Descent Into Chaos Read online

  The first official U.S. delegation to visit Islamabad since the coup also arrived in January. The U.S. assistant secretary of state Karl Inderfurth delivered a blunt message urging Pakistan to ban terrorist groups and hand over al Qaeda members known to be operating inside the country.16 The ISI had never bothered to rein in al Qaeda’s extensive logistics network in Pakistan because the terrorist group helped train Kashmiri militants willing to fight India. Al Qaeda was now also helping the Taliban, another ally of the military regime. Moreover, the same extremist Pakistani groups the ISI funded and sponsored helped al Qaeda find safe houses and deliver young men for training.

  U.S. intelligence had discovered that Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda recruiter, was operating openly from a house in Peshawar and vetting foreign recruits before sending them on to training camps in Afghanistan. Inderfurth asked Musharraf to hand him over. “The Pakistanis told us they could not find him, even though everyone knew where he was,” William Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, told me. “The ISI just turned a blind eye to his activities,” Milam added.17 In fact, Zubaydah played a role in vetting Kashmiri militants on behalf of the ISI before sending them to Afghanistan for training.

  Within the U.S. administration there were serious differences of opinion as to how to pressure Musharraf. The Pentagon feared losing its long-standing relationship with the Pakistan military and wanted no punishments, while the State Department called for sanctions and further isolation. State itself was divided as to what to emphasize, with Michael Sheehan, the coordinator of the Office for Counterterrorism, wanting to make terrorism the most important issue with Pakistan. Others, such as Inderfurth and Strobe Talbott, wanted to stress nonproliferation and improving relations with India. The only leverage Washington had was to halt loans from international financial institutions, but it balked at taking such a step because it would only have destabilized Pakistan further. “The only thing we could have done that we didn’t do was cut off their access to IMF loans, which would have collapsed Pakistan,” said National Security Advisor Samuel Berger.18

  However, the Clinton administration still had no coherent strategy for undermining the Taliban regime, and as long as it delayed shaping one, there was confusion as to what exactly it could demand from Pakistan. Washington’s only clear position for the Taliban and Pakistan was to help deliver bin Laden to the U.S. justice system. There were no hard-and-fast U.S. demands regarding the Taliban or Pakistan’s continued support to the regime.

  The U.S. lack of trust regarding Pakistan was self-evident when President Clinton arrived in Islamabad for a five-hour visit on March 25, 2000, after spending five days in India. A marked business jet first landed as a decoy, followed by a second, unmarked jet carrying Clinton. Six bulletproof limos lined up in front of the plane to form a barrier as U.S.-manned helicopters flew overhead. No armed Pakistani security officers were allowed near the U.S. president. It was the first time a foreign airport had been taken over by the U.S. Secret Service for a presidential visit. Clinton made it clear that the visit did not imply an endorsement of Pakistan’s military regime, and he was never photographed shaking hands with Musharraf. The visit should have been a humiliating experience, but Musharraf did not seem to mind. Clinton made a fourteen-minute national television address to the Pakistani people. It was a powerful speech in which he issued a blunt warning that Pakistan had to face a reality in which jihad was not an option.

  “This era does not reward people who struggle in vain to redraw borders with blood.” Clinton said. “It belongs to those with the vision to look beyond borders, for partners in commerce and trade. . . . Democracy cannot develop if it is constantly uprooted before it has a chance to firmly take hold. There is a danger that Pakistan may grow even more isolated, draining even more resources away from the needs of the people, moving even closer to a conflict no one can win.”19

  The speech made a deep impact on many Pakistanis, but Musharraf ignored Clinton’s words, saying he had given no assurances to Clinton on stopping the jihad in Kashmir or support to the Taliban, but he was ready to hold talks with India and would go to Kandahar to discuss with Mullah Omar the Osama bin Laden issue. In private, Clinton had told Musharraf that Pakistan had to deescalate tensions over Kashmir. “You have to decide do you want Kashmir or do you want to save Pakistan. You cannot do both at the same time,” Clinton had bluntly told Musharraf, according to a U.S. official who briefed me. Nevertheless, Clinton’s visit did ensure that the relationship between the two countries not break down completely. “If Clinton had not come to Pakistan, our relationship with the United States would have gone into freefall,” said interior minister Moeenuddin Haider lamely.20

  Musharraf continued to make even plainer his differences with the United States on the issue of terrorism. “I just want to say that there is a difference of understanding on who is a terrorist. The perceptions are different in the United States and in Pakistan, in the West and what we understand is terrorism,” Musharraf insisted in May.21 The United States responded by chastising Pakistan for doing nothing to bring bin Laden to justice, given its relationship with the Taliban.

  The war of words with the United States continued as Musharraf then publicly stated that Pakistan’s strategic interests lay with supporting the Afghan Pashtuns, whom he associated solely with the Taliban. His comments were widely presumed to be prompted by hard-line generals such as Mohammed Aziz and Mehmood Ahmad. “Afghanistan’s majority ethnic Pashtuns have to be on our side,” Musharraf said. “This is our national interest . . . the Taliban cannot be alienated by Pakistan. We have a national security interest there,” he added. His comments outraged many Afghans, including all the anti-Taliban factions. The usually withdrawn former king Zahir Shah termed the comments “interference and aggravation of the national unity of Afghanistan.”22 Hamid Karzai remarked to me that the comments made him “feel sick in the stomach.” Such remarks were to make Musharraf a hated figure for most Afghans, something he could not live down even after 9/11.

  Musharraf’s aides made it clear that they would oppose all U.S. efforts to undermine the Taliban regime. “We are trying to stop the U.S. from undermining the Taliban regime. They cannot do it without Pakistan’s help, because they have no assets there, but we will not allow it to happen,” said Maj.-Gen. Ghulam Ahmad Khan, principal staff officer to Musharraf.23

  Musharraf’s promised reform agenda was blocked by the same kitchen cabinet of hard-line generals who wished to maintain the army’s close relationship with the Islamic fundamentalist parties and who did not want to antagonize them by introducing liberal reforms at home. After Musharraf reneged on his promise to reform the unjust blasphemy law, liberal civilians who had joined his cabinet began to resign.24 “The lack of reforms, the control of policy and decision making by the ISI and a few generals, the army’s pandering to the fundamentalists, the refusal to change direction in foreign policy—all this has disillusioned me,” one cabinet minister told me after his resignation. On October 15, information minister Javed Jabbar, a close personal friend of Musharraf, resigned, signaling a decisive shift in the public politics of the regime.25

  Musharraf became known as “double-talk Musharraf,” speaking with one breath about how he would turn Pakistan into a moderate Islamic state, and then just as vehemently with another supporting jihad and militancy. He began to invoke divine will as a justification for military rule. “God has chosen me to lead the nation and he will protect me,” he said on television at the end of 2000.26 Disillusionment with Musharraf increased rapidly across the country. Qualified people voted with their feet and began to leave the country in droves. A Gallup poll conducted in November stated that 38 percent of the entire adult work force wanted to emigrate, while 62 percent said they wanted to work abroad. Such impulses were not difficult to understand. There were no jobs, the Pakistani education system remained in a state of dilapidation, and the army had failed to improve law and order. In their reports for 2000, Amnesty International and the H
uman Rights Commission of Pakistan said violence against women, torture and deaths in police custody, and intolerance toward non-Muslims were all on the increase, despite the army’s commitment to reform.

  In 2000 the army began a political experiment to create a pliant political superstructure that would owe its first loyalty to Musharraf. Heavily rigged local council elections were held, followed by attempts to create a “king’s party” that would do the army’s bidding once general elections were held. Every previous military regime had gone down the same path, revamping the Pakistan Muslim League and cutting deals with small-time politicians who would remain loyal to the army. The ISI was used extensively to twist the arms of feudal politicians, young technocrats, and opposition politicians to join the Muslim League. The ISI’s investigative arm, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), ostensibly exposed corruption among politicians and bureaucrats, but also provided these files to the ISI. NAB compiled dossiers on the income, property holdings, taxes paid or unpaid, bank loans, telephone bills, and even children’s school fees of every politician in the country, enabling the ISI to pressure them.27

  In a speech on August 14, 2000, Musharraf promised that general elections would be held in October 2002 and that he would amend the constitution to validate army rule. Opposition parties formed the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD) and tried to hold protest rallies to oppose the military’s plans, but thousands of their supporters were arrested. Meanwhile, Musharraf abused Bhutto, Sharif, and other politicians. “Those who are useless politicians should stay at home,” he said in April 2001. “They have played their innings and they have played useless innings and have been getting out on zero.”28 From her exile in London, Bhutto gave a rapid-fire response: “The Pakistan army is infected by the extremists,” she claimed. “By aiming to disqualify the mainstream leaders, the army plans a vacuum which can be filled by extremists linked to the Taliban.”29

  In June 2001, Musharraf simply declared himself president, saying that it was in the “supreme national interest.”30 It was a familiar path struck by former military rulers. “Military rulers in Pakistan traverse a familiar and well-trodden route, sooner or later assuming the title and office of president, ” wrote the newspaper Dawn. “It took General Ayub Khan three weeks to arrive at this stage, General Yahya Khan a few days, General Ziaul Haq about a year and it has taken General Pervaiz Musharraf a little over 18 months to cover the same journey.”31

  With the September 11 attacks just three months away, Musharraf faced growing criticism for the army’s support of the Taliban. At a conference of Pakistani ambassadors in January 2001, Musharraf heard one envoy after another demand an end to such support because it was making his job untenable in foreign capitals. For the usually timid diplomats, this was a landmark event and demonstrated their desperation. There was also growing opposition from within the army. In April, Lt.-Gen. Imtiaz Shaheen, the corps commander in Peshawar who was responsible for providing logistics to the Taliban, was removed by Musharraf after he demanded a change in Afghan policy.32 A senior civilian adviser to Musharraf told me that any ideas of policy change “were systematically blocked by Generals Aziz and Mehmood.”33

  In April 2001, the ISI funded the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, headed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, to hold a three-day International Deoband Conference near Peshawar. (The Deobandi are a sect of Sunni Islam, among whose adherents are the Taliban and Pakistani extremists who believe in active jihad.) Hundreds of thousands of people attended the meeting, which pledged support to the Taliban. A message from Osama bin Laden was read out in support of Mullah Omar. Western embassies in Islamabad were appalled at the rally, as it was in total defiance of UN sanctions against the Taliban. In late April, the ISI allowed Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, one of the largest extremist groups fighting in Kashmir, to hold a similar rally near Lahore, in which it denounced the British government for placing it on a list of terrorist groups.34 By staging such rallies, when all political rallies were banned by the regime, the ISI was sending an unambiguous message to the Americans and the UN: that Pakistan continued to support the Taliban even as the UN attempted to seek an end to the civil war in Afghanistan.

  Since the United Nations had brokered the 1988 Geneva Accords, which ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a “Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Afghanistan” was charged with trying to end the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. By July 1997, when Kofi Annan appointed the experienced Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to this post, any UN role in ending the conflict was considered near hopeless. Without significant U.S. and European involvement or pressure on the neighboring states who continued to arm their proxies, there was little the UN could do. Brahimi told Annan he would make a one-shot attempt at brokering a deal. His main interlocutor on the Taliban side was Mullah Omar’s deputy, Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, who was to die of cancer before 9/11, but the key would be Pakistan’s attitude.

  “I told Mullah Rabbani,” said Brahimi, “the conflict is not about territory. It is about the Afghans finding a peaceful solution that is acceptable to them. An offensive may bring more territory under your control, it may even bring all of the territory under your control. And then what? You know well there will be more Afghans willing to fight against you.”35

  In a bid to end the interference in Afghanistan by neighboring states, the UN had created the six-plus-two group of countries: Afghanistan’s six neighbors plus the United States and Russia. Brahimi banked on their holding a productive meeting in Tashkent in July 1999, just before the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Northern Alliance. If the meeting could persuade the Taliban to halt their offensive, then talks on a cease-fire could begin. The Tashkent meeting ended with a Pakistani pledge to bring about a cease-fire as their diplomats promised to persuade the Taliban. Instead, just ten days after the Tashkent meeting, the ISI encouraged the Taliban to launch their offensive. The UN was insulted; Brahimi was incensed and resigned, publicly blaming the Pakistanis. “A lot of Pakistanis lied to me through their teeth . . . my temptation to slam the door and tell everyone to go to hell when the offensive started was very strong,” he told me. Meanwhile, the ISI had stories planted in the Pakistani media that Brahimi was working for the Indians. Coming on top of Islamabad’s flagrant refusal to comply with UN sanctions on the Taliban, Brahimi’s resignation was to increase the mistrust between Pakistan and the international community.

  Brahimi had brought the few scholars and experts on Afghanistan into a working group to advise him about seeking ways to end the civil war. The core group consisted of Barnett Rubin, the best and at one time the only American scholar on Afghanistan, who had written several books on the country and ran conflict-prevention programs at the Council on Foreign Relations, and later at New York University; Oliver Roy, the French scholar who had written several books on Afghanistan and Islamic fundamentalism and was an adviser to the French government; William Maley, an Australian scholar who had edited the first book on the Taliban and advised the Australian government while teaching diplomacy in Canberra; 36 Ashraf Ghani, an Afghan anthropologist and economist at the World Bank; and me, the only non-scholar in the group. Other experts were called in when needed.

  We brainstormed with Brahimi and other UN officials several times a year—at the UN headquarters in New York, in Berlin, and in Oslo in 1999, where we met with Terje Roed-Larsen and his Norwegian team, who had concluded the Oslo peace process in the Middle East, to see if its methodology could be applied to Afghanistan. (We failed; nothing, it seemed, could be applied to the Taliban.) All of us in the group had been good friends for a long time. Afghanistan had drawn us together for many years, and we admired one another’s work. And we all had enormous respect for Brahimi, to whom we gave very frank advice as to what was and was not possible.

  After Brahimi’s departure in October 1999, the task of UN mediation was considered even more hopeless. Nevertheless, the challenge was taken up by Francesc Vendrell, an experienced Spa
nish-born UN diplomat who had brokered peace processes in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and most recently East Timor.37 Vendrell, who took up the job in January 2000, knew he was not going to make much progress with the Taliban. Instead, from his base in Islamabad, he prepared the diplomatic ground for when and if the geopolitical situation changed in favor of negotiations. He continued meetings with our experts group and set up a second track of negotiations between retired senior diplomats and generals from the United States, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan.38

  Another group Vendrell set up in December 2000 came to be known as the Geneva Initiative. It consisted of representatives from the United States, Iran, Germany, and Italy. Its purpose was to bring together the three non-fighting Afghan groups based in Europe. These consisted of the Rome group, comprising Zahir Shah’s supporters; a splinter of that movement, called the Bonn group; and the Cyprus group, made up of Pashtuns and Hazaras who detested the king and were backed by Iran. These meetings were the only venue where U.S. and Iranian officials met face-to-face, and they became even more important after 9/11. Iran sent some of its top diplomats to the venue. “There were essentially two sets of conversations going on between the Americans and the Iranians, one in public and the other in private, where they discussed how to undermine the Taliban,” said Vendrell. 39 During the spring of 2001, Vendrell and his aides prepared a concept paper that aimed to achieve minimal agreement among those in the international community on what pressures it would be prepared to put on the Taliban. The paper called for the rearming of the Northern Alliance in order to deny the Taliban total victory.40