Descent Into Chaos Read online

  Seizing the opportunity to weaken India, the ISI encouraged young Kashmiris to come to Pakistan for training. The ISI first trained secular and nationalist Kashmiri groups but quickly switched its support to Kashmiri Islamic groups, who were linked to Pakistan’s own Islamic parties. These Kashmiris drew their inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood and described their struggle as an Islamic war of national liberation, but not as a jihad. However, in 1995-1996, fearing that the insurgency was petering out, the ISI shifted its support again—this time to Pakistani and Kashmiri extremist groups belonging to the Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam, which believed in a jihad to defeat India and “Islamize” Kashmir. It was precisely at this juncture that the ISI also switched its support in Afghanistan from Gulbuddin Hikmetyar to the Deobandi-inspired Taliban. This decision had less to do with religion than with the fact that in both Kashmir and Afghanistan such groups were more extreme in their hatred for India and more willing to do the ISI’s bidding. The ISI soon shifted many of the Kashmiri training camps to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

  The ISI’s shift to supporting Deobandi and Wahhabi extremist groups increased funding and support for these groups from Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf states and later drew in al Qaeda. By the late 1990s the Pakistani military justified jihad in Kashmir as a legitimate part of its foreign policy, even as it played a game of divide and rule in order to prevent any single Kashmiri group from gaining ascendancy. In 1993, in Indian Kashmir, several Kashmiri groups and parties formed an umbrella alliance—the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC)—which, despite splits and desertions, emerged as the strongest voice of the Kashmiri people.4 Aside from the insurgency, the Kashmiri population conducted continuous public strikes and protests in response to the harsh punitive policies and bloody military tactics adopted by the Indians, which included the killing of civilians in reprisal attacks, extrajudicial killings, torture of prisoners, and the systematic use of rape as a weapon of terror by Indian soldiers.5

  For the Pakistan army, the insurgency was a successful strategic ploy to tie down hundreds of thousands of Indian troops who would otherwise have been deployed on the border and possibly threatened Pakistan. The army carefully calibrated the kinds of weapons and level of funds it provided the Kashmiri militants, and at times reined in the ISI so as not to provoke Indian military retaliation against Pakistan. The level of support was kept just below what India might use to justify an attack on Pakistan. This “strategic restraint” by the army also prevented Western governments from coming down too hard on Pakistan. However, General Musharraf, rash and impetuous, was to undermine this carefully calibrated restraint by launching the Kargil War in 1999. That conflict underscored the severe differences between Musharraf and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and led to the coup that brought Musharraf to power. Thus the Kashmir issue was now also a determining factor in the domestic politics of Pakistan.

  The Musharraf regime continued to pursue an aggressive line with India, especially in the aftermath of the December 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane bound for New Delhi. The plane, with 160 passengers on board, was hijacked on its way from Katmandu, the capital of Nepal. After several landings, the five hijackers finally put the plane down in Taliban-controlled Kandahar on Christmas Day. A war of words between India and Pakistan began immediately. The world was already on a high state of alert due to the threat of al Qaeda attacks during celebrations for the millennium on December 31.6 All the hijackers were subsequently discovered to be Pakistanis, members of Harkat ul-Ansar, a group closely linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban. They initially demanded $200 million and the release of thirty-five Kashmiri militants from Indian jails, including Harkat leader Maulana Masud Azhar and Ahmed Omar Sheikh.7

  Harkat ul-Ansar had been set up by with ISI support in the mid-1990s as a fringe militant group primed to carry out spectacular acts of terrorism. After several kidnappings and killings of Westerners in Indian Kashmir, the United States declared it a terrorist group in 1998, after which it changed its name to Harkat ul-Mujahedin. By then Harkat was a key ally of the Taliban and al Qaeda, helping run training camps in Afghanistan for Kashmiri militants. It was Harkat camps that U.S. missiles destroyed in 1998 after President Clinton retaliated for the al Qaeda attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa. Ten Harkat militants and at least five ISI instructors were killed.8 America continued its war against Harkat after 9/11, when on October 23, 2001, U.S. warplanes bombed a Harkat office in Kabul, killing twenty-two Pakistani members of Harkat.

  Masud Azhar had been in jail in India since 1994 and was considered one of Pakistan’s most important international jihadists, having fought in Afghanistan and set up Harkat affiliates in Chechnya, Somalia, and Central Asia. After President Clinton deployed troops to Somalia in 1993, Azhar was credited with teaching Somalian warlords how to trim the fins of their rocket-propelled grenades so that they would explode in midair and bring down U.S. helicopters. (The Somalis later shot down several U.S. Black Hawk helicopters, an incident that was recounted in the bestselling book and movie Black Hawk Down.)9 Bin Laden had wanted Azhar freed and, according to several authoritative sources, had ordered al Qaeda to plan the Indian Airlines hijacking with Harkat.10 Ahmed Omar Sheikh, twenty-nine, a highly educated Pakistani-born British citizen, had been in an Indian jail since 1994 after trying to kidnap British and Canadian tourists in New Delhi. A member of Harkat with close ISI ties, Sheikh gained ultimate notoriety after 9/11 for organizing the kidnapping and execution of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

  The hijacking standoff in Kandahar continued for a week, until New Year’s Eve, when a humiliated Indian government freed Azhar, Sheikh, and another Kashmiri militant. Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh delivered the three men to the hijackers on the tarmac of Kandahar airport. The three men and the five hijackers were released by the Taliban and returned to Pakistan, where they were never apprehended. The Indians accused the ISI of planning the hijacking and were furious with the Clinton administration for refusing to condemn Pakistan, but U.S. diplomats did not want to escalate the already high state of tension between Islamabad and New Delhi by seeming to take sides.11

  Azhar was a charismatic leader and organizer whose stint in an Indian jail had greatly enhanced his reputation. A short, heavily built man with a flowing beard, he spoke in a booming voice, preaching at Friday prayers at army mosques around the country, where his message was the need for jihad. He continued to preach even after 9/11, when the militant Islamic group he later founded had been officially banned. I heard his sermons frequently and met with him—once at the army-run mosque in a Lahore cantonment in 2003, even though Musharraf had declared him a terrorist. In 2004 some Jaish militants working closely with Al Qaeda tried to assassinate Musharraf.

  At home, Azhar was lionized, and encouraged by the ISI to set up the new group for jihad in Kashmir called Jaish-e-Mohammed (the Army of the Prophet Mohammed). With ISI officers by his side, Azhar toured the country giving rousing speeches. “Marry for jihad, give birth for jihad and earn money only for jihad till the cruelty of American and India ends,” he told crowds at a rally in Karachi.12 Indian leaders were apoplectic, and once again Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called on the international community to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Jaish later introduced the first suicide bombings in Indian Kashmir.

  The Indian Airlines hijacking was a spectacular success for al Qaeda and all extremists in the region, a daring act in that it took place when the entire world was on a high terrorist alert and extraordinary because the hijackers crisscrossed five countries with impunity—Nepal, India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Afghanistan. The hijacking made India even more determined to punish Pakistan, but the country failed to garner American support for this. Pakistan’s military considered the lack of direct condemnation from abroad as a victory and surmised that the world was still willing to give it the benefit of the doubt when it came to Kashmir. I was constantly told by army officers that the more unpredictable Pakist
ani actions were, the more notice the Kashmir cause would receive abroad. It was this cocksure attitude of Musharraf and his generals that led them to take major risks after 9/11 in order to highlight the Kashmir cause.

  The hijacking caused relations between India and Pakistan to plummet to dangerously low levels, as a war of words erupted. On April 20, 2000, Jaish-e-Mohammed carried out the first suicide bombing in Kashmir when a guerrilla exploded a bomb in an Indian army barracks, killing five Indian soldiers and himself. Other Kashmiri militant groups swiftly copied the example of Jaish.

  India welcomed the 2000 Republican victory at the U.S. polls, hoping for a shift in policy from the neocons. In fact, the incoming Bush administration was keen to befriend India, but more in order to enlist it as a partner in the strategic containment of China than to punish Pakistan. In February the CIA’s annual report concluded that the risk of war between India and Pakistan “was unacceptably high.”13

  Then, in May 2001, in a surprise move aimed at winning even greater U.S. support, Prime Minister Vajpayee invited Musharraf for talks. In a gross misinterpretation, Musharraf saw Vajpayee’s offer as coming from a position of weakness, in resonse to the stepped-up attacks by the militants. Vajpayee, too, underestimated Musharraf. As a result, the three-day summit in Agra in mid-July between the two leaders ended in failure. In an orgy of bloodletting, eighty-six militants, soldiers, and civilians in Kashmir were killed during the summit.

  After 9/11, India was stunned at how easily and quickly the United States embraced Pakistan as a strategic ally. But both countries were to misinterpret world reaction to their dispute. The Pakistani army never understood what was obvious to liberal Pakistanis—that after 9/11 the international community would have zero tolerance for Islamic extremism and that the ISI’s backing of militant groups would have to cease, not just in Afghanistan but also in Kashmir. Logic also dictated that at home, Pakistan would have to take control of the madrassas that were turning out militants in the thousands, fight extremism, and prevent al Qaeda from using Pakistan as a base. There was genuine hope that the army would have no choice but to break its nexus with the extremists.

  The military and the ISI thought otherwise, believing instead that helping the United States overthrow the Taliban regime would absolve it of reining in the Kashmiri militants. Now that Pakistan was allied to the United States, and the United States was dependent on Pakistan for conducting the war in Afghanistan, the military believed it could force India to the negotiating table by stepping up attacks. It was the same logic that had prompted the 1999 war in Kargil. When, after 9/11, Musharraf declared that by siding with the United States he had “saved” the Kashmir issue, he was signaling to the militants that nothing would change.

  India, on the other hand, viewed 9/11 as a major opportunity to persuade the United States to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. Surely the U.S. alliance with Pakistan would last only until U.S. forces were victorious in Afghanistan, at which point the Bush administration would see the light about Pakistan. In fact, New Delhi underestimated U.S. dependency on Pakistan for continuing to hunt down al Qaeda and supplying its forces in Afghanistan. India also thought that Bush’s new policy of preemption would give it the right to take unilateral military action against Pakistan. After Kargil, the Indian military had been planning to launch short, hot pursuit strikes against militants in Pakistani Kashmir, but the Americans had to warn the Indians several times that preemption did not apply to India over Pakistan.

  For its part, the Bush administration failed to understand the degree to which it had annoyed the Indians by taking on Pakistan’s help in Afghanistan, while failing to denounce terrorist attacks in Kashmir more vehemently. Colin Powell and the State Department took for granted Indian acquiescence to the new alignments in the region, and as U.S. officials poured into Islamabad and lionized Musharraf for his statesmanship, no official deigned to visit New Delhi. Washington was, therefore, taken entirely by surprise when tensions between India and Pakistan suddenly escalated. The opaque position of the United States, and continuing covert ISI support, encouraged the Pakistan-based Kashmiri groups to gamble on stepping up the insurgency. On October 1, 2001, a massive car bomb exploded outside the Kashmir parliament building in Srinagar, killing twenty-nine people. Indian leaders responded in an uproar of condemnation, blaming Pakistan for the attack. Attacks multiplied until, on December 13, five militants shot their way into the Indian parliament in New Delhi, killing fourteen people, before being shot dead themselves. India called it an attack on democracy, while Indians demanded retaliation.

  India immediately began large-scale troop movements to the Pakistan border, and within days war fever built up on both sides of the frontier. “Our anxieties are mounting not only by the day, but by the hour as we receive information about the movement of Indian forces on the border,” said Pakistan’s foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, on December 30. “Pakistan does not want war, local or general, conventional or nuclear. The decision lies with India,” he said.14 Colin Powell was on the telephone to Musharraf almost every day, urging him to take steps to rein in the jihadis. On December 30, Bush got involved, telling Musharraf “to take additional strong and decisive measures to eliminate the extremists who seek to harm India.”15

  On January 1, 2002, India announced it had begun the largest war games in the past fifteen years on the Pakistan border. Pakistan retaliated with its own war games and began to move troops from the Afghan border to the eastern front, abandoning the hunt for Osama bin Laden.16 U.S. commanders in Kabul were furious but could do nothing. In dense winter fog, I watched as massive Pakistan army convoys stretching for twenty-five miles lumbered across Punjab province, returning sixty thousand troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border. Fighter aircraft and missiles were moved to small secret air bases around the country. India began to rip up the electrified fence along the border so that its tanks would not be impeded. A Pakistani general told me that 80 percent of India’s one-million-strong army had been mobilized in an offensive posture. The United States became concerned about its own bases in Pakistan. If there was a war, all U.S. forces would have to be evacuated from the country.17

  What came as a shock to the generals was that there was little Pakistani public support for war with India. During the Kargil crisis, most Pakistanis had reacted negatively to what they saw as the military’s adventurism, and they regarded this buildup the same way.

  Realizing that the Indians would not budge, Bush made it plain to Musharraf what he expected if Pakistan was to remain a U.S. ally, delivering an ultimatum in the same blunt words that had been used by Richard Armitage after September 11: “I think it’s very important for President Musharraf to make a clear statement to the world that he intends to crack down on terror.” Bush said. “And I believe if he does that . . . it’ll provide relief . . . on a situation that’s still serious.”18 The world watched with bated breath as the government announced that Musharraf would address the nation on television on January 12. U.S. diplomats in Islamabad told me that Washington had provided Musharraf with a wish list to include in his speech. Musharraf had no option but to offer a significant climbdown. His January 12 speech was dubbed a U-turn as significant as the one he had made after 9 /11. Musharraf told his countrymen that “Pakistan rejects and condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. Pakistan will not allow its territory to be used for any terrorist activity anywhere in the world. . . . No organization will be allowed to indulge in terrorism in the name of Kashmir.”

  However, he said that Pakistan would never surrender its claim to Kashmir. “Kashmir runs in our blood,” he insisted. For the first time he spoke out against jihad, saying it should be waged only against poverty and hunger. “We are not the custodians of taking jihad all over the world,” he said after announcing a ban on five extremist groups. The reaction from the jihadi groups was hostile as hundreds of militants were rounded up. The Jamiat-e-Islami did not hesitate to take a blatant dig at the ISI
. “Will Musharraf care to explain who has been patronizing jihad for all those 25 years in Afghanistan and 12 years in Kashmir,” said Jamiat leader Munawar Hussain.

  Yet public and media cynicism was widespread. Ayaz Amir, the renowned columnist, wrote, “By joining America’s war effort we thought that we had neutralized the threat from India and indeed left India out in the cold. Now it turns out that it is we who were caught in a bind. Helpless then, helpless now but justifying every turnaround by reference to that mystical entity, the national interest.”19

  Colin Powell visited India and Pakistan to ask both countries to deescalate tensions, but the Vajpayee government faced a political crisis and rising unpopularity at home, and India prepared for war again in May.20

  Stock markets in both countries crashed, and foreigners started to pack up and leave. Musharraf had once again badly miscalculated by refusing to shut down the militant attacks. “By March it was clear to us that Musharraf was not going to implement his promises of January 12. All the arrested militants were freed, and the military had no intention of imposing any curbs on their activities,” a U.S. diplomat in Islamabad told me. In Washington there were differences of approach between the State and Defense departments. Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, handled South Asia. Powell liked Musharraf enormously and had developed a close relationship with him—he telephoned the Pakistani leader eleven times in eight weeks—but that did not stop Armitage from getting tough with Musharraf when it was needed.

  Donald Rumsfeld, however, was less willing to put pressure on Pakistan, fearing that Musharraf would cut off assistance to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and stop cooperating in the hunt for al Qaeda. Throughout the crisis, Rumsfeld did not criticize Musharraf once, and General Franks made no bones about how much he trusted Musharraf as one soldier to another. Referring to a visit to Islamabad back in January 2001, Franks wrote, “As we spoke, it struck me that it was appropriate we both wore uniforms.” The United States had for years “hectored soldier-politicians such as Pervez Musharraf about human rights and representative government. Of course I believed in these issues with equal conviction, but at this point in history we needed to establish priorities. Stopping al Qaeda was such a priority.”21