War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan Farrow

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ it was time to make a strategic decision to move away from” support for the Taliban, Powell later said. “And he reversed the direction in which Pakistan was moving.”

      This was wishful, if not magical, thinking. The ISI had spent the years leading up to 9/11 pumping money, arms, and advisers into Afghanistan to prop up the Taliban and vanquish its enemies—including the coalition of warlords known as the Northern Alliance, which received support from India. When the United States’ demands for cooperation rolled in after 9/11, Musharraf assembled his war room—stacked with generals notorious for championing the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups—and decided to “unequivocally accept all US demands, but then later … not necessarily agree with all the details,” as one attendee recalled. Pakistan was playing a double game, as it had in the past. As had been the case in the midst of cooperation against the Soviets, the United States looked the other way.

      The other half of the American response involved arming the Northern Alliance, and the consequences of backing the two opposing factions became apparent almost immediately. As US-backed Northern Alliance fighters toppled the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz, Musharraf made a frantic call to President Bush and asked for a favor: a break in the bombing, and permission to land in Kunduz and airlift out Pakistanis. A series of flights collected men and ferried them into Pakistan, where they promptly disappeared. The operation was kept secret, and American officials lied to conceal it. “Neither Pakistan nor any other country flew planes into Afghanistan to evacuate anybody,” then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted. Those evacuated were, by most accounts, not innocent bystanders: among them were numerous al-Qaeda loyalists. A CIA agent who worked with the Northern Alliance at the time told me flatly of the incident: “it was a mistake.”

      The extremists who escaped set up shop in Pakistan, where organized terrorist structures flourished in two safe havens. In Quetta, Mullah Omar built a new Taliban council or shura and appointed commanders to lead an insurgency in Afghanistan’s southern provinces. In the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) in Northwest Pakistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani (no relation to Husain, the ambassador) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—both former operatives used by the ISI and CIA against the Soviets—ran their own Taliban-allied movements. The ISI also continued to directly fund and arm the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership allowed the extremists to function openly, while brazenly lying to the Americans and denying anything was amiss. This was one of the great ironies of the war on terror—as the United States drew closer to Pakistan to fight the Taliban, it was in effect also ensuring the survival of the Taliban.

      Husain Haqqani, who had become ambassador in the final year of the Bush administration, said Pakistani military and intelligence brass repeatedly asked him to lie about the support for terrorists. When Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a group based out of Pakistan and heavily sponsored by the ISI, executed a series of bombings and shootings in Mumbai, India that killed 164 people, ISI director Ahmed Shuja Pasha told Haqqani to inform the Americans that “nobody in Pakistan had any knowledge” of the attack and that none of the perpetrators were Pakistani. “I said, ‘But you know, that’s an outright lie.’ The reason why America and Pakistan have this huge trust deficit is because we tell them bold-faced lies,” Haqqani said. “Diplomacy is never 100 percent truth, but it’s never 100 percent lies either. I wanted it to be …” he paused, a half-smile turning the edges of his lips. “Truth well told.”

      The Bush administration knew Pakistan was playing a double game but, as a general rule, publicly denied it. CIA director Michael Hayden even said at the time that the United States had “not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis.” Hayden, a retired four-star general, was a compact, energetic man with an affable manner. He spoke quickly, his eyebrows darting up and down over the ovals of his small rimless glasses. When I pressed him on the Bush administration’s rosy characterizations of the relationship with Pakistan, he was frank. “If I said that about the Pakistanis,” he told me, “it was to balance that which then followed. Which was, this is the ally from hell because, actually, they have made a deal with the devil.” He had seen strong cooperation from some divisions of the ISI. But there were others, like the infamously pro–al-Qaeda Directorate S, “whose sole purpose in life was to actually sustain groups who we would identify as terrorist groups,” Hayden said. General Pasha, likewise, had been “duplicitous.” Pasha declined to respond. “I can not tell half truth,” he wrote in an email, “and I do not think I should tell the whole truth!!” (General Pasha corresponded with courtly politeness and a lot of exclamation points, like a Victorian gentleman dictating to a millennial teen.)

      Multiple senior Bush administration officials said they seldom, if ever, confronted Pakistan about the support for terrorists, for fear of jeopardizing the counterterrorism alliance. Hayden recalled only one such direct conversation, late in the administration, in which Musharraf “fobbed it off on retired ISI officers. You know, the ones who supported the ‘mooj’ during the Soviet War.” The US had helped create Pakistan’s state sponsorship of militant Islam in that era, and now it couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. If it wanted to, Hayden argued, that would take more than the narrow confines of intelligence and military cooperation. “Look, I mean, the director of the CIA is not going to cause the government of Pakistan to change course based upon a conversation he has in either Washington or Islamabad,” he said. “That requires a whole government effort of long-term … and really powerful sanctions that I saw no evidence that we were prepared to make.” He was describing the urgent need for a larger diplomatic effort that would never take place.

      The result of Pakistan’s double-dealing, and the United States’ relative tolerance of it, was a slide into violent turmoil on the Afghan side of the border, with the Taliban steadily resurging over the course of the Bush administration. American and NATO operations offered periodic pushback, but the supply of fighters always replenished from the safe havens in Pakistan. Over the course of Bush’s second term, the insurgency gained strength, staging devastating attacks, sometimes with the Pakistani military providing cover from across the border, firing on American and Afghan soldiers. The Taliban’s gains allowed them to establish a parallel government in the country’s south and then east—complete with governors and judges. By the beginning of the Obama administration, America was losing.

       7

       THE FRAT HOUSE

      AS AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN unraveled, Richard Holbrooke was still chasing the role he felt he was born to play: secretary of state. I first met him as he came close yet again in 2004, throwing his weight behind John Kerry’s failed bid for the presidency. Holbrooke was a private citizen then, working as an investment banker again, but still a fixture at United Nations and charity functions. I was working with UNICEF, in New York and several conflict zones. In Sudan, I began cranking out Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune columns about a gathering ethnic cleansing campaign there. For years, Holbrooke was religious about sending appraisals of my stories: “Ronan, this is a splendid, vivid piece … You should try to get lift-off on this issue with State and the UN. I’ll send it around.” Or, just СКАЧАТЬ