The Way of the Knife Read online

  He suggested that the government of Pakistan, by brokering the peace deal, was protecting the people of South Waziristan from the American bombs.

  “If the Pakistan government had not made such a wise choice, then just like America invaded Iraq and invaded Afghanistan, they also would have invaded the tribal areas,” he said. The crowd cheered wildly.

  Nek Muhammad also spoke of peace. “Whatever happened, happened,” he said before a bank of microphones. “Be it our fault or the army’s, we will not fight each other again.”

  There was little doubt which side was negotiating from strength. Nek Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrassa rather than in a public location, where tribal meetings were traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”

  Judging by the terms of the truce, he was right. The government agreed to pay reparations for the carnage in South Waziristan and to free all the prisoners who had been captured during the offensive. The foreign fighters in the mountains were granted amnesty as long as they pledged to give up attacks on Pakistani troops and raids into Afghanistan—a provision that was essentially unenforceable. Nek Muhammad and his followers also promised not to attack Pakistani troops but did not renounce attacks into Afghanistan. Later, Nek Muhammad said that he would not give up jihad in Afghanistan until the country was free from foreign occupation.

  Not everyone in Pakistan’s government thought that the peace deal was a wise move. By 2004, Asad Munir had retired from the ISI and taken a job as a civilian administrator in Peshawar, overseeing security and development in the tribal areas. The former station chief who had worked closely with the CIA in 2002 and 2003 watched as Pakistani generals debated whether to negotiate with Nek Muhammad. He warned that appeasing the tribal militants would only expand their reach into the settled parts of Pakistan. The peace deals that were brokered in the tribal areas beginning in 2004, Munir now believes, led to the rise of a powerful, deadly group in the country, a group that came to be known as the Pakistani Taliban.

  “If [Pakistani troops] had just carried through with the operation in 2004, both in South and North Waziristan, the Taliban would not have spread” to areas much closer to Islamabad, he said. “With every peace deal, they gained strength and controlled more areas, and people started to take them as the rulers because the state was not interfering.”

  Nevertheless, government officials in Islamabad boasted that the peace deal had driven a wedge between Pakistani militants and al Qaeda fighters. Nek Muhammad continued to deny publicly that there were any al Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas. “There is no al Qaeda here,” he said. “Had there been a single al Qaeda fighter here, the government would have caught one by now.”

  The Shakai peace arrangement propelled Nek Muhammad to new fame. He was the man who had brought the government to its knees, and he began comparing himself to famous Wazir tribesmen who had repelled British forces from the mountains. Within weeks, the truce was exposed as a sham and Nek Muhammad resumed attacks against Pakistani troops. Musharraf once again ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

  CIA officials in Islamabad had been lobbying the Pakistanis for months to allow Predator flights in the tribal areas, and Nek Muhammad’s repeated humiliation of Pakistani troops presented an opportunity. The CIA’s station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to General Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the CIA killed Nek Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular drone flights over the tribal areas? “Nek Muhammad really pissed off the Pakistanis,” recalled the former station chief. “They said, ‘If you guys can find him, go get him.’”

  But the access came with limits. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they approve each drone strike before it happened, giving them tight control over the killing list. After tense discussions about where exactly the drones could fly, Pakistani spies insisted that the drones be restricted to narrow “flight boxes” in the tribal areas, knowing that more extensive access would allow the CIA to spy in places where Islamabad didn’t want the Americans to go: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and mountain camps where Kashmiri militant groups were trained for attacks against India.

  The ISI also insisted that all drone flights in Pakistan operate under the CIA’s covert-action authority—meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and Pakistan would either take credit for individual kills or remain silent. President Musharraf didn’t think it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. During the negotiations he told one CIA operative, “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”

  Even if the CIA had not been constrained, the agency at that time would not have been able to carry out a more extensive killing campaign in the tribal areas. The Americans had hardly any intelligence sources in the area and precious little information about where bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders might be hiding. CIA analysts suspected that bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were somewhere in the tribal areas, but vague suspicions and sketchy third-hand reports were hardly enough to make effective use of the Predator. The ISI wasn’t much better connected. The Pakistani spy service had extensive source networks in the cities to help track down al Qaeda leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but in South Waziristan and the other tribal agencies the ISI did not have reliable contacts.

  Lucky for both the American and Pakistani spies, Nek Muhammad wasn’t exactly in deep hiding. He gave regular interviews to the Pashto channels of Western news outlets, bragging about humbling the mighty Pakistani military. These interviews, by satellite phone, made him an easy mark for American eavesdroppers, and by mid-June 2004 the Americans were regularly tracking his movements. On June 18, one day after Nek Muhammad spoke to the BBC and wondered aloud about the strange bird that was following him, a Predator fixed on his position and fired a Hellfire missile at the compound where he had been resting. The blast severed Nek Muhammad’s left leg and left hand, and he died almost instantly. Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain visited the village days later and saw the mud grave at Shakai that was already becoming a pilgrimage site. A sign on the grave read, HE LIVED AND DIED LIKE A TRUE PASHTUN.

  After a discussion between CIA and ISI officials about how to handle news of the strike, they decided that Pakistan would take credit for killing the man who had humiliated its military. One day after Nek Muhammad was killed, a charade began that would go on for years. Major General Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told Voice of America that “al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other militants had been killed during a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

  —

  FOUR MONTHS after the drone strike, a general with sad, hollow eyes and stooped shoulders took control of Pakistan’s ISI. Beyond the basics of his biography, American spies knew little about the phlegmatic, chain-smoking Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. He was born into a military family and raised in Jhelum, an arid region of Punjab. He received his army commission in 1971, the year Pakistani forces were defeated during a thirteen-day war with India that led to Pakistan losing the territory that would eventually become Bangladesh. Like most Pakistani officers, Kayani believed that Pakistan fought a daily struggle for its own survival and that the country could make no military decisions without determining first how those decisions would affect its ability to defend itself against India.

  And yet Kayani was controlled where others were hotheaded. After militants based in Pakistan launched a deadly attack on India’s parliament in New Delhi in late 2001 and it looked as if the two nuclear rivals might go to war, Kayani was the army commander in charge of marshaling Pakistani forces along the border with India. He won praise inside Pakistan for quietly managing the tense situation, staying in contact with his Indian counterparts, and preventing the simmering dispute from escalating into nuclear war. He won General Musharraf’s loyalty two years later, when he was in charge of the investigations into the De
cember 2003 assassination attempts on the president.

  It wasn’t long after Kayani took over the ISI that he had earned a grudging respect at CIA headquarters for being something of a master manipulator—this was a compliment—and a man who always kept his most important agendas a secret. During meetings, he could go long stretches without speaking a word, appearing to be asleep. Then, when a subject came up that agitated him, he would speak passionately for several minutes and then return to his somnolent state. He golfed obsessively and went everywhere trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  He rarely spoke about himself, and when he did it was difficult to understand what he was saying, because of his tendency to mumble. Where his ISI predecessor, General ul Haq, was dapper and suave, General Kayani was rumpled and unpretentious. During trips to Washington, D.C., he insisted that his limousine driver take him to Marshalls, the discount-clothing chain, where he would shop for suits and ties. Above all, he could wait patiently for what he wanted. One top American spy recalled a lengthy meeting with Kayani during which the Pakistani general spent half an hour meticulously rolling a cigarette between his fingers. Then, after taking one puff, he gently stubbed it out.

  General Kayani took over the ISI at a time when Pakistani leaders were becoming increasingly convinced that the Americans had lost their stomach for the fight in Afghanistan. The Iraq war had diverted Washington’s attention away from Afghanistan, and soldiers, spies, and politicians in Islamabad believed it was only a matter of time before the rising violence in Pakistan’s western neighbor would threaten the government in Islamabad. According to several Pakistani officials in positions of authority at that time, it was during this period when the ISI decided to take a more active role with the Afghan Taliban, hoping to steer Afghanistan toward a political future that was acceptable to Islamabad.

  General Kayani was consumed with the past, and he understood that Afghanistan’s bloody history was prologue to America’s war in that country. He had been studying Afghanistan for decades and was an expert in the dynamics that helped Afghan insurgents vanquish a superpower in the 1980s. In 1988, as a young Pakistani army major studying at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, Kayani wrote a master’s thesis about the Soviet war in Afghanistan titled “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement.” By then, the Soviet Union had endured nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already begun to pull out his troops. Over ninety-eight pages of clear, straightforward prose, Kayani examined how the Afghan Resistance Movement (ARM) had bled the vaunted Soviet army and increased “the price of Soviet presence in Afghanistan.”

  Kayani was, in essence, writing the playbook for how Pakistan could hold the strings in Afghanistan during the occupation of a foreign army. Pakistan, he wrote, could use proxy militias to wreak havoc in the country but also to control the groups effectively so that Islamabad could avoid a direct confrontation with the occupying force.

  In a country without national identity, Kayani argued, it was necessary for the Afghan resistance to build support in the tribal system and to gradually weaken Afghanistan’s central government. As for Pakistan, Kayani believed that Islamabad likely didn’t want to be on a “collision course” with the Soviet Union, or at least didn’t want the Afghan resistance to set them on that path. Therefore, it was essential for Pakistan’s security to keep the strength of the Afghan resistance “managed.”

  By the time he took over the ISI in 2004, Kayani knew that the Afghan war would be decided not by soldiers in mountain redoubts but by politicians in Washington who had an acute sensitivity to America’s limited tolerance for years more of bloody conflict. He knew because he had studied what had happened to the Soviets. In his thesis, he wrote that “the most striking feature of the Soviet military effort at present is the increasing evidence that it may not be designed to secure a purely military solution through a decisive defeat of the ARM.

  “This is likely due to the realization that such a military solution is not obtainable short of entailing massive, and perhaps intolerable, personnel losses and economic and political cost.”

  In 2004, Kayani’s thesis sat in the library at Fort Leavenworth, amid stacks of other largely ignored research papers written by foreign officers who went to Kansas to study how the United States Army fights its battles. This was a manual for a different kind of battle, a secret guerrilla campaign. Two decades after the young Pakistani military officer wrote it, he was the country’s spymaster, in the perfect position to put it to use.

  7: CONVERGENCE

  “Deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

  —Enrique Prado

  On a cold afternoon in early 2005, CIA director Porter Goss was attending a ceremony for a class of agency case officers graduating from “The Farm,” the CIA’s training base at Camp Peary, in southern Virginia. It was a standard ritual for CIA directors to make the trip down to the base for the graduations, and the ceremonies were a brief moment of normalcy for the graduates before they began their lives of cover identities, deceit, and, occasionally, extreme danger. But the ceremony was cut short after one of Goss’s aides came to him with an urgent message. Within minutes, the CIA director and his bodyguards had loaded back into a Blackhawk helicopter and were flying north. But instead of returning to Langley, Goss flew directly to the Pentagon to meet with Donald Rumsfeld. There was about to be a military assault into Pakistan.

  A Pakistani agent working for the CIA had delivered the American spies a rare tip: There was to be a high-level meeting of al Qaeda officials in Bajaur, one of the desolate tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan. The agent had been tracking Abu Faraj al-Libi, the third-ranking official in al Qaeda, who had occasionally been spotted riding around the mountain villages of Pakistan on a red motorcycle. The agent told his CIA handlers not only that al-Libi would be at the gathering but also that Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, might attend.

  A plan of attack was hastily put together, and Goss and Rumsfeld considered the risks. Three dozen Navy SEALs would jump out of a C-130 cargo plane and parachute into a drop zone not far from where the meeting was supposed to take place. The SEALs would attack the compound, grab as many people as possible, and take them to a staging area where everyone would be spirited back over the Afghanistan border in helicopters. Goss urged that the military carry out the mission, and he had the backing of Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, a rail-thin and intense ascetic who had taken over Joint Special Operations Command in 2003.

  But Rumsfeld and his top intelligence aide, Stephen Cambone, resisted the plan. It was too risky, they said, and Rumsfeld demanded that dozens more Army Rangers be added to the mission so they could bail out the SEALs in case something went wrong. The invasion force swelled to more than 150 troops, and Rumsfeld decided there was no way an operation that size could be kept from President Pervez Musharraf. Another objection came from the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who had been awakened in the middle of the night and told that a large group of well-armed Americans were about to enter the country. “This is a really bad idea, Stan,” the station chief told McChrystal, who had been the one to call him. “You might kill a couple of al Qaeda guys, but it won’t be worth it.

  “You’re invading Pakistan,” he said.

  All the while, the SEALs were sitting inside the C-130 at Bagram Air Base, waiting for the final orders to launch the mission. They waited for hours before the mission was finally scrubbed.

  Rumsfeld’s concerns about the assault were largely about intelligence. The information came from one CIA source, and the defense secretary thought that a single strand of information was a shaky basis for a high-risk mission into the snowy mountains of western Pakistan. He also didn’t trust the CIA’s track record, and in early 2005 the spy agency was having difficulty convincing anyone—especially Rumsfeld—about the credibility of its intelligence analysis. American spy agencies were still reeling from the Iraq war debacle, when they had judged that Saddam Hussein
was keeping stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and a cloud of suspicion hung over all of the CIA’s assessments for several years afterward. As much as Goss was frustrated by how the discussions about the Bajaur operation ended, there was nothing he could do. Rumsfeld didn’t trust even a CIA judgment that there was an 80 percent chance that al-Zawahiri was at the meeting, and Rumsfeld was the one in charge of the troops. As one aide to Goss described it, “It was like your dad telling you that you can’t have the car for the weekend.”

  But beyond the questions about the reliability of the intelligence, the episode was also a bleak reminder that, several years after the September 11 attacks, the war against international terror groups remained haphazard and chaotic. Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon had a coherent plan for the secret wars outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both agencies were still locked in turf battles, set to prove to the White House that they ought to be in charge of the global manhunt. And, increasingly, they were mimicking each other: the CIA, after Nek Muhammad’s killing in Pakistan, becoming ever more a lethal, paramilitary organization, and the Pentagon ramping up its spying operations to support a special-operations war. There were no clear ground rules. When an emergency came up, like the intelligence about the al Qaeda meeting in Bajaur, there was no plan in place to act on it.

  —

  IF THERE WAS ONE EVENT that had catalyzed the CIA’s escalation of lethal operations, it was the completion of a devastating internal report in May 2004 by the spy agency’s inspector general. The 106-page report by John Helgerson kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA detention-and-interrogation program had rested, and it raised questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for the brutal interrogations carried out inside the agency’s network of secret prisons. It suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and exploiting the phobias of prisoners—such as confining them in a small box with live bugs—violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The CIA had subjected several detainees to waterboarding—wherein the prisoner was hooded and immobilized on a wooden plank while water was poured over his face, creating the sensation of drowning—and in one month alone had used the technique on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times.