The Real Winner of the Afghan War? It’s Not Who You Think.

Pakistan, nominally a U.S. partner in the war, was the Afghan Taliban’s main patron, and sees the Taliban’s victory as its own. But now what does it do with its prize?

NY TIMES


Taliban members in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

By Jane Perlez
Published Aug. 26, 2021Updated Aug. 27, 2021, 11:52 a.m. ET

Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying high above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture intended to spite the defeated Americans. But it was also a sign of the real victors in the 20-year Afghan war.

Pakistan was ostensibly America’s partner in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Its military won tens of billions of dollars in American aid over the last two decades, even as Washington acknowledged that much of the money disappeared into unaccounted sinkholes.

But it was a relationship riven by duplicity and divided interests from its very start after 9/11. Not least, the Afghan Taliban the Americans were fighting are, in large part, a creation of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., which through the course of the war nurtured and protected Taliban assets inside Pakistan.

In the last three months as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Pakistani military waved a surge of new fighters across the border from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, tribal leaders have said. It was a final coup de grace to the American-trained Afghan security forces.


“The Pakistanis and the I.S.I. think they have won in Afghanistan,” said Robert L. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan. But, he warned, the Pakistanis should watch what they wish for. “If the Afghan Taliban become leaders of a pariah state, which is likely, Pakistan will find itself tethered to them.”

Pakistan’s already shaky reputation in the West is likely to plummet now, as the Taliban take over Afghanistan. Calls to sanction Pakistan have already circulated on social media. Absent foreign financing, Pakistan faces reliance on a jihadist drug trade encouraged by the new rulers in Kabul. A Taliban-run state on its border will no doubt embolden Taliban and other Islamist militants in Pakistan itself.

Not least, relations with the United States, already on the downslope, will unravel further. Aside from maintaining the stability of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the Americans now have less incentive to deal with Pakistan.

So the question for the Pakistanis is what will they do with the broken country that is their prize? Already Pakistan, along with Russia and China, is helping fill the space the Americans have vacated. The embassies of the three nations have remained open since the Taliban seized Kabul.


A Pakistani protégé, Khalil Haqqani, a Taliban leader who was a regular visitor to Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi, is one of the new rulers of Afghanistan.
Khalil Haqqani, a Taliban leader, delivering a sermon after Friday prayers at the Pul-e Kheshti mosque in Kabul on Friday.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times


Known to American intelligence as the Taliban emissary to Al Qaeda, Mr. Haqqani showed up in Kabul last week as their new chief of security, brazenly armed with an American-made M4 rifle, with a protection squad dressed in American combat gear.

“Governing a war-ravaged country will be the real test and imposing challenge especially as the Taliban have been a warring force, not one adept at governing,” Maleeha Lohdi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a column in The Dawn newspaper this week.

During the war the Americans tolerated Pakistan’s duplicitous game because they saw little choice, preferring to fight a chaotic war in Afghanistan to warring with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Moreover, Pakistan’s ports and airfields provided the main entry points and supply lines for American military equipment needed in Afghanistan.

Pakistan did that, even as its spy agency provided planning assistance, training expertise and sometimes on the ground advice to the Taliban all through the war, American officials said.

Though Pakistan was supposed to be an American ally, it always worked toward its own interests, as nations do. Those interests did not include a large American military presence on its border, an autonomous Afghanistan with a democratic government it could not control, or a strong and centralized military.

Rather, Pakistan’s goal in Afghanistan was to create a sphere of influence to block its archnemesis, India. The Pakistanis insist that India uses separatist groups like the Balochistan Liberation Army, operating from havens in Afghanistan, to stir dissent in Pakistan.

Members of the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam Nazryate party celebrating the agreement signed between the U.S. and Taliban during a rally in Quetta, Pakistan, in March 2020.Credit...Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


“The Pakistani army believes Afghanistan provides strategic depth against India, which is their obsession,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations. “The U.S. encouraged India to support the American-backed Afghan government after 2001, fueling the army’s paranoia.”

The Pakistanis were incensed that former President Barack Obama visited India in 2015 but conspicuously boycotted Pakistan, he said.

During a visit to Washington this spring, Moeed Yusuf, the national security adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, stressed the need to eliminate the Indian presence in Afghanistan, Americans who met him said.

Mr. Yusuf is considered a moderate on the Pakistani political spectrum, and the Americans said they were struck by his vehemence on India’s role in Afghanistan.

When Indian diplomats were among the first foreigners to evacuate from Kabul, their departure was played in the Pakistani press as a singular victory.

The nexus between the Pakistanis and the victorious Mr. Haqqani was indisputable and indispensable to the Taliban victory, said Douglas London, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia.

The head of the Pakistani army, Qamar Javed Bajwa, and the head of the I.S.I., Hameed Faiz, met with Mr. Haqqani on a “recurring basis,” Mr. London said. The extended Haqqani family has long been known to live in the largely ungoverned areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border.

“All the time Bajwa was pressed by the U.S. to give up Khalil Haqqani and two other Haqqani leaders, and all the time, Bajwa would say, ‘Tell us where they are,’” said Mr. London, who has written an upcoming memoir of his C.I.A. years, “The Recruiter.” “My favorite quote was when Bajwa said: ‘You just have to come to my office and we will go in a helicopter and we will go and pick them up.’”

Pakistani police standing guard outside the compound where U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden on 5 May, 2011, in Abbottabad.Credit...Warrick Page for The New York Times


Pakistan’s help, he said, encompassed a gamut of services. Safe havens in the borderlands of Pakistan, particularly in the city of Quetta, sheltered Afghan Taliban fighters and their families. Medical services treated wounded fighters, sometimes in hospitals in the major cities, Karachi and Peshawar. Free rein for the Haqqanis to run lucrative real estate, smuggling and other businesses in Pakistan kept their war machine churning.

Washington’s relationship with Pakistan cooled after Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 at a safe house located near a Pakistani military academy. Top American officials stopped visiting Pakistan and assistance was reduced.

But the Obama administration never said publicly what it suspected: that the Pakistani military knew all along that bin Laden was living with his extended family in Abbottabad, one of Pakistan’s best-known garrison towns.

If Washington had declared that Pakistan was harboring bin Laden, then Pakistan would have legally been a state sponsor of terrorism, and subject to mandatory sanctions like Iran, said Mr. Riedel, the former South Asia adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations.

Supporters of the religious political party Sunni Tehreek setting ablaze an effigy of former President Barack Obama in Hyderabad, Pakistan, in 2011.Credit...Akram Shahid/Reuters


That would have forced the Americans to end its support for Pakistan and that in turn, would have led Pakistan to stop American war supplies from transiting Pakistan, increasing the cost of the war.

The bin Laden raid played into longstanding fears within the Pakistani military that the Americans wanted to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and would violate Pakistani territory to do it.

Despite the strained relations, the U.S. continues to work with Pakistan through the Department of Energy to help provide security for the weapons, and fissile material, said Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment.


But Pakistan is also agile in its alliances. China, a longtime patron of Pakistan — they call each other as “close as lips and teeth” — is investing heavily in Pakistani infrastructure.

Publicly, China says it is cheered to see the Americans exit Afghanistan, and is ready to step into the void, expanding its Belt and Road initiative into Afghanistan, where it hopes to extract minerals.

But privately, the Chinese are wary. Chinese workers in Pakistan have been killed in terrorist attacks, which could presage a rough ride in Afghanistan. And the Taliban prefer isolation to roads and dams that could serve to loosen their control on the population.

China is counting on Pakistan to serve as its facilitator in Afghanistan, said Sajjan Gohel, International Security Director of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London.

“The Chinese appear confident that they will be able to secure more security guarantees from the Taliban,” Mr. Gohel said, “because of their mutual ties with Pakistan.”

The security post at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border crossing in Chaman on Tuesday.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

THE CIA: Soldiers, Spies And Shadow Wars

PETER BERGEN, WASHINGTON POST

On May 1, 2011, CIA Director Leon Panetta was in command of the single most important U.S. military operation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: the Navy SEAL Team 6 assault on a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding. The SEALs were sneaking into Pakistan without the permission of its government on a covert “deniable” mission in a country that was supposedly allied to the United States. Because U.S. law forbids the military to do this kind of work, the SEALs were turned over to the control of the CIA and were “sheep-dipped” to become, in effect, spies under Panetta’s nominal control.

....A few years before the bin Laden operation, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, had turned the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEAL Team 6 into a fighting machine in Iraq and Afghanistan that increasingly mounted operations to gather intelligence — what McChrystal termed “a fight for knowledge.”

Stanley A. McChrystal

....Since the 9/11 attacks, a dramatic shift has occurred in the way the United States deploys its military and intelligence forces. In his new book, “The Way of the Knife,” Mark Mazzetti documents the militarization of the CIA and the stepped-up intelligence focus of Special Operations forces. As Mazzetti observes in his deeply reported and crisply written account, over the past decade “the CIA’s top priority was no longer gathering intelligence on foreign governments and their countries, but man hunting.” The bin Laden operation was far from the only deadly mission that Panetta presided over.
Panetta’s tenure at CIA, Mazzetti writes, was known for its “aggressive — some would come to believe reckless — campaign of targeted killings.” He authorized 216 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 1,196 people, mostly militants, but also a smaller number of civilians, according to a count by the New America Foundation. Panetta, a devout Catholic, observed that he had “said more Hail Marys in the last two years than I have in my whole life. ”Conversely, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was deeply irritated when the CIA rather than the military led the ground operation in late 2001 that ejected the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. He came to the conclusion that “the only answer was to make the Pentagon more like the CIA.”

The emergence of a “military-intelligence complex” has proved devastating to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The CIA drone campaign in Pakistan has killed much of the terror network’s leaders and largely eliminated Pakistan’s tribal regions as the key training ground for the group; as a result, al-Qaeda hasn’t been able to mount a successful assault on the West since the suicide attacks on the London transportation system in 2005.

Meanwhile, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) not only  killed bin Laden, but also largely destroyed the vicious leadership of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, which had precipitated the civil war in Iraq by its numerous attacks on the Shia community. JSOC’s campaign against al-Qaeda played a key role in tamping down the Iraqi civil war and helped enable a steady decline in violence in Iraq since 2007.

Until recently this history had not been well understood because units like SEAL Team 6 that make up Joint Special Operations Command aren’t even officially acknowledged. McChrystal’s recent authoritative memoir, “My Share of the Task,” has done much to illuminate this important chapter in the evolution of American military operations.

If there is an “Obama doctrine,” it is to fight the war against al-Qaeda and its allies with drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and with small numbers of clandestine Special Operations forces on the ground in countries such as Somalia. This new kind of fighting gives Mazzetti the title of his book, “The Way of the Knife.” It’s a form of warfare that avoids “messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation.”
The benefits of the way of the knife are obvious: Few Americans are put at risk, and the costs are relatively low in a time of budgetary constraints. But as Mazzetti points out, this type of knife fighting is not as surgical as some of its proponents think, for it “creates enemies just as it has obliterated them.” It also has “lowered the bar for waging war, and it is now easier for the United States to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth than at any other time in its history.”

CIA drone strikes are emblematic of this point. In Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, drone attacks are deeply unpopular, angering many of the 180 million Pakistanis. This is a high cost to pay. In 2010, a record 122 strikes occurred in Pakistan, yet few of the victims were leaders of al-Qaeda, suggesting that this tactic was being used without much thought for the larger strategic picture. The CIA drone program, which was conceived of as a way to kill the leaders of militant groups, had evolved into a counterinsurgency air force that killed mostly lower-level members of the Taliban in Pakistan.

But some big payoffs emerge from the blending of the roles of the military and the CIA that are well illustrated by the execution of the bin Laden raid. The first 15 minutes of the raid were consumed in killing bin Laden’s two bodyguards, his son and the al-Qaeda leader himself. But during the next 23 minutes, the SEALs picked up every computer, thumb drive and file they could lay their hands on in bin Laden’s compound. More than half of the time that the SEALs were on the ground in Pakistan they were performing what is known among intelligence professionals as SSE, or sensitive site exploitation.

As a result, the CIA was able to launch drone strikes — presided over by Panetta, not the military — that killed a number of al-Qaeda leaders, such as Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who had appeared prominently in the documents the SEALs had recovered at the Abbottabad compound. The documents revealed that Rahman was not the middle-tier al-Qaeda official he had originally been pegged, but bin Laden’s chief of staff.

Atiyah Abd al-Rahman

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The increasingly intelligence-driven mission of Special Operations forces is surely a net gain for U.S. national security interests, but balanced against this is the fact that these forces operate behind a screen of secrecy that makes them far less accountable than the conventional military is to Congress and the American public. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned a century ago, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”



N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Given the extent to which Pakistan and the US have gotten on each other’s nerves in recent years, putting a greater distance between them might seem a very good idea. The notion of moving to a hostile “containment” of Pakistan, however, suffers from several flaws. It ignores the presence of large Pakistani diasporas in the West, which make the very idea of “containing” Pakistan ridiculous. It implies that the US will lose all interest in the fate of Afghanistan once US ground forces are withdrawn. It misses the great importance of Pakistan to the increasingly fraught triangular relationship between the US, India, and China. And it implies handing an even greater share of the responsibility for dealing with Pakistan to the CIA and the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

As Mark Mazzetti makes clear in The Way of the Knife, his powerful exposé of the strategy of these forces since September 11, that would be a really bad idea. The militarization of US intelligence has both reflected and encouraged a tendency to forget certain crucial points about Pakistan.

The first is that groups based in Pakistan are only part of the Pakistani terrorist threat to the West. Launching attacks in the West requires terrorists from the Pakistani diaspora in the West. It is therefore not helpful to US security to kill terrorists in Pakistan if the result is to radicalize Pakistanis in the US and other Western countries—which is why the British authorities, acutely aware of their large, growing, and deeply troubled Pakistani communities, have a significantly different attitude toward these issues than their US counterparts.

The second point...is that in the end, only Pakistanis can control Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence services may be unreliable and infuriating, but they are also indispensable. Even if US intelligence could conceivably develop a presence in Pakistan that would enable it to monitor a country of more than 180 million people, what would it do with the intelligence gathered? In future, terrorist plots against the US may well be hatched in parts of Karachi or in Punjabi cities that are under militant influence, as much as in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan border that have been the target of the US drone campaign so far....

The CIA does have some great tactical successes to its credit in Pakistan, most notably finding Osama bin Laden; but if an intelligence service is to be given the power to conduct military operations of targeted killing in other countries, then—questions of morality and legality aside—it is essential that these be subject to political oversight and guided by political considerations.

In the case of CIA actions within Pakistan, it is not just that, as Mazzetti recounts, CIA policy has often operated on autopilot, with ostentatious disdain for political considerations and diplomatic advice; it is that on occasion it has also been extremely incompetent, most notably in the Raymond Davis affair in 2011, in which the CIA persuaded the Obama administration to undertake a strategy that ended in crisis.
Raymond Davis was a former US soldier and private security employee who was hired by the CIA to work out of the US consulate in Lahore—allegedly to spy on the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. On January 27, 2011, Davis shot and killed two men who were supposedly trying to rob him. Amid public fury in Pakistan, he was arrested and held for several weeks, before being released as part of a deal under sharia law whereby the families of the deceased were compensated by the US.

It should have been absolutely clear that the background, training, and character of Davis made him unsuited for a sensitive intelligence role in an important and volatile country (after returning to the US he attacked a man in a dispute over a parking space and later pleaded guilty to assault). And Davis was not alone. He was one of hundreds of new CIA operatives sent into Pakistan in 2010 in a disastrous effort to bypass Pakistani intelligence and gain information on terrorist groups.

The CIA then compounded its error by denying to the Pakistanis that Davis was indeed its man, and overruling for several weeks attempts by the US ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, to arrange what was from the start the only way out of the crisis: the compensation of the victims’ families. As recounted by Mazzetti, the ability of the CIA to override the State Department is becoming a truly sinister aspect of US government.