed militia members can stand at the checkpoints. He is correct. As we drive, I occasionally see members of the militia standing on the side of the road without guns. Some casually chat with local tribesmen.

The trip confirms suspicions I have long harbored as a reporter. The Haqqanis oversee a sprawling Taliban ministate in North Waziristan with the acquiescence of the Pakistani military. A 2006 truce the Pakistani army signed with militants has given them complete control of North Waziristan. Repeated Pakistani army claims to the contrary are false. The Haqqanis are so confident of their control of the area that they take me—a person they consider to be an extraordinarily valuable hostage—on a three-hour drive in broad daylight to shoot a location scene for an outdoor video.

 

 

For years, dozens of Pakistani, Afghan, foreign journalists, and I have written about the systematic takeover of the tribal areas by foreign militants and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. After being driven from Afghanistan by the 2001 American invasion, Uzbek and Arab militants began slowly reorganizing themselves. The foreigners rented compounds from local tribesmen who fought alongside them in Afghanistan, sympathized with their cause, or were in search of money and security. The foreign fighters paid two to three times the normal rate for rent in the impoverished area. The Haqqanis—my kidnappers—welcomed Arabs and Uzbeks.

Surrounded by high mud-brick walls, the Pashtun family compounds are oases of privacy and protection for conservative tribesmen. The high walls prevent strangers from seeing—and dishonoring—Pashtun women and shelter families from attacks from rival clans. They also hide the inhabitants’ identity.

In some ways, the Arabs and Uzbeks are returning home. Many of them used the tribal areas as a base during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. Dozens of Arabs and Uzbeks married local women.

In the spring of 2002, CIA officials began reporting to Pakistani army commanders that large numbers of foreign fighters appeared to be hiding in South Waziristan. Pakistani military officials were skeptical. In an interview nine months before I was kidnapped, a former Pakistani military official who served in the tribal areas told me that he did not believe large numbers of foreign militants had settled there. “There were conflicting figures about the number who crossed the border,” he told me. “Nobody was sure. It was all guesswork.”

General Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai, a tall, commanding Pashtun whose family hailed from the tribal areas, was Pakistani president Musharraf’s main adviser on the issue. After serving as the military commander of the region from 2001 to 2004, he served as its civilian governor from 2006 to 2008. For years, he argued that American officials exaggerated the threat in the tribal areas and that the Pakistani army should avoid sparking a tribal rebellion at all cost.

The former senior Pakistani military official defended the army’s record to me, contending that the Pakistani military had doubled the number of troops in South and North Waziristan from roughly 2,000 to 4,000 in September 2002. He said Pakistani soldiers also pushed into dozens of square miles of “no-go” areas that Pakistani or British forces had never before entered but “found nothing.”

American officials said that Pakistani army sweeps, though, were slow moving and easily circumvented by militants. A former CIA official who served in Islamabad told me that Pakistani generals were “dismissive” of the reports because they feared sparking a tribal rebellion.

“Aurakzai and others didn’t want to believe it because it would have been an inconvenient fact,” the former official recalled. “Going out there, rooting around, trying to root out foreigners was going to cause real problems for them.”

Another American official was blunt. He derided Aurakzai as a “snake oil salesman” and “the Neville Chamberlain of Pakistan,” a reference to the pre-World War II British leader who downplayed the threat from Nazi Germany.

Throughout 2002, officials in Washington largely ignored a chorus of warnings from American officials in Afghanistan that the Pakistani tribal areas were becoming the Afghan Taliban’s new base of operations. Instead, they downplayed the group’s importance and praised the Pakistani government for arresting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan’s major cities.

A conversation with one American diplomat in Islamabad illustrated the mentality. He told me that the Afghan Taliban no longer represented a national security threat to the United States while Al Qaeda remained one. When I contended that the Taliban and Al Qaeda worked closely together, he dismissed my argument.

In December 2002, I visited Miran Shah on a reporting trip. At that time, it was still under Pakistani government control. Escorted by members of the Frontier Corps, the government-paid tribal militia, I found the tribal areas simmering with anger at the United States. On the roads leading to Miran Shah, men carried Kalashnikovs. On the roofs of houses, flags of Pakistan’s hard-line religious parties fluttered. And in front of religious schools, fierce-looking young students strung ropes across the road, stopped cars, and demanded donations.

“Mosques, mosques, mosques,” I scribbled in my notebook. “This is a completely different world.”

We first stopped at a border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan fifteen miles outside Miran Shah. Members of the Frontier Corps went through the motions of checking cars as they rolled across the border. An officer told me it was impossible to control the border because smuggling routes blanketed the surrounding hills.

In Miran Shah itself, I met the Pakistani government-appointed political agent charged with governing North Waziristan. He said anger was simmering in the town because of a recent joint Pakistani-FBI raid on the sprawling Manba Uloom madrassa the Haqqani family had built north of the city in the 1980s. No foreign militants—and no Haqqani family members—had been found.

Rumors abounded that the FBI agents wore boots into madrassas and mosques, an insult and desecration to Pashtuns. Furious local tribesmen fired rockets at an abandoned technical school where the Americans were believed to be staying. Six local tribal elders gathered by the North Waziristan political agent fumed. They denied that any Afghan Taliban or foreign militants were in North Waziristan.

“The Americans have fifteen to twenty times disgraced our soil and our sacred mosques,” one tribal elder told me, vastly exaggerating the number of raids. “They cannot produce a single man from the fourteen or fifteen attempts.”

The elders believed that the American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 had killed 50,000 Afghan women and children. They said the United States had invaded Afghanistan to control the oil and gas riches of the Middle East and Central Asia. Asked about the 9/11 attacks, they said there was no proof who had carried them out.

“People have actually started believing Osama never existed,” one elder told me. “They think it is a conspiracy against us.”

I later learned that Americans—most likely CIA operatives—had, in fact, raided the Haqqani madrassa and found nothing. Before the raid, the Americans intercepted communications in which a local Pakistani official called the madrassa and warned the occupants that the Americans were on their way.

My trip was part of a sophisticated campaign by Musharraf’s government to show that the Afghan Taliban were not using Pakistan as a base. The Pakistani military ferried American journalists, diplomats, and intelligence officials to the tribal areas and told them the area was ungovernable. In many ways, the trips mirrored the tours the Pakistani military conducted in the 1980s for Congressman Wilson and other American government officials. The only difference was the message. Now, the Pakistani military said it could not control the tribal areas.

Evidence that the Afghan Taliban were, in fact, reorganizing inside Pakistan abounded. In September 2003, I interviewed two Afghan Taliban members in the southwestern city of Quetta, which lies several hundred miles south of the tribal areas. Afghan officials had long charged that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was based in the city.

Hajji Abdul Majid denied that the Afghan Taliban were receiving support from Pakistan. A wizened Afghan Taliban commander who had lost his right leg fighting Soviet troops, he appeared completely at ease in Pakistan. He and the other former Taliban commander met me in the basement of the office of a local radio reporter. He predicted the United States would eventually fail in Afghanistan. He said Afghans initially supported the Russians to “take their money” and then turned against them.

“The same case will be the Americans,” the Taliban commander told me confidently. “For two or three years, they will support the Americans for their money but after that they will leave them.”

Hostility toward Westerners simmered in Quetta as well. The same false stories of American bombs killing tens of thousands of civilians swirled. During a subsequent reporting trip to Quetta, a young Pashtun spit in my face as our car drove past a religious school. My translator, who was also a Pashtun, profusely apologized. He was ashamed that a Pashtun would do such a thing.

Complaints that Pakistan was failing to crack down on the Afghan Taliban reached the White House in October 2003. In a principals meeting, American military and diplomatic officials based in Afghanistan said that Pakistan had become a major safe haven for the Afghan Taliban. They presented their argument that Musharraf was playing a “double game,” periodically arresting Al Qaeda members but allowing the Afghan Taliban to regroup on Pakistani territory.

Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage believed the allegations that Musharraf was playing a double game were false. In meetings with senior American officials and interviews with me and other journalists, Musharraf vehemently denied the charges.

Armitage insisted that Musharraf did, in fact, break the ISI’s ties with the Taliban from 2001 to 2005. “There was little contact between the ISI and the Taliban other than liaison,” Armitage told me when I interviewed him for my book.

Armitage said that during those years the administration focused its efforts on persuading Musharraf to end the ISI’s support to two Pakistani militant groups targeting India: Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. The two groups had carried out a December 2001 attack on India’s parliament that nearly sparked a war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

Armitage, who left the Bush administration with Powell in early 2005, said that he believes the ISI reestablished its ties with the Taliban later that year when the ISI saw the Taliban successfully reorganizing and the American-led military effort flagging. “My personal view is that the ISI began increasing support for the Afghan Taliban when they started to see the Talibs regrouping,” Armitage said. “ISI was coming of the view that the coalition might not prevail.”

In 2005, the Haqqani network and other Taliban did gain strength, doubling American deaths in Afghanistan from fifty-two in 2004 to ninety-nine in 2005. American military officials requested permission to carry out commando raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas. Military officials argued that as long as the Taliban safe havens existed in Pakistan, American troops could not stabilize Afghanistan.

American troops carried out two cross-border raids into the tribal areas in 2006 and 2008, but they sparked an immediate outcry from the Pakistani army. Bush opposed further operations inside Pakistan. He worried that unrest could topple Musharraf or derail his personal efforts to persuade the Pakistani leader to take off his military uniform, become a civilian president, and reinstate democracy in Pakistan. As part of his commitment to spreading democracy abroad, Bush had privately and repeatedly lobbied Musharraf—who was both Pakistan’s president and army chief—to resign from his army post and become simply president.

CIA officials based in Pakistan argued that it was far better to have Pakistani troops carry out such operations. The arrival of American troops in the tribal areas would confirm Islamist conspiracy theories that the United States planned to occupy Pakistan, the world’s only predominantly Muslim country with nuclear weapons.

In an attempt to get the Pakistani army to be more aggressive in the tribal areas, the Bush administration backed a loosely monitored billion-dollar-a-year reimbursement program where the United States paid fuel, ammunition, and other costs incurred by Pakistani forces in the tribal areas. The massive program was by far the largest source of American funding to Pakistan.

American military officials detected that the Pakistani military was inflating their claims under the program and receiving tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent reimbursements. They also warned of a more dangerous problem: The Pakistani army was so weak, they warned, that it could not defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda if it confronted them.

For the next three years, that appeared to be true. The Pakistani military fought brief operations against militants in the tribal areas and then struck two peace agreements. Each cease-fire further emboldened the militants, who killed more than 200 tribal elders they saw as potential rivals in 2005 and 2006. The army signed a third and final cease-fire agreement—known as the Waziristan accord—in Miran Shah in September 2006. In exchange for militants promising to halt attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistani army agreed to withdraw its forces from all checkpoints in North Waziristan. The Taliban ministate that I later inhabited was born.