Killing Machine (25 page)

It was a very complicated business, because at the same time as the hullabaloo over the outing, there was also cooperation between American and Pakistani military units throughout the border area. Things had worsened in the early months of 2011, triggered by the arrest of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis on the streets of Lahore. Washington’s first reaction was to claim diplomatic immunity status for Davis—an assertion that crumbled into pieces almost at once. Making matters worse, a car driven on the wrong side of the road by a consular official rushing to the scene, apparently in a failed effort to get Davis out of the area, killed a third Pakistani. In a display of the arrogance Chalmers Johnson described, an American official complained that “Pakistan became paranoid about the agency’s presence,” almost as if there were nothing to the incident.
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The Davis case had all the trappings of a spy thriller. He shot the first man through his windshield with his Glock pistol. The second man was shot in the back as he tried to run away. Davis’s cover story that he had shot in self-defense during a robbery attempt didn’t explain why he was careful to take pictures of the two men he had killed. When it was finally admitted that he was no diplomat but a CIA-assigned contractor charged with protecting a “safe house” in Lahore, the plot thickened. Because of the nature of his
job, there were likely ties to the drone campaign, and indeed Davis had been known to offer CIA payments to Pakistanis willing to name “militants.” Eventually the U.S. government paid the victims’ relatives $2.2 million in blood money. The handling of the “Davis affair” divided American officials in both Islamabad and Washington, with the CIA chief quarreling openly with Ambassador Cameron Munter about the need to strike a deal to secure his release. At first the CIA station chief confronted Munter with a blunt statement that he was not to cut a deal, adding, “Pakistan is the enemy.” In the end the State Department pragmatists won out. But the fallout from the Davis case left a permanent mark on everyone it touched—and on Islamabad’s relations with Washington.
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Almost immediately upon Davis’s release, moreover, the United States carried out an especially controversial “signature” drone strike on March 17, 2011, that killed an estimated forty-two people. The gathering was a jirga called to settle a dispute over a chromite mine. Most of those killed were civilians, said an investigative report, including elders and auxiliary police. Only about four known members of a Taliban group attended, the report claimed, quoting survivors and news accounts. U.S. officials insisted, on the other hand, that all the dead were militants. Inevitably, the question of drones and intimidation came up every time: Did four Taliban justify an attack on forty-two people? What if there had been twenty? Where
did
body counts lead in such a war?
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But the question of CIA funding of Pakistani “assets” came to a full boil after the raid on Abbottabad. Pakistan arrested five suspected informants, including an army major who had noted down the license plates of vehicles entering the compound. Another was the owner of a safe house used by the CIA to observe the goings-on at the compound. Then there was the doctor who agreed to pretend he was part of the Pakistani health service offering vaccinations to children in an effort to gain access to the compound. He would face the most serious charge and be sentenced to thirty-three years in prison—despite strong protests from Washington. Bruce Riedel, the former CIA agent that Obama had called upon for his first review of the Afghan War, commented that the arrests were about trying
to learn more of what the CIA and other agencies were doing inside the country. But they also wanted to send a warning to other Pakistanis thinking about working with the United States. “By letting this news out,” he said, the Pakistanis “are intimidating anyone who might consider working for the Americans in future.”
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Intimidation, then, could work both ways. Drones were intimidators, or so it was hoped, but working with American targeters could be dangerous, too. Riedel added that the Pakistanis wanted to go back to the “Reagan rules” of the 1980s, when Washington gave Pakistan millions of dollars to fund the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. “We are not going to go back to the 1980s but they are trying to clip the wings of the US in Pakistan and this is one way of getting closer to that.” In the wake of bin Laden’s death, other officials dismissed Islamabad’s complaints as all part of the burden borne by being the indispensable nation, as secretaries of state from Dean Acheson to Madeleine Albright had explained the American role in the world. In a closed briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA deputy director Michael Morell was asked to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with U.S. counterintelligence on a scale of 1 to 10; he replied that it was a 3. Defense Secretary Gates quipped that most governments “lie to each other” and sometimes spy on each other: “It’s the real world we deal with.”
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In the post–Osama bin Laden world, reality apparently meant that the United States could do pretty much what it wished. “There’s also much less riding on the US-Pakistan relationship than even a year ago when the Davis affair erupted,” said a writer in the
Christian Science Monitor
about the doctor’s sentence. “NATO has managed to keep the Afghan war effort going, despite Pakistan cutting off supply lines through its territory. Then, too, trust has evaporated since the discovery of bin Laden in Pakistan and the unauthorized US raid to kill him.”
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Game Changer?

Despite the downgrading of Pakistani-American relations with the death of bin Laden, there was still the Afghan War. Brennan had
said at the time of bin Laden’s death that there had been differences of opinion with Islamabad, including “what we think they should and shouldn’t be doing . . . we believe that that partnership is critically important to breaking the back of al-Qaeda and eventually prevailing over al-Qaeda as well as associated groups.” Then he went on to deliver a one-sentence lecture on the meaning of bin Laden’s death: ‘And we’re hoping that this is going to send a message to those individuals who are out there that terrorism and militancy is not the wave of the future, it’s the wave of the past.”
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Getting bin Laden was “immeasurably important,” agreed Lawrence Wright, author of
The Looming Tower
(2007), the authoritative history of al Qaeda. “He’s been a symbol of resistance and of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe.” With all the changes that had been going on in the Arab world, “real change—in some ways—couldn’t come until this moment happened.”
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Put another way, Wright’s argument almost seemed to be that the United States had somehow liberated Arabs from a useless and dangerous past by killing bin Laden and dumping his corpse into the sea, thereby opening the way to modernization and Western-style democracy. Defense secretary Bob Gates also suggested that bin Laden’s death “could be a game changer.” “Bin Laden and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar had a very close personal relationship, and there are others in the Taliban who have felt betrayed by al-Qaida—[they feel] it was because of al-Qaida’s attack on the United States that the Taliban got thrown out of Afghanistan.” Gates added, “We’ll have to see what that relationship looks like.”
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Within days of Gates’s remarks there were new reports of speeded-up efforts to talk with the Taliban, to see where matters stood. Contacts were proceeding along a number of tracks involving both Arab and European governments. The Taliban was interested, said a U.S. official, in opening a formal political office in Qatar that could lead to direct talks with the American side. And reporters were reminded that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had signaled as far back as February that talks between the two sides did not
have to wait until the Taliban renounced all ties with al Qaeda. That could come as a declaration made at the end of negotiations. All this was a bit breathtaking, if not wishful thinking, coming so soon after bin Laden’s demise at the hands of the SEAL team. Exactly what role the Taliban would play in a postconflict government was indeed a crucial matter, and it did not appear that Afghan president Hamid Karzai had been consulted. Certainly his opponents were making the argument that such talks could lead to the end of the democratic experiment in Afghanistan—a victim of American desires to get out as soon as possible.
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Secretary Gates’s suggestion that bin Laden’s death offered a game-changing possibility left plenty of room for speculation about the changed objectives in American policy. Instead of conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, the more important question had become the political ground in the United States. Nine days after bin Laden’s death, Republican senator Richard Lugar was ready to consider alternatives for Afghanistan and scale down expectations accordingly: “The question before us is whether Afghanistan is important enough to justify the lives and massive resources that are being spent there, especially given our nation’s debt crisis.” Just withdrawing an arbitrary number of troops was not the right way to go about rethinking the Afghan strategy, he went on; what was needed was a new definition of success.
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What then of the argument that victory or defeat in Afghanistan was of crucial significance to America’s future security? Had bin Laden’s death made all the difference? Apparently so. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, agreed with Lugar about the escalating cost of the war, saying, “It is fundamentally unsustainable to continue spending $10 billion a month on a massive military operation with no end in sight.” But he worried about the “lack of clarity” the administration had exhibited about its ultimate goals—and whether or not America’s allies were being read into the picture. In response, a senior administration official simply said that was because the situation
was
unclear, but bin Laden’s death made it more likely the Taliban would seek to separate
itself from al Qaeda, which could give “traction to reconciliation efforts.”
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Karzai might well have reason to believe that his regime had been relegated to outsider status, as had Nguyen van Thieu’s in the Paris peace talks on Vietnam three decades earlier. The reports on potential peace talks even implied that by responding to American overtures, the Taliban could secure for itself a safe route out of Pakistan, one that would end interference in its affairs from the ISI and the Haqqani network. That was really breathtaking if one stopped to consider all the things Americans had supposedly been fighting for—religious tolerance, women’s rights to education, et cetera. “Some people who have met with the Taliban say that among the reasons [the insurgents] want to establish their own office is so they can get out from under the Pakistanis,” said a senior administration official.
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The hopes of direct talks with the Taliban quickly faded, but the American determination to “get out from under” the war grew stronger—as did the desire to carry on drone warfare wherever a likely target was spotted. Counterinsurgency was yesterday’s top story; drones were the headliners now. Indeed, Afghanistan began to be relegated to the inside pages. If al Qaeda was knocked out, where did that leave the Taliban?

Even before bin Laden’s death, however, there were comments that the drone strikes were no longer taking out major al Qaeda targets in Pakistan—there just weren’t that many left. What made such reports especially interesting, of course, was the implication that for all of his threats and plans to carry out assassinations, Osama bin Laden had indeed become little more than a caged tiger venting his rage on videotapes. Former CIA officials who continued to describe the drones as essential now admitted that they recognized fewer and fewer among the names of the killed. The agency was increasingly firing off missiles when it saw certain “signatures,” such as travel out of a “known” al Qaeda site or a group traveling in possession of explosives. “It’s like watching ‘The Sopranos’: You know what’s going on in the Bada Bing.” Instead of clearing the air,
bin Laden’s death had filled the skies with UAVs in search of targets to vaporize. Yes, it was always more dramatic to take the bishop and, if you can find them, the king and queen, said the former official, but “pawns matter.”
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The Real Game Changer

When the two Afghan surges were announced by President Obama in the spring and fall of 2009, it had not been expected that finding and killing Osama bin Laden would change everything all at once. Neither, however, had it been expected that drones and special ops would provide a whole new framework for thinking about the ultimate deterrence quotient in the war on terror. Drones were eliminating the need for pursuing the war on terror one country at a time. They were the technological fix for long, inconclusive wars—if political obstacles such as national sovereignty or irksome constitutional rights could be overcome. Having gotten away with the Abbottabad raid, the United States was truly ready to expand its capacity by opening up new drone bases and legal justifications for striking at anyone anywhere.

There had been the Af-Pak theater of operations; now there would be attacks on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as well as ventures into Somalia and eventually Libya and Mali by proxy. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that the U.S. military had reopened a base for unmanned aircraft in the Seychelles Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean about a thousand miles from mainland Africa’s east coast. “Defense Secretary Leon Panetta,” said the
Journal
article, “and other officials have stressed a need to urgently follow up on the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May with operations to destroy his terrorist organization.” Or, as another “senior U.S. official” said, “We do not know enough about the leaders of the al Qaeda affiliates in Africa. Is there a guy out there saying, ‘I am the future of al Qaeda’? Who is the next Osama bin Laden?”
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