Descent Into Chaos (44 page)

KSM had narrowly evaded capture several times.
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A Pakistani Baloch who had grown up in Kuwait and studied mechanical engineering in North Carolina, in the 1980s he arrived in Peshawar to join the anti-Soviet war and became private secretary to the Wahhabi Mujahedin leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, now allied to Karzai. A master of disguises who held twenty different passports and spoke four languages, KSM had been the first to suggest the idea of the 9/11 plot to Osama bin Laden. He had built up extensive links with Pakistani extremists, who now provided al Qaeda with a support network. In July 2004, Pakistani extremists murdered Raja Saqlain, the police officer who arrested KSM in 2003.
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After 9/11 KSM had ordered his operatives to go after soft Western targets. A Jewish synagogue in Tunisia was bombed in April 2002. Twenty-one people, including fourteen German tourists, were killed. There were the lethal bombings on the island of Bali in October 2002, which killed 190 people. After his capture, the CIA raced to make him talk quickly, and within days there were red alerts in several countries, including one at Heathrow Airport, near London. His capture led to suspicions of his links within the Pakistan army because he had stayed in a secure military housing estate in Rawalpindi. His host there was Ahmed Abdul Qadoos, whose mother was an activist of the Jamiat-e-Islami and whose brother was a major serving in Kohat, close to the Afghan border; Qadoos was swiftly arrested.

The Jamiat connection with al Qaeda proved deeply contentious. The Jamiat is Pakistan’s most ideological Islamic party, with close links to the army and the ISI. On behalf of the ISI it had spawned numerous extremist groups to fight in Kashmir and had twice helped the military undermine the government of Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s. Opposition politicians alleged that the Jamiat was protecting al Qaeda militants. Several alleged militants had been arrested from Jamiat members’ homes in Karachi and Lahore, while the Jamiat leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, denied that al Qaeda even existed.

With its closest political ally under withering media criticism, on March 12 the ISI gave an unprecedented briefing to Pakistani newspaper editors, telling them that the Jamiat had no links with al Qaeda and that they should stop writing about such allegations. There was silence from Washington.

To this day none of the Islamic parties making up the MMA acknowledge the existence of al Qaeda and they maintain that 9 /11 was carried out by the CIA and Israel. MMA leaders go unquestioned by Musharraf and the military when they insist that the “war on terrorism” is an American fiction created by Bush because he hates Muslims. Al Qaeda’s attacks after 9/11 in Pakistan and abroad would have been impossible without the support network provided by Pakistani extremist groups and individual militants from mainstream Islamic parties such as the Jamiat-e-Islami. Even Musharraf acknowledges the links in his biography. “Al’ Qaeda provided the money, weapons and equipment and the local organizations provided the manpower and motivation to actually execute the attacks,” Musharraf writes.
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The Pakistani government also made no attempt to contain the inflammatory jihadi literature that flooded the country after 9/11. Some forty publications with a circulation of over one million were published by extremist groups. Lashkar-e-Tayyaba claimed that its weekly newspaper had a print run of more than one hundred thousand copies and it continued to publish gory accounts of suicide bombers killed in Kashmir.
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Other publications by Sunni extremist groups spewed hatred against Shias, claiming they were apostates. The two main Sunni extremist groups, Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet) and its splinter Lashkar-e -Jhangvi (the Army of Jhangvi), launched a bloody sectarian war against the minority Shia population. These two Sunni groups who had fought for the Taliban and carried out massacres of Afghan Shias became a mainstay of al Qaeda planning in Pakistan.

Sipah-e-Sahaba was founded in 1985 with the aim of turning Pakistan into a Sunni state. Several splinter groups broke away from it, each more vicious than the one before. The last to do so was Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which was set up in 1996 by Riaz Basra, who was based in Taliban-controlled Kabul. Although the military regime had declared war on all sectarian groups, the ISI still pursued a dual-track policy. In 2002 Sipah’s leader, Maulana Azam Tariq, was freed from jail, where he had faced multiple murder charges, and allowed to contest the general elections on the condition that he would support the regime—which he did until he was assassinated two years later.
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The bloodiest sectarian attacks took place in Quetta, where Taliban leaders now lived and where Pakistani Shia Hazaras were recruited as interpreters by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. On June 8, 2003, eleven Hazara policemen were shot dead by gunmen believed to be from Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The same group was responsible for the March 2, 2004, massacre of a procession for the Muslim holy day of Ashura in Quetta, which left 47 people dead and 150 wounded.
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On the same day in Iraq, 180 Shias were killed by Sunni extremists in another Ashura procession. In May 2004 a massive bomb explosion in a Shia mosque in Karachi killed 16 worshippers. The blast followed the assassination of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai by suspected Shia militants in an escalating tit-for-tat war. Shamzai had headed the Deobandi madrassa in Binori Town, made famous by the Taliban leaders who had studied there, and was the notorious figure who had gone to Kandahar with the ISI chief after 9/11 and urged Mullah Omar to resist the U.S. invasion.
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The marginalization of mainstream political parties and the boost to religious parties given by military rule had fueled sectarianism in Pakistan.
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Although the army had banned all sectarian groups after 9/11, Musharraf had legitimized Sunni extremism by endorsing Azam Tariq. Other Islamic groups banned by the government or named as terrorist organizations by the United States, Britain, and the UN continued to be granted special favors. In March 2003 the government allowed the banned Lashkar-e-Tayyaba to organize the Defense of the Ummah Conference in Islamabad, in which speakers called for jihad. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba leader Hafiz Saeed condoned suicide bombings and urged fighters to go to Iraq—where at least seven Lashkar members were killed in 2003. Hafiz Saeed told his followers, “The powerful Western world is terrorizing the Muslims. We are being invaded, humiliated, manipulated and looted. How else can we respond but through jihad? . . . We must fight against the evil trio, America, Israel and India. Suicide missions are in accordance with Islam. In fact a suicide attack is the best form of jihad.”
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Most Pakistanis were appalled at these double standards being carried out by the military. There was increasing cynicism among them when Musharraf toured world capitals and lectured Western leaders about the need for a moderate and enlightened Islam when just the opposite was happening at home. A senior official of the Interior Ministry complained to me in May 2003 that some five thousand militants were operating in FATA—Federally Administered Tribal Areas, adjacent to Afghanistan— but the ISI had told the ministry to ignore them. A UN report to the UN Security Council described militants streaming into new training camps in Waziristan: “Particularly disturbing about this trend is the fact that new volunteers are making their way to these camps, increasing the number of would-be terrorists and the long-term capabilities of the network,” said the report.
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By the summer of 2003, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were becoming deeply frustrated. “Pakistani border troops have been given orders to allow extremists to cross into Afghanistan and then help them return home by giving them covering fire,” a U.S. military officer told me in Bagram. Maj.-Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned, “Hot pursuit would probably be my last resort.”
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Karzai was frustrated with the Americans because no senior U.S. official was criticizing Islamabad for allowing the Taliban to operate out of Pakistan. On a visit to Islamabad in April 2003, Karzai gave Musharraf a list of Taliban commanders allegedly living openly in Quetta. Musharraf was furious and denied that there was such a list.

Meanwhile, Islamabad stepped up criticism of the Kabul regime for allowing Indian influence to grow in Afghanistan, asking why Kabul had allowed Indian consulates to be opened in Kandahar and Jalalabad, adjacent to the Pakistan border. New Delhi said it had reopened only the four consulates it had before 1979, including those in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, just as Pakistan and Iran had reopened their consulates in the same cities. However, Musharraf was blunt in his accusations: “India’s motivation in Afghanistan is very clear, nothing further than upsetting Pakistan. Why should they have consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar, what is their interest? There is no interest other than disturbing Pakistan, doing something against Pakistan.”
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Despite the army’s attempts to deflect the real issues of terrorism taking root along Pakistan’s border region, Musharraf faced low-key pressure from Washington to move troops into South Waziristan and combat al Qaeda. Occasionally the simmering tensions between the two countries erupted into the open. “I personally believe that President Musharraf is genuine when he assists us in the tribal areas . . . but I don’t think that affection for working with us extends up and down the rank and file of the Pakistani security community,” Richard Armitage admitted on October 1.
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Islamabad retorted angrily, forcing Armitage to backtrack when he visited Islamabad a few days later. He now said that Pakistan’s security forces were “two hundred percent” behind Musharraf.
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This American shadowboxing at the expense of Afghanistan made Karzai and the Afghans increasingly angry.

The Pakistan army continued to patronize extremist groups in the country even though such groups had been banned. After the U.S. embassy received threats from one group in November, U.S. ambassador Nancy Powell publicly warned the regime that these groups posed a serious threat. . . . “These banned groups are re-establishing themselves with new names.” Musharraf promptly banned the same three extremist groups he had banned two years earlier but that had reappeared under new names.
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Yet even as Musharraf remained soft on banning the extremists, they were planning deadly attacks against him. Al Qaeda leaders had issued unambiguous threats to kill him. In October 2002, bin Laden had called on “my Pakistani Muslim brothers . . . to get rid of the shameful Musharraf.”
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A year later Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Pakistanis to “unite and cooperate to topple this traitor and install a sincere leadership that would defend Islam and Muslims.”
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For months there was talk in extremist circles about plans to kill Musharraf.

On December 14, 2003, the day Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq, a massive bomb exploded under a bridge in Rawalpindi just thirty seconds after Musharraf’s convoy had driven across it. The heavily guarded bridge was just a mile from the army’s general headquarters and Musharraf’s home, yet militants were able to spend several days undetected tying explosives to the bridge’s pylons. Musharraf’s life was saved only by a jamming device in his car provided by the FBI, which momentarily blocked off all telephone signals, thereby delaying the explosion.

A week later there was an even more determined attack. On Christmas Day two suicide bombers rammed their explosives-packed cars into Musharraf’s convoy as he was returning home for lunch—just a few hundred yards from the first attack. Musharraf was hit by flying glass as his car windscreen shattered. Fifteen people were killed and fifty were wounded. Human body parts littered the highway. The face of one suicide bomber was lifted clean off his severed head and flattened against a nearby roof. The two suicide bombers were soon identified. One was Mohammed Jamil, twenty-three, a member of Jaish-e-Mohammed who had fought with the Taliban. On his return home in April 2002 he had been interrogated by the ISI, who had declared him “white,” or safe. Found in the debris was the memory chip from Jamil’s mobile phone, which showed that he had made one hundred calls before his death, including one to a policeman who told him about the timing of Musharraf’s convoy.

The second suicide bomber was identified as Hazir Sultan, forty-two, who had also fought with the Taliban. Both men had received their explosives from an al Qaeda camp in South Waziristan. The very men whom the army had encouraged to fight for the Taliban were now returning to haunt them. The profiles of the two men were a clear example of how terrorist networks partially created by the ISI remained intimately linked and how little had been done by the regime to break them up. At one time or another these two men had been engaged with al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Kashmiri militants, Pakistani extremist groups, and dissidents in the armed forces of Pakistan. The attacks shocked the world because they demonstrated the worst-case scenario: disaffected military personnel on the inside linked to terrorist groups on the outside. Only a handful of military officers knew the route and timing of Musharraf’s travel plans or which of his several identical armored-plated cars he would be using.

After the attacks Musharraf carried out a widespread reshuffling in the army high command, including appointing Maj.-Gen. Nadeem Taj, a close confidant, as head of military intelligence, which now oversaw Musharraf’s personal security. The extremist threat within the armed forces was growing. In August, after an FBI tip-off, five officers had been arrested for suspected links to al Qaeda. They included a lieutenant-colonel and a major serving on the Afghan border.
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More than 150 police and security personnel were arrested and interrogated after the December attacks. Eventually six air force noncommissioned officers, several military personnel, and civilians were tried in a secret court-martial for the two assassination bids. It was alleged that the terrorists had been trying to kill Musharraf for the previous eighteen months. There was such secrecy around the trial that even the number of accused was never made public by the army, although twelve suspects were found guilty and given the death sentence in 2006.
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