The Way of the Knife (5 page)

On that morning on Capitol Hill, Ahmed was having a friendly exchange with Representative Porter Goss, the committee’s top Republican, regaling the congressman with his knowledge of obscure facts about the American Civil War. Goss had wrapped a book about the Civil War to give to Ahmed as a gift, but the pleasantries were cut short when committee staffers raced into the meeting room to tell the lawmakers and the ISI chief that the second plane had just hit the World Trade Center. “Mahmud’s face turned ashen,” recalls Goss. The Pakistani spymaster quickly excused himself from the meeting and jumped into
the embassy car waiting for him
. The book, still wrapped, was left inside the room.

The following morning, General Ahmed was called to the office of Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who was in no mood for diplomatic correctness. President Bush had announced the night before that the United States would treat both the terrorists and their patrons equally, and Armitage presented the ISI’s dilemma in Manichean terms.

“Pakistan faces a stark choice; either it is with us or it is not,” Armitage told the Pakistani spy chief, saying the decision was black and white, with no gray.

Insulted by Armitage’s bluntness, Ahmed responded that although Pakistan had long been accused of “being in bed” with terrorists, nothing could be further from the truth. His country would back the United States without hesitation, he said, assuring Armitage that “Pakistan has always seen such matters in black and white.” Armitage warned that the United States was preparing a laundry list of demands for Pakistan that were likely to cause “
deep introspection” in Islamabad
.

The terms of the CIA–ISI marriage were discussed the next day. Armitage told General Ahmed that the United States wanted unfettered access to Pakistani airspace and the ability to carry out military and intelligence operations inside Pakistan. America also wanted access to Pakistani ports, airstrips, and bases in the mountains along the border with Afghanistan. Finally, he insisted that the ISI hand over to the CIA
all the intelligence it had about al Qaeda
.

Ahmed assured Armitage he would pass the list of demands to Musharraf. But, he said, Pakistan wanted something in return: assurance that it would be reimbursed for its support in the campaign against al Qaeda. If Pakistan was going to turn against the Taliban and agree to a war on its western border, it would need to be rewarded for it.

The parameters of America’s dysfunctional relationship with Pakistan in the post-9/11 era had been set: The United States insisted on the right to wage a secret war inside Pakistan, and Islamabad extracted money in return. President Musharraf had acceded to most, but not all, of Washington’s requirements. For instance, he put limits on where American planes could fly in Pakistani airspace, fearing that the United States might try to conduct surveillance flights over Pakistani nuclear sites. He also denied the United States access to most military bases, allowing the American military to station personnel at only two air bases: Shamsi, in the southwestern region of Balochistan, and Jacobabad, in
the northern province of Sindh
. In the end, Washington and Islamabad’s renewal of their vows left both sides believing they had given up more than they were getting, creating recriminations and resentment that would boil over years later.

The rhetoric from Washington had been unambiguous, and Musharraf knew it. A man who had spent his career in the military, he considered his options as if this were a war game. He later wrote in his memoir that if he had chosen to protect the Taliban, the United States would consider Pakistan a terrorist state and, for all he knew, would attack Pakistan, eviscerate Pakistan’s military, and seize the country’s nuclear arsenal. India had already offered its bases for the Afghan war, and Musharraf figured that soon enough the United States could be flying combat missions from a base in Amritsar, in northwestern India. The bombers would streak over Pakistani territory on their way into Afghanistan, and back again after they had delivered their deadly payloads. Even worse, the Indians could seize the opportunity to open an offensive in Kashmir, with America’s blessing. The strategic balance in South Asia, which had long aligned Pakistan with the United States against India and its historic ally Russia, would change permanently. Pakistan would be
a crushed, impoverished outcast
.

On the evening of September 19, Musharraf told the people of Pakistan how he had answered Washington’s demands. He was dressed in a crisp military uniform, but his face was haggard and drawn, the toll of endless meetings with his generals, civilian politicians, religious leaders, and American diplomats. His televised speech was not a denunciation of al Qaeda or the Taliban, and at no time did Musharraf condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He instead framed his decision to help America in narrow, nationalistic terms. India had already pledged its full support to Washington, he said, and New Delhi was determined to ensure that “
if and when the government
in Afghanistan changes, it shall be an anti-Pakistan government.” He said that Pakistan had four priorities: the security of its borders; the Kashmir cause; the revival of its economy; and, finally, the protection of its “strategic assets.”

That final item on the list was not just a reference to the nuclear arsenal that Pakistan had built to destroy India. Pakistan’s military had other “strategic assets” to consider. By 2001, groups like the Afghan Taliban and the militia network run by mujahedeen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani were considered critical elements of Pakistan’s defenses, and Musharraf made it clear in the speech that night that he still regarded the Taliban as an important bulwark against India. Even as he was leaning on Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden, he told the country that the tactic was a way to emerge from the crisis “without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban.”

Things weren’t, in fact, black and white. One week after the September 11 attacks, and one night before President Bush in front of a joint session of Congress accused the Taliban of “aiding and abetting murder,” Musharraf was still hoping that the Taliban could remain in power. Washington had been comforted by the belief that Musharraf had pushed all of his poker chips to the center of the table on a bet on the Bush administration. In fact, he adopted a far more nuanced strategy—a strategy that even after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, many American officials would still have difficulty discerning.

The ISI was still hoping that another bloody Afghan war could be avoided, especially one that might replace the Taliban with the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance. After General Ahmed returned to Islamabad, he implored American ambassador Wendy Chamberlin not to start a war out of revenge. A true victory in Afghanistan, Ahmed said, would come only by negotiating. “If the Taliban are eliminated,” he said, “
Afghanistan will revert to warlordism
.”

To try to convince Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to give up bin Laden, General Ahmed flew to Kandahar on a plane loaned by the CIA. Omar, a former mujahedeen commander who had lost one eye during the Soviet war, mocked the Pakistani general as the Bush administration’s errand boy and rejected the demands. He issued a stinging rebuke to his longtime ISI benefactor. “
You want to please the Americans
, and I want to please God,” he said.

—

THE AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY
had created divisions in the CIA from the beginning, with rifts opening between officers at Langley and those posted at the CIA station in Islamabad. Cofer Black, the CTC chief, pressed to immediately arm the Northern Alliance and begin a push south toward Kabul. But Robert Grenier, the Islamabad station chief, fought against the plan. He warned that any move to arm a militia backed by India and Russia could immediately destroy relations with Pakistan just as they were thawing
after years of mistrust
. These internal fights got a wider audience three weeks after the September 11 attacks, when CIA officers went to the Pentagon for a teleconference between Washington, Islamabad, and United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa.

During the call, Grenier said that any ground offensive using the Northern Alliance ought to be put on hold to give the ISI more time to pressure the Taliban to release bin Laden. Backing the Northern Alliance could lead to another bloody Afghan civil war, Grenier said, adding that an air campaign could be enough for the time being to bring the Taliban to negotiations. But Hank Crumpton, a CTC officer who had been designated by Cofer Black to run the CIA’s war in Afghanistan, thought Grenier was being naive. He was merely reflecting the ISI’s position, Crumpton thought, and was displaying a bad case of “clientitis.” After the meeting, Crumpton told Rumsfeld he thought that
Grenier was dead wrong
.

Grenier may have been channeling the concerns of the ISI, but they were hardly unreasonable worries. For weeks, ISI officials had been whispering to their CIA counterparts in Islamabad that a war in Afghanistan could spin wildly out of control. It would upset a delicate balance in the region, they said, perhaps even leading India and Pakistan toward a full-blown proxy war inside Afghanistan.

As the negotiations dragged on and September turned to October, the CIA quietly began inserting paramilitary teams into Afghanistan to make contact with the warlord commanders who fought under the Northern Alliance banner. Meanwhile, a torrent of threat information continued to come into the agency’s Counterterrorist Center from CIA stations in the Middle East and South Asia. On October 5, two days before the United States dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan, Armitage sent an eyes-only cable to Ambassador Chamberlin demanding that she meet immediately with General Ahmed. He wanted a simple message delivered to Mullah Omar, and he wanted Ahmed to deliver it. If another attack was traced back to Afghanistan, Armitage wrote, the American response would be devastating:

“
Every pillar of the Taliban regime will be destroyed
.”

The day after America’s war in Afghanistan began, Musharraf replaced General Ahmed at the ISI. CIA leaders in Washington had been pressing for General Ahmed to be sacked, and his replacement was an uncontroversial choice. General Ehsan ul Haq, an urbane commander who at the time was leading the army’s corps in Peshawar, had been part of the cabal of military leaders who installed Musharraf in power in 1999, and unlike Ahmed, he had no obvious loyalties to the Taliban. Within weeks he was sitting by Musharraf’s side at the United Nations, where Musharraf and Bush met for the first time since the September 11 attacks to discuss America’s plans in Afghanistan.

To prepare Bush for the meeting, Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote the president a memo that praised Musharraf and said unequivocally that Pakistan’s government had “abandoned the Taliban.” “President Musharraf’s decision to fully cooperate with the United States in the wake of September 11, at considerable political risk, abruptly
turned our stalled relationship around
,” the memo began. In hindsight, Powell’s analysis was naive—it was what American officials wanted to believe and chose to hear. Musharraf hadn’t fundamentally shifted Pakistan’s foreign policy as much as he had reprised a deal that General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s former president, had struck with the Americans during the 1980s. Musharraf would help the United States get what it wanted in Afghanistan, and Pakistan would be paid handsomely.

Musharraf hadn’t managed to prevent the war, but he wanted it to be short and for the United States to leave his neighborhood as quickly as possible. This is the message he brought to Bush at the United Nations: Do what you need to do to expel Osama bin Laden and his followers from Afghanistan, but the last thing the United States should do is
stay in Afghanistan for years
.

As it turned out, the Pakistanis had misread the Americans just as badly as the Americans had misread the Pakistanis. In the months after the September 11 attacks a string of intelligence cables from ISI headquarters went out to
Pakistan’s embassies in Washington
and elsewhere. The spy service’s analysts concluded that the United States had no plans for a long-term commitment to Afghanistan beyond the defeat of al Qaeda there, a conclusion that had been informed by the knowledge that Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan after the last war as soon as the Soviets had withdrawn. This is how it appeared to Asad Durrani, a retired Pakistani lieutenant-general who had run the ISI during the 1990s. Durrani was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia in late 2001, when the ISI cables began arriving in the foreign embassies. America’s new war in Afghanistan, Durrani said years later, “seemed as if it was going to be
a very short-term affair
.”

Pakistani spies were still trying to ensure that it was, and in November and December 2001 they held a series of secret meetings with Afghan tribal leaders to determine how many outer layers of the Taliban’s followers could be peeled away from the movement’s fanatical core. During one of these meetings, General Ehsan ul Haq, the new ISI chief, sat down with Jalaluddin Haqqani in Islamabad. General ul Haq had called Haqqani to the capital to gauge the loyalties of the wizened militia leader. Haqqani had once been the CIA’s greatest ally in Afghanistan, during the war against the Soviets, but in the years since had pledged loyalty to al Qaeda and had built up a sprawling criminal empire from his base in Miranshah, in North Waziristan.

It became clear during the meeting that Haqqani wasn’t about to be turned. The American invasion of Afghanistan, Haqqani told General ul Haq, was no different from the Soviet war years earlier. With chilling prescience, he predicted that the new war would play out just as the last one had. Haqqani said that he could not stop American bombers, but eventually the United States would have to send in large numbers of ground troops. When that happened, Haqqani told the ISI chief, he would be
on level ground with the Americans
.