Pakistan: Post-9/11 Double Game

Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn’t control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don’t follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We’re now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state … The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover — that would dwarf everything we’ve seen in the war on terror today.

—David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency expert1

Obviously, bin Laden did have a support system (in Pakistan). The issue was that support system within the government and the state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan … We all know that there are people in Pakistan who share the same belief system as bin Laden and other extremists … So that is a fact, that there are people who probably protected him.

—Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan ambassador2

Obviously the concern has always been how could a compound like this, how could bin Laden be in an area where there were [Pakistani] military establishments, where we could see the military operating and not have them know.

—U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta3

I think it’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time.

—Tom Brennan, White House counterterrorism advisor4

Bin Laden was the ‘Golden Goose’ that the [Pakistani] army had kept under its watch but which, to its chagrin, has now been stolen from under its nose. Until then, the thinking had been to trade in the Goose at the right time for the right price, either in the form of dollars or political concessions.

—Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistani scientist and analyst5

In the weeks between September 11, 2001 and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the head of the ISI, Mahmood Ahmed, made a personal visit to the Taliban’s ambassador in Islamabad. “We want to assure you,” he told the ambassador, “that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.”6 And they were. What is amazing about Pakistan’s behavior after 9/11 is not how much it changed, but how much never changed.

PAKISTAN’S 9/11 AND AL QAEDA CONNECTIONS

It is now commonly known that many of the movements and the key individuals that spread terrorism around the world today got their start during the Afghan jihad. But not many realize how many of them were trained, funded, and supplied for that jihad by Pakistan. Even less appreciated are the direct links between Pakistan and the 9/11 plot. Foremost among these links is Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (now commonly referred to simply as “KSM”).

KSM and his family were Pakistanis, although KSM himself was born and raised in Kuwait, where his father was working as an imam. Early on he became enamored by the virulent teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood, which emphasized complete rejection of western influences and the embrace of violent Islamic supremacy. KSM bounced around as a young man, eventually obtaining an engineering degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. But it was during a stay in Peshawar in the 1980s where he truly found his calling as a major player in the terror business.

Peshawar was effectively the Pakistani headquarters of the Afghan jihad. Many of the jihadists who came from around the world looking to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan passed through Peshawar on their way to or from the battlefields. It was the home of now- legendary figures in modern jihadist terrorism: Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden and Zawahiri.7 KSM moved in this milieu for several years, expanding his knowledge and skills—and more importantly, making contacts.

One of these contacts was a nephew, a man known in the West by the name Ramzi Yousef. With financial assistance from KSM, Yousef carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef eluded capture and reunited with his uncle at KSM’s apartment in Karachi. The pair moved together to the Philippines, thinking it would be an ideal spot to launch more terror plots. But their elaborate plan to blow up multiple airliners was scuttled by a bomb-making fire in their apartment. Yousef was arrested and taken to the United States, but KSM escaped. Back in Pakistan, he continued to mull over the idea of using airliners to cause widespread death and destruction. Soon he had a new plan— what became the 9/11 attacks—and he traveled from Karachi to bin Laden’s safe haven in Afghanistan to make a proposal.8

Bin Laden gave the green light and the financial backing to the plot, but the organization and oversight was KSM’s. From Pakistan, KSM recruited the hijackers, gave them their instructions, made the final choice of targets, and issued the go order. It was in Pakistan, according to journalist Zahid Hussain, that KSM was finally arrested in 2003.9 At the time, he was still involved in plotting future terror attacks. He also had a personal killing to his credit: the American journalist Daniel Pearl. On a videotape later captured by American intelligence, KSM brags about beheading Pearl with his own hands.10

In retrospect, it is clear that KSM’s terrorist activities were deeply embedded in his Pakistani homeland. He received “huge support from extended family members living in Balochistan and Karachi” and was sheltered by Pakistani political activists and even an Army Major.11 Recall that KSM was, by this time, a senior al-Qaeda operative. Terry McDermott, a journalist who has been investigating KSM for years, concludes:

Mohammad thrived in the chaos of Pakistan, and that chaos still exists. The melding of the various jihadi groups with Al Qaeda and the Taliban has resulted in an indecipherable mess … Most of the terrorists who have attacked the West in the name of Islam … are sparks thrown off by the fires in Pakistan.12

Pakistani officials claim that the opposite is true. They publicize the arrest of KSM as a demonstration of their implacable opposition to terror. Certainly Pakistan arrested hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in the first years after 9/11. But the details of these arrests often run counter to Pakistani claims about fighting terror. For example, Abu Zubaydah was another high-profile capture made by Pakistani officials in the early 2000s. Yet, as Ahmed Rashid describes, before his arrest he “lived openly in Peshawar, with the full knowledge of the ISI, running a guesthouse for al Qaeda.” Rashid points to evidence showing that prior to 9/11 Zubaydah had worked directly with the ISI in vetting potential militants for training in al-Qaeda’s camps.13

Frankly, arresting al-Qaeda operatives was the least Pakistan could do to placate the United States after 9/11—particularly given that they were still maintaining active and widespread support for jihadists in western Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Pakistan gladly accepted billions of dollars in American aid for its anti-terrorist efforts. But the Army and the ISI focused their attention mainly on al-Qaeda members in the large cities, thereby ensuring that many Taliban fighters and leaders could escape. Not only that, they protected Afghan Taliban who retreated across the border into Pakistani border towns to regroup. There, the Taliban were equipped, supplied with fresh recruits, and sent back over the border to wage war against American and coalition soldiers and the new Afghan government. In the words of John Schmidt, Pakistan was simply “playing both sides of the street, supporting the forces who were killing the soldiers they were helping to provision.”14

Former American envoy to Afghanistan Peter Tomsen was in a position to know that the U.S.-led effort in that country “could only succeed … by convincing Pakistan to dismantle the unholy alliance network and allow Afghans to find their own path to stabilizing their country.”15 But no one in a position of authority in the Pakistani state had any intention of doing this. As they had been for decades, Pakistan was seeking “to harness radical Islamic fervor to gain strategic depth against India, liberate Kashmir, and fan the flames of religious holy war in the South Asian region and elsewhere.”16

This double game was apparent to well-informed observers in Pakistan. A year after 9/11 and General Musharraf ’s promise to aid the United States in its war on terror, it was already clear to many Pakistanis that no fundamental change had taken place. Pakistani Army support for Islamic extremists had not ceased. Instead, there was only a short-term, tactical appeasement of the United States.17

The U.S. and its allies were unable or unwilling to see Pakistan’s post-9/11 alliance for what it was—a tactical maneuver. As a result, jihadists were able to use the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border to regroup and resupply with impunity. Osama bin Laden made similar use of that border to flee the country at the end of 2001. He found a suitable base in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan and continued to oversee terror attacks in London, Bali, and even inside Pakistan itself. As we will see later, Pakistan would later reap the whirlwind for this. But in the early years after 9/11, Pakistan allowed part of the FATA to become a bastion of terrorist networks and jihadist fighters.18

By 2004, it was clear to Western intelligence sources that Pakistan’s ISI was reorganizing the bloody resurgence of the Afghan Taliban. It ran camps for new recruits, drove trucks full of fighters to the border, provided covering fire as they crossed, and picked them up again when they returned. Again, Rashid’s Pakistan-based journalism is revealing:

Most damning of all was the extensive monitoring of the US base at Bagram of wireless communications between Taliban commanders and Pakistani army officers on the border. The Taliban would speak to officers at border checkpoints, asking for safe passage as they came out of Afghanistan. The ISI’s activities emerged in the open when NATO troops deployed in southern Afghanistan in late 2005 were faced with a full-blown Taliban offensive being run out of Quetta [Pakistan].19

The Pakistani city of Quetta had become the Afghan Taliban’s base. Mullah Omar led a shura (council) in Quetta from which, as Rashid’s reporting describes, attacks against coalition and Afghan government forces were planned.

The situation was an amazing repeat of the original Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Once more the United States was handing billions of dollars over to Pakistan with which they funded and directed proxy fighters to kill on their own behalf. Only this time, those American dollars were ultimately being directed not against the Soviets but against Americans. Even as American intelligence became aware of the game, because America and its allies were unable to operate in Afghanistan without the supply lines they had established in Pakistan, they were unable to do much about it. The Americans were forced to tread lightly in criticizing the Pakistanis for fear of antagonizing them too much. Meanwhile, this supposed ally kept America’s enemies well supplied with weapons and recruits.

Speaking of a Pakistani double game might actually overstate their assistance to the U.S. side of that game. The Pakistanis did not just let the Afghan Taliban operate out of their territory, they actively provided direction and assistance to the Taliban. In his in- depth examination of the links between the ISI and the Taliban, Harvard’s Mark Waldman spoke to Taliban commanders who revealed that ISI officers sat in on the shura meetings in Quetta from which offensive operations were launched. After a major Taliban offensive in 2006, a joint assessment by the U.S., NATO, and the Afghan government concluded that the ISI was paying and even pressuring the Afghan Taliban to fight.20

HIDING BIN LADEN

The most glaring and undeniable example of Pakistan’s double game is the case of America’s most wanted himself, Osama bin Laden. The spacious villa in Abbottabad where he was discovered and killed by American Special Forces was constructed, U.S. and European intelligence sources say, with money and assistance provided by former ISI officers. Current and former ISI officials who lived near the facility knew it for what it was when it was completed in 2005. Indeed, sources also suspect bin Laden’s entire escape from Afghanistan was orchestrated by Pakistan:

Bin Laden may have been staying as a guest in safe houses provided by several retired ISI officers, all with the full knowledge of the Pakistani government, for years prior to the villa being constructed.21

This should come as no surprise. For decades, Saudi intelligence and the ISI had worked together to support the Taliban and, at least indirectly, the efforts of bin Laden. It was highly unlikely that an attack on the United States would suddenly destroy allegiances and relationships built up over a lifetime—particularly when many of those on the Pakistani side were highly sympathetic to bin Laden’s cause. According to French intelligence services, the ISI would provide bin Laden shelter so long as he did not initiate terror operations inside Pakistan or encourage attacks against the Saudi royal family.22

It was American intelligence which smoked out bin Laden even as the Pakistanis continued to stonewall and misdirect. In 2010, a phone call from a man known to be bin Laden’s courier to the outside was intercepted by American agents. A drone aircraft tailed the courier back to the Abbottabad complex. Even as SEALs trained for the raid that would eventually bag bin Laden, Pakistan continued its ruse, suggesting that the terror mastermind might be hiding somewhere in the mountains. This was typical behavior, according to one military intelligence agent, who claimed the Pakistanis “actually protected Bin Laden by sending the CIA and DIA down a series of false trails for years.”23 Counter-terrorism Chief (and now CIA Director) John Brennan agrees, saying after the raid that it was “inconceivable that Bin Laden could have been living there without the knowledge of the government.”24

BLOWBACK

The recognition of Pakistan’s role in aiding America’s enemies is somewhat complicated by the fact that General Musharraf ’s regime and Pakistani civilians had also become terror targets. This gives some apparent credence to Pakistan’s oft-repeated claims that it was a victim of terrorism, not its sponsor.

This appearance is deceptive. In truth, the terrorism Pakistan currently endures is the result of its own recklessness and decades-long sponsorship of the forces of jihad. As we saw in the previous Pakistan chapters, the country has radical Islamic ideology baked into its original creation, and it has cleaved to that ideology ever since. The country has nurtured and supported the forces of jihad in any number of ways, including state funding and through a network of radical madrasas. What Pakistan started facing in the mid-2000s was blowback from the other side of its double game.

The blowback is due to a tactical distinction which the Pakistani government is willing to make for political reasons but which many militants are not. We have already seen that groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which were used to spread terror and mayhem in Kashmir, were legally banned in Pakistan while never being actively disrupted or disbanded by the government. But when the Pakistanis began to arrest al-Qaeda operatives to appease the United States they stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Al-Qaeda terrorists who were based or took refuge in Pakistan were deeply integrated with native Pakistani groups. So, when the government began to crack down on them, the native groups providing them shelter had to make a decision. Would they serve Islam by collaborating with the Pakistani state or with al-Qaeda fighters? For many, it wasn’t a difficult choice.

By 2003, it was clear to many observers that the areas of chief concern in Pakistan had been operating outside the control of the central government since the days of the Raj. Prior to 9/11, Pakistan (and even the United States, when it was interested in foiling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) was happy to weaponize and radicalize these areas. When the Pakistani Army attempted to intervene in these regions—places like South Waziristan and the Swat Valley—they discovered a Pakistani variant of the Taliban had emerged there. In many cases these militants were working with al-Qaeda. Local tribal leaders had been usurped and replaced; their jihadist replacements were hostile and resistant Army incursions into “their” territory. John Schmidt describes the situation:

Tribal area madrasa students, who a few years earlier would have headed to Afghanistan to join the Taliban flocked to their banner. So too did disaffected members of Punjab-based groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad … They would side with Al Qaeda and make war against the state.25

The turning point came with two serious assassination attempts against General Musharraf in December, 2003. Both occurred in Rawalpindi, where Musharraf was based at the Army’s headquarters. The first attempt destroyed a bridge moments after Musharraf ’s vehicle had crossed it. An FBI device in his car saved him by jamming the detonation signal. The second attempt was a double suicide bombing on Christmas Day that killed 15 people, but just missed Musharraf.

The background of the suicide bombers was sobering. Both men had fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and one was even a member of Pakistan’s own Jaish-e-Mohammed (JM). Both attacks were planned by JM leader and veteran jihadist Amjad Hussain Farooqi. Al Qaeda operatives planted the explosives.26 In other words, the two men had both served Pakistan’s interests for years; now they were attacking Pakistan’s leader inside Pakistan.

Another ominous development came in 2007 when 13 Pakistani jihadist groups joined together to form an umbrella group called Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It is this group which people currently refer to as the “Pakistani Taliban.”27 The TTP has brought home the suicide bombers Pakistan once sent into Kashmir and Afghanistan to carry on a ghastly campaign of mass murder inside Pakistan. In 2009 alone there were 87 suicide attacks in the country, most of them targeting civilians, with a death toll over 1,300.28 Between January 2009 and September 2012, 8,953 civilian deaths in Pakistan were caused by terror attacks.29

This escalation of violence has certainly encouraged the Pakistani government to engage in a serious fight against the Taliban within their borders. Yet their efforts have been full of false starts and dangerous compromises. Army incursions into mountainous frontier bases usually end in completely ineffective truces.30 One such deal in February 2005 with a leader named Baitullah Mehsud illustrates the problem:

Baitullah Mehsud never fulfilled his end of the bargain. He saw it as a total Pakistani surrender and a sign of weakness. He used the reprieve from Pakistani attacks to terrorize local khans and maliks into granting him total power … When the Pakistani Army responded to these flagrant breaches of the treaty by launching an offensive, Baitullah Mehsud’s fighters fought the Pakistani army to a standstill. This necessitated further humiliating treaties, resulting in yet another peace deal that simply allowed Baitullah Mehsud to regroup and further expand his power.31

As the Pakistani government has continued to prop up (and to some extent direct) the Afghan Taliban, it has also found itself targeted as an enemy by native jihadists. Its response has been largely ineffective and counter-productive, neither dissuading terrorists from further attacks nor limiting their abilities to carry them out. While this situation lasts, Pakistan continues to serve as a home to a wide variety of jihadists. Today, Pakistan is both able and willing to use jihadists to damage other nations, and is also unable to control many of the very jihadists it has spawned.

FROM LONDON TO MUMBAI

These two dangers emanating from Pakistan are well represented by two of the worst terror attacks since 9/11: London 2005 and Mumbai 2008. Lashkar-e-Taiba is an unusual jihadist proxy in that it is one of the few that has not yet turned against its sponsor.32 Perhaps because the ISI groomed it for Kashmir, the group has retained its focus on that province and its chief adversary there, India. Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002, but this was just a token gesture with no follow-through. The group retains a massive headquarters complex near Lahore.33 It still recruits new fighters from among Pakistan’s elite, and still receives training, funding, supplies, and directions from the ISI.34

In November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadists unleashed a three-day spectacle of mass murder across Mumbai. By the time it was over, they had killed 166 and spread terror throughout India and the civilized world. In the subsequent trials of two men involved in the plot, the full nature of ISI’s collusion emerged.

Trial testimony and the investigative work of U.S. intelligence independently showed that multiple ranking officers in the ISI helped recruit attackers, funded the attacks, and even directed them from a safe house in Pakistan. The explicit goal was “killing Americans, Jews and other Westerners as well as Indians.”35 A trail of emails, videos, phone intercepts, credit card charges, and eyewitness accounts all corroborated the detailed involvement of ISI.

When Pakistanis immigrate to the West, the same commitment to Islam and jihad can be found. Nowhere is this more evident than the United Kingdom, which is home to about three million Muslims, most of them from South Asia.36 Is it a coincidence that immigrant communities of Sikhs and Hindus have made peaceful homes in England, while Muslims who also hail from the Indian subcontinent have been a source of discontent, intolerance, and violence? Surveys have shown that second-generation Pakistani Muslims in Britain are more likely to hold violent, anti-British views than their parents.37

In 2005, this situation became undeniable when three British-born Muslims from Pakistani families (along with a Jamaican-born convert to Islam) blew themselves up in suicide bombings in London, murdering 52 people. The year before the bombings, two of the members of the suicide group traveled to Pakistan for four months where they received explosives training at an al-Qaeda camp. In fact, their initial contact in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf, was himself a British-born Pakistani. Rauf stayed in contact with the future London bombers up until July 7, 2005 when he was arrested in Pakistan for plotting to blow up transatlantic airliners.38

These British-born Pakistani jihadists were far from being aberrations. Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, also received training and direction from Pakistan. American journalist Daniel Pearl was investigating connections between Reid and Pakistani jihadists when he was kidnapped and eventually murdered. One of the men involved in Pearl’s kidnapping was a British Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saaed Sheikh. It later emerged that Ahmed Sheikh also may have spent time working for the ISI. He is currently on death row in Pakistan for his role in the Pearl murder.39

The flow of British Pakistani jihadists has wide-ranging consequences. In 2003, a British Pakistani from West London, Asif Mohammed Hanif, blew himself up outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv, killing three civilians. Another British Pakistani killed Indian soldiers and Kashmiri students in a suicide attack in Srinagar.40 And it’s not just Britain. In September, 2008, Spanish police arrested a dozen Pakistanis who had formed a terror-planning cell in Barcelona.41 Even though most Pakistani immigrants are honest and decent, it is clear that there is a disproportionate danger from their communities.

THE ONGOING THREAT FROM PAKISTAN

Pakistan remains a major threat to the world on three key points: as a producer of jihadists, as a major drug trafficker, and as a key agent in nuclear proliferation. On the first point, Mark Waldman has conducted eye-opening investigations in recent years. He found that the ISI continues to run training centers for jihadist insurgents and the madrasas which help to create them. In interviews with Taliban commanders he learned “that significant numbers of their fighters attend training camps in Pakistan that are run or backed by the ISI.”42

As a drug trafficker, Pakistan is one of the primary routes through which Afghan poppy production reaches world markets. A 2010 report found that 40 percent of Afghanistan’s opiate trafficking (Afghanistan is the number one supplier of opiates worldwide) was either consumed in or trafficked through Pakistan.43 Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has admitted that top military and intelligence officials, in his first term as Prime Minister, asked for a green light to use drug money “to finance proxy terrorism in the region” (all done in clandestine fashion so no one would suspect Pakistan).44 This was simply a request for official imprimatur to what a number of government officials were already engaged in privately—for example, General Fazle Haq (a former Chief Minister and Governor) “was popularly known as General Noriega of Pakistan due to his deep rooted involvement in drug business.”45

Perhaps even more significantly, Pakistan has used its status as a nuclear power to become a destabilizing force around the world. It has exported nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In the case of Iran, information on uranium processing critical to producing the material necessary for nuclear weapons was acquired from Pakistan. Now, the people of the Arabian Peninsula are looking to Pakistan to provide them with weaponry if Iran manages to build a nuclear arsenal. Saudi Arabia is reportedly negotiating with the Pakistanis to acquire a stockpile of their own to match Iran.46

In the end, Pakistan today is very much a schizophrenic nation—a Hindu soul underneath an Arabic mind. Without a national identity of its own, “Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India,” as the son of the assassinated Punjab governor Salman Taseer puts it. Guided by its two-nation theory, Pakistan turned its back on everything that it had known before—the literature, customs, rituals, and even clothing it once shared with India. “In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India,” the same observer says, “Pakistan turned its back on itself.”47 But once cut off from its past, the Muslims of Pakistan could not simply become Arab any more than they could become Japanese. Instead of being unified by Islam, Pakistan— as we have seen in the past three chapters—was torn apart by it. It is still torn apart by Islam.

Take the case of one of Pakistan’s most ardent jihadists, Abul A’la Maududi. He founded the jihadist group Jamaat-i-Islami in 1941, and is one of the undisputed godfathers of the modern jihadist movement. He spent his life in a campaign “to institutionalize Islamic values in every part of Pakistani society.”48 Despite his uncompromising approach to jihad, Maududi forbade his own children from getting involved in his movement or reading his books. As his son Farooq later reflected, “this is a tragedy of all our religious politics that we use [other] people’s children, but keep our own away from it as we all know about its negative impacts.”49 When Maududi fell ill late in life, he sought treatment not from Islamic doctors but at an American hospital in Buffalo, New York where his son was a physician. Hypocrisy and hatred are never far apart in the stories of Pakistani jihadists.