EARLY SEPTEMBER 2001
MALEEHA LODHI HAD CLEARLY checked out. She was staring up at the ceiling, making little pretense of listening. Both she and I had heard this monologue many times before.
In the West Wing of the White House, small increments of power and influence are measured in square feet of office space and proximity to the Oval Office. The space accorded Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, was relatively capacious, and included a small seating area and a conference table, set by a working fireplace. But her deputy Steve Hadley’s office, where we were sitting, could have been mistaken for a broom closet. The Pakistani ambassador was forced to sit upright and primly, lest her right knee touch my left. Seemingly oblivious of the uncomfortable setting and the evident lack of interest from two thirds of his audience, Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed droned on with his usual precise diction, in a deep, sonorous voice. He was at his articulate but tiresomely pedantic best.
Maddening as he was, I had long found Mahmud to be a fascinating character. In an army formed on the British model, he was the prototype of the British-style officer. From the bristling mustaches, to the ascot, to the ramrod-straight posture, to the swagger stick tucked under his right arm, he might have stepped out of a picture book of the early twentieth-century British-Indian Army. A classicist and an intellectual, his discourse was strewn with references to Clausewitz, Bertrand Russell, and Aristotle. In his telling, the Amu Darya River, which set the northern border of present-day Afghanistan, was the ancient Oxus; modern Istanbul was Constantinople, or Byzantium. And yet he startled me on one occasion by quoting, at length and by heart, the lyrics of a recent sentimental Western pop ballad.
Mahmud was said to have rediscovered religion as he entered middle age, and he clearly wore both his personal piety and his pro-Taliban sympathies on his sleeve. In neither respect was he unusual. But among many, to me overwrought, foreign observers he represented something more. He was darkly reputed to be among the “closet Islamists” in Pakistan’s military leadership, holding religiously inspired political views and insidiously advocating a “jihadist” foreign policy.
In any event, for all that he was an unabashed apologist for the Taliban, it was hard to imagine such an urbane and sophisticated man having much personal sympathy for a group of primitive obscurantists who brutally repressed women and refused to see them educated. His strikingly pretty young wife, whom I had met, was highly literate, sharp-tongued and opinionated. Mahmud had told me with some pride that he and his daughter, with whom he was obviously close, were reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time so that they could discuss it together.
Given the strong ties between the Northern Alliance and India, Pakistan saw support for the Taliban as in its national interest, a view Mahmud clearly shared. But one could not reconcile the private man with his evident personal enthusiasm for the Taliban, which appeared to go well beyond considerations of Pakistani national interest, without assuming a large measure of social and cultural condescension toward Afghans, and what these benighted tribalists might legitimately aspire to. That, too, was consistent with his character.
Now, having regaled Hadley with graphic stories of the obscene depredations of the Afghan warlords whom the Taliban had deposed, he went on to describe the impossible challenges they would face in trying to track down bin Laden on our behalf—in the unlikely event they ever agreed to do so. “The peaks of the Hindu Kush,” he intoned dramatically, “rise over 20,000 feet, and the valleys are so deep that the sun never penetrates.” Allowing for some poetic license, most of what Mahmud had to tell the deputy national security advisor, along with other senior officials around town, was true enough; and all of it was irrelevant.
In a cable to headquarters in advance of Mahmud’s September 2001 visit, I had warned my senior leadership that “his mission is not engagement, but pacification.” At the time of my hushed late July conversation with Ambassador Lodhi on the flight to Islamabad, there had been yet a glimmer of hope. Now, a little more than a month later, I had concluded that so long as Mahmud was in place, there was no realistic prospect of gaining active Pakistani support either in attacking and disabling al-Qa’ida’s infrastructure in Pakistan, or for a prospective effort to drive a wedge between the Taliban and bin Laden in Afghanistan. We would have to proceed on our own, I said, and hope the Pakistanis would turn a “blind eye” to our cross-border efforts in the likely event they discovered them. Pakistani interference with us would be more easily avoided if we could convince them that we did not seek the downfall of the Taliban per se, but only to drive al-Qa’ida from its safehaven.
Neither Mahmud nor anyone else in the Pakistani government seemed to have any brief for bin Laden or his Afghan Arabs. Logically speaking, and so long as it was kept quiet, there was no reason for them not to cooperate in a limited campaign against al-Qa’ida, and seemingly every reason to do so, if they hoped to rebuild their relations with the United States. In his final lunch at CIA Headquarters, Mahmud suggested that we bribe Afghan tribals to track down bin Laden. But he pointedly did not offer any assistance in the effort.
As we rode together in the back of a chauffeured car up the George Washington Parkway toward the CIA Headquarters building for a final, unpleasant meeting with Cofer Black and CTC, I put the question to Mahmud directly: Given that bin Laden’s presence served no Pakistani national interest, why did he refuse to cooperate against the Saudi and his terrorist followers? There was a long silence. Was it because of the Pressler sanctions? I asked. Mahmud paused, and looked away. “Yes,” he said quietly. It was something I already knew, but his admission was nonetheless significant. The ISI chief had no interest in rebuilding relations with America; he was too busy nursing resentments over the past.
Within Afghanistan, I wrote that August, our best intelligence indicated that ties between Mullah Omar and the Arabs were strengthening, while the animosity of Omar’s senior lieutenants toward the outsiders was growing. These opposing trends had not yet created a fissure in the leadership, and it was not yet clear which side would predominate. On August 27, I sent another message to headquarters, pressing again for an integrated U.S. policy to produce and exploit such a break in Taliban unity. Once again, I argued that if we were permitted to foment a tribal uprising in protest of the Arab presence in Afghanistan, we might sufficiently empower the anti-Arab elements in the Taliban Shura to force Omar to expel bin Laden.
CIA, unable to reconcile the conflicting advice between CTC and myself, sent a draft covert action proposal to the NSC combining both our ideas: We should reinforce the Northern Alliance, it said, while simultaneously encouraging a tribal uprising in the south. The White House tabled the draft for further study.
Lacking the new authorities we sought, my officers and I pressed forward aggressively with what authorities we had. In the second half of August, our southern tribal contacts distributed hundreds of “night letters”—propaganda sheets slid under doors or tossed over compound walls in the dark of night—in and around Kandahar, decrying bin Laden and the pernicious presence of Arab foreigners. We hoped they would convey the impression of a groundswell of popular opposition to al-Qa’ida.
The September round of Washington meetings almost concluded, and just before departing once again for Pakistan, I met with Ambassador Lodhi over a private dinner in a restaurant overlooking the Potomac. Though neither of us said so, the sense of resignation was palpable. She could not move her government, and I could not move mine. In fact, there was little of substance for us to discuss.
Mahmud planned to stay on in Washington for several days after my September 7 departure, so that he could make a reciprocal meeting with the chairmen of the two congressional intelligence oversight committees, whom he had hosted at a lavish outdoor dinner in Pakistan a few days before, on August 29. Their meeting was scheduled for September 11. That morning, as the general and Ambassador Lodhi sat in the Capitol with Representative Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, the group was suddenly approached by an aide who reported stunning news from New York. A television set was turned on, and all watched the scene of smoke rising from the twin towers, until the order came to evacuate the building. I was watching the identical scene from my office in Islamabad.
As the two Pakistanis were driven west down Constitution Avenue, they suddenly saw a plume of smoke rise in the sky off to their left, in the direction of the Pentagon. Time was up. As some of us had feared, and to a greater extent than we could ever have imagined, life as we had known it was about to change.