The Longest August (47 page)

After the event, there was much debate as to who was responsible for the failure of the summit. As often happens in long-running disputes, cause and effect get mixed up. The Indians' fixation on cross-border terrorism paralleled the Pakistanis' insistence on treating Kashmir as the core problem. Keen on quashing terrorism by all means, India's top officials missed the logical point that terrorism stemmed from the fact that because of Delhi's obduracy the Kashmir dispute had remained unresolved for sixty-odd years. It followed that cross-frontier terrorism and the unresolved Kashmir problem could not be treated on par. The cause had to precede the result. This plain logic was unacceptable to BJP ministers.

The BJP had been in the forefront of forging strong ties with Israel, which had won Delhi's diplomatic recognition in 1992. During his visit to Israel in June 2000, the BJP home minister Advani had said, “Defeating the designs of our neighbor [Pakistan] who has unleashed cross-border terrorism, illegal infiltration, and border management are concerns that have brought me to Israel.”
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His trip prepared the ground for India's purchase of Israel's surveillance equipment, including thermal sensors and night-vision devices, for use mainly in Kashmir. Later a team of senior Israeli counterterrorism officials toured Indian Kashmir and other areas of endemic antigovernment violence. According to the August 14, 2001, issue of the United Kingdom–based
Jane's Terrorism and Security Monitor,
Israel had posted “several teams” in the Kashmir Valley to train Indian counterinsurgency personnel.
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The next month's shattering attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington strengthened the hands of BJP leaders in Delhi at the expense of Musharraf.

9/11: A Geopolitical Earthquake

The sensational crashing of three passenger aircrafts into two World Trade Center skyscrapers and the Pentagon, along with the failed but fatal hijacking of a fourth plane, on September 11, 2001, led to almost three thousand deaths. It was the most lethal assault from a foreign source the United States had suffered on its mainland. “The deliberate and deadly attacks that were carried out against our country yesterday were more than acts of terror,” said President George W. Bush on September 12. “They were acts of war.”
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He immediately formed a war cabinet.

Among Afghanistan's neighbors, Pakistan mattered most to the United States. Indeed, it was the key state. In the absence of land bases in an adjoining country sharing long borders—which Pakistan did—the Pentagon's options would be severely limited. That in turn would diminish the prospect of a short, successful campaign, which, given the very real prospect of inflaming Muslim opinion worldwide, was essential.

As it happened, on September 11 the ISI head, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, was having a business breakfast with Congressman Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham—respective chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees—when the airplanes struck the towers. Ahmed assured his interlocutors that, when pressured, Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar would hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States.

Goss and Graham were dubious about Ahmed's loyalties. They knew that he had refused to cooperate with an earlier CIA plan to subvert the Taliban by bribing local commanders to desert.
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The next day, accompanied by Maheela Lodhi, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Ahmed found himself facing Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, in the latter's office. According to Lodhi, “The two of them were very tense. Armitage started out by saying, ‘This is a grave moment. History begins today for the United States. We are asking all our friends—you're not the only country we're speaking to—we're asking people whether they're with us or against us.'”
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He then handed Ahmed a list of official demands. Washington's wish list—later published in
The 9/11 Commission Report
—read:

1. Stop Al Qaida operatives at its border and end all logistical support for bin Laden. 2. Give the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations. 3. Provide territorial
access to US and allied military intelligence and other personnel to conduct operations against Al Qaida. 4. Provide the United States with intelligence information. 5. Continue to publicly condemn the terrorist attacks. 6. Cut off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop recruits from going to Afghanistan. 7. If the evidence implicated bin Laden and Al Qaida, and the Taliban continued to harbor them, to break relations with the Taliban government.
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Armitage's document was actually a follow-up to the urgent phone calls that the Bush White House had made earlier to Musharraf, who had agreed to come on board. In his television address on September 13, Musharraf said, “I wish to assure President Bush and the US government of our fullest cooperation in the fight against terrorism.” He immediately froze the assets of the Taliban regime in the State Bank of Pakistan as well as the accounts being used by various Pakistani organizations to fund the Taliban.
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Musharraf's swift and sudden abandoning of his erstwhile policy of sustaining and aiding the Taliban while professing to have scant influence over them was a severe blow to the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Kabul. Since its inception, Pakistan had been not only the chief provider of military supplies, fuel, and food to the Taliban's armed forces, but also the sole supplier of officers to act as its military planners. It had allowed sixty thousand students, mainly from madrassas (religious schools), to participate in many Taliban offensives at one time or another.
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Having received Washington's list of demands, Musharraf called a meeting of a dozen top military commanders at the general headquarters in Rawalpindi on September 15. The atmosphere was somber. Musharraf outlined his proposal to support America fully in its imminent war against the Taliban and bin Laden–led Al Qaida. He explained that failure to opt for the United States would not only result in Washington cutting off its economic funding, including loans from the International Monetary Fund, but most likely make Pakistan its potential target for punishment. He was challenged by Lieutenant General Ahmed, who led the opposition, consisting of Musharraf's other coconspirators in the 1999 coup—General Muhammad Aziz Khan and Lieutenant General Muzaffar Hussein Usmani—as well as General Jamshaid Gulzar Kiani, now commander of the powerful Tenth Corps in Rawalpindi. “Let the US do its [own] dirty work,” remarked Ahmed. “Its enemies are our friends.”
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Musharraf then argued that this was a strategic opportunity to manipulate
the situation for Pakistan's benefit, just as General Muhammad Zia ul Haq had done in 1979. Among other things that alliance had shored up Pakistan's cash-strapped treasury: “We should offer up help and, mark my words, we will receive a clean bill of health.”
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In subsequent years Pakistan would be upgraded to a non-NATO ally (in 2004), which entitled it to purchase advanced US military hardware, and would receive a total of $10 billion in economic and military assistance for participating in Washington's counterterrorism campaign. But, at this pivotal, highly charged meeting, the dissenters remained unconvinced.

In desperation, Musharraf played his strongest card. He revealed that on September 13 Delhi had offered the use of Indian soil for US military strikes against Afghanistan—a decision kept secret by the Vajpayee government so as not to inflame Muslim opinion in India.
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Because of a lack of common borders with Afghanistan, India's offer could not match Pakistan's. All the same, for the Islamist Pakistani generals, more anti-India than pro-Taliban, such a prospect was taboo. Reluctantly, they went along with Musharraf.

Indeed, in his TV address to the nation on September 19 to justify his U-turn on the Taliban and lining up solidly with Washington, he played up the Indian angle. “They [Indians] have readily offered all their bases, facilities, and logistic support to the United States.” He said. “They want the United States . . . to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. They also want our strategic assets—nuclear and missiles—and our Kashmir cause to be harmed.”
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Pakistan's Dire Economy

At $38 billion, Pakistan's foreign borrowings were half of its GDP. Servicing these and domestic loans consumed 65 percent of government revenue. Another 25 percent of its annual treasure was spent by the military. Islamabad's foreign reserves at $1.7 billion were barely enough to pay for essential imports for two months. Therefore the bilateral talks conducted behind closed doors were focused on working out the modalities of a graduated deal, with economic concessions to Islamabad moving up gradually—from the lifting of US sanctions imposed because of Pakistan's nuclear tests to easier rescheduling of foreign loans, more bilateral and multilateral credits, and better access to the American market for Pakistani goods in exchange for Islamabad implementing US demands,
culminating in the dismissal or retirement of the pro-Taliban, Islamist generals.
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In return, Musharraf extracted a promise from Washington that it would not promote the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which had been supported by Russia, Iran, and India—a pledge the United States would break with impunity.
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On the other side of the international border, once Delhi backed Bush's campaign in Afghanistan, the United States restored its military ties with India, which had been suspended after the 1998 nuclear tests.

Though Musharraf airily dismissed the opposition to his alliance with America as representing no more than 15 percent of the population, a later Gallup Poll would show 62 percent against Pakistan joining the US-led global coalition.
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Having done the deal with the Bush administration, Musharraf tried to persuade Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden to the United States. During their eight-hour meeting in Kandahar, the Pakistani military delegates, led by Lieutenant General Ahmed, warned Omar that if his government did not turn over bin Laden to Washington, he would face an attack by the US-led coalition. He remained obdurate.

The Pentagon's relentless air campaign started on October 7 and ended on November 14, with Kabul falling to the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmad Shah Masoud, in the wake of the Taliban's overnight flight from the capital. Reneging on its pledge to Musharraf, the Bush administration had actively bolstered the Northern Alliance, whose original backers included India.

By contrast, Musharraf delivered on his most secret promises to the United States about the hard-line Islamist generals in the military's high command a day after he had extended his own term as president indefinitely, “in the larger interests of the country,” on October 7. He forced Lieutenant General Ahmed to resign. India claimed a secret role in the downfall of Ahmed.

Lieutenant General Ehsan ul Haq, who replaced Ahmed as ISI chief, was expected to purge those ISI officers who had helped the Taliban in the past. Musharraf removed General Kiani from the command of the Tenth Corps and appointed him adjutant general, the chief military administrative officer—a desk job. He “promoted” Aziz Khan to a largely ceremonial position of chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, with no direct command of troops. By so doing he weakened the hand of the ambitious Islamist vice COAS Lieutenant General Muzaffar Hussein Usmani. In protest, Usmani resigned. His job went to a moderate, Lieutenant General
Muhammad Yusaf Khan. These moves by Musharraf satisfied the Bush administration while making his refurbished top team line up fully behind him, conceptually and strategically.

India's Elevated Moral Ground

Meanwhile, a daring terrorist attack on the Kashmir State Assembly in Srinagar on October 1 highlighted India's condition as a victim of cross-frontier terrorism. A suicide attacker drove a hijacked government jeep loaded with explosives to the main entrance of the Assembly complex and exploded it. In the mayhem that followed, two militants in police uniform slipped into the main Assembly building, firing their weapons and throwing hand grenades at security forces. At the end of a several-hour gun battle, interspersed with grenade explosions, thirty-eight people were dead. The Pakistan-based Jaish-e Muhammad (Urdu: Army of Muhammad; JeM), founded by Maulana Masoud Azhar in March 2000, claimed responsibility for the lethal assault and named Wajahat Hussein, a Pakistani national, as the suicide bomber.
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The storming of the legislature in Srinagar proved to be a precursor of something far more sensational in which JeM was involved. On December 13, five gunmen in commando uniforms went past the perimeter entrance gate to the mammoth, circular Parliament House in Delhi—built on a high platform with chambers for both houses of the central legislature—in a white car, carrying bulky bags filled with grenades, Kalashnikov rifles, and explosives, with a red flashing beacon on the roof, used typically by members of Parliament.

The vehicle crossed gate number 1, a sandstone portico. Fortuitously, the driveway was blocked by the motorcade of Vice President Krishna Kant, presiding official of Parliament's upper house, ready for a swift departure. When the driver of the gunmen's car tried to bypass the motorcade, he crashed into the vice president's car. The five attackers scrambled. As they rushed up the steps firing, they wounded an unarmed sentry guarding the huge carved door. Despite his injury, he managed to close the door and raise the alarm on his walkie-talkie. Swiftly the other eleven entrances to the building were shut. The ensuing gun battle between the attackers and security personnel on the steps of the Parliament House lasted half an hour. In the end, all the assailants lay dead, as did eight
security guards. The terrorists had planned on massacring many of the eight hundred–odd Indian MPs, with their focus on the front benches of the Lower House, occupied by cabinet ministers.