Ghost Wars (38 page)

American motivations during this period were easier to describe. Indifference was the largest factor. President Bush paid hardly any attention to Afghanistan. CIA officers who met the president reported that he seemed barely aware that the war there was continuing. His National Security Council had few high-level meetings on the subject. The Soviet Union was dissolving and Germany was reuniting: These were the issues of the day. With Soviet troops gone, Afghanistan had suddenly become a third-tier foreign policy issue, pushed out to the edges of the Washington bureaucracy. The covert action policy, while formally endorsed by the president, by 1990 moved to a great extent on automatic pilot. Still, American negotiators made clear in public that they
were
trying to chart a new policy direction, however far they might operate from the center of White House power. Undersecretary of State Robert Kimmitt announced that the United States would not object if Najibullah participated in elections organized to settle the Afghan war. After the initial delay caused by the CIA, Tomsen opened the first direct talks between the United States and exiled king Zahir Shah.

“The impression is being created that the Americans are actually concerned with the danger of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism,” Gorbachev confided to Najibullah in private that August. “They think, and they frankly say this, that the establishment today of fundamentalism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran would mean that tomorrow this phenomenon would encompass the entire Islamic world. And there are already symptoms of this, if you take Algeria, for example. But the Americans will remain Americans. And it would be naïve if one permitted the thought that we see only this side of their policy, and do not notice the other aspects.”
20

In Islamabad the CIA-ISI partnership was under pressure. There was continual turnover at the top of both intelligence agencies. Benazir Bhutto fired Hamid Gul as ISI chief because she learned that Gul was conspiring to overthrow her government. She tried to bring in a Bhutto family loyalist, a retired general, to run ISI, but the new man could never control the Afghan bureau and resigned. The next ISI chief, Asad Durrani, quickly discovered the outlines of the CIA Islamabad station’s unilateral network of paid Afghan commanders, including the agency’s extensive independent contacts with Massoud.
21
This discovery reinforced the rising suspicions of Pakistani intelligence officers that the Americans, in bed with Bhutto, were now playing their own double game.

Peter Tomsen deepened these Pakistani doubts by flying in and out of Islamabad, convening meeting after meeting to push both the CIA and Pakistani intelligence to support his new “grassroots” National Commanders Shura. The assembly convened for the first time in Paktia, attracting about three hundred mostly Pashtun commanders. To aid the effort, to bolster Massoud, and to improve Massoud’s supply lines, the U.S. Agency for International Development built all-weather roads from Pakistan to northern Afghanistan. At first the CIA objected to the emphasis on Massoud. The station had just cut Massoud’s stipend because of his failure to attack the Salang Highway. (Because of the agency’s secrecy rules, CIA officers could not tell most of their State counterparts about what had happened, which exacerbated tensions between the two groups.) Still, under continual pressure the agency agreed to give Massoud another chance.

Pakistani intelligence continued to build up Hekmatyar’s Army of Sacrifice, integrating Tanai and other former Afghan army officers into its command. In October 1990 the CIA station’s unilateral Afghan network reported a new alarm: A massive convoy of seven hundred Pakistani trucks carrying forty thousand long-range rockets had crossed the border from Peshawar, headed to Kabul’s outskirts. There Hekmatyar planned to batter the capital into final submission with a massive artillery attack, the largest of the war by far, a barrage that would surely claim many hundreds of civilian lives. On October 6, Tomsen met in Peshawar with ten leading independent commanders, including Abdul Haq and Massoud’s representatives. Hekmatyar’s planned rain of death on Kabul would be “worse than Jalalabad,” the commander Amin Wardak warned. As a Confidential cable to Washington describing Tomsen’s meeting put it, “The commanders were keenly aware that an unsuccessful military attack with heavy civilian casualties would rebound against the mujahedin.” They would be seen in the eyes of the world as complicit in mass killings. Also, if Kabul fell without a replacement government, there would be “political chaos,” Abdul Haq warned. Massoud and other commanders who could not accept Hekmatyar would wage war against him. Wardak estimated “further destruction, perhaps 200–300 thousand casualties,” the October 10 cable reported. As it happened, this was a grimly accurate forecast of Kabul’s future.
22

Only after Oakley warned of the gravest consequences for American-Pakistani relations if Pakistani intelligence did not abandon the plan did Durrani, the ISI chief, agree to call off the attack and turn the trucks back. “Tanai Two,” as the planned mass rocket attack came to be known in the Islamabad embassy, had been aborted in the nick of time, but it signaled the Pakistani army’s deepening break with American priorities. Oakley, now more firmly opposed to Pakistani intelligence than he had been during McWilliams’s tour, denounced ISI as “a rogue elephant” in a meeting with Pakistan’s president. Had the CIA known about this Hekmatyar rocket assault plan all along? Had Harry endorsed or acquiesced in it despite the prospect of thousands of civilian deaths in Kabul? Tomsen and others at State believed he had. They saw this episode as an example of the independent CIA war being commanded in secret from the Islamabad station while State’s diplomats followed their own policies. Tomsen and Harry met at the station chief’s house in Islamabad, and over tuna sandwiches and soup the CIA chief recounted the history of the October rocket attack plan as he knew it. He described a meeting he had attended with ISI and Hekmatyar at which Hekmatyar, boasting of his ability to capture Kabul for the mujahedin, had exclaimed, “I can do it!” The station chief said he had insisted that Hekmatyar work with other Afghan commanders. Tomsen concluded that the Islamabad station had likely endorsed the operation and perhaps even authorized weapons and other supplies. Tomsen regarded the decision as “not only a horribly bad one” but symptomatic of a larger danger. “It reflected all of the ills of the CIA’s own self-compartmentalization and inability to understand the Afghan political context,” Tomsen wrote at the time.
23

Days after the excitement over Hekmatyar’s aborted attack, Tomsen drove to the northern Pakistani town of Chitral to prepare a second National Commanders Shura. Massoud attended, as did prominent commanders from around Afghanistan. The organizers, who included Abdul Haq, banned Hekmatyar’s commanders. Sayyaf ordered his commanders to boycott. But hundreds of other Afghan rebel leaders gathered for days of political and military discussions. It was the largest gathering of wartime Afghan field commanders in years. ISI’s Durrani insisted on attending. He stayed in a tent nearby but was excluded from the meetings. Still, the ISI chief managed to get a message through to Massoud, and he invited him to Islamabad for a meeting.
24

Massoud’s representatives met with Prince Turki in Riyadh for the first time. Turki agreed to facilitate a new rapprochement with ISI. Massoud, who had been stung by the cutback of his CIA subsidy, agreed to travel to Pakistan for the first time in a decade. He was prepared to compete with Hekmatyar for support from Pakistani intelligence as the war’s endgame approached. In Islamabad he met with Durrani and with Harry, the CIA station chief.
25

Durrani, who sought to build trust with Massoud and enlist him in a unified rebel push against Najibullah, promised to resume military supplies to Massoud. Harry agreed to restore some of Massoud’s retainer, increasing his stipend from $50,000 to $100,000 per month. The CIA instructed Pakistani intelligence to send more weapons convoys across the now half-built American road to the north. Some of these ISI shipments to Massoud, convoys as large as 250 trucks, did get through. On direct orders from the American embassy in Islamabad, Massoud received his first, albeit small, batch of Stinger missiles. But in other cases, heavy convoys dispatched by Pakistani intelligence to Afghanistan’s north mysteriously disappeared, never reaching the Panjshir. The Americans suspected that Pakistani intelligence was doing all it could to resist their pressure to aid Massoud.
26

A pattern in the CIA-ISI liaison was emerging: Faced with ardent demands from the Americans, ISI officers in the Afghan bureau now nodded their heads agreeably—and then followed their own policy to the extent they could, sometimes with CIA collaboration, sometimes unilaterally.

The dominant view among Pakistani generals, whether they were Islamists or secularists, was that Hekmatyar offered the best hope for a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul. The strong feeling even among the most liberal Punjabi generals—whose sons cavorted in London and who spent their own afternoons on the army’s Rawalpindi golf course—was “We should settle this business. It’s a sore on our backside.”
27

The Islamabad CIA station spent much of its time worrying about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. In 1990, just as the agency’s partnership with ISI on the Afghan frontier was fraying, the CIA’s sources began to report that Pakistan’s generals had pushed their nuclear program to a new and dangerous level. After a visit to Washington, Robert Oakley returned to Islamabad carrying a private message for Pakistan’s army. Pakistan was now just one or two metaphorical turns of a screw away from possessing nuclear bombs, and the CIA knew it. Under an American law known as the Pressler Amendment, the CIA’s conclusion automatically triggered the end of American military and economic assistance to the government of Pakistan—$564 million in aid that year.
28
After a decade of intensive U.S.-Pakistan cooperation, the United States had decided, in effect, to file for divorce.

American fears of nuclear proliferation from Pakistan were well grounded. Mirza Aslam Beg, the army chief of staff, opened discussions in Tehran with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard about the possibility of Pakistani nuclear cooperation with Iran. Beg discussed a deal in which Pakistan would trade its bombmaking expertise for Iranian oil. Oakley met with the Pakistani general to explain “what a disaster this would be, certainly in terms of the relationship with the United States,” and Beg agreed to abandon the Iranian talks.
29
But it seemed now that in their relations with the Pakistan army, American officials were racing from one fire to the next.

A popular rebellion had erupted late in 1989 across Pakistan’s border in the disputed territory of Kashmir, a vale of mountain lakes with a largely Muslim population that had been the site of three wars in four decades between India and Pakistan. Inspired by their success against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers announced to Bhutto that they were prepared to use the same methods of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir. They had begun to build up Muslim Brotherhood militant networks in the Kashmir valley, using religious schools and professional organizations. ISI organized training camps for Kashmiri guerrillas in Afghanistan’s Paktia province where the Arab volunteers had earlier organized their own camps. According to the CIA’s reporting that year, the Kashmiri volunteers trained side by side with the Arab jihadists. The Kashmir guerrillas began to surface in Indian-held territory wielding Chinese-made Kalashnikov rifles and other weapons siphoned from the Afghan pipeline. The CIA became worried that Pakistani intelligence might also divert to Kashmir high-technology weapons such as the buffalo gun sniper rifles originally shipped to Pakistan to kill Soviet military officers. The United States passed private warnings to India to protect politicians and government officials traveling in Kashmir from long-range sniper attacks.
30

The Afghan jihad had crossed one more border. It was about to expand again.

BY LATE 1990, bin Laden had returned to his family’s business in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. He remained in cordial contact with Ahmed Badeeb, the chief of staff to Saudi intelligence, who offered bin Laden “business advice when he asked for it.”
31

Badeeb learned that bin Laden had begun to organize former Saudi and Yemeni volunteers from his days in Afghanistan to undertake a new jihad in South Yemen, then governed by Soviet-backed Marxists.Working from apartment buildings in Jedda, he had funded and equipped them to open a guerrilla war against the South Yemen government. Once bin Laden’s mujahedin crossed the border, the Yemeni government picked up some of them and complained to Riyadh, denouncing bin Laden by name.
32

By the autumn of 1990, bin Laden was agitated, too, about the threat facing Saudi Arabia from the Iraqi army forces that had invaded and occupied Kuwait in August. Bin Laden wanted to lead a new jihad against the Iraqis. He spoke out at schools and small gatherings in Jedda about how it would be possible to defeat Saddam Hussein by organizing battalions of righteous Islamic volunteers. Bin Laden objected violently to the decision of the Saudi royal family to invite American troops to defend the kingdom. He demanded an audience with senior princes in the Saudi royal family—and King Fahd himself—to present his plans for a new jihad.

Uncertain what to make of bin Laden’s rantings and concerned about the violence he was stirring up in Yemen, a senior Saudi prince, along with a pro-government Islamic theologian named Khalil A. Khalil, traveled to Jedda to hear bin Laden out and assess his state of mind. Bin Laden brought bodyguards to the private meeting. He carried a proposal of about sixty pages, typed in Arabic, outlining his ideas.

Khalil found bin Laden “very formal, very tense.” Bin Laden demanded to meet with King Fahd. He declared, “I want to fight against Saddam, an infidel. I want to establish a guerrilla war against Iraq.” Khalil asked how many troops bin Laden had. “Sixty thousand,” bin Laden boasted, “and twenty thousand Saudis.” Khalil and the prince knew this was foolishness, but bin Laden boasted, “I don’t need any weapons. I have plenty.”