Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (17 page)

In late July, as the day of the militants’ meeting approached, analysts pored over intelligence reports and communications intercepts to glean any clues. The picture was still murky. But commanders were given the green light several days later and ordered the B-2s to take off, to be in position if the meeting materialized. As the bombers approached the Indian Ocean, however, Admiral Fallon ordered the giant planes to return to base. President Bush was briefed on the decision, but he had left it in the hands of the military. “This was carpet bombing, pure and simple,” said another top military officer who had openly voiced disagreement with the operation. “It was not precision-targeted. There was no way to separate the Al Qaeda leadership that might be on hand, and the fighters, from the local population and the camp followers.” Even without the B-2s, however, a smaller, less ambitious operation later went forward with the HIMARS artillery, helicopter gunships, and Special Operations commandos pummeling the insurgent safe haven, and reclaiming control over the territory. Some senior White House officials said that the larger mission was cancelled because the meeting never happened, or at least not at the significant size that the intelligence officers had anticipated. Had the militants been tipped off? Was the original information wrong? To this day, government analysts still don’t know.

At the White House, the disappointment was palpable. Senior officials had deliberately sought to maintain low expectations, but many had held out hope that this time they had bin Laden in their sights. It was not to be.

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Nearly five months later, on December 27, 2007, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader and former prime minister, sent shock waves from Islamabad to Washington and marked an escalation of the militant threat. Al Qaeda and its Pakistani Taliban allies were increasingly bent on destabilizing the country. Distinguishing the various militant groups—sometimes working together, sometimes separately—had become an increasingly difficult task for American intelligence analysts. Among the groups they focused on most intently was one commanded by Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the legendary militant leader Jalaluddin Haqqani and one of the many mujahideen commanders that Michael Vickers knew well from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Another group, the Tehrik-i-Taliban, was a network led by the Islamic militant Baitullah Mehsud and was believed to be responsible for Bhutto’s death. “It went from being a salad to a stew,” Hayden told colleagues.

Just days after the assassination, President Bush’s national security team met at the White House on January 4, 2008, to debate whether to expand the authority of the CIA and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas. No decisions were made on the proposal, but five days later, the top two American intelligence officials traveled secretly to Pakistan to press Musharraf to allow the CIA greater latitude to operate in the tribal areas. The two officials, CIA director Mike Hayden and his boss, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, jokingly called their fourteen-thousand-mile, round-trip, one-day visit the “trip from hell.”

They had flown overnight from Washington and changed to a C-17 cargo plane in Turkey for the flight into Islamabad. There, the two men caught a few hours’ sleep before heading to Musharraf’s presidential suite for a late-morning appointment. Musharraf had resigned as Army chief of staff in late November 2007 but would remain president through mid-August 2008. He was joined by the powerful Pakistani Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the director of the ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj. For more than an hour, McConnell and Hayden reviewed their threat briefing with the Pakistanis. At one point, Hayden got down on one knee to spread out the maps and charts on a coffee table while explaining them.

“Mr. President, we’ve seen a merger,” Hayden told Musharraf. “You’ve been slow in recognizing this merger between Al Qaeda and Pashtun extremists. Now they’re coming out of the tribal areas, not just to kill us but to kill you. They’re after you now.”

At the end of the meeting, Musharraf rejected the American proposals to expand any U.S. combat presence in Pakistan through either unilateral covert CIA missions or joint operations with Pakistani security forces. Instead, Pakistan and the United States agreed to loosen restrictions on the CIA Predators flying secretly from a Pakistani air base at Shamsi in southwestern Pakistan. Rather than having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, the shift allowed American operators to strike convoys of vehicles that bore the signature characteristics of Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run, for instance, as long as the risk of civilian casualties was judged to be low. The new procedures increased the CIA’s freedom of action, but the drone program averaged only one strike a month for the first half of the year.

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The election of a new coalition government in Pakistan in February 2008 presented new challenges for the Bush administration as it sought to weaken Al Qaeda in the tribal areas. American officials expressed alarm that the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition government, Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party (Benazir Bhutto’s husband) and Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League, were negotiating with the same extremists believed to be responsible for an increasing number of suicide attacks against the security forces and political figures, including Bhutto.

The new government had signaled that it wanted to follow a more independent path with the United States than had been the case with Musharraf. But the new political face in Islamabad did little to curb the violence emanating from the tribal areas, where American officials and independent experts said between 150 and 500 hard-core Al Qaeda fighters were operating. Cross-border attacks into Afghanistan by militants based in Pakistan doubled during the month after the elections from the same period the year before, while Pakistani counterinsurgency operations in the tribal areas dropped sharply during the talks. Adding to the danger, American intelligence officials detected an increase in the number of foreign fighters infiltrating the tribal areas to join militants there. The flow of several dozen or more fighters reflected a change that made Pakistan, not Iraq, the preferred destination for many Sunni extremists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia who were seeking to take up arms against the West.

The classified diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, that were shared with the
New York Times
and other news organizations, document deep skepticism that Pakistan would ever cooperate fully in fighting the full array of extremist groups. This is partly because Pakistan sees some of the strongest militant groups as insurance against the inevitable day that the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan, and Pakistan wants to exert maximum influence inside Afghanistan and against Indian intervention. Indeed, the U.S. consul general in Peshawar, Lynne Tracy, wrote in July 2009 that she believed that some members of the Haqqani network—one of the most lethal groups attacking American and Afghan soldiers—had left North Waziristan to escape drone strikes. Some family members, she wrote, relocated south of Peshawar; others lived in Rawalpindi, where senior Pakistani military officials also live. In another cable, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson said that more money and military assistance would not be persuasive. “There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support for these groups, which it sees as an important part of its national security apparatus against India,” she observed. In a rare dissent with Washington, she said that Pakistan would only dig in deeper if America continued to improve ties with India, which, she said, “feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir focused terrorist groups.” The groups to which she referred were almost certainly the Haqqani network, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group financed by Pakistan in the 1990s to fight India in Kashmir that has since been accused of being responsible for the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

The roller-coaster relations between the CIA and the ISI hit a new low on July 12, 2008, when Stephen Kappes, the deputy CIA director, traveled secretly to Islamabad with Admiral Mullen to confront officials there with evidence that the Pakistani spy service helped plan the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, five days earlier, which had killed fifty-four people, including an Indian defense attaché. The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and the militants who had carried out the attack, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers were actively undermining American efforts to combat terrorism in the region. Kappes also presented new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases enabling them to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Bush’s decision to confront Pakistan over the embassy bombing and the ISI’s ties to extremist groups was the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since the initial ultimatum immediately following the September 11 attacks. The tense meeting strained relations between the two countries, and by the time Mullen and Kappes had returned to Washington, the decision to ramp up unilateral American pressure on the tribal areas was gaining momentum. One participant in the late July 2008 meeting in the Yellow Oval Room said it seemed that the president had already made up his mind; he was just waiting for the command briefing.

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Seven thousand miles away, Jeffrey Schloesser was looking at the Pakistani militancy from the Afghan side of the border. Schloesser had left Washington to take the prestigious command of the 101st Airborne Division in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in November 2006. In April 2008, Schloesser, by now promoted to two-star general, deployed to Afghanistan for a fifteen-month tour to assume control over military operations in the rugged eastern portion of the country bordering Pakistan. It was a culmination of Schloesser’s counterterrorism career, stretching from his days as a Special Operations helicopter pilot and liaison in Kuwait to his work after 9/11 in the Pentagon and at the National Counterterrorism Center. Deploying to one of the most dangerous areas in Afghanistan, Schloesser would be putting his policy experiences into ground-level practice. “I saw it in longer terms than I think others did,” Schloesser said of the fight against the Al Qaeda–backed militancy in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I saw this thing as a continuum from what had been done in the area before, for better or worse.”

For Schloesser, and for many of the best commanders in Afghanistan, the key was understanding the local culture, understanding that Afghanistan and the rugged Pakistani tribal areas would be won valley by valley against a tenacious enemy that sent out a global message but fought its battles, both tactical and ideological, at a very local level. “Whether you call it a syndicate in Afghanistan and Pakistan or a network globally, you find that these organizations are all very local,” Schloesser said. “They have regional aspirations but they are localized because of where the people come from. If you don’t pay attention to your enemy in a local way, you have no idea what they will do to you.”

The consequences of not fully understanding that local culture and its complicated dynamics can often undermine the American-led mission in Afghanistan were amply demonstrated by an audacious American raid in the late summer of 2008, just a few weeks after the meeting in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House. On September 3, American Special Operations forces attacked Al Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan in the first publicly acknowledged instance of U.S. forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil. With AC-130 aerial gunships overhead, more than two dozen Navy SEALs carried out running gun battles with insurgents for several hours, killing more than two dozen suspected Al Qaeda–related fighters and a small number of civilians before the commandos were whisked away by helicopters after completing the mission. Back in Washington, senior officials were stunned by what was supposed to have been a quick, stealthy raid. “The operation made a lot more noise on the ground than anticipated,” a senior national security official said. “In retrospect the target was not as confined, the entering force was not as small as anticipated, and when they ran into trouble and firing started, lots of people came from around the neighboring areas which we were not fully aware were there.”

The raid stirred such fierce protests from the Pakistani military that American commanders shelved plans for additional boots-on-the-ground attacks. But the CIA aggressively executed the rest of Bush’s order. In the final six months of 2008, CIA drones launched twenty-eight attacks in the tribal areas, nearly double the total number carried out in the previous four and a half years. How ironic for an agency that in the late 1990s had fought hard against the armed Predator when the Air Force was developing it. In fact, it was one of John Tyson’s DIA colleagues who was sent over to Langley to help manage the CIA’s fledgling armed Predator program.

Within just over a year, American officials would assert that eleven of the twenty Al Qaeda or allied leaders most wanted by the United States in the Pakistani tribal areas had been killed or captured since the fateful July 2008 meeting at the White House. The officials would claim that the targeting had become so refined that few if any civilians were killed in the drone strikes, an assessment challenged by many human rights groups. But the strikes by the Predators and their bigger, more lethal cousins, the Reapers, were a tactic and not a strategy—a means to keep Al Qaeda and its confederates in the tribal areas off balance and buy time until the Pakistani military took more decisive action on the ground.