On the Grand Trunk Road (52 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
I asked if the local Taliban played favorites at election time. “The Taliban have no part in politics,” Paracha answered emphatically. “They are totally against democracy and the ballot. They will decide everything under the Holy Koran or with the bullet.”
Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban has often seemed mysterious and has proved vexing for the Bush administration. During 2004 and 2005, as the Taliban and al Qaeda increased in strength in Pakistan, they carried out attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The Bush administration urged President Musharraf to dispatch the Pakistani Army into South Waziristan to disrupt them, and Musharraf agreed to do so. The army had never before entered the Tribal Areas to subdue them by force; after British troops were defeated there, during the late imperial period, colonial and Pakistani governments had favored a system premised upon local autonomy. The invasion began poorly and has been deteriorating ever since; the army has taken significant casualties, and, while its forces have killed or captured some Taliban leaders, they have also set off popular resentment.
For decades, Pakistan’s army has been trained and equipped primarily to fight conventional infantry-and-armor wars against India; it has little capacity for counterinsurgency. Moreover, both officers and men are mainly ethnic Punjabis from the eastern province bordering India; they are foreigners among the Pashtuns of the Tribal Areas. By late 2006, after sporadic battles that received little international attention, the Army had been, in essence, “militarily defeated” by the Taliban and al Qaeda, as a U.S. Defense Department official put it.
During this campaign, the Taliban has captured hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and paramilitaries, not only in the Tribal Areas but also in the towns and villages of the North-West Frontier. Many prisoners are released after negotiations, but sometimes, when the Taliban discovers enlisted men or officers who are Shiites, they execute them. Militants in black turbans parade the victims before handheld cameras and behead them with machetes or knives. The Taliban’s propaganda wing distributes these gruesome videos throughout Pakistan.
The army has some Pashtun commanders—about fifteen percent of the officer corps—and many of them also serve in the Frontier Corps. Frontier Corps personnel occasionally balk at assaulting fellow Pashtuns among the Taliban because they regard the army’s campaign in the Tribal Areas as a mercenary expedition directed by Washington. “They have been saying, ‘We won’t fight,’ ” Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani researcher from a prominent military family, told me. He has written a book about the army,
Crossed Swords,
that is based on extensive interviews with generals and access to military archives. According to Nawaz and other specialists, a number of these dissenting soldiers have been court-martialed and imprisoned in cases that the Musharraf government has never publicized. Mullahs in the Tribal Areas have refused to preside over proper burials for fallen soldiers because the dead did not perish righteously.
Crossed Swords,
that is based on extensive interviews with generals and access to military archives. According to Nawaz and other specialists, a number of these dissenting soldiers have been court-martialed and imprisoned in cases that the Musharraf government has never publicized. Mullahs in the Tribal Areas have refused to preside over proper burials for fallen soldiers because the dead did not perish righteously.
As these failures accumulated, Musharraf was distracted. He published an autobiography, toured abroad, appeared on The Daily Show, and, at home, became increasingly preoccupied by domestic politics. “He was a part-time army chief, and it showed,” Mushahid Hussain, a senator who is a member of Musharraf’s party, the other branch of the Pakistan Muslim League, told me. The president delegated the campaign in the Tribal Areas to a Pashtun general, Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, who advocated a more political approach, using the jirga system; Aurakzai believed that this could reduce the need for military force. In September 2006, he signed a peace treaty with Pakistani Taliban leaders in North Waziristan.
Pakistan promoted this deal in Washington as being a means of pacifying the Taliban and luring its fighters away from hard-core al Qaeda groups. To the Bush administration and the government of Afghanistan, however, the North Waziristan treaty appeared to be a nonaggression pact that gave the Taliban tacit license to strike across the Afghan border if they left the Pakistani Army alone.
Tariq Waseem Ghazi, a retired three-star general who served as Pakistan’s defense secretary between 2005 and 2007, told me that, among Pakistan’s top commanders, “Everybody felt there was a need for a political accommodation” in the Tribal Areas. “I think it was unreasonable at any time that we should go into the Tribal Areas with the same kind of motivation and fervor with which the coalition went into Afghanistan or into Iraq,” he said. “That was a point that I made to the U.S. Defense Department in my talks a number of times. I kept telling them, ‘Shock and awe is fine for you if you fly in from the U.S. or Canada, but shock and awe is no good for us when we have to live with the Tribal Areas as part and parcel of Pakistan.” ’
Ghazi said that he often found the Pentagon to be unsympathetic. In fact, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan believed that American and NATO soldiers were dying as a result of the North Waziristan peace treaty. Nonetheless, Pakistan’s generals felt that Washington had rushed to judgment. “Whenever you had casualties in the U.S. forces, they had to find somebody they could put the blame on,” Ghazi said. Pentagon delegations traveled to Pakistan with “fancy graphs about attacks going up” in Afghanistan as a result of the treaty, but Ghazi found their analysis of cause and effect unconvincing.
This situation did little to relieve the undercurrents of mistrust that circulated among the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States. “That’s not how partnerships work,” Ghazi said. “I think we did not have a common plan because we did not have common objectives. You can’t have partners who are suspicious of each other. The Americans are suspicious of us. We are suspicious of the Americans. The Afghans are suspicious of us. We are suspicious of the Aghans.”
Afghan intelligence officials have repeatedly claimed that the ISI may still be collaborating with the Taliban. Among other things, the Afghans have asked why Musharraf’s government has been unable to root out Taliban leaders from major Pakistani cities like Quetta, in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Some American officials and outside regional experts share the Afghans’ suspicions about the activities of the ISI, or elements within it. Pakistan could have several motives in undertaking a covert program to aid or protect the Taliban: appeasing Pakistan’s radicalized Pashtun population; pressuring Afghanistan’s government into political concessions favorable to Pakistan; or preserving a historically friendly militia as a hedge against an eventual American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Ghazi, referring to these suspicions, said, “We thought they were most irresponsible.” In discussions with American officials, “We cried ourselves hoarse,” he said, trying to convince them that Pakistan had abandoned its clandestine support for the Taliban. “But, every time, somebody would come around saying, ‘This is true.’ We ended up saying, ‘If that’s what you believe, believe it. There’s nothing we can do about it.’ I think there were people in Pakistan who just gave up trying to convince the Americans.” He added, “There is absolutely no reason for the Pakistan Army or anyone to have been involved with the Taliban.” General Rashid Qureshi, Musharraf’s spokesman, said the notion that Pakistan might support the Taliban was “A ridiculous argument, really. We have lost over a thousand military men fighting these extremists. How can the government be supporting extremists to fight its own security people?” Even within the ISI, he added, “There’s no way that these officers would defy or go against the orders of the Chief of Army Staff.” Those who suggest otherwise “want to bring doubt in the minds of the Western world” about Musharraf, “a man to whom we all owe so much.” (Also, Musharraf has survived four assassination attempts by Islamist conspirators.)
When Vice President Dick Cheney visited Pakistan in February 2007, the Musharraf government made a carefully timed arrest of a Taliban leader in Quetta. The apparent ease with which this and other, similarly timed roundups were engineered suggested that Pakistan could take down the Taliban’s fugitive leadership if it really wished to do so. Ghazi conceded that some of the arrests may have been ordered by Musharraf’s government “purely for cosmetic reasons,” because “there was this pressure on us” to prove that Pakistan was cracking down. “I think we may have overdone it, overplayed it, because of which we lost credibility.” He insisted, however, that the roundups were merely public relations—a matter of grabbing whoever could be located quickly—“not a deliberate ploy in the sense that we always had the ability to deliver what needed to be done.”
Even if Pakistan has no organized covert policy to support the Taliban, the army has yet to make a full commitment to the Taliban’s eradication. Shuja Nawaz, the military historian, said he doesn’t think that among the senior generals and intelligence officers “there’s any consensus that the Taliban are the enemy.” He explained, “So long as the Taliban don’t attack the army, it sees them as perfectly fine. And, potentially, if they take over Afghanistan, it sees them as a group that would have at least some sympathies with Pakistan, and vice versa. That has been in the way of Musharraf’s desire to act and capture the Taliban leadership. I cannot believe that the ISI does not know which houses are owned by the Taliban leadership and where they’re living and so on.”
The ISI has had only limited ties to al Qaeda in the past, while other jihadis, such as the Kashmiri groups and the Afghan Taliban, have been much more closely connected. None of these groups have ever been easy for Pakistan to control. Particularly in the case of the Taliban, however, American intelligence analysts have been unable to determine whether the ISI or sections of it are still trying to support or at least protect their former jihadi allies. “This is a big subject of debate for us,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told me late last year. “The fact that they operate from Pakistani soil is undeniable. Is it ommission or commission?” He added, “The legacy’s still there. But is there official sanction? I would tend to say no, but I have no way of knowing.”
“There’s calibration,” another senior U.S. intelligence official said. The Pakistanis “recognize that they want a friendly Pashtun entity in Afghanistan” and that the Taliban might eventually provide this, as they did during the late 1990s. Yet it is unclear how many active ISI officers might be involved in such a project today. “Is it a lot of people? Several people? It’s changing. It’s a dynamic issue.” Perhaps, the official speculated, the recent spate of attacks against the army by Islamists would force a reevaluation. When “suicide bombers are shooting up Pakistan,” he said, “do you see that, whatever you’ve been doing, it’s not working?”
Intelligence dossiers about the ISI and the Taliban are often ambiguous. “There is an enormous amount of evidence about what the Taliban do in Pakistan,” Ronald E. Neumann, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan between July 2005 and April 2007, said. “There is a body of evidence about what some retired or technically retired ISI officers are doing. But there’s a dearth of hard evidence—‘These five documents.’ So at that point it’s everybody’s opinion.”
When U.S. military commanders on the Afghan side of the border monitored Pakistani operations in the Tribal Areas, Neumann said, they observed that some Pakistani officers attacked the Taliban, some did so halfheartedly, and others did not fight at all. “That’s too incoherent to be policy,” Neumann said. “Maybe it’s the fear of the individual commanders. Maybe it’s the absence of policy. I don’t know the factors that create this incoherence, but it’s there.” Still, while “the mass” of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are recruited there, the most important Taliban leadership is based in Pakistan, and the sanctuary the leaders enjoy there is destabilizing both countries.
There is raw intelligence describing contacts between ISI officers and Taliban leaders, U.S. officials told me, but the accuracy of this reporting can be difficult to assess, and the motives of the ISI officers are not always clear.
The evidence that retired ISI officers support the Taliban is more convincing, though it can be difficult to know whether these officers are acting as religious volunteers or as clandestine operatives of the ISI. In any event, Pakistan’s militants are by no means a cohesive force. A Pakistani who has been a senior member of one of the country’s militant groups for more than a decade told me that al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and the Pakistani Taliban have separate leadership councils. (Pentagon analysts refer to the Afghan Taliban as Big T, and their Pakistani counterpart as Little T.) By late 2007, some of the jihadis appeared to be acting more destructively than ever before—a Frankensteinian narrative that had long been predicted by the ISI’s critics. On November 24th, a suicide bomber detonated himself beside a bus at the entrance to Camp Hamza, the ISI’s national headquarters, in Islamabad. More than a dozen people died; it was one of the first known attacks by an apparent Islamist cell against the intelligence service.
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