JULY 29, 2001
THE CABIN WAS DARK, the dishes had been cleared away, and there was little sound to compete with the low thrum of the aircraft engines. I was reclining in my seat, beginning to drop off to sleep, when I felt a subtle presence, like soft breathing, above my face. Thinking it was my imagination, I opened my eyes slightly, to find a dark-haired woman leaning over me.
“Are you awake?” she whispered. Slightly startled, I glanced around me. “Yes,” I breathed.
“We must speak,” she said. She inclined her head toward the forward end of the cabin. “Five minutes.”
I had first met Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi almost two years before, while waiting in a salon at the official Pakistani prime minister’s residence. General Musharraf’s overthrow of Prime Minister Sharif had taken place just a few weeks earlier. With no one else to occupy it, the general was using the ornate, Moorish-style mansion as a venue to receive guests while in Islamabad, away from his official residence at Army House.
The room was flooded with bright sunlight, streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. A peacock strutted on the lawn outside. Sitting alone, I looked up to see a slight and strikingly beautiful woman as she approached from my right. I recognized her immediately. Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, from a leading Pakistani family, was a well-known and eminent scholar, the former editor of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, and a former diplomat, having previously represented the government of Benazir Bhutto as ambassador to Washington. Now she had been designated by Musharraf to serve again as Pakistan’s envoy to the U.S. capital.
She took a place beside me. She glanced knowingly when I told her my position; she obviously recognized who I was. “Well,” she said in a mellifluous voice, “you must be having an interesting time here.”
She was dressed in traditional shalwar khameez, in complementary shades of pastel green, with an offsetting silk dupatta, or shawl, draped over her chest and back over her shoulders. Perfectly groomed, she seemed much younger than her long résumé would imply, but it was impossible to say by how much. She exuded an aura of competence and command, combined with an almost girlish curiosity and, disarmingly, a hint of mischievous fun.
Suddenly she stopped. What was I doing here? I explained that Ambassador Milam and his political counselor, John Schmidt, were meeting with the Pakistani chief executive, and that I was cooling my heels in case I was called upon to address some issue or other. Her eyes widened in surprise for a moment, and then, as quickly, a veil of anger fell over them. We both realized at once that she was in an impossible position. She had been summoned to meet with General Musharraf immediately after his meeting with the American ambassador. She could not be included in the current meeting, as she had not presented her credentials in Washington, and so as yet had no official status. And yet here she was, sitting outside and therefore seeming pointedly excluded from the meeting. The exiting guests would understand the reasons for this, but still she would look slightly ridiculous, as though loitering outside a stage door she could not enter.
Just then, a pudgy brigadier from Army Protocol wandered into the room. She was on her feet and at him in a flash, in a salvo of elegant but acidic Urdu. A serious mistake had been made at her expense, and someone was going to pay. The hapless fellow fell back three steps, wincing, and then turned and scampered down the hallway like a scalded dog. Her fury momentarily slaked, Lodhi turned on her heel and marched across the room to a low settee. She whirled and flung herself on the middle cushion. There was a long pause. “Shit,” she said.
Now, as we leaned in the shadows against the forward bulkhead, Ambassador Lodhi was equally direct: She wanted to know what was going on, and she insisted that I must tell her. We were on a British Airways flight from London to Islamabad. I was returning from my consultations in Washington; she was traveling to Pakistan in advance of an expected visit by Christina Rocca, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia.
The Pakistani foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, had recently visited Washington and had been “shellshocked,” she said, by the vehemence of U.S. views regarding Pakistani support for the Taliban. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you for eighteen months?” Lodhi had told him. Senior officials in Pakistan didn’t want to acknowledge the growing U.S. anger and apprehension. Her detractors, she charged, were quick to play the “gender card,” suggesting that as a woman, she was panicking. Now that Sattar had gotten an earful for himself, perhaps they’d begin to understand what was at stake.
For months, in terms similar to those employed by Milam and me in our early 2000 conversation with President Musharraf, Lodhi had been warning Islamabad that the next attack by al-Qa’ida would generate a major response by the Americans, and that the consequences for Pakistan, as the most important defender and ally of the Taliban, would be severe. What, she wanted to know, was the chief of station telling General Mahmud, director-general of the ISI? So far as she could tell, Mahmud was “serene,” stating that he had no problems with CIA, based on “decades of good relations” between Langley and the vaunted Pakistani intelligence service.
That last phrase, the one about “decades of good relations,” stung me. In fact, at my instigation, we had tried a new tack with Mahmud and his service following my failed February 2000 meeting with Musharraf. Our charm offensive had been keyed to General Mahmud’s visit to Washington a month later, and to George Tenet’s subsequent visit to Pakistan in June of that year. I had lavished as much favorable attention on Mahmud as I could.
My idea, adopted readily by Director Tenet and Jim Pavitt, who had now risen to be the agency’s deputy director for operations, was that during the reciprocal visits by the two intelligence chiefs, we should distance ourselves from the rest of the U.S. government, and appeal for ISI help based on the long cooperative relationship between our services, of which our spectacularly successful joint effort during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s was the most prominent example. Our pitch was that effective intelligence cooperation against al-Qa’ida would get the favorable attention of the U.S. government, and perhaps lead to a wider thaw in relations. “Help us help you,” we said.
During his March 2000 visit to Washington, in sharp counterpoint to his unpleasant contacts with the Department of State and the National Security Council, we treated Mahmud with warm respect and fêted him and his senior officers at clubby dinners in the countryside. Having learned that Mahmud had written a thesis at the Pakistan Army Command and Staff College on the battle of Gettysburg, I arranged a special tour and walked the entire battlefield with him and his staff, accompanied by an eminent Civil War historian from the U.S. Army War College.
It appeared for a time that the “good cop” approach might work: during Tenet’s visit to Pakistan in June 2000, General Musharraf, in the presence of both Mahmud and myself, promised a vigorous program of counterterrorism cooperation, including establishment of a joint counterterrorism unit. But it was all for naught. As soon as Tenet’s plane cleared Pakistani airspace, Mahmud began assiduously to avoid me. When at length he agreed to meet with me in September 2000, he finally responded to my repeated appeals for concrete follow-up by saying, “What’s the next item on your agenda?”
Now it appeared to me that not only was General Mahmud not following through on the Pakistani chief executive’s commitments, but that my moderate tone was perhaps leading him to believe—or at least to claim—that CIA’s message was different from what Pakistan was getting elsewhere in the U.S. government. This was both embarrassing and galling.
Our message in Islamabad, I assured Lodhi, was the same as hers. General Mahmud wasn’t hearing it, I said, “because we don’t talk.”
“That has to change,” she asserted. The United States and Pakistan must cooperate on Afghanistan, and so must the intelligence services.
“Look,” I said. “The reason we can’t get there is that Pakistan won’t engage on the issue. If your government would level with us, and explain the national interests being served by your support of the Taliban, we could work with you to find an alternative means of addressing your problems and pursuing your interests. Pakistan seems convinced that the United States has ulterior, unstated goals in Afghanistan, and we can’t counter those concerns if they’re never expressed.”
Lodhi agreed. “We’ve got to do something before Pakistan is blamed for the next al-Qa’ida attack. And violence in Afghanistan is affecting Pakistan as well; it must be eliminated at the source.”
Time is of the essence, I stressed. Al-Qa’ida, we knew, was planning to strike us again. “It’s not a matter of if, but of when. Between us, we have to find a way to make them understand.” The ambassador had the haunted look of someone who could see the future when no one else in her government could. Her agenda and mine were certainly not identical, but they overlapped. My goal was to neutralize bin Laden and deny a platform to al-Qa’ida before they could launch another strike against U.S. interests; her goal was to avoid having Pakistan take the blame if and when such a strike occurred. The key to realizing both our goals was Mahmud. If he could be induced to provide some effective cooperation against al-Qa’ida, whose operatives and facilitators were transiting Pakistan with impunity, it might help us disrupt the next attack, and it would change the prism through which Pakistan was seen in the U.S. government. Lodhi’s was clearly the only compelling voice of reason in the Pakistani government, but she was an outlier, with little internal support; I did not envy her position.
“You must engage with Mahmud,” she insisted again. “Besides,” she added, with a sly smile, “he likes you.”