Authors: Matthew M. Aid
At the top of the chain of command, the intelligence situation on the ground inside Pakistan at times approached the surreal.
The CIA station chief in Islamabad, John D. Bennett, whose cover position was counselor for regional affairs
at the U.S. embassy, wrote a lengthy cable to Washington for the new Obama administration describing what he termed the “complicated” state of the U.S.-Pakistani intelligence relationship. The gravamen of the cable was that the state of intelligence cooperation with the Pakistani government, while important in the overall context of the war on terrorism, had not been everything that could have been hoped for. While the CIA's drones continued to relentlessly pound al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in the FATA, the Islamabad station's principal concern was that the overall collaborative effort between the CIA and the ISI had been rapidly deteriorating since the summer of 2008 with no discernible sign of improvement.
Bennett broke the Pakistani intelligence problem into three equally important and complex parts: (1) how his station was supposed to continue to work with the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, knowing full well about its continuing clandestine protection and support of Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban; (2) what, if anything, did Washington want him to do regarding the growing menace posed by the Pakistani Taliban; and (3) what new steps, if any, were he and his station to take to combat the residual al Qaeda presence in northern Pakistan other than continuing the practice begun during the Bush administration of hitting the terrorists with missile strikes from the agency's fleet of unmanned drones based in Pakistan.
On the surface, the agency's long-standing problems with the ISI seemed to be improving somewhat. Three months earlier, in October 2008, Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Kayani had finally acceded to Washington's wishes and fired the much-detested director of the ISI, General Nadeem Taj. His replacement, Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, was handpicked for the post by Kayani in order to, according to a leaked State Department cable,
“get control of the ISI.”
Although General Pasha was not tainted by the problems of his predecessor, according to interviews with Pakistani intelligence officials, the CIA's Bennett, at their first face-to-face meeting, told the general that the credibility of the organization that he now commanded was low in the eyes of the agency. The tension between the CIA and ISI had grown so bad that it was affecting the conduct of clandestine intelligence gathering and covert action operations against al Qaeda in northern Pakistan. Information exchanges between the two spy agencies on al Qaeda and the Taliban had declined significantly as Washington withheld blocks of information that it had formerly given to the Pakistanis. In one extreme example, the CIA station in Islamabad complained to Washington that the ISI was essentially holding prisoner the CIA case officers who were manning a small number of forward operating bases spread across northern Pakistan rather than letting them perform their duties.
In January 2009, General Pasha flew to Washington for a “Come to Jesus” meeting with outgoing CIA director Michael V. Hayden that was, at times, quite heated. In effect, Pasha was told that his organization was on probation until Langley was convinced that ISI was no longer protecting the Taliban and other terrorist groups. General Pasha tried to convince the incoming Obama administration that it had nothing to fear from putting its trust in the ISI, telling vice-president-elect Joe Biden in January 2009, according to a leaked State Department cable, that “
the United States and Pakistan needed to have confidence in each other
. Pasha said he was hurt about the inference that he did not have a relationship of trust with CIA.”
On January 20, 2009, the “Pakistani mess,” as Ambassador Richard Holbrooke described it, became President Barack Obama's problem. The situation that Obama inherited was neatly summarized in a February 4, 2009, cable from U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson: “
The [Pakistani] government is losing more and more territory every day to foreign and domestic militant groups;
deteriorating law and order in turn is undermining economic recovery. The bureaucracy is settling into third-world mediocrity, as demonstrated by some corruption and a limited capacity to implement or articulate policy.”
But to some in the new administration, amid all the gloom, there was reason for hope. The loss of the Swat Valley in January 2009 gave the U.S. government a new degree of leverage to try to force the Pakistani government and the ISI to abandon their support of Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistanis desperately needed more American military equipment and money in the aftermath of the Swat defeat. The question was: what price should the White House exact in return for this aid?
In February 2009, General Kayani flew to Washington hat in hand to beg the White House for billions of dollars of additional military aid as well as access to intelligence available to the U.S. intelligence community on the Pakistani Taliban, including live imagery from CIA Predator drones and realtime SIGINT from NSA. The Obama administration decided to give Kayani what he wanted, as well as “forgive and forget” the Pakistani government and ISI's past support for the Taliban.
But there was a steep price tag that came with Washington's forgiveness of Islamabad's past sins. U.S. government officials told Kayani that the Pakistani government had to stop supporting the Afghan Taliban and other terrorist groups based in Pakistan. The Obama administration was not above using less than subtle blackmail to get what it wanted. According to a leaked cable, Washington thought that Kayani would give Washington what it wanted because the general, who had been the director-general of ISI from 2004 to 2007 at the height of the Pakistani government's support for the Taliban,
“does not want a reckoning with the past.”
Kayani apparently agreed to the conditions stipulated by the White House, but try as it might, the Obama administration just could not change the general's mind about how serious the threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban was, despite the fact that the extremist militiamen now controlled the strategically important Swat Valley. President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani agreed wholeheartedly with the U.S. government that the Taliban were now the chief threat to Pakistan's security, but General Kayani and the rest of the Pakistani high command refused to budge from their age-old mind-set that it was India that remained the main threat to their country's survival. According to a cable from the American embassy in Islamabad, “
President Zardari and PM Gilani recognize Pakistan's greatest threat has shifted from India to militancy
concentrated on the Pak-Afghan border but is spreading to NWFP [the North-West Frontier Province, whose capital is the city of Peshawar] and beyond. The Army and ISI, however, have not turned that corner.”
So instead of pulling troops from the Indian border and fighting, the Pakistani government decided to make a deal with the Taliban in the hope that by giving the militant tribesmen what they wanted, the problem would go away. On February 15, 2009, Taliban representatives signed a cease-fire agreement with the Pakistani government, which, in effect, ceded control of Swat to the Taliban. The Taliban also got a $6 million bribe, as well as permission to immediately implement a harsh form of Muslim religious law called Sharia in the Swat Valley. The “peace treaty” was both cynical and dreadfully shortsighted, and nobody in the U.S. government or intelligence community expected that the Pakistani Taliban would honor it once they realized that they had the Pakistani government and military on the ropes.
When the Taliban did realize just how truly desperate the plight of the Pakistani government and military was, they wasted little time. On February 23, 2009, the top three Pakistani Taliban commanders in the FATAâBaitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, and Maulvi Nazirâannounced that they had formed an alliance called the Council of the United Mujahideen and merged their respective militias into a single fighting force. The announcement sent shock waves through the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment. One of the three Taliban chiefs, Commander Nazir, was, according to a leaked State Department cable, “the Pakistani government's man,” having been on the ISI payroll since 2007. Nazir's defection to the Taliban was not only a huge blow, but more important it showed, according to the cable, that the Pakistani government's
“divide and conquer strategy is not working.”
Insofar as the al Qaeda presence in northern Pakistan was concerned, there really was not much more that the CIA could do beyond what was already being done. As noted above, the CIA's unmanned drones had taken a dreadful toll on al Qaeda's leadership in 2008, but the drones had not brought the war against al Qaeda any closer to being won. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were still alive, and they were still able to direct the operations of the global al Qaeda terrorist franchise from their hiding places in northern Pakistan. According to Dr. Peter Lavoy at DNI headquarters, al Qaeda had been
“damaged, [but] not broken.”
The decision that President Obama and his newly installed national security team had to make was this: Absent the Pakistani government surrendering its sovereignty and allowing the United States to use American combat troops inside Pakistan, which everyone on Obama's national security team knew would never happen, the CIA's Predator and larger Reaper drones were the only option left through which they could strike al Qaeda inside its sanctuaries in northern Pakistan. The only decision left was whether to continue the drone strikes at the same level as the Bush administration, which was three missile strikes a month, or up the ante and accelerate the number of drone attacks in order to intensify the pressure on al Qaeda.
One of the lead items on the agenda for President Obama's first National Security Council meeting, on Friday morning, January 23, 2009, was to consider whether to approve an urgent proposal submitted by Michael J. Sulick, the head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service (the nomination of the new CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, was not confirmed by the Senate until February 12, 2009), to commence an even more aggressive program of drone missile strikes against al Qaeda hideouts in northern Pakistan.
The entire senior leadership of the U.S. intelligence community, almost to a person, supported the program because the drone strikes seemed to be working. In December 2008, the CIA had concluded that the unmanned drone strikes on al Qaeda targets in northern Pakistan were having the desired effect. According to reports coming in from the U.S. embassy and CIA station in Islamabad, al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan had been decimated by the drone attacks, reduced to just a few hundred operatives who spent most of their time moving from one hiding place to another in the FATA in order to avoid detection by the CIA's unmanned drones hovering overhead. According to a cable from Ambassador Patterson, “
The U.S. has been remarkably successful in disrupting al-Qaida operations in Pakistan's tribal areas
. In the past year, 10 of the top 20 al-Qaida operatives, including those responsible for the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and tied to Islambad's Marriott bombing [on September 20, 2008, which killed 60 people and wounded 260 more], have been eliminated.”
The CIA's new plan was palatable because it was relatively clean and not likely to produce any diplomatic blowback; it enjoyed support at the highest level of the Pakistani government; and it was one of the very few intelligence programs that was wildly popular with the House and Senate intelligence committees, so getting it approved and funded by Congress was not going to be a problem. Without any dissent, the NSC approved the CIA proposal to intensify the number of drone attacks against al Qaeda targets in northern Pakistan.
According to Pakistani military officials, after January 2009 the CIA drones became near-permanent presences in the air over northern Pakistan. During the daytime, two and sometimes three CIA drones armed with Hellfire missiles were continuously in orbit over the FATA looking for targets to hit. A Pakistani Army staff officer who served a tour of duty with the 7th Division at Miram Shah in North Waziristan in 2009 and 2010 told the author in a recent interview that the distinctive and annoying buzzing noise that the drones make could be heard almost continuously during daylight hours from his garrison, if the weather was good. “I hoped God would have pity on those [on the ground] below,” he said, “but these infernal machines have no mercy.”
In April 2009, to no one's surprise, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, broke the Swat cease-fire agreement that his representatives had signed just two months earlier and resumed hostilities. In a matter of forty-eight hours the Taliban overwhelmed the few remaining Pakistani Army and paramilitary posts in the district and quickly advanced eastward against virtually no resistance into the neighboring Buner District, reaching a point only sixty miles from Islamabad. At the same time, the CIA station in Islamabad and an allied foreign intelligence service reported that Pakistani Taliban militants had been detected moving into the city of Karachi and other cities in the populous Punjabi heartland of Pakistan, where they quickly linked up with other militant groups opposed to the Pakistani government. The office of the director of national intelligence sent to the White House a classified spot report that essentially concluded that the security situation in Pakistan was deteriorating rapidly and that the Pakistani government and military had now lost control of large parts of the northern part of the country.
As the Taliban swept south toward Islamabad, Obama administration officials openly voiced their frustration at the inability or unwillingness of the Pakistani government and military to aggressively confront the Pakistani Taliban militants. The weak and indecisive Zardari government seemed to be mired in political bickering, and the Pakistani Army would not budge from its fixation on India. Testifying before Congress on April 1, 2009, the commander of U.S. Central Command, General David H. Petraeus, issued a less-than-subtle warning to the Pakistani government that the Pakistani Taliban extremists, if not checked, “could literally take down their state.”