TEN DAYS AFTER Benazir Bhutto was killed on the streets of Rawalpindi, America's two top spy chiefs boarded a CIA plane for the grueling, fifteen-hour flight to Pakistan. They carried aboard a portfolio of fresh intelligence about the man they believed killed her, and a dire warning to Pervez Musharraf that his government was the next target.
The very fact that the “two Mikes,” as they are called in the intelligence world—McConnell and Hayden—were traveling together made this an unusual mission. Bush had come to depend on his morning intelligence briefings, with their “threat matrixes” and accounts of overnight captures or action in Iraq, and his aides believed he was vaguely uncomfortable whenever his director of national intelligence and the CIA director were out of Washington at the same time.
But Pakistan was headed into a downward spiral that left them little choice. Hayden and McConnell thought that this was Musharraf's last chance, his last opportunity to take on the militants in the tribal areas and to defuse the protests in the streets. The gravity of the message, they hoped, would be reinforced by the rank of the messengers.
The trip was a blitz—more than 16,000 miles round trip for a stayover in Islamabad that lasted less than a day. But they were able to fly completely under the radar. If anyone saw them get off the CIA's unmarked plane—highly unlikely given the secrecy and security surrounding their visit—they would have looked like two graying executives arriving to sell airplane parts or consulting services.
McConnell looks like George Smiley in a John le Carré novel. He measures each sentence carefully, as if weighing what his audience already knows and what it is cleared to know. He speaks in a light Carolina drawl with an intense demeanor leavened by a flash of ironic humor.
Hayden, by contrast, is a sprightly, balding former Air Force general, with a down-home demeanor rooted in his youth in a hard-scrabble area of Pittsburgh. Hayden also ran the NSA—after McConnell—and with mixed results. Known as a skilled bureaucratic infighter, he won battles over funding and shook up the place. He courted reporters by inviting them into Fort Meade, home of what was once known as “No Such Agency.” But his signature program, Trailblazer, which began in 2001 as part of an effort to improve the agency's ability to sort through a haul of 650 million messages a day, cost hundreds of millions of dollars and suffered long delays. His critics used it to question his management skills; his advocates maintained that he woke the agency from its post-Cold War stupor. In the Bush years, he emerged as the defender of the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program—the administration dubbed it the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” once its existence was exposed—and was left to explain why the administration simply ignored legal requirements that it found inconvenient. Away from the cameras, he was far more down to earth than might be expected of an Air Force officer turned spy chief.
“He's Type A, but Mike's far more likely to find the humorous or the ridiculous in whatever problem we're tackling,” one of his colleagues told me. “And he's often the first one to say, ‘You know, there are some problems that all the covert action in the world won't solve.’”
Pakistan was one of those problems. Since 2001 Musharraf had been the master of promises, most unkept. One day he was vowing to send 100,000 troops into the tribal areas to root out what he called “miscreants,” a politically less loaded term than “terrorists.” The next day he was pronouncing that seeking Osama bin Laden was Bush's problem, not his, while quietly assuring Bush in private phone calls that his statements were all about quieting domestic criticism while sending crack counterterrorism teams into the mountains to bring him bin Laden's head. In 2002, Musharraf made a huge show of arresting 2,000 suspected militants, many of whom had trained in Taliban camps that Pakistan had sponsored. After he had milked the arrests for publicity, he quietly ordered all of the prisoners released. He was, as McConnell and Hayden often commented to each other, the master of the double game.
Inevitably, the game turned against him. Many of the same militants Pakistan had once supported to fight the Soviets, and secretly funded to blow up Indian troops in the disputed areas of Kashmir, were now taking aim at the Pakistani government itself. To them, Musharraf was an American lackey who had sold Pakistan's soul, its sovereignty and, if you believed the rumors, maybe control of its nuclear weapons to the Americans. In a country where conspiracy theories are served up with dinner, others thought he had been duped, falling for a secret plot between India and the United States to disarm Pakistan, then destroy it.
To the Americans, this view of Musharraf was not only incomprehensible, it was laughable. Musharraf appeared so busy balancing competing interests to stay in power that he was ignoring the storm gathering around him. As they flew to Islamabad, McConnell and Hayden debated how to convince Musharraf that he could not survive unless he took the war to the militants. They pored over the evidence they were prepared to show him, largely intercepts of conversations among the insurgents in the northwest territories. Cell phone conversations convinced them that the man who had ordered Bhutto's death was Baitullah Mehsud, a thuggish militant who had established the Tehrik-e-Taliban just weeks before Bhutto's death in an effort to create an umbrella organization for the “Pakistani Taliban.”
That was only the opening page of the portfolio. McConnell and Hayden planned to lay out for Musharraf what Hayden later termed a map of the “nexus between Pashtun extremism and the growing attacks on Pakistan.” They brought evidence of how attacks originating from the safe haven of the tribal region had “gotten worse, progressively worse.” The warning to Musharraf was stark: This was an all-out war between Pakistan and the militants, and Pakistani forces had to get into the fight.
As always, Musharraf was a cipher. He knew what his visitors wanted to hear and sounded as if he were in complete agreement. Hayden later told associates that Musharraf was under no illusions. After all, this was a man who had survived at least two assassination attempts. He was finishing our sentences, Hayden said when he returned to Washington. He got it.
McConnell wasn't so sure. He thought Musharraf was still living in a state of denial, unaware of the dark clouds headed for Islamabad.
WHAT MUSHARRAF did not know during his meeting with McConnell and Hayden—or, at least, what he was not explicitly told— was that Bush was out of patience and secretly preparing for a major change in American strategy. Only days before their trip, after considerable debate within his national security team, Bush secretly began to lift the restrictions that greatly limited CIA operations inside Pakistani territory. It was the first of a series of decisions—none ever announced publicly or even acknowledged in my conversations with administration officials, except by knowing looks or their requests that not too many details become public, for fear of the backlash in Pakistan.1
Bush did not issue a new “finding”—the legal document, which the White House would have to report to Congress, that permits the CIA to conduct a new covert operation. Instead he loosened restrictions on an existing finding, one issued just days after 9/11. Using that method, he did not have to notify Congress of a new approach.
Until the early days of 2008, the CIA Predator aircraft that hovered off the Afghan-Pakistan border could strike targets inside Pakistan only under the most restrictive conditions. The plane's operators—7,000 miles away, flying the drones from video consoles in Nevada—could not strike without knowing exactly who they had in their sights. There had to be a full assessment of the potential “collateral damage.” You could not hit a basement full of terrorists if above them was a living room full of kids. The list of acceptable targets was small—a short list of top al Qaeda operatives, starting with bin Laden himself.
Now, in a process that had taken months, Bush had expanded what Hayden and McConnell called “the permissions.” He simply lowered the standard of proof needed before the Predators could strike. For the first time the CIA no longer had to identify its target by name; now the “signature” of a typical al Qaeda motorcade, or of a group entering a known al Qaeda safe house, was enough to authorize a strike. Moreover, the agency and Special Forces were given permission to go after a wider group of al Qaeda members. The list of targets was expanded to about twenty. And they could make use of a specially modified version of the Predator—designed for precision strikes. It could drop a ton of guided bombs and missiles, all from a pilotless “hunter-killer drone” that had bulked up to the size of a small fighter aircraft. It was a drone on steroids at 50,000 feet.
One of his top national security aides referred to the choices presented to Bush as “a Chinese menu of other options” that would gradually allow the CIA greater latitude. “It's risky,” the aide said, “because you can make more mistakes—you can hit the wrong house, or misidentify the motorcade.”
By the time Bush was done making his menu selections, it was clear that a new front was opening in the war along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bush's decision was enveloped in enormous secrecy because Musharraf had warned of a huge backlash if Americans were ever caught operating in sovereign Pakistani territory—something he publicly insisted he would never permit. Of course, he knew the United States was already in Pakistan, with two small CIA “forward operating bases” deep inside Pakistani military facilities. But the bases were tiny, and the American faces could be easily explained away as military advisers. Now, Bush was greatly upping the ante. This would turn out to be only the first in a series of escalating “permissions” as the White House became convinced that the Paksitani government was both unwilling to deal with the Pashtun militants in the tribal belt and incapable of doing so. “It was born of sheer frustration,” one of Bush's top aides said to me. “It was clear that the chaos settling over the country would continue, and maybe worsen.”
He paused. “The problem of Pakistan comes down to this: How do you invade an ally?”
IT QUICKLY TURNED OUT that McConnell and Hayden were talking to the wrong man. Pervez Musharraf still looked as if he were leading Pakistan. He was as charming and witty as ever, with all the characteristics that had led Bush to invest too much confidence in him. He had been able to talk general-to-general with Powell. He could spin out a democratic vision for Pakistan that appealed to Americans. But at home his magic had long since worn off. And it took Bush far too long to understand that Musharraf was yesterday's dictator.
Bush's dependence on Musharraf was understandable, up to a point. Since the Pakistani's shotgun transformation into an American ally in the hours after the 9/11 attacks, he seemed like the kind of leader Bush was looking for, a wily pragmatist, a survivor who understood where his interests lay. But, over time, Bush came to believe too much of his own public praise for Musharraf. Out of optimism, out of necessity, out of an absence of other options, Bush clung to the hope that Musharraf was a fierce warrior against terrorists of all stripes—a perception Musharraf fostered early in the “war on terror” by handing over some al Qaeda members.
The intelligence reports Bush and the rest of the national security team received each morning—and Hayden's own presentations in January 2008 to Bush's national security team—told a very different story. In the weeks after Bhutto's assassination, a flurry of new assessments on the deepening crisis in Pakistan concluded that it was unlikely that Musharraf, the man in whom Bush had invested America's entire Pakistan strategy and with it the battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda, could remain in power for long. The general, Hayden reported, had started losing control in the summer of 2007, with the standoff and shootout with militants who seized the famed Red Mosque in Islamabad. By August, Rice was often on the phone with Musharraf—twice a day, in one case—urging him not to impose martial law, a step that would almost certainly require Washington to denounce him for backing away from the democratic reforms he had long promised. Then came the fall of 2007 and a succession of political crises, as Musharraf attempted to kneecap a growing democratic movement by arresting protesting lawyers instead of using his time and resources to hunt down terrorists.
Rice and her deputy, John D. Negroponte, who had recently returned to the State Department after an unhappy year and a half as America's first director of national intelligence, tried to help save Musharraf from himself. They worked behind the scenes to engineer Bhutto's return to Pakistan and urged a “power-sharing” agreement between the plotting Bhutto, whom they distrusted, and Musharraf, whom they viewed as his own worst enemy. They knew it was a marriage made in hell, between two politicians whose hatred of each other went back years. But the hope was that the deal would take the passion out of the anti-Musharraf protests and buy some time. Washington could point to a democratic transition, and still have Musharraf at the other end of the phone. It was, in short, an unstable, long-shot political deal dressed up as a strategy.
The first assassination attempt against Bhutto occurred hours after she stepped off her plane for her first return to Pakistan in eight years. During the election campaign—which Musharraf permitted to go ahead, under tremendous pressure from the United States—she drew huge crowds, but the danger was palpable every day. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable suicide bomb exploded, or a shot rang out from the crowd. Even before she was struck down, Islamabad was rife with conspiracy theories, fanned by Bhutto's supporters, that Musharraf was deliberately withholding the kind of protection she needed. That charge was never proven, and she would not have trusted his guards anyway. Musharraf insisted that he offered protection, but after her assassination in December he shrugged and all but said she had it coming.
In December, as the negotiations over power-sharing took place behind the scenes, Bhutto argued with visiting American officials that they were making a huge mistake in betting on Musharraf. “Mr. Ambassador,” she said, drawing out every word in a telephone conversation with Negroponte, “don't you think it is time for him to go?” Her motives were transparent, and Negroponte was more amused than convinced. But at the White House, in corridor conversations, some officials were beginning to question whether their critics were right. They had bet on one horse for seven years, and now he was lame.
Musharraf's party was crushed in the elections, which were held more than a month after Bhutto's killing. “From that moment he was toast,” one of Bush's cabinet members said a few months later. Bush had to welcome the arrival of democracy, but with the new era came a powerless, bitterly divided government. It pitted a former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf had thrown out of power and sent into exile in a coup in 1999, against Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who had evaded or defeated corruption charges on several continents.
By the time I arrived in Islamabad in April 2008 to survey the damage, Musharraf's star was fading (He canceled an interview, and his spokesman, a burly ex-general who seemed unable to accept reality, explained one night that Musharraf was “the only one who can command this country, but he can't be talking about it.”) Having finally fulfilled his promise to retire from the army—and thus give up his most powerful role—Musharraf watched his authority ebb each day. “Without the uniform, he is nothing,” a senior general in the army, suddenly able to express his contempt for his ex-boss, told me late one afternoon at army headquarters. “He is just Bush's instrument, and the instrument is no longer sharp.”
By late spring, Bush realized that seven years after he had begun assiduously courting a Pakistani leader whose name he famously could not remember during the 2000 campaign, Pakistan was, in essence, being governed by no one. The newly elected civilian government was manned by the powerless, the corrupt, and the incompetent. The military was the only institution holding the country together, but for once it was staying out of politics. For the militants in the tribal areas, it was a dream come true. Pakistan was becoming a failed state, and the militants and the Taliban were speeding the process with regular bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations.
But admitting the obvious—that al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the militants had more running room than ever—was painful for an administration that was beginning to understand how much its preoccupation with Iraq had cost elsewhere. Just how painful became clear when Ted Gistaro, the National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, gave a speech in the doldrums of August 2008, that stated the obvious: In the year since the formal intelligence estimate concluding that al Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the tribal areas, al Qaeda had “maintained or strengthened key elements of its capability to attack the United States in the past year.” Its hold on the tribal area was stronger than ever, Gistaro said, and “it now has many of the operational and organization advantages it once enjoyed across the border in Afghanistan, albeit on a smaller and less secure scale.” Al Qaeda had “replenished its bench” of midlevel operatives, Gistaro explained, and deepened its alliances with the Taliban and other militants. Al Qaeda was more dynamic than ever, he argued, because it had “developed succession plans, [and could] reshuffle leadership responsibilities, and promote younger commanders with years of battlefield experience to senior positions.”2
Fortunately for Bush, so much of official Washington was elsewhere because of the summer holiday and congressional recess that few noticed the conclusions. Some administration officials pushed back gently, telling members of Congress they thought the situation had been overstated. But the White House had long since pulled the plug on Bush's regular speeches proclaiming victory against al Qaeda, speeches in which he usually cited statistics about how many of bin Laden's lieutenants had been killed, and how the organization's middle management had been wiped out. The speeches were now painfully easy to ridicule.
IF ANYONE NEEDED evidence that the reality on the ground was even worse than the formal assessments, it could be found near the Pakistani border, in the city of Kandahar, once the center of Taliban power in Afghanistan. That was, of course, the city where Nick Burns had taken the NATO ambassadors in 2003 to convince them that Afghanistan was becoming more peaceful, and that NATO should send in forces. It was the place where they sipped tea with tribal leaders. And while Americans rightly regard Pakistan and Afghanistan as separate countries, to the Taliban and other Pash-tun tribal leaders, it is all one friendly, familiar piece of territory. To them, the border, formally known as the Durand Line, is just a Western invention, an invisible boundary named for a long-dead Brit. It is meaningless to them; it only means something to the American military and NATO, for whom it has long been a wall over which they could not pass.
On the evening of June 13, 2008, a white fuel tanker truck pulled up near the gates of Kandahar's biggest prison. The driver hopped out of the cab, laughed, and ran off. In a flash, the few guards at the gate recognized what was happening and opened fire on him, but they missed—killing the son of a shopkeeper nearby instead. Within seconds a rocket-propelled grenade hit the tanker, setting off the fuel, killing the guards, and blowing a huge hole in the entryway to the prison. Just blocks away, the Afghan police didn't move; they, too, figured out what was happening and were too frightened to help. That left ten guards—several of whom were already dead—to fight off a wave of about forty invading Taliban. The undermanned NATO outpost in the city, consisting almost entirely of Canadian troops who had already suffered heavy casualties, were off dealing with roadside bombs that had been set off just a half hour before, in what appears to have been an effective diversion. By the time they figured out what was happening, it was over.
Investigators later determined that of the 900 prisoners who escaped that night, slightly more than a third were hardcore members of the Taliban.3 Still, six years after the American-led invasion, the prison had no blast walls, not even a barrier at the front gate. “This has been car-bomb central for years,” one senior administration official said to me after accounts of the prison break started leaking out. “We're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into the place. And we can't figure out how to build a blast wall?”
But it wasn't just the wall that was blown to pieces that night; so were the last remnants of credibility of the Karzai government. “What astounded me,” said Vikram Singh, a former Defense Department official who traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2008 and met with tribal leaders in Kandahar, “was how little control Karzai's government had beyond the capital.” Roads that were rebuilt with international funds, and hailed by Bush in speeches, were now unsafe even during the day. Singh quickly concluded that driving from Kandahar to Kabul would be suicidal for a foreigner. Even one of the provinces adjacent to Kabul was under de facto control of the Taliban, giving the capital a feeling of constant siege.
The spring brought a grim new turning point: American casualties in the country exceeded those in Iraq—even though the American force in Afghanistan was a fifth of the size of the U.S. force in Iraq during the “surge.” NATO forces became a regular target of suicide bombers and militant attacks; in August one battle involving 100 insurgents cost the lives of ten elite French paratroopers.
The Taliban and the insurgents had seen their window of opportunity. Despite the commitment of European leaders to stay in the fight, most NATO countries had ignored Bush's call for them to provide more troops. While several thousand additional American troops were arriving in Afghanistan as reinforcements, Bush was a lame duck, conducting one “strategy review” after another—an odd exercise in the last months of an eight-year-long presidency. The next administration would undoubtedly start with its own such review—and it would be months before a new national security team would be ready to adopt a strategy. And as long as the Americans could not cross the border into Pakistan, the Taliban knew that they had little to fear, save the occasional Predator overhead.
In the summer of 2008, just before the seventh anniversary of the attacks that started America's war in Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and Senator Chuck Hagel, who was retiring after two terms as a Republican senator from Nebraska, visited Afghanistan. I saw Hagel a few days after he returned, and we talked about the military assessments he had received.
“It's never looked worse,” Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, said to me. Then he stopped and corrected himself. “It's never looked worse since September 10, 2001.”
IN LATE MAY 2008, McConnell made a secret trip to Pakistan— his fourth or fifth since becoming the director of national intelligence, trips that seemed to blur together in his head. But this one was dramatically different from the rest—and ended up driving the push in the last days of the Bush administration to greatly step up covert action across the border into Pakistan.
Pacing quickly through his usual rounds of meetings with Musharraf and a raft of intelligence officials in Islamabad, Mc-Connell and his small entourage found themselves in a conference room with several military officers, including a two-star Pakistani general.
One officer was talking to another participant in the meetings as if the American intelligence chief—the visiting dignitary for the day—wasn't in the room. Not surprisingly, he was being pressed about Pakistan's strategy in the tribal areas, and he was “reluctant to start,” one of the participants in the conversation recalled. “But once he got into it, he couldn't contain himself.”
The officer began making the case that the real problem in the tribal areas and in Afghanistan was not al Qaeda or the Taliban, or even the militants who were trying to topple the Pakistani government. The real problem was Pakistan's rival of more than sixty years, which he said was secretly manipulating events in an effort to crush Pakistan and undo the 1947 partition that sought to separate the Islamic and Hindu states.
“The overwhelming enemy is India,” the Pakistani officer told the general. “We have to watch them at every moment. We've had wars with India,” he said, as if anyone in the room needed reminding.
The Pakistani two-star described President Karzai's cozy relationship with the Indians, seeking investment and aid. With alarm, he talked about how the Indians were opening consulates around the country and building roads. What the rest of the world saw as a desperately needed nation-building program, the Pakistanis saw as a threat. He wasn't alone in that view; conspiracy theories about India's activities in Afghanistan are a daily staple in the Pakistani media.
As the officer talked, he became more and more animated. “The Indians will surround us and annihilate us,” he said, knowing that McConnell was hearing every word. “And the Indians, in their surrounding strategy, have gone to Afghanistan.” Those newly built roads were future invasion routes, he seemed to suggest, without ever quite saying so. The consulates were dens of Indian spies. The real purpose of the humanitarian aid to Afghanistan was to run “operations out of Afghanistan to target Pakistan.”
The conspiracy theory deepened. “In the long run, America will not have the stomach to bear the burden of staying in Afghanistan,” the officer continued, still seeming to ignore the presence of the American intelligence chief. “And when America pulls out, India will reign. Therefore the Pakistanis will have to sustain contact” with the opposition to the Afghan government—meaning the Taliban—”so when the Americans pull out, it's a friendly government to Pakistan.”
“Therefore,” the officer concluded with a flourish, “we must support the Taliban.”
That last statement stunned McConnell. For six years the American government had paid upward of $10 billion to the Pakistani government to support its operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Bush and his aides knew—though they never admitted—that much of that money had been diverted to buying equipment for the Pakistani military to bulk up against the Indians. What was sold to Congress as “reimbursements” were actually being used to buy new airplanes and new artillery. The equipment would be enormously useful in stopping an Indian invasion force, but was useless in battling terrorists in caves. Now a Pakistani officer, in his fury and frustration, was openly admitting what the Pakistani government had officially denied, that it was playing both sides of the war, the American side and the Taliban side. In return for the American billions, Pakistani forces or intelligence operatives occasionally picked off a few al Qaeda leaders (though even that had slowed to a trickle). But they were actively supporting the Taliban and even some of the militants in the tribal regions. In a world of fungible money—that $10 billion in American aid was paid straight to the Pakistani treasury—it was almost as if the American taxpayers were making monthly deposits in the Taliban's bank accounts. Some in the Pentagon objected but were overruled.
None of this was really a surprise—except to the American people, who were regularly told by President Bush that Pakistan and its leadership were a “strong ally against terror.” Even some of Bush's aides cringed when he uttered those words. “It was like hearing him say ‘Victory in Iraq,’” one told me after leaving the White House. “He thought that to publicly acknowledge the muddled complexity of it all was some kind of admission of defeat.”
Even inside the White House, some officials admitted to me that the “reimbursements” to the Pakistani military were just this side of fraud. They had been paid out even when Musharraf had announced he was pulling back from the tribal areas because of a “truce” he had agreed to with tribal leaders. When Congress threatened to link the “reimbursements” to the Pakistani military's performance, one American general summarized his reaction this way: “It's about goddamn time.”
Bush knew the truth: Intelligence reports written over the past five years have all documented the ISI's support of the Taliban-something Bush had admitted to me and other reporters. He knew, of course, that even Musharraf had little interest in sending his army into frontier territory, where, as Bush once put it to an aide, “they get their asses kicked every week.” Every military professional who returned from Islamabad came back with the same report: Seven years after 9/11, 80 percent of the Pakistani military was arrayed against India. McConnell himself, returning from one of his trips, noted that there is only one army that has more artillery tubes per unit—everything from old cannons to rocket launchers and mortars. It is North Korea's, he said. It was a telling statistic. Artillery tubes weigh tons—and are useful only in holding back Indian hordes as they come across the plains. They are useless against terrorist enclaves in the mountains.
Overhearing the two-star's rant about India was not the only rude surprise McConnell experienced on this trip. He had brought with him the chart he used in the White House Situation Room tracking the number of attacks inside Pakistan over the past two and a half years. One of the charts showed that about 1,300 Pakistanis had been killed in 2007, chiefly from suicide bombers, about double the number in 2006. (The figures didn't include Pakistani troops killed in various clashes against militants.) He told Musharraf and Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the smooth-talking, American-trained head of the Pakistani Army and former chief of the ISI, that the casualty numbers were on track to double again in 2008. Then he described the interviews that Osama bin Laden and his deputies had given, declaring their intention to topple the Pakistani government. You're aware of these casualty numbers and what bin Laden said, of course, McConnell asked. He got blank stares. They told him they had not heard about bin Laden's statements.
“It was news,” McConnell reported to his colleagues later. “I talked to the highest levels of the Pakistani government and it was news. They just weren't tracking it.” It astounded him that officials in Washington and at the American embassy in Islamabad might be keeping more careful tabs on the rising number of attacks than were Musharraf or Pakistan's new crop of democratically elected leaders. Were they ignoring the obvious, or were they just denying they knew about it, part of the deceptions within the deceptions as they supported both sides in the terror fight?
When McConnell returned to Washington in late May 2008, he ordered up a full assessment so that he could match what he'd heard from a single angry officer with the intelligence that had poured in over the years. His question was a basic one: Is there what McConnell called an officially sanctioned “dual policy” in Pakistan? That was a polite way of asking whether the leadership of the country—including Musharraf and General Kayani—had been playing both sides of the war all along?
It did not take long for McConnell's staff to produce the answer. Musharraf's record of duplicity was well known. While Kayani was a favorite of the White House, he had also been overheard— presumably on telephone intercepts—referring to one of the most brutal of the Taliban leaders, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, as a “strategic asset.”4 (A quarter-century ago, Haqqani was an American asset as well, when he organized Mujahideen fighters from several nations to attack the Soviets during the occupation of Afghanistan. In the real-life version of Charlie Wilson's War, Haqqani was the classic local ally of convenience.)
McConnell took the formal assessment to the White House, concluding that the Pakistani government regularly gave the Taliban and some of the militant groups “weapons and support to go into Afghanistan to attack Afghan and coalition forces.” This was not news to many in the administration, but McConnell wanted to have it down on paper. The assessment was circulated to the entire national security leadership, and to Bush, who was still giving public speeches praising Musharraf as a great ally.
“It wasn't news to him,” said one of the officials who briefed Bush and watched his reaction to McConnell's assessment. “And he always says the same thing: ‘So, what do you do about it?’”
BY THE SUMMER, Bush answered his own question. For the first time in a presidency filled with secret unilateral actions, he authorized the American military to invade an ally.
This was a different kind of invasion than the type Americans were used to seeing on CNN during the Bush years. This was not Iraq or Afghanistan; Bush did not want to topple a government, control any territory, or search for any weapons of mass destruction. (Though in Pakistan he could have actually found some.) He certainly did not want to give threatening speeches or send a big force into a sovereign state, a mistake that would help create a new generation of pro-Taliban sympathizers. Worse yet, if the Americans did anything obvious, it would lead to a huge confrontation with the Pakistani military. The new government would have no choice: They were about to issue articles of impeachment against Musharraf, accusing him of acting as Bush's toady, too eager to fight in what millions of Pakistanis called “America's war.”
Yet Bush knew that if he waited for the new Pakistani government to act on its own, he would likely leave office at noon on January 20, 2009, with Osama bin Laden still a free man, whole cities in Pakistan on the verge of falling to the Taliban, and the border territory with Afghanistan a mountainous amusement park where all of America's greatest enemies could gather to share the rides.
What Bush, Hadley, Rice, Gates, and the military had in mind were operations that were entirely covert and, if everything went well, completely deniable: quick attacks by Bush's favorite branch of the military, the Joint Special Operations Command, over the border into Pakistani territory. There they would do what JSOC had done so effectively against al Qaeda in Iraq: hit a house full of suspected terrorists, kill the occupants, grab the cell phones and computer hard drives, and exploit the information inside them instantly. If the intelligence led to another nearby safe house, or a cell phone that could be traced, that would be hit the same night, if possible.
There was a problem, however. Bush always assured the Pakistanis, particularly in public, that American ground operations on their territory would happen only with advance consultation with the Pakistani military, and, when possible, American and Pakistani troops would operate together. It sounded like one of those great partnerships with a “major non-NATO ally,” which was still Pakistan's official status. In reality, those joint operations had been rare, and almost never satisfactory for either side. The Pakistanis resented the American military presence. It was embarrassing to have them on Pakistani soil, and it didn't help that they were equipped with the latest in everything, including the newest night-vision goggles and communications devices. The Pakistanis weren't just on a different wavelength, they were stuck in a different technological age.
For their part, the Americans were always vaguely suspicious that the Pakistani military was tipping off targets in advance. The military-to-military relationship was increasingly sour. But it was a love fest compared to the animosities between the CIA and their intelligence counterpart in Pakistan, the ISI. “By summer there was a sense inside the CIA that the ISI is absolutely in complete coordination with the Taliban,” said one senior official who was in the middle of the debate. Still, Hayden knew he had to tread somewhat carefully; the CIA depended heavily on the ISI for its information about militants in Pakistan, and that was not likely to change.
By late June, however, evidence began to arrive to back up the CIA's hunch. The National Security Agency intercepted messages indicating that ISI officers were helping the Taliban plan a big bombing in Afghanistan. The target was unclear. “It read like they were giving them the weapons and the support,” said one senior official who had been read into the intelligence. The decision was made to send Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director of the CIA and a veteran of the CIA station in Islamabad, to present the Pakistani leadership with the evidence and demand a cessation of the connections to the Taliban. Kappes made the trip, but arrived too late. On July 7, India's embassy in Kabul was bombed, killing fifty-four people, including India's defense attaché to Afghanistan.
“It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held,” one State Department official who dealt with Afghanistan told my colleague Eric Schmitt. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof.”5
By the time Kappes arrived in Pakistan to “put demands on the table,” according to a senior administration official, Bush had already begun to act. He decided he had to go well beyond his decision in January to loosen the reins on the CIA. Now he lowered the barriers even further. “We got down to a sort of ‘reasonable man’ standard,” said one official. “If it seemed reasonable, you could hit it.” All notions of “advance consultation” with Pakistani authorities were scrapped. Now they would just be informed of a strike—preferably a few seconds before it happened.
That was only the start. For the first time Bush was going to put the American military into the fight inside a sovereign nation that was also an ally. And for the first time he approved lists of militants who could be targeted by either the CIA or American military commandos—lists that went far beyond the ranks of al Qaeda.
Haqqani topped the classified list, because he was identified as an “al Qaeda associate.” So was Baitullah Mehsud, the accused killer of Bhutto. The list went on. Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader who had managed to escape during the 2001 invasion and was still actively plotting the Taliban's return to Afghanistan, made the list. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former warlord and Mujahideen leader who once fought the Soviets and now is designated a “global terrorist” by the United States. A range of lesser-known militants. It was a huge decision, and among the most tightly held in the U.S. government, because the potential for backlash was so great. In legal terms, some inside the administration noted, it would be as if the president sent American commandos—not just stealthy CIA operatives, but platoons of night fighters with big guns—into Berlin or Paris to root out groups plotting to bomb an airplane. Suddenly a flurry of memos was ordered up, seeking authority for the military to act, not just as a temporary adjunct to the CIA, but in its own right. White House officials developed a new definition of “anticipatory self-defense” that justified the violations of Pakistan's sovereignty. To some, especially in the State Department, where the few officials who knew about Bush's decision were queasy about it, the secret decision was akin to Nixon's decision during Vietnam to conduct a “secret war” in Cambodia, where the Vietcong had found sanctuary.
It also presented enormous legal problems. While the CIA could operate inside Pakistan with a proper “finding,” authorizing the military to do so was far trickier. For weeks lawyers argued about how they could expand on the authorizations that allowed the military to conduct a “war on terror” across the border into a country that was an ally, but has publicly barred the military from entering. Inside the White House, Bush's choices seemed stark: send in American forces or continue to suffer an escalation of the violence against coalition forces in Afghanistan, and an increase in the risk posed by al Qaeda and the Taliban from their safe haven in Pakistan. Opinions were written and put in the file.
Many elements of the decision, and the legal logic behind it, remain secret to this day. Presumably they will be reviewed—and perhaps rewritten—by the Obama administration. But in deciding to loosen the reins on JSOC, for the first time since 9/11, Bush expanded the list of targets in the region far beyond al Qaeda.
“The briefings all made clear that there were three insurgencies under way in the tribal belt, not just one,” said one official who participated in the debate. “There was al Qaeda—Osama and his buddies, plotting away, and we were no goddamn closer to them than we were in 2001. There was big-T Taliban, the guys going into Afghanistan to attack us and attack NATO. And then there was the little-T Taliban that was headed for Pakistan's capital itself—those are the guys living in the hope that some day they could take over the whole state, nukes and all.”
Bush had decided, in essence, to go after all three. The war for Afghanistan had spread over the border into the tribal regions of Pakistan and North and South Waziristan, a huge piece of land (imagine the dimensions of Massachusetts, but the topography of Switzerland). Bush just didn't want to tell the Americans or the Pakistanis he was fighting there.
IN JULY 2008, with Musharraf losing power daily, Prime Minister Gilani arrived in Washington for his first visit. Because of Kappes's secret trip to Islamabad only days before, he knew he was going to come under intense pressure for a plan to defeat the militants-something he was completely incapable of doing. But he knew better than to show up without a gift.
So he arranged for one. He planned to tell Bush that he had sent forces into the tribal areas to clean out a major madrassa—one well known to American intelligence officers—where hardline ideology and intolerance were part of the daily academic curriculum. There were roughly 25,000 private Islamic schools around Pakistan, though only a small number of them regularly bred young terrorists and sent them out to attack Americans. Musharraf, naturally, had promised time and again to close the worst of the schools—and, as my colleague Dexter Filkins put it, “never took the slightest steps to do so.”6 Though Gilani never knew it, Bush was aware of this gift in advance. The NSA was already picking up intercepts as the units that were getting ready to hit the school called up to the tribal areas in advance, to warn them what was coming.
“They must have dialed 1-800-HAQQANI,” said one person who was familiar with the intercepted conversation. According to another, the account of the warning sent to the school was almost comical. “It was something like, ‘Hey, we're going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram.’”
But leave a few weapons around, Haqqani's operatives were told, so that it would not look as if the Pakistani Army had come up with nothing. They needed a few trophies to bring back. “Oh, and they warned them that there would be a lot of smoke bombs and stuff, but they shouldn't worry too much.”
When the “attack” on the madrassa came, the Pakistani forces liberated a few guns and hauled away a few teenagers. Sure enough, a few days later Gilani showed up in the Oval Office and conveyed the wonderful news to Bush—the great crackdown on the madrassas had begun.
The officials in the room did not want to confront Gilani with the evidence that the ISI was involved—that would require revealing sensitive intercepts, and they simply did not trust Gilani to stay quiet. They were even hesitant to tell the man they viewed as really running Pakistan: the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, in whom the administration had invested almost as much confidence as they once showered on Musharraf. Kayani had been trained in the United States years before, and American military leaders knew him, and respected him. But he also used to run the ISI, the organization that they believed was aiding the Taliban. Presenting the latest evidence to Kayani might not prove all that fruitful, one of Bush's aides told me. Kayani “would shake his head and tell us he'd try to learn about who at the ISI was doing this kind of thing—as if he hadn't been the head of the ISI for the previous few years.”
So instead of confronting Prime Minister Gilani directly with the evidence that he knew the raid on the madrassa was a sham, Bush simply told him, in effect, that he'd heard that some of these raids and arrests amounted to less than met the eye. Gilani looked at him, seeming not to understand at first. Later I asked a senior official who participated in the meeting, was Gilani clueless about what the military and the ISI were doing?
“Well, yeah,” he said. I told him I'd heard that the meeting with Gilani had been disastrous, that Bush had quickly dismissed Gilani as a sophisticated politician, but powerless. The aide thought about it, and added, “I wouldn't call it the president's worst meeting with a foreign leader ever.”
When they were finished discussing the depth of Pakistan's economic crisis, and aid the United States might pump into the economy, Bush escorted Gilani out to the South Lawn to repeat the same words he had often said with Musharraf at his side—that Pakistan was a “vibrant democracy.” Twice Bush repeated the line that the United States “respects” Pakistan's sovereignty. He made no mention, of course, of his decision to order American Special Forces to enter Pakistani territory. Perhaps for fear of their differences becoming too obvious, they took no questions, and Bush sent the new Pakistani leader packing after lunch. But the next day Gilani showed up at the Council on Foreign Relations forum in Washington and seemed to be living in a different world.
With Bush-like optimism he said, “Pakistan is back,” and predicted that “soon you will see a lot of investors coming to Pakistan.” When he was asked why his own government had such trouble hunting down militants, he argued that they were enjoying secret successes. They were pushing Taliban and other militants out of their safe haven. He didn't say where they were going, but it seemed evident the answer was Afghanistan. Officials in the audience looked at each other in wonderment, because they knew the Pakistani Army had barely been in the region.
Someone asked him about reining in the ISI, and he responded, “It is under the prime minister,” an assertion that turned out not to be true. “Therefore they will do only what I want them to do.” The crowd—a pretty sophisticated audience of Washington insiders, some of whom had been posted to Pakistan or just finished reading intelligence about it that morning—just looked at one another and shook their heads.
BY THE END of the summer of 2008, the secrecy Bush had tried to wrap around his January and July orders began to unravel. Since the beginning of the year there had been twenty or so Predator strikes-more than in the previous two or three years combined. The “black” Special Forces, newly liberated from the restrictions that had bound them before, began looking for targets ripe for a cross-border raid, the kind of raids that had been conducted every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the new operating rules, there was no prior consultation with the Pakistanis, or even warning. The idea, said one of the planners, was that the attacks would be “not deep, not frequent, and not very loud.” But that turned out to be impossible to engineer, and an early raid provoked yet another crisis, threatening whatever was left of the shredded American alliance with Pakistan.
The inevitable collision came on the night of September 3, 2008. A unit of Navy SEALs was helicoptered to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, just opposite the town of Angor Adda, in South Waziristan. That town, and several around it, were believed to be the base used to launch several attacks against American and NATO forces.
Equipped with night-vision goggles and operating in almost total silence, nearly two dozen SEALs hiked several miles through the mountains, to a small house that they believed was used as an al Qaeda gathering point. They could have hit it, of course, with a missile from a Predator. But the purpose of Bush's new order was to unnerve the terror groups and to exploit whatever information the Special Forces could grab—hard drives, cell phones, anything that would crack the network of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militant fighters. “What we learned in Iraq is that we have to act less like the army and more like ‘CSI,’” said one general who was trying to apply the lessons of one conflict to the other.
When they attacked the house, there was a brief but furious firefight. Everyone inside—probably a dozen or so, including a young woman and her baby—were killed in a matter of minutes. What surprised the SEALs was the arrival of another group of well-armed militants, apparently from a nearby house, who showed up as reinforcements. They were also killed. Then American helicopters dropped in, no longer worried about blowing the element of surprise, and swept the SEALs out of Pakistan and back to their base in Afghanistan.
As the sun rose, and villagers ventured out of their houses to count the dead, it was obvious to all that Bush had opened a “third front.” America was now five years into a war in Iraq and seven years into a war in Afghanistan. But it was just beginning to engage in ground warfare—as opposed to just missile strikes—on sovereign Pakistani territory.
“It was a little louder than we would have liked,” said one senior official who analyzed the first fruits of Bush's new thrust. “There was a hell of a firefight. We wanted to send a message that would really disrupt the network—that you better post guards, you better stay away from the border, you better not sleep in the same house two nights in a row. But it kicked up a hell of a storm, and that's always a problem.”
Suddenly the Pakistani newspapers were filled with tales of the raid, with disputes about how many people were killed, and rumors about who had been inside the house. In fact, none of the occupants appeared to be high-level al Qaeda, which prompted one former top strategist for Bush to ask me, “Is this worth it, if you Talibanize 166 million people, and you don't come up with one dead al Qaeda guy you can name?” Bush's answer was clear: It was worth it if America could begin closing down the sanctuary during his presidency. Otherwise, his aides were convinced the Afghan war would be lost. It was only a matter of time.
ON A SATURDAY in mid-September 2008, just days after Zardari had finally been inaugurated as president and had delivered his first address to Parliament vowing a national debate about how to fight terrorism, the entire Pakistani cabinet gathered for dinner in the prime minister's residence. The ritual was well known to Zardari; he had lived in this privileged corner of Islamabad when he was the deal-making First Man of Pakistan, and Benazir Bhutto was the country's embattled prime minister. It was back then that he got his nickname “Mr. Ten Percent,” a derisive moniker referring to his sticky fingers, which one American diplomat said “understates his skills at corruption by about twenty percent.”
At least he knew how to work a deal. As president, Zardari had Musharraf's old title but none of his old authority. He was ignored by the army, and derided by the intelligence services. His only secure hold was on Benazir's old party. That day, in his first address to Parliament, he had sounded all the right notes, vowing in his speech to eliminate extremists and—the words Washington was waiting to hear—to stop terror groups from using Pakistani soil to attack “other countries.”
Yet Zardari knew the risks of appearing to do the bidding of the Americans. Zardari was not about to make the Musharraf mistake.
But he was not off to a good start. As Musharraf left, the country was headed over a financial cliff; foreign exchange reserves had shrunk to just under $6 billion, and the country only had about $3 billion available to pay for oil—which Pakistan had always subsidized—and food. The reserves were dropping at the rate of $1.25 billion a month. Saudi Arabia, which had always stepped into save Pakistan from the brink, was unwilling to announce a major concession on the price of oil, or allow deferred payments for the 100,000 barrels that Pakistan imported every day from its fellow Sunni nation. An inspection team from Moody's, the international credit rating company, had just been in town, and when they left they cut Pakistan's credit rating to “negative.” At a time of a financial crisis in the United States, which was radiating outward, it was almost impossible to imagine who would throw Pakistan a lifeline.
THE DINNER that night for the cabinet was supposed to be held at the Marriott, a luxury hotel just a few hundred yards from the prime minister's official residence. It was the meeting place of Islamabad's elite; you could sit in the broad lobby or the dining room and see everyone—CIA agents and their counterparts from the ISI, expatriates who could afford the ridiculous prices, government ministers, and financiers. But recently the hotel had been making Americans uneasy; it was a huge target, and many of the rooms looked directly out on the street. While there were barriers in front of the hotel, security officials had long worried that it was vulnerable—it was big, American, near the center of political power, and, worst of all, barely set back from a busy road. The place should have been on high alert, especially after a steady stream of intelligence reports assessed that militant groups that had already succeeded at killing Zardari's wife might be planning to mark his inauguration with another spectacular attack.
Now the inauguration was over, and the Pakistani guards around the hotel had returned to their usual sleepy routines. The army troops dismantled their barriers and departed. As evening fell, the policemen along the main roads of Islamabad, a low-rise, wide-open city, were sitting on their haunches along the road, enjoying the traditional breaking of the fast during Ramadan. Everyone was out of position, just as the Taliban knew they would be.
So there was just a stunned silence when a huge dump truck careened around the corner and crashed into the hotel's front gate. At first nothing happened. Guards came out to investigate. It was a few moments before the 1,300 pounds of TNT and RDX, mixed with aluminum oxide, exploded in a fireball that took out the whole front of the building, killing more than 60 people and injuring more than 250. The fire grew so large and hot it could be seen for miles. At the prime minister's residence, the cabinet could feel the explosion, and then could hear, in the distance, the cries of the injured and dying.
It was the biggest terror attack inside the Pakistani capital, and no one thought it would be the last. Within days Pakistani authorities said they thought the huge explosive load had been assembled right near the capital, undetected. But they had no real suspects—it could be any of a half-dozen militant groups, they told Washington. The American embassy in Islamabad—which already had the fortress look of the castle of a Medellín drug lord—told its employees to work from home if they could, and closed its visa section, erecting the final wall between Pakistan and America. Lawyers and business executives who had stayed through the Musharraf years, and had taken to the streets to protest in favor of democracy, talked about moving away. One of the major newspapers in the capital, one that usually supports Zardari, surveyed the collapsing economy and the rising threat, and concluded that the new government was “confronted with a general breakdown of the state.” With that bombing, there was no doubt Pakistan had become the central front in the war against the extremists. “We have to stabilize Iraq, because if we don't, there's no hope of creating a model for the Middle East,” one of the members of the U.S. joint chiefs told me not long after the bombing. “But what's going on in Pakistan is, to my mind, going to be the number-one crisis for the next president—Bush's truly unfinished business. Because we've never seen a nuclear state implode before, and that's the threat that comes right here,” he said, pointing to downtown Washington.
But as Bush left office, America and Pakistan were no closer to a common strategy than they were on September 12, 2001. Bush had utterly failed to convince the Pakistanis that they were fighting a war for their own survival. The Pakistanis were still, in Musharraf's words, “tightrope walking.” Publicly, that meant giving the United States just enough help to keep the aid flowing, without making Pakistanis think that they were fighting “America's war.” In reality, it meant supporting both sides of the war—so that Pakistan was positioned to ally itself with the winner, whether that was Washington or the Taliban. This was no alliance. It was a huge diplomatic failure. And what was left was the only country in the world where Islamic militants, nuclear weapons, and a failing government all were thrown together into a bloody and chaotic mix.
THERE ARE SOME bitter lessons in America's failed alliance with Pakistan.
The first is obvious: We left Afghanistan far too early and focused on the sanctuary in Pakistan far too late. Once we diverted intelligence assets and forces to Iraq, we missed the key signals of the mounting insurgency—and willfully ignored the obvious evidence that the Pakistani government was not capable of or interested in dealing with the problem. And like so many problems that Bush pushed off, this one became a full-scale crisis by the time he decided to deal with it.
The second was almost as obvious: Bush invested far too much confidence in his personal relationship with a single strongman, exactly the mistake that he rightly criticized Bill Clinton for making in dealing with Russia during the Yeltsin years. Perhaps it was unavoidable for much of the Bush presidency; the political opposition in Pakistan was so muffled that it would have been hard to reach out. But when Musharraf began to lose power, Bush and his aides could not imagine Pakistan without him, and so they were far too slow to show that they were on the side of those seeking a democratic nation. “It gets pretty embarrassing when our guy is spending more time beating up lawyers in the streets than beating up al Qaeda,” Nick Burns acknowledged to me during the unraveling of Musharraf's government in late 2007. This was symptomatic of Bush's style of governing: He was intoxicated with the value of picking up the phone and having a leader-to-leader talk, arguing that it enabled him to get through layers of bureaucratic obfuscation, to cut deals that only presidents can make. With some allies, that might have been correct. With Pakistan, it revealed a misunderstanding of Musharraf and the games he was playing. Until the last eighteen months of his presidency, Bush appeared to believe what he said publicly about Musharraf, when he would walk him out to reporters at Camp David and pump him up as a man committed to democracy and a stalwart fighter against terrorism. He was neither.
“I just don't think the president saw it for the longest time,” one of his former aides who handled the war in Afghanistan told me after Musharraf was forced out of office. “He loves being able to pick up the phone and call. But he just couldn't bring himself to lower the boom,” the aide said, speculating that he feared it would jeopardize the relationship, and leave him with nothing.
No one understood this better than Pervez Musharraf himself. “He became the master of telling Bush whatever Bush wanted to hear, and then going back home and telling the Pakistani military what it wanted to hear,” said Vali Nasr, a scholar at Boston University who was well plugged into this relationship. “I think the Pakistani military was never on board. Not on September 12, 2001, and not at any point after that. They hedged their bets. They are obsessed with the thought that Afghanistan will become a client state of India,” and surround Pakistan's borders. “So they are more interested in counting Indian consulates in Afghanistan than they are in counting terrorist training camps in the tribal areas.”
Bush's biggest mistake, however, was his failure to use all the elements of American soft power in Pakistan—especially because he was unable, or unwilling until the end of his presidency, to employ much hard power. With Congress's acquiescence, the administration pumped roughly $1 billion a year into Pakistan to pay for counterinsurgency operations that mostly never happened. Everyone knew it; the Pakistanis were not fooling Washington. Washington was fooling itself.
For all his talk about his determination to fight the war on terror, Bush never came face to face with the strategic choices he had to make. Early in his presidency he established some basic truths in his mind: Pakistan was his ally, Iran was his enemy, and the “central front” of the war on terrorism was in Iraq. Every few months there would be “strategy reviews” and new papers issued, but each came to the same conclusion: that the Pakistanis needed to be pressured to win this war on their own. Only rarely in those reviews did the reality bubble to the surface—that many senior Pakistanis viewed the United States and India and Afghanistan as something of an Axis of Evil of its own, plotting Pakistan's downfall. The Pakistani establishment believed that by allying with Bush in the week after 9/11, they were buying security. By the time Bush left, they felt more insecure than ever.
There are some problems without a solution, and this may be one of them. But a few steps seem worth trying. Tying American military aid to real performance is one. Spending at least as much, or maybe more, helping to build Pakistani schools and to bring roads and hospitals into the tribal areas, is long overdue. Until Pakistanis of all stripes are invested in American-backed projects, they will not be invested in American-style success. The stategy will have to be implemented delicately, and no doubt the projects themselves will become targets for militants.
Eventually Bush edged toward that thinking. When I visited Pakistan, the American ambassador, Anne W Patterson, was enthusiastically promoting a new plan to spend $750 million in the tribal areas on development projects—over the next five years. It struck me as way too little, way too late—and still just a fraction of what we were paying the Pakistani military to fight for our side, while they secretly supported the other side.
I asked Ambassador Patterson why it took until 2008, seven years after 9/11, to get projects going to build schools and roads, especially in the one corner of the world where we are in a desperate battle for the minds of impoverished teenagers weighing the lure of the West against a life as a militant.
She paused, clearly wanting to speak her mind. “Well,” she said, “the important thing is that we are doing it now.”
Sooner or later the United States is going to have to talk to some elements of the Taliban. During Bush's last months in office, Bob Gates admitted as much, saying “there has to be ultimately, and I'll underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of a political outcome of this.” The British came to the same conclusion in 2008. But getting there would require a new president in Washington. As Gates knew, negotiations are not what Bush had in mind when he declared “with us or against us.”
IN OCTOBER 2008, at the very end of Bush's presidency, his staff held a task force meeting at the White House every day to conduct yet another Afghanistan-Pakistan review. The whole exercise had an air of unreality to it: “Whatever we decide to do is going to get rewritten by the next president in three months,” one of the members of Bush's review effort said to me one day.
The review would allow Bush to argue that he had left his successor with a workable plan. If Obama failed to execute it—well, that wasn't in Bush's control.
But very little was. The Pentagon told the review panel that few troops—maybe a combat battalion or two—would be available for service in Afghanistan; most were still tied up in Iraq. The intelligence agencies told the panel to brace itself for a 40 percent increase in violence. A new National Intelligence Estimate circulating through the administration warned that Afghanistan was in a “downward spiral” and that corruption inside the Karzai government was accelerating the problem.7 Reading between the lines, the document was a sweeping indictment of a White House that waited too long to respond to warnings, that poured too many resources into Iraq, and that still was too slow in turning around the strategy.
“It's taken them a long time to realize it,” said Hank Crumpton, the man who had led CIA operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, and operated along the fuzzy border with Pakistan. “But now they know it's pretty grim.”8
Grim indeed. The final review, when completed, concluded that Pakistan was the real prize for al Qaeda—not Iraq, not the greater Middle East, not the ability to terrorize Europe. “For al Qaeda, Pakistan is the home game,”one of the members of Bush's review panel concluded. It is territory that al Qaeda and its associates know intimately. At the end of Bush's term, al Qaeda clearly had its best shot ever: The Pakistani economy was collapsing (the country was so close to defaulting on its debt that it sought a bailout from the International Monetary Fund), the government was more unstable than ever, the anger at American Predator strikes was at an all-time high. The effort to bring new aid into the tribal areas had barely gotten off the ground.
The review concluded that in the end, the United States has far more at stake in preventing Pakistan's collapse than it does in stabilizing Afghanistan or Iraq. If only Bush's aides had come to that conclusion in 2002, before the United States turned its sights on Saddam Hussein.
WITH AFGHANISTAN and Pakistan in simultaneous meltdown, President Karzai came to Washington at the end of September 2008. He was in his traditional robe, his handshake was still firm. Urbane as always, he brushed off any questions about the attempts on his life, as if that was just part of everyday life.
When we talked, he made the case that if Bush wanted to win through unilateral action, he simply acted too late. In the one country where Bush needed to take early, strong action against terrorists, the man who said “bring ‘em on” had hesitated. It was un-Bush-like, he seemed to suggest.
“If someone in those territories in Pakistan…makes a statement saying he will send people to kill Americans in Afghanistan and to kill Afghans in Afghanistan, what do you expect us to do?” Karzai asked. “Sit and wait for him to kill us? Or defend ourselves?” He was sounding a lot like Bush circa 2002, when the preemption doctrine was issued.
But then his tone turned. “Now, here is the delicacy of the matter,” Karzai went on. “How do we do it? Do we interpret his statement as the statement of a few people? Or of the community? Or the statement of a terrorist network? The right thing would be to differentiate a terrorist network from the community that they have taken hostage. To help the community liberate themselves, and to isolate these elements.”
This was something, he suggested, that couldn't be done with Predator hits. Even nighttime raids were problematic—yes, the Special Forces could come in at night and kill twenty people in a fire-fight, but that often just Talibanized the young men in the community. It had to be done by negotiation.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said, and related a conversation with an Afghan relative, who had been talking to some teenagers who were being raised in Taliban-controlled territory. (Karzai himself doesn't get out much, for obvious reasons.)
“They talked a bit about travel, and about New York, and one of them said, ‘Yes, I would like to bring bombs to New York and blow it up.’ Now, these are teenagers—teenagers! Teenagers should think about New York and how exciting it is, all that neon, all that action, and just want to be on its streets.” Seven years after the invasion that threw the Taliban out of power and put the smooth-talking Karzai in the president's palace, he was suggesting that in our bigger effort, we are failing. We are left with a generation, he said, whose first thought about New York is still a burning desire to annihilate it.