Killing Machine (24 page)

Despite Carney’s insistence that the “firefight” or “resistance” began the second helicopters arrived at the compound and continued until the final shots into bin Laden’s body, the questions kept coming.

       
Q:
Jay, just to follow up, how did . . . Osama bin Laden resist if he didn’t—if he didn’t have his hand on a gun, how was he resisting?

       
MR. CARNEY:
Yes, the information I have to [give] you—first of all, I think resistance does not require a firearm. But the information I gave you today is what I can tell you about it. I’m sure more details will be provided as they come available and we are able to release them.
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There were no more briefings like this one. They were not needed. Getting the first word is often more important than getting the last word. Besides, with teeming crowds in New York at the 9/11 site and outside the White House in Washington chanting “USA, USA, USA” and “CIA, CIA, CIA,” the details of Osama bin Laden’s death mattered very little to the public. It was easy for Jay Carney to say that the mistakes and contradictions resulted from the “fog of war” and the desire to get the story out.
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But all the accounts agreed on one point: bin Laden himself had no weapon at hand when he was killed.
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When the reaction in Pakistan proved far less joyous, the White House argued that Osama bin Laden had committed the real violation of Pakistan’s territory. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went to see an Obama aide, offering up some barbed advice. “I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,” he said. What was that? asked the aide, Tom Donilon. The defense secretary replied, “Shut the fuck up.” But simply shutting up was not going to win any new friends in places where American drone attacks had already caused more than PR problems.
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A few weeks later General James Cartwright, another close adviser to the president, talked to a reporter about other meanings of bin Laden’s death, and the success of the mission, code-named Neptune’s Spear. Were there other terrorists out there, he was asked, worth the risk of another helicopter assault on a Pakistani city? Yes, there were, Cartwright said, giving as examples Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric in Yemen. Going after them, he cautioned,
did not necessarily mean SEAL teams dropping down ropes or hustling up stairs after their targets. What was important here was the precedent the raid set for more unilateral actions in the future. “Folks now realize we can weather it. . . . penetrating other countries’ sovereign airspace covertly is something that’s always available for the right mission and the right gain.”
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No matter, then, whether all the Hellfire missiles from drones were actual “hits” or not. The usefulness of the drone as intimidators—as in Obama’s crude joke warning the Jonas Bothers to stay away from his daughters—was a weighty part of the calculation.

The Lead-in to Neptune’s Spear

The compound at Abbottabad, a midsize city only an hour’s drive from Islamabad, was where Osama bin Laden had lived in secret for six years. It was also less than a mile away from a large Pakistani military academy. Without being prompted, Brennan had brought up the latter point during his first briefing, more than implying some form of Pakistani involvement in the latter stages of his career. “We are looking right now at how he was able to hold out there for so long, and whether or not there was any type of support system within Pakistan that allowed him to stay there.”
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President Obama had been careful in his original announcement of the raid’s success to credit Pakistan with help in finding the al Qaeda leader, but journalists took Brennan’s hints and pursued the leads he offered. “Signs Point to Pakistan Link,” wrote three reporters in the
Wall Street Journal
almost immediately after Brennan’s comments. Reaching out for background confirmation to a “high-level” European military official, they got this answer to Brennan’s “question.” “There’s no doubt he was protected by some in the ISI,” said the European official, referring to the Pakistani intelligence service. These “same elements,” they were told by American officials, had connections with “other Pakistan-based terror groups, the Haqqani militant network and Lashkar-e-Taiba”—the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai hotel raids in India that left 165 dead and more than 300 wounded.
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Obama’s own words about Pakistani aid in finding bin Laden clashed with the reality of his aides’ responses to questions about when the Pakistanis had actually been informed of the raid: not until the Americans had recrossed the border and were safely out of Pakistani airspace. Speculations about whether it was the ISI who protected bin Laden’s hiding place, or some unconnected “rogue element” acting in sympathy with his anti-American agenda, led to a discussion of the problematic cooperation between the ISI and the CIA in the post–9/11 era. In the early days of the Obama administration, the president appointed Richard Holbrooke, now deceased, as his special representative for what was called the “Af-Pak” theater to stress the connections between events in the two countries and American objectives. Of course, one vital connection was Pakistan’s possession of a nuclear arsenal—a situation that scared the daylights out of the administration in the spring of 2009. The Bush administration had spent more than $100 million teaching the Pakistanis how to build fences around their nuclear installations. But Islamabad had refused any technical visits to sites it thought might help Americans identify the actual location of nuclear weapons. The most frightening thing was the possibility that a bin Laden sympathizer or one of the groups “allied” to al Qaeda might sneak out of a facility with enough weapons-grade plutonium to make a bomb.
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The issue of Pakistan’s vulnerability somehow got into the press with rumors that the local Taliban had a bead on stockpiles of highly enriched uranium—material, ironically, that had been supplied for a reactor by the United States years earlier. There followed a series of contretemps with Pakistani officials over American ambassador Anne Patterson’s attempts to get the uranium back. There were questions at Obama’s press conferences and testy exchanges with reporters. These led Pakistani authorities to tell Patterson that it was simply impossible to talk about sending the uranium back because the “sensational” international media coverage made it impossible to proceed “at this time.” Within a short time, however, the crisis went away: it appeared that the National Security Agency—the code breakers with all the latest high-tech stuff—had
misunderstood a word passed along in an unfamiliar dialect, and that the word didn’t necessarily mean “nuclear.”
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As David Sanger wrote, however, the “bomb scare” underscored the fact that Pakistan could represent a genuine strategic threat. American diplomacy toward Pakistan veered constantly between poles of “friendly persuasion” and “timely warnings,” but there could never be a complete break, because each side needed the other.

The number of drone strikes inside Pakistani territory reached a peak in 2010 at nearly 120—more than double the number of the previous year, when Obama ramped up the campaign from Bush levels. The last four months of the year saw particularly intense levels, with an attack every 1.8 days after Labor Day. “That torrid pace of attacks should make it beyond debate,” wrote one military affairs specialist, “that the drones are the long pole in the U.S.’s counterterrorism tent, even if the drone program is technically a secret.”
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The number of civilians killed in these attacks was always at issue—particularly because the “enemy” wore no regular army uniform. The dispute over “civilian” casualties centered on the so-called signature strikes, where military and CIA officials claimed that they could identify the enemy by the company they kept. At one point John Brennan even asserted that not one civilian had been killed by an American drone. “There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” But after many reports that the drones were not infallible made it into the media, Brennan adjusted his wording—slightly. “Fortunately, for more than a year,” he said in August 2011, “due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way.”
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Defenders of the strikes slowly retreated from the zero civilian deaths line to a more reasonable argument that while there were no perfect bombing missions, drones caused far less collateral damage than strikes, say, by F-117s or other similar piloted aircraft. Of course, that evaded the question of national sovereignty or formal war zones, as well as the controversy over “signature” strikes. In
mid-December 2010 the Pentagon completed its congressionally mandated review of the war situation in Afghanistan, one year after President Obama sent the additional thirty thousand troops to reverse the Taliban’s momentum. Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs, said in the review that there had been some “hard won security gains” over the past year, but they would not last unless cemented by “more important gains” in governance. In other words, Hamid Karzai’s government was still a big part of the problem, instead of the solution. But there was also the Pakistani half of the struggle, and Islamabad had not done its part. Specifically, that government had repeatedly rebuffed U.S. pleas “to launch a ground operation in North Waziristan, the base of an alphabet soup of militant organizations” that included al Qaeda and Afghan insurgents such as the Haqqani network.
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Pakistan had supposedly placed 140,000 troops on its western border. What was the problem? Why the reluctance, then, to really go after the Haqqani network? The answers were really quite simple, as they had been all along. Islamabad did not want to be excluded from any final settlement of the Afghan War, and the Haqqanis were a valuable asset that could ensure a strong voice for Pakistan; that could not be forsaken in order to satisfy American demands. But Washington could not press the issue too far, officials confided to a Reuters correspondent, because Pakistan could make life difficult for the International Assistance Force by shutting down vital supply routes into Afghanistan—as it had recently done in October after a helicopter intrusion killed two Pakistani troops.
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The day after Mullen talked about the annual review, news broke about the removal of the “top CIA spy” from Islamabad because of death threats after his cover was blown. A Pakistani attorney representing a North Waziristan resident who claimed that two relatives and a friend had been killed by American drone strikes had named the station chief in a legal document. The resident had threatened a lawsuit against the CIA and had asked Pakistani police to file a criminal complaint against the station chief to prevent him from leaving the country. The death threats followed. These were of such a serious nature, said U.S. intelligence officials, “that it would be
imprudent not to act.” He was rushed out of the country the same day that President Obama issued a new warning that Pakistan’s leaders must act against “terrorist safe havens within their borders.”
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Intelligence officials also believed that the outing of the CIA station chief had been part of a tit-for-tat power game going on between the ISI and the CIA. American officials had become persuaded, it was said, that the lawyer and the lawsuit were all part of these maneuvers over drone attacks. And that game, in turn, was part of the internal struggle between the ISI and the civilian government in Islamabad. Nonsense, insisted ISI spokespeople; the station chief’s name was well known throughout the capital, and the lawyer confirmed he had gotten the name from reporters, adding, “If there is an official complaint that the CIA has, then they should use official channels rather than leaking it to newspapers.” What was not in doubt was that the Islamabad station was “one of the largest in the CIA’s constellation of overseas posts.” Neither was it denied—indeed, it was actually affirmed by Washington sources—that the station chief would have had a principal role in selecting and approving the targets of Predator drone strikes.

The outing infuriated American officials because it was doubtful that this highly competent “up-and-coming” young officer could ever regain the ability to serve overseas again. Whether a direct response or not to the blown cover, three more drone strikes in the Khyber tribal area were launched with claims that fifty-four suspected militants were killed, “an unusually large casualty count.”
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Pakistanis chafed at American behavior all the time, and had begun calling the American embassy a fortress. The new embassy in Islamabad was said to cost $736 million when it was announced in 2009, and to be the second priciest after the Vatican City–sized one in Iraq. These vice-regal compounds designed to hold not only diplomats but contingents from various intelligence agencies displayed American power while also stirring deep-seated feelings about the colonial past. Plans had been made, for example, to buy a five-star hotel, the Pearl Continental in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a “consulate,” but at the height of the nuclear scare a truck full of explosives had rammed it. Whatever
the Islamabad embassy cost, wrote longtime foreign policy critic Chalmers Johnson, it would more resemble a medieval fortress than a traditional embassy. Housing more spies, intelligence officers, and military than diplomats, such “embassies” will now be the visible part “of an in-your-face American imperial presence.”
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It was true that Pakistan was considered one of the most dangerous assignments for Foreign Service officers, and that while most lived outside the building, they could be seen traveling to and from in armored cars. Despite all these rumblings, American officials insisted they wanted to make their work more visible to improve the local public’s impression of the United States. They wanted to make sure the symbolism was not that of a fortress, one official told foreign journalists in Islamabad, but, he added, “It’s also a gesture to [the] Pakistani people that we’re not scared of them.”
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