The first indication that Musharraf might not be entirely on-side came just eight days after 9/11 with his public address to the nation. By then I was in Pakistan, and I watched eagerly to see what he would say. He made clear the pressure he was under. ‘Pakistan is facing a very critical time,’ he said. ‘If we make any mistake they can culminate in very bad ends.’ Yet he did not condemn the Taliban or al Qaeda, or blame them for 9/11, as he had agreed with Powell. ‘He wanted to break with the Taliban,’ says Armitage. ‘But at that point we didn’t want him to, as they were holding two American women [among eight foreign missionaries arrested in August] and thought Pakistan could help.’
Others say Musharraf already thought he could play a double game, and fool the Americans just as Zia and ISI had in the 1980s. ‘The ISI had become a mini CIA with Afghanistan,’10 said Husain Haqqani, who was very familiar with the agency, having worked with them in 1988 to try to stop Benazir Bhutto coming to power, then ending up working for her, eventually becoming Pakistan’s Ambassador in Washington from 2008 to 2011.
Bob Grenier, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad at the time of 9/11, was not surprised. ‘Right from the start, I was convinced that the Pakistanis did not want to foreclose their options. They’d seen the Americans come and go in the past. They weren’t at all sure they trusted Hamid Karzai. And irrespective of how they felt about him, I think there was probably a tendency to see him as a Pashtun face of what was really a Northern Alliance government. They were very distrustful, obviously, of the Northern Alliance.’11
Such was the lack of trust that while the US agreed no military action would start until General Mahmood’s mission to see Mullah Omar in Kandahar, the CIA sent their own mission, led by Grenier, to meet one of Mullah Omar’s representatives in Quetta. It had no more success.
The Taliban leadership was outraged at Musharraf’s volte-face, but not surprised. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was Ambassador to Pakistan at the time of 9/11, and became known as ‘the Smiling Taliban’ for his jovial 4 o’clock press briefings in his garden during the US bombing campaign. He said no Afghans really trusted ISI: ‘The wolf and sheep may drink water from the same stream, but since the start of the jihad the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan like a cancer. Every ruler complained about it, but none could get rid of it.’
Before the bombing campaign started three top ISI officers came to Saeef’s house in Islamabad to pledge their support – General Mahmood, his deputy General Jailani, and Brigadier Farooq who ran the agency’s Afghan desk. ‘We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America,’ they told him. ‘We will be with you.’ Saeef was enraged. ‘You speak of jihad while the Americans are stationed in your airbases and flying through your airspace, even attacking Afghanistan based on your intelligence reports!’ he shouted. ‘You should be ashamed to even utter the word jihad!’ When he looked at General Mahmood, ‘tears were running down his face’. As for Jailani, ‘He was crying out loud with his arms around my neck like a woman.’
Shortly afterwards, all three were removed from their posts in what was described officially as ‘normal military procedures’. General Mahmood was retired and replaced by General Ehsan ul Haq, whose instructions were to ‘weed out the beards’. Brigadier Faruq and General Jailani were both transferred. Mahmood has never spoken about these events, but his friends told me he felt totally betrayed. Once I managed to speak to his wife by phone, and asked what her husband thought of Musharraf. ‘How do you think he feels?’ she replied angrily.
Mullah Zaeef said he was told that before they left their posts these ISI officers had burned documents regarding Afghanistan which the Americans had requested, and had advised Mullah Omar to find safe haven.
General Zia’s son Ijaz-ul-Haq, who was in close contact with senior military and Taliban because of the respect in which they held his late father, predicted the changes at the top would make little difference. ‘ISI chiefs only last one or two years anyway,’ he told me. ‘The real people running the game are the majors and colonels lower down, and they haven’t switched sides. It isn’t a matter of policy for them; it’s a matter of belief.’
The Interior Minister General Haider agreed. ‘It cannot be ruled out that some members of the intelligence services may have their sympathies with the other side. You see, since 1979 we had been actively helping and directing the Taliban along with the Americans against the Soviets. When suddenly a U-turn is taken, your [individual] contacts will remain.’12
The biggest indication of how deeply ISI were still involved came after General Mahmood had been transferred, in an episode that became known as ‘the Airlift of Evil’. By mid-November 2001, the US bombing had forced the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Kabul and concentrated their fighters in two main areas – Kandahar in the south and Kunduz in the north. In Kunduz, al Qaeda fighters, along with thousands of Taliban under the command of Mullah Dadullah, had been surrounded by Northern Alliance forces from two rival commanders – Atta and his Tajik forces to the south, and Dostum and his Uzbeks to the west. But they were refusing to surrender to these commanders, who they feared would slaughter them. Instead they sent radio messages offering to surrender to the US or the UN.
There was one other problem. Trapped with them were hundreds of ISI and Frontier Corps officers who had been sent from Pakistan to help. Musharraf phoned Bush and asked for a pause in the US bombing so that the Pakistani air force could rescue them. On 15 November Northern Alliance commanders told journalists that Pakistani planes had landed at Kunduz. This was strongly denied by Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, and the foreign media were distracted by reporting the fall of Kabul. In fact, for each of the next few nights there were night-time rescues, and they were flying out not just ISI but also Taliban and al Qaeda.
When Kunduz finally fell to the Northern Alliance on 24 November, so many had been flown out that only 3,300 Taliban remained, about half what the CIA had estimated. Those men had been right to be worried about what would befall them. Most of them ended up packed into shipping containers, where they suffocated.
The Northern Alliance leadership was furious that once again the Americans had allowed Pakistan to say one thing and do something else. ‘I don’t know how much we understood of what we were getting into,’ said Armitage. ‘And attention was already moving elsewhere.’
The reality was that Washington’s attention had shifted elsewhere. ‘We rapidly moved on to Iraq,’ said Richard Armitage. ‘Frankly, we didn’t care much about Afghanistan. We didn’t have a strategy for Afghanistan. Rumsfeld wanted to pull out of there early on. We would have been perfectly willing to let the Taliban sit it out if they’d stopped helping the Arabs.’
7
Quetta, February 2002
The Additional Secretary Home and Tribal Affairs for Baluchistan was fed up. ‘Look at all these files, it’s rubbish!’ he barked. ‘This whole building is filled with rubbish!’
I could hardly disagree. Every available surface was covered with tottering piles of dusty files spewing out yellowing papers, and from adjoining offices came the sound of clattering typewriters churning out more. A stream of men wandered in and out, bringing files back and forth containing carbon-copied letters to be signed and placed in other files.
‘You people did this,’ he said, waving his hands. In fact, I suspected things hadn’t really changed since colonial days, though I wasn’t sure if he meant the bureaucracy, or if he was gesturing at the map on the wall. It was a large hand-drawn map of the region on which the land north of Afghanistan was marked ‘Russian Dominions’, while that to the west was ‘Caucasia’.