Killing ourselves in Afghanistan

After the U.S invaded and occupied Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, it demanded that Islamabad stop supporting LeT. The fighters, many of them Afghans from Nuristan Province, filtered back from Kashmir to their homes in Nuristan or settled just across the border from Nuristan in Pakistan's Chitral and Dir districts. By 2005, however, the LeT network was alive and well again, this time in Chitral, and the Pakistanis were apparently redirecting their old proxies at the new foe right next door. Insurgents were being driven at night from the Chitral training camp to a Pakistan army outpost in Pakistani trucks, their flatbeds covered and the headlights turned off. Once at the outpost, they were given Chinese-made weapons, mostly small arms and automatic rifles, and sent on separate mountain trails into Afghanistan to attack Americans.

Despite the mounting evidence that their Pakistani counterparts could not be trusted, American intelligence attempted to take action against insurgents sheltering on the Pakistani side of the border. But on at least two occasions, they were apparently thwarted by interference from elements within the Pakistani military or the ISI who were sympathetic to the insurgents.

In December 2006, a few months after reports about the LeT camp in Chitral had begun trickling in, a team of roughly 20 CIA and Afghan paramilitary officers drove pickup trucks from a CIA base in Chitral to an Afghan border post. They parked their vehicles and struck out on foot through small goat trails back over the border into Pakistan. It was nearly 2 a.m and all the men were outfitted with night-vision goggles, Kevlar helmets and vests, and plenty of automatic weapons. Their target was a Pakistani mullah named Hari Yusef. The CIA believed he was an IED expert, and used his compound in the Pakistani border town of Arandu as a safe house for dozens of insurgents.

But when the team kicked in the front gate to Mullah Yusef's mud-walled compound and entered, they found nothing. Neither Yusef nor any fighting-age men were there. They conducted a search, but left empty-handed within a half-hour. All they accomplished was burning a small footbridge that Yusef's men had used to cross the Kunar River into Afghanistan out of sight of the official border post.

Also in 2006, while Haji Muhammed was still with Taliban leader Siraj Haqqani, CIA officers at a Pakistani military garrison in Miran Shah, North Waziristan, attempted to capture Haqqani. Siraj's father, Jalaluddin, had grown too sick and weak to lead an insurgency. His son, however, had developed into a dangerous Taliban commander. Much as his father had done to the Soviets 20 years earlier, Siraj, with Haji Muhammed's help, was punishing foreign troops inside Afghanistan with effective guerrilla attacks. The CIA had long known about a mosque and madrassa that the Haqqanis used as a headquarters in Miran Shah. The CIA readied a plan to raid the mosque when surveillance indicated Siraj Haqqani was present.

The CIA plan required approval of a Pakistan Army commander in Peshawar. But there was never any Pakistani response, which killed the plan.

This refusal to cooperate, however, was no longer a surprise to American operatives. A year earlier, it had been. The CIA's first attempt to raid Haqqani, in 2005, had netted nothing. CIA officers discovered that an ISI officer had warned Haqqani in advance about the raid.

"Our guys couldn't believe it," the former CIA officer told me. "CIA had worked on this thing for some time, and the son of a bitch tipped Haqqani off." They presented their evidence to the ISI general in charge, who responded with embarrassment and apologies. "He told us that they were punishing the officer, but all we could verify is that he was no longer working with us. He could have been thrown in prison, or he could have been sent to another field office. We had no way of knowing."

The frustrated intelligence officers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may finally be getting some traction in Washington. While they have long been telling their superiors back home that there is a problem, their bosses seem to have chosen to believe that any Pakistani aid to the Taliban was the work of a few rogue officers and not policy. But the recent disclosure that the White House was considering giving CIA officers based in Afghanistan more freedom to operate unilaterally -- that is, without Pakistani approval -- is a result of accumulating intelligence reports such as the one about the LeT camp and reports about retired officers such as Yusef.

The U.S. recently announced plans to send 100 military trainers to the Pakistani frontier to aid the Pakistanis in the fight against al-Qaida. But recent American proposals to enter the Tribal Areas with U.S. troops, and to increase CIA efforts inside Pakistan, have been rebuffed by Pakistan's President Musharraf. He told Newsweek in January that Americans would "curse the day they came here" if they crossed the border without Pakistani permission. He continued, "I know American troops. I know our troops. This is not easy. American troops don't have any magic wands. Our troops, who are the locals, who understand groups and customs, are very hardy. Our troops can go on roti and water. American troops would need chocolate."

The outlook seems bleak for any real cooperation from the Pakistanis in stopping cross-border attacks. But in the end the Americans actually derive some benefit, however small, from the fact that the Musharraf regime is pursuing its own agenda. Sometimes the needs of the Americans and the Pakistanis coincide.

Haji Muhammed explained to me that when fighting rekindled along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2002, the two main branches of the Taliban had slightly differing goals. The foreign-led fighters, though they were aiding the Afghan fighters looking to take back their country from the U.S., were really focused on the "Far-Enemy," training for terrorism missions against the West. The ISI-led Taliban were focused primarily on attacking the Americans inside Afghanistan, the "Near-Enemy."

Of late, however, the foreign-led Taliban factions in the Tribal Areas, the ones believed to shelter al-Qaida's Arab leadership, have begun focusing more attention on destabilizing Islamabad than Kabul. Now Pakistani intelligence has reason to work with the Americans, at least when it comes to some jihadis, including those known locally as "the Arabs."

Many of these insurgents were once aligned with the ISI, but no more. "The Arabs no longer trust the ISI," Muhammed told me. "They refuse to let the ISI know where they are because they are afraid the ISI will sell them out to the Americans." So while the ISI continues aiding Pashtun Taliban insurgents in North Waziristan, as long as those insurgents keep focusing their activities across the Afghan border, they are now simultaneously fighting other Talibs farther to the north.

The Pakistani government is particularly concerned with Baitullah Mehsud, whom both Musharraf and the CIA have identified as responsible for Benazir Bhutto's assassination in December. Mehsud, who operates in South Waziristan, is, like Haji Muhammed, a former lieutenant to Jalaluddin Haqqani. When he fought under Haqqani, he received ISI aid. He became the head of a Taliban group with branches in five of the seven Tribal Areas, which the ISI allowed to operate unimpeded as long as their military actions were directed at Americans in Afghanistan. Now, however, since Mehsud has become a threat to Islamabad's stability, Pakistani authorities are far more dedicated to killing him than they are to catching Osama bin Laden. The ISI and the Pakistani army are now at war with a powerful, many-tendriled insurgent band they helped to create. The ISI's history of double-dealing has come back to haunt it.

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