Descent Into Chaos Read online

  Again the United States issued an ultimatum. On May 25, Bush warned Musharraf to stop infiltration into Indian Kashmir and to live up to the commitments he had made on January 12. “It’s very important for President Musharraf to do what he said he was going to do and that is stop the incursions across the border,” Bush said.22 Musharraf continued to deny support for the militants. Bush reiterated his demands on May 29. For an administration that preferred conducting its foreign policy in the shadows rather than in public, Bush’s interventions were highly unusual and demonstrated how serious the confrontation between India and Pakistan had become.

  After receiving messages from Islamabad that it was prepared to rein in the militants if India de-escalated on the border, Washington began to use coercive diplomacy against India for the first time. On June 1, in an unprecedented coordinated move, the United States, Britain, and Germany advised all their nationals to leave India on a voluntary basis because of the danger of war. With sixty thousand American and twenty thousand British citizens in India—many of them business executives—the warning came as a rude shock. New Delhi had not contemplated the fallout of a war on its booming economy. A senior U.S. official later told me that “it was a calculated move carried out by Armitage to shock India into seeing the consequences of even a limited incursion across the [Line of Control].”23 U.S. intelligence had learned that India planned for a brigade-level commando raid across the LOC to attack militants’ training camps, which would certainly have resulted in all-out war.

  Now Armitage met with a positive response when he arrived in Islamabad. Musharraf promised that the infiltration of militants would cease, and Armitage conveyed the message to a still-skeptical Indian leadership.24 U.S. intelligence knew that Musharraf and senior ISI officers had met with Kashmiri extremists to tell them that their entry into Indian Kashmir was now forbidden. By late June, Indian officials were admitting that infiltration was much reduced, while artillery guns on both sides of the LOC had fallen silent.

  India still delayed withdrawing its forces from the border, largely because the government had no idea how to explain such a climbdown to its own people. By July, attacks in Indian Kashmir had resumed. India now demanded that Pakistan dismantle all terrorist training camps and that the United States monitor the process. The United States weighed in once again with a visit to the region at the end of July by Powell, who admitted that “we still do not have evidence whether infiltration has been stopped on a permanent basis or not.”25 In September, elections for the state assembly in Indian Kashmir turned into a bloodbath, with militants gunning down twenty-three political activists and two candidates in the space of two weeks. Over the two-month campaign period, more than eight hundred soldiers and civilians were killed.26 However, India termed the elections a triumph, as the international community endorsed them as free and fair. That claim of success gave India the excuse to move its troops back from the border.

  The possibility of the Indian-Pakistan conflict quickly escalating into all-out conventional war and then turning into a nuclear exchange was a persistent worry for the White House, but of even greater concern was the potential of an al Qaeda attack using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the first months after 9/11, the CIA was deeply fearful of a follow-up nuclear or biological weapons attack on the American mainland by al Qaeda. In 1998, bin Laden had said that obtaining nuclear weapons was “a religious duty,” and he spoke frequently about creating an American Hiroshima.27 The discovery at al Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan of computer disks, laboratories, and even a crude diagram of a nuclear bomb, showing that al Qaeda was experimenting with biological and nuclear warfare, only confirmed the worst about al Qaeda’s intentions.

  Another intelligence failure by the CIA would have been catastrophic, and now to err on the side of a heightened threat perception was preferable to ignoring the danger. As al Qaeda fighters were captured, there was an urgent demand from Washington for “instant actionable intelligence,” about what prisoners could reveal about possible WMD attacks. Right after the war ended, several U.S. officials told me that the fear of a WMD attack and the lack of intelligence about how well prepared al Qaeda was to launch one haunted the CIA and the Pentagon. “The kind of warnings and threat perceptions that passed across my desk every morning would not let me to sleep at night,” one U.S. intelligence official told me. “It was without doubt the scariest time of our lives—there was a real fear that al Qaeda had a follow-up plan to 9/11 which involved WMD,” said a State Department official.”28

  Due to the penetration of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment by Britain’s MI6, the CIA learned astonishing information about contact between Pakistani nuclear scientists and al Qaeda. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, two retired nuclear scientists from the stable run by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri several times—the last time just a few weeks before 9 /11. According to journalist Ron Suskind, at first the CIA was uncertain of the extent to which it could trust the ISI with this information. The uncertainty prompted Dick Cheney to lay out a guiding principle for the administration that was later to justify many of the half-truths stated as the reasons for invading Iraq. Cheney said, “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapons, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”29

  One reason for the stepped-up fear was that neither MI6 nor the CIA had a complete picture of the extent of contacts between Pakistani scientists and al Qaeda on WMD. Before 9 /11 several retired ISI officers had boasted that one of the key reasons for Pakistan’s support to the Taliban regime was to gain access to vast former Soviet underground storage bunkers built at major airfields such as Bagram. Here Pakistan could stash away conventional and nuclear-tipped missiles in order to enhance its second-strike capability against India in case of war. After U.S. forces searched these Soviet-era airfields it became clear that no such bunkers existed.

  With so many scary stories floating around, the U.S. administration imagined the worst when it heard about the two scientists’ possible ties to al Qaeda. In fact, Mahmood was a bit of a crackpot. He had been part of the nuclear program since 1974, and had helped A. Q. Khan set up his global clandestine network to purchase nuclear parts. Later, though, he had written a book called Cosmology and Human Destiny, in which he tried to connect major historical events to sunspots, while suggesting that the power of “jinns”—mythical beings who are a cross between humans and angels—could be harnessed to generate energy. After retiring, he had established Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Rebuilding the Ummah), an Islamic aid agency that attracted Islamic fundamentalist technocrats and former ISI officers and ostensibly provided medical care in Afghanistan.

  At the CIA’s behest, the ISI arrested Mahmood, Majid, and four others. Mahmood later admitted to meeting bin Laden. “I met Mullah Omar, members of his council of ministers as well as Osama bin Laden only to seek their cooperation in pursuing the goals of my organization,” he said.30 The CIA was not satisfied and George Tenet secretly visited Islamabad on December 1 to insist that Musharraf allow the CIA to interrogate the scientists. Tenet also asked Musharraf to carry out a more extensive purge of officers from the ISI whom the CIA considered closet extremists.31

  Musharraf was already in the dock concerning nuclear proliferation. A few months before 9 /11, suspicions that Dr. Khan had sold nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran had led the United States and Britain to force Musharraf to remove Khan as head of Khan Research Laboratories, one of the key atomic weapons centers in the country. However, Khan was considered a true local hero, especially by the army, and Musharraf made him his special adviser, a perfunctory post with no powers. At a dinner in Khan’s honor held on March 27, 2001, in Islamabad, Musharraf described him as “a giant of a man,” “our national hero,” “imbued
with supreme patriotism and a sense of destiny.” Yet Musharraf failed to root out the criminal actions in the sale of nuclear technology that Khan had begun, which would lead to a far bigger scandal in 2005, when Khan was caught red-handed selling nuclear plans to Libya.32

  After the scare of 2002, India refused to hold talks with Pakistan, although the Bush administration tried to convince New Delhi that in order for India to play a larger role in the region it needed to put the Pakistan problem behind it. “It is simply a fact of life that India will not realize its immense potential on the global stage until its relationship with Pakistan is normalized,” Richard Haass told an Indian audience in Hyderabad in January 2003.33 Such appeals to India’s sense of self-importance seemed to work, as in April 2003 Prime Minister Vajpayee offered to talk to Pakistan.

  A back channel for secret talks had already been opened by both sides. Tariq Aziz, a national security adviser to Musharraf, and Brajesh Mishra, Aziz’s Indian counterpart, began a series of meetings in London, Dubai, and Singapore. Relations began to normalize as diplomats returned to take up their posts and both sides took small steps to rebuild mutual confidence. The ISI made greater efforts to stop militants from crossing into Indian Kashmir. A full year later the back-channel dialogue led to the two leaders’ meeting on January 5, 2004, in Islamabad, at a regional summit. This time there was no rush to judgment as there had been during the Agra summit. This summit had been well prepared and nothing was left to chance, especially as in the previous month there had been two attempts on Musharraf’s life in Islamabad.

  Vajpayee, now seventy-nine and ailing, arrived saying this was his last attempt to make peace. Musharraf echoed similar sentiments.34 In the negotiations, Pakistan wanted India to announce a date for the start of a structured dialogue on the Kashmir issue, while India wanted stronger commitments from Pakistan on controlling “cross-border terrorism.” In the end, both sides got something of what they wanted. Pakistan assured India that it would not allow its territory to be used for terrorism—exactly what Musharraf had promised but never implemented earlier, in his January 12, 2002, speech. Vajpayee promised to negotiate on settling the Kashmir dispute.35 It had taken nearly three years since 9/11 for relations between the two countries to normalize.

  India held general elections in May 2004, and the results jolted Pakistan as the Bharatiya Janata Party lost to the Congress Party and its allies. Congress had not been in power for twelve years, and it would now move very cautiously in its relations with Pakistan. Instead of substantial dialogue on Kashmir the Congress government launched a blitz of small confidence-building measures with Pakistan, which deeply frustrated the Pakistanis. When Musharraf met with Congress Party prime minister Manmohan Singh for the first time at the UN General Assembly in September 2004, Singh told him that India would not accept any redrawing of its borders. India remained wary of any new arrangements in Kashmir.36

  Talks between the two countries limped along for the next three years. The militants continued to launch periodic attacks in Indian Kashmir, but New Delhi acknowledged that infiltration was down. India’s counterinsurgency efforts were also proving to be more effective. Musharraf became increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of progress in the talks. He told his aides that he wanted a major breakthrough in 2006, so that the following year he could get elected as president for the second time on the back of having “resolved” the Kashmir dispute. Yet the Indians told interlocutors that they would never dream of obliging a military dictator in such a way, even if a solution were possible.

  Pakistan had also lost the war of influence in Washington, as the United States built a new and long-lasting relationship with India, which had become the main U.S. ally in the region. In the summer of 2007, an Indo-U.S. deal that legitimized India’s civilian nuclear program removed a fundamental roadblock between the two countries and was to promote even closer cooperation in all fields. India had become Washington’s major geostrategic ally in combating the rising power of China, and was considered a responsible nuclear power, while Pakistan was still considered a pariah.

  It was Musharraf who had gone to war in Kargil and had upped the ante after 9/11, and he now found himself reaping the bitter harvest he himself had sown. Since Kargil, Musharraf had followed a continuous policy of brinkmanship by using extremists, in the belief that they could force India to the negotiating table. His policies were opportunistic and dangerous, and ultimately damaged his political credibility at home and abroad. Musharraf got away with so much for so long simply because the Bush administration did not want to jeopardize Pakistan’s cooperation in chasing al Qaeda leaders.

  The years of conflict had also given enormous powers to the intelligence agencies of both countries, which waged a nonstop proxy war, funding and arming dissidents in each other’s territory. “The intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan have fed paranoia about each other and have engaged in cross-border interference. Theirs is a dangerous game,” warned Bush administration official Shirin Tahir-Kheli.37 In 2005 and 2006, Afghanistan became a new battleground for their rivalries as Musharraf accused Karzai of giving Indian agents access to Pakistan’s western borders. The ISI accused India’s Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, of funding the insurgency by Baloch tribes in Balochistan, while RAW accused the ISI of funding Maoists and other dissidents in northeast India.

  For five decades Pakistan’s army had used the threat from India as the principal reason for building a national security state in Pakistan and to justify long bouts of military rule and large expenditures on the army. Every attempt by elected civilian leaders to make peace with India had been deliberately undermined by the army. Now Musharraf used making peace with India as a rationale for consolidating his power, insisting that only the army could sustain peace and hoping the international community would look favorably upon his continuing in power now that he led an army whose ostemsible goal was peace with India.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The One-Billion-Dollar Warlords The War Within Afghanistan

  In the spring of 2002, some forty American U.S. Special Operations Forces and CIA agents were ensconced in a huge, white-domed marble palace perched on a hill overlooking the city of Herat, in western Afghanistan. The palace had been lent to them by the warlord Ismael Khan. At the bottom of the hill was the Iranian consulate, and farther along were the offices of the paramilitary Sipah-e-Pasadran, or Army of God, extremists who were loyal to Iran’s fundamentalist supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and who tended to ignore the moderate government of President Mohammad Khatami. The Americans considered Herat the front line in the war against the newly coined “axis of evil,” which Bush had delineated in his January State of the Union address as comprising Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. From being a good and helpful interlocutor during the Bonn talks, Iran had suddenly been demonized by the U.S. president. The team on the hill was concerned that al Qaeda leaders were escaping to Iran through Herat.

  In a typical Afghan ploy, the wily Ismael Khan made sure that the Iranians and the Americans spent most of the time watching each other rather than him, as he fed them tidbits of misinformation and gossip that kept their daggers drawn. In a country where all the institutions of state and civil society had been destroyed by war, the resulting vacuum was filled with heavily armed militias and warlords. Ismael Khan was a genuine warlord in that he was both ruthless and popular, a provider of essential services to the people and a perpetrator of terror. He commanded territory—five western provinces—and an army of some twenty thousand men, who lived off the land. Khan was the epitome of the warlord who learns the art of survival by being extremely flexible. “Iran has been supporting us militarily for many years against the Taliban but it is not supporting us now,” he told me. “And I am a friend of the U.S. because it supported us in the war against the Taliban.”1

  As the Iranians clandestinely provided spare parts and ammunition for Khan’s Soviet-era tanks and built roads for him, the Americans tried to reciprocate with canal-cleaning
projects and ego-building gestures. On his first trip to visit a warlord outside Kabul, Donald Rumsfeld described Khan as “a very interesting, deep man.”2

  Now age fifty-six, with a bushy snow-white beard that covered his chest, Khan had been a young Afghan army captain when he led a revolt against the Soviet garrison in Herat in 1979, killing some fifty Soviet officers and their wives while they slept. In retaliation, the Soviets bombed half the city, killing more than fifty thousand Heratis. I visited the city a few months later, and the rubble still smelled of dead bodies. Khan had liberated Herat twice, once in 1992, after the fall of the communist regime, and then again after the fall of the Taliban. In the meantime he had spent two years in a Taliban jail.

  I had known Khan for nearly two decades and we had got on well. In the 1990s he ran the best warlord fiefdom in Afghanistan, which educated girls and set up industry. His authoritarian rule had turned Herat into the most peaceful and cleanest city but also the most repressed, where 75 percent of children went to school but nobody could utter a word in support of President Karzai or Zahir Shah. The time Khan spent in a Taliban jail had turned him into an insomniac and changed him from a religious conservative into a fanatic. Now he insisted that all women wear the burqa, and human rights advocates allege that he tortured his opponents. A Persian-speaking Herati, he persecuted the Pashtuns living in his territory.