Ghost Wars Part 14

"This is bad business," Tenet told Black, as an official involved in the transition recalled. "These guys are getting stronger and stronger. We're going to get struck. We've got to engage this target. We've got to get more penetrations. We've got to go out after these guys."9 Black's bluff speech, vaguely British inflections, and love of warrior metaphors created a new table-thumping martial air at the Counterterrorist Center. He and the new bin Laden unit chief knew each other well from their years in the Directorate of Operations. They wanted to shake up the unit's strategy.

Cofer Black was not a natural partner for Paul Pillar, the intellectual terrorism a.n.a.lyst who was the Counterterrorist Center's long-serving deputy director. Pillar's emphasis on managing permanent terrorist threats, and his skepticism about how the Clinton administration had personalized its campaign against bin Laden, stood in some contrast to Black's gung-ho ambitions. After years of exhausting, nerve-racking service, Pillar soon left the center for a fellows.h.i.+p at a Was.h.i.+ngton think tank.

Black and his new bin Laden unit wanted to "project" into Afghanistan, to "penetrate" bin Laden's Afghan sanctuaries. They described their plan as military officers might. They sought to surround Afghanistan with secure covert bases for CIA operations-as many bases as they could arrange. Then they would mount operations from each of these platforms, trying to move inside Afghanistan and as close to bin Laden as they could get to recruit agents and to attempt capture operations.

Sometimes they would work with regional intelligence services, Black announced. Other times they would work on their own. They would not try to pick and choose their partners fastidiously. Black declared that he wanted to develop liaison operations especially aimed at agent recruitment with every intelligence service in the Middle East and South Asia that might possibly offer a way to get at bin Laden and his lieutenants.

"Eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy, we don't care what you are, we want to be in contact," Black told his colleagues. "We are at war," declared a doc.u.ment presented to a closed Counterterrorist Center meeting on September 10. They had to continue to sow doubt in bin Laden's mind about the "security of his operations." And Black did not want to sit around in restaurants and exchange written reports, the traditional emphasis of intelligence liaison. He wanted recruitments, and he wanted to develop commando or paramilitary strike teams made up of officers and men who could "blend" into the region's Muslim populations.10 Even with Tenet's support they struggled for resources. In the same weeks that he began to talk at the White House, FBI, and Pentagon about what he called "The Plan" for revived global operations against bin Laden, Black was forced to implement a 30 percent cut in cash operating budgets at the Counterterrorist Center-including in the bin Laden unit. The CIA had started to reverse its decline in personnel, but by the end of 1999 it still had 25 percent fewer operations officers than it had fielded when the decade began. The annual cash crunch at the Counterterrorist Center could often be partly offset by budgetary scavenging at the end of a fiscal year, but these were distracting and uncertain efforts. As he developed briefing slides for Tenet and the White House that summer, Black boasted that "The Plan" was comprehensive, global, and newly ambitious. But his colorful slides masked a threadbare checking account. A study commissioned by Black and presented to a CIA conference on September 16, 1999, concluded that the Counterterrorist Center could not carry out its more ambitious plans against al Qaeda without more money and people.11 Worse, the geopolitical map that Black and the new bin Laden unit chief pored over did not look promising. Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was a "denied area" in CIA parlance, with no secure bases for permanent operations. Pakistan seemed a highly unreliable partner, Black and the new bin Laden unit chief agreed. Pakistani intelligence was so penetrated by Taliban and bin Laden sympathizers, they believed, that there was little basis to rely on joint operations such as the commando training the CIA was providing. Iran shared a long border with Afghanistan but was out of the question as a partner. Turkmenistan, another neighbor, wanted nothing to do with the CIA. A civil war engulfed Tajikistan to the northeast.

That left only Uzbekistan, which bordered Afghanistan to the north, far from the southern and eastern Taliban strongholds where bin Laden mainly operated. But at least Uzbekistan's government was not penetrated by Taliban sympathizers, Black and his colleagues calculated. A jowly, secular ex-communist autocrat named Islam Karimov ruled the country as if it were his estate. Karimov jailed and sometimes tortured democratic and Islamist opponents. He had no sympathy for bin Laden. Karimov's hold on power was threatened by a violent radical group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; its leaders had been inspired by Saudi proselytizing and later found exile with bin Laden in Afghanistan. By 1999, bin Laden and the Taliban leaders.h.i.+p saw these Uzbek Islamists as important allies. The IMU fought as committed shock troops in the Taliban's war against Ma.s.soud's forces in northern Afghanistan. They were also a vanguard of bin Laden's grandiose plans to sponsor a thrust by Islamist forces into Central Asia to overthrow the region's secular leaders and establish new caliphates.

Bin Laden provided the Uzbek radicals with funding, weapons, and access to training camps. The Taliban provided them with bases and housing in Kabul and farther north. Uzbek terrorist units began to sneak across the border to mount operations against Karimov's government. On February 16, 1999, they announced themselves in the capital of Tashkent: As Karimov drove in a limousine to a cabinet meeting, the radicals detonated six car bombs in a downtown plaza. Karimov escaped, but sixteen people died. Within days Karimov arrested at least two thousand Islamic activists. Many of these arrests were indiscriminate, sweeping up peaceful democratic parties challenging Karimov's iron-fisted rule. But Karimov described the crackdown as war against bin Laden's allies.12 Cofer Black and his colleagues saw this turmoil as an opportunity. Through the CIA station in Tashkent they reached out to Karimov's government and proposed a new intelligence alliance focused on their mutual enemies in Afghanistan. Karimov wanted CIA a.s.sistance but was nervous about the political price he might pay if his contacts with Langley became known. He agreed to explore the CIA's proposals but insisted that all of his dealings be kept secret.

Black and the new bin Laden unit chief, Rich, flew discreetly into Tashkent, a Soviet-style city of broad avenues and monumental government buildings in the Central Asian steppe, to outline a new CIA liaison program. Black proposed CIA funding and training for a counterterrorism strike force to be commanded by the Uzbek military. The CIA hoped the force, once fully trained and equipped, might carry out covert s.n.a.t.c.h operations against bin Laden or his lieutenants.13 Karimov accepted the plan. He made Uzbek air bases available to the CIA for small-scale transit and helicopter operations. He allowed the CIA and the National Security Agency to install monitoring equipment designed to intercept Taliban and al Qaeda communications. He agreed to share what intelligence his government had about bin Laden's bases in Afghanistan. Karimov and his aides hinted that they might be willing to join the CIA in military operations once the new commando force was ready.

The CIA's officers were excited and optimistic. They admired Karimov's willingness to take political risks to go after bin Laden. Finally they had found a new partner less penetrated than Pakistan and less complicated than Saudi Arabia. Karimov and his intelligence aides agreed to just about every request the CIA put forward.14 At the White House, National Security Council aides drafted the highly cla.s.sified legal approvals and budgetary papers for the new Uzbek liaison in a mood of jaundiced, sometimes acid skepticism. "Uzbek motivations were highly suspect to say the least," recalled one official. To these skeptics the CIA liaison did not seem like "a plan that fit into anything larger than 'Get something going with the Uzbeks.' " Tashkent was a long way from Kandahar, but it was "certainly closer than Langley," so at least it was something. There were fears at the White House about Uzbek corruption, human rights abuses, and scandal. Some of the White House aides saw the CIA itself as "pa.s.sive-aggressive" about the Uzbek outreach in the sense that Langley pushed to get the liaison going and then worried aloud about rules and financial audits. One White House official remembered a CIA counterpart announcing wearily, "We're going to have to deploy hundreds of accountants to Uzbekistan to make sure every piece of equipment that we send to these people is accounted for."15 Formal CIA and Pentagon liaisons like the one in Uzbekistan had a natural bureaucratic shape and momentum that emphasized office meetings, long training sessions, equipment purchases, audits, and slide presentations. They often chewed up more time on process and planning than on covert operations.

On the ground in Afghanistan during that summer of 1999 there was only one leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and their international Islamist allies. His disputed government possessed no real capital, no international airport, and little credibility. His budget was cobbled together week to week, partly from heroin smuggling deals. He did not have much of an office and, for lack of electricity, could not rely much on slide projectors. He had acquired a few tanks, a good supply of mortars, many small arms, and a few tattered helicopters pasted together from incompatible spare parts and with rotors that continually threatened to detach and fly away.

Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud remained a charismatic force among his own Tajik people, especially in the northeastern Panjs.h.i.+r Valley. He was by far the most formidable military commander in Afghanistan yet to be defeated by the Taliban. The CIA had continued to maintain regular contact with Ma.s.soud in the two years since Gary Schroen's visit to the commander in Taloqan in the spring of 1997. A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash-up to $250,000 per trip-had visited Ma.s.soud in the Panjs.h.i.+r Valley several times since then. Sometimes the teams were led by officers from the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations, where Schroen was now deputy chief. Other times they were led by officers from the Counterterrorist Center. When Near East was in the lead, the missions were code-named NALT, for Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team. When the Counterterrorist Center was in charge, they were dubbed JAWBREAKER. The first group, NALT-1, flew on one of Ma.s.soud's helicopters from Dushanbe to the Panjs.h.i.+r late in 1997. Three other CIA teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. They typically stayed in Barak village, near Ma.s.soud's headquarters, for a week or two and met with the commander several times. The intercept equipment they delivered allowed Ma.s.soud to monitor Taliban battlefield radio transmissions. In exchange the CIA officers asked Ma.s.soud to let them know immediately if his men ever heard accounts on the Taliban radios indicating that bin Laden or his lieutenants were on the move in a particular sector. The agency teams established secure communications links to Langley so that Ma.s.soud could pa.s.s along such bin Laden alerts.

Both the Near East Division and the Counterterrorist Center supported the liaison with Ma.s.soud, but they disagreed about its purpose and potential. Within Near East there were many, including Schroen, who remembered the commander's stubborn independence in years past even when he was handsomely paid to follow the CIA's lead. They wondered if Ma.s.soud could really be a reliable partner against bin Laden. In any event they wanted to support Ma.s.soud against the Taliban to keep his northern forces viable and to provide a foothold in Afghanistan for CIA intelligence collection and operations. The Near East officers did not doubt Ma.s.soud's contempt for bin Laden and his Arab volunteers, but Schroen argued that geography and logistics made operations against bin Laden nearly impossible for Ma.s.soud. Even the Near East Division's TRODPINT tracking team, operating on al Qaeda's home turf around Kandahar, had been unable to produce reliable forecasts of bin Laden's movements. Ma.s.soud was even more remote from the target.

But Black and especially Rich argued that they had to renew their effort to bring Ma.s.soud into the campaign against bin Laden. They saw Ma.s.soud as many of his admirers in Europe did, as an epochal figure, extraordinarily skillful and determined. They had no personal history with him, no legacy of disappointments or conflicts involving Pakistani intelligence. If the CIA really intended to reinvent its plan to disrupt and capture bin Laden, they asked that summer, how could the agency possibly succeed if it did not begin to do serious business with Ma.s.soud?

THE AFGHAN WAR was changing. The murder by Taliban agents of Abdul Haq's family in Peshawar early in 1999 presaged new opposition to Mullah Omar among Pashtuns. That spring the Karzai family, who had backed the Taliban's initial rise, began to explore armed opposition.

The Karzais' frustration with the Taliban had been rising for months. At Hamid Karzai's April wedding in Quetta, his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, the family patriarch and a former Afghan senator, called his sons and several other Pashtun leaders to a late-night meeting and declared, as Hamid's brother Qayam remembered it, that "our country is gone and it's somebody else's country now, and it would remain that way unless we resisted." The Karzai patriarch declared that "the only option left is that we have to start from within. We would have to be more diligent, we would have to be more stubborn. We would have to start talking to Ma.s.soud." They decided to seek American a.s.sistance but agreed this would be a long shot.16 Hamid Karzai worked with his father from the family compound in Quetta that spring and early summer to organize political resistance to the Taliban among prominent royalist Pashtuns. He coordinated meetings of tribal chiefs in Pakistan and in Rome. He promoted a formal loya jirga loya jirga to reconsider Afghan politics, and his father agitated for the return of the Afghan king. Hamid Karzai wrote a letter to Mullah Omar, inviting him to attend some of these political meetings but also warning him that the Taliban had to change, "that they must remove the foreigners that were with them here killing and destroying our country, ruining our lives," as Karzai recalled it. to reconsider Afghan politics, and his father agitated for the return of the Afghan king. Hamid Karzai wrote a letter to Mullah Omar, inviting him to attend some of these political meetings but also warning him that the Taliban had to change, "that they must remove the foreigners that were with them here killing and destroying our country, ruining our lives," as Karzai recalled it.17 The Taliban sent their reply on July 15. As the elderly Karzai patriarch walked home from a mosque through Quetta's mud-rock alleyways, Afghan a.s.sa.s.sins on motorcycles roared up and opened fire, killing him instantly.

Heir to his father's political position, Hamid Karzai sought to avenge his death. Within weeks of Abdul Ahad's grand Kandahar funeral-a mix of mourning and anti-Taliban politics-Hamid Karzai redoubled his efforts. He already had numerous American contacts and helped funnel humanitarian aid to Afghanistan from Quetta. Now he asked Bill Milam, the U.S. amba.s.sador to Pakistan, for weapons. Milam told Karzai he was being reckless and unrealistic. The Taliban or their Arab allies would slaughter him if he attempted an uprising; the political ground had not been laid.18 Karzai was inclined to concede the point, but he pressed anyway. He felt rash, he said later. Officers in the CIA's Islamabad station believed that an armed uprising was unrealistic but urged continuing talks and cooperation. Karzai was a "small player," one U.S. official recalled, but his political and tribal allies were well wired in Kandahar and could provide helpful information about the Taliban and bin Laden. Arms supplies seemed implausible, however. "I would go every week to Islamabad," Karzai recalled of this period. "I would go to the Americans, I would go to the French, I would go to the English, I would go to the Germans, I would go to the Italians . . . [and] tell them about the readiness of the Afghan people to move against the Taliban. They wouldn't trust me. They wouldn't believe me. . . . They didn't see it. They didn't even see it in Was.h.i.+ngton."19 Some State Department officials and some a.n.a.lysts at the CIA still believed-despite little supporting evidence-that the Taliban might voluntarily turn bin Laden over for trial in exchange for diplomatic recognition and relief from economic sanctions. Pressure from Karzai and other dissident Pashtuns might encourage the Taliban to compromise, but otherwise it was not something the State Department sought to encourage. Albright, Tom Pickering, and Rick Inderfurth declared publicly again and again that the United States would not take sides in the Afghan war.

State Department intelligence a.n.a.lysts did report during the first half of 1999 that resistance to the Taliban was growing. Still, "We believe there is no military solution to this conflict," Inderfurth said. "The United States supports no individual Afghan faction but maintains contacts with all to further progress toward a peaceful settlement."20 At interagency meetings CIA officials had raised the possibility of a new American alliance with Ma.s.soud, possibly involving covert arms supplies. But outside of the CIA, the Clinton administration remained deeply skeptical about the commander and his northern warlord allies. At an amba.s.sadors' meeting in Was.h.i.+ngton in May, Albright canva.s.sed her envoys to Pakistan and Central Asia: What did they think about a new tilt toward Ma.s.soud? Milam was adamantly opposed. Arms supplies to Ma.s.soud would only deepen the war and kill more innocent Afghans, he and his colleagues at the Islamabad emba.s.sy firmly believed. Ma.s.soud could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield. He was bottled up in the north and losing ground.21 The influential Pickering argued that no Afghan policy could succeed if it did not involve the Pashtuns in the south. If the U.S. tilted toward Ma.s.soud in the north, it would only exacerbate Afghanistan's ethnic divisions-and in a quixotic military cause.22 Other State and White House officials recalled the horrible violence against civilians in Kabul during the mid-1990s while Ma.s.soud was defense minister and pointed to persistent reports that he relied on drug trafficking. He was not a worthy ally of the United States, they argued. Other State and White House officials recalled the horrible violence against civilians in Kabul during the mid-1990s while Ma.s.soud was defense minister and pointed to persistent reports that he relied on drug trafficking. He was not a worthy ally of the United States, they argued.

Ma.s.sOUD TOLD HIS AIDES he was confident that the Taliban would wither. They would overextend themselves, and opposition among Pashtuns would gradually rise.23 Twice Ma.s.soud spoke by satellite telephone to Mullah Omar. As his aides listened, Ma.s.soud told the Taliban leader that history clearly showed Afghanistan could never be ruled by one faction, that the country could only be governed by a coalition. But the only history Omar had ever read was in the Koran, and he refused to compromise.

Ma.s.soud persisted. He dispatched his intelligence aide, Amrullah Saleh, to Switzerland to meet secretly with Taliban representatives. They also held back-channel talks in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But the Taliban were buoyed by their support from ISI, Saudi, and other Persian Gulf donors. "They were very arrogant," recalled one of Ma.s.soud's aides.

Still, Ma.s.soud counseled patience. His strategy in 1999, recalled his brother Ahmed Wali, was similar to what it had been a decade earlier, when Soviet troops withdrew: He planned to outlast and eventually outmaneuver Pakistani intelligence. Eventually, Ma.s.soud said, the United States would recognize that the Taliban was its enemy.When that happened, he would be ready to receive American help. Meanwhile, through the Stinger missile recovery program and occasional meetings with CIA officers at safehouses in Tajikistan and in the Panjs.h.i.+r, Ma.s.soud kept his lines to Langley open.

At the State Department, Pickering and Inderfurth evolved a more nuanced policy toward Ma.s.soud by the summer of 1999. They still strongly opposed American arms supplies, but they privately made clear to Russia and Iran that the United States had no objections to the covert arms those those countries supplied Ma.s.soud. They defended this policy by saying they did not want to see the Northern Alliance completely overrun. If Ma.s.soud's forces were expelled from Afghanistan, that would leave the Taliban triumphantly unchallenged-and less willing than ever to negotiate. countries supplied Ma.s.soud. They defended this policy by saying they did not want to see the Northern Alliance completely overrun. If Ma.s.soud's forces were expelled from Afghanistan, that would leave the Taliban triumphantly unchallenged-and less willing than ever to negotiate.24 Inderfurth traveled to Tashkent that July for multiparty peace talks with Afghan leaders sponsored by the United Nations. Ma.s.soud also decided to attend. Inderfurth's opening statement offered olive branches to every group, including the Taliban. The conference's "Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan" was a testament to muddled policy and dead-end negotiations. Its preamble expressed "profound concern" about the status of Afghan minorities and women and then declared that the signatories were "deeply distressed" about drug trafficking and, thirdly, were "also concerned" about terrorism. Pakistan and Iran pledged to end arms s.h.i.+pments to their favored Afghan militias, pledges they did not intend to keep, as the United States well understood.25 On the night the talks broke up, Inderfurth met with Ma.s.soud and his aides in a side room of the behemoth Soviet-era hall where the conference had been held. Ma.s.soud swept in wearing pressed khaki robes and a wool cap, radiating "charisma and presence," as Inderfurth recalled it. As the American envoy reviewed diplomatic issues, Ma.s.soud seemed bored, but when Inderfurth asked about the war, Ma.s.soud lit up and leaned forward to describe his defenses and plans.26 Inderfurth asked if Ma.s.soud needed military equipment to undertake his summer operations. Ma.s.soud demurred. His aides said later they did not request weapons because they knew the Clinton administration had ruled out such supplies. Also, Russia, Iran, and India "were finding themselves comfortable providing us means to counter the Taliban because there was no objection from the U.S. on s.h.i.+pment of arms," one of Ma.s.soud's aides recalled.

Ma.s.soud expressed disappointment about U.S. indifference to Afghanistan, as Inderfurth recalled it. Ma.s.soud's aides remember him as more than disappointed. He liked Inderfurth better than some other U.S. diplomats, they said, but Ma.s.soud saw American policy as profoundly misguided, and he could not understand why it was so slow to change. At the Tashkent sessions the Americans kept talking about the Taliban and the Northern Alliance as two equally culpable "warring factions." This seemed outrageous to Ma.s.soud. It showed expediency and a loss of perspective in American foreign policy, he thought. As the Taliban became more powerful, even the United States moved to appease them, Ma.s.soud believed.27 Ma.s.soud tried to inventory for Inderfurth the ma.s.sacres of civilians carried out by Taliban and al Qaeda forces. Summoning an argument designed to resonate in Was.h.i.+ngton, he described the Taliban as among the world's most egregious human rights violators, a regime that systematically repressed women and s.h.i.+te minorities. "We said, 'The United States is the only major power in this world pursuing a policy basically oriented on human rights. Let us see the reality,' " recalled a senior Ma.s.soud aide who was present. Ma.s.soud sought to convince Inderfurth that the Taliban were beginning to weaken, his aide recalled. Now was the time for the United States to pressure Pakistan to cut off aid to the Taliban, Ma.s.soud argued.

Inderfurth and Pickering believed they were pus.h.i.+ng Pakistan as hard as they could, yet they had limited leverage in Islamabad. Counterterrorism officials such as the State Department's Michael Sheehan argued in internal memos during this period that State could push harder by placing terrorism at the very top of the American agenda. But State's brain trust-Albright, Pickering, and Strobe Talbott-felt that the United States could not afford to take such a narrow approach. America had other compelling interests: nuclear weapons, Kashmir, and the stability of Pakistani society. The support flowing to the Taliban from the Pakistani army and ISI had to be challenged in this broader context of American concerns, State's leaders.h.i.+p insisted. Clinton agreed. The United States had a full agenda with Pakistan-the threat of war with India, nuclear weapons, terrorism, democracy, Kashmir-and all of it was important, Clinton believed.28 A decade before, it had been the State Department's Peter Tomsen, among others, who pushed a reluctant CIA to move closer to Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud and away from Pakistani intelligence. Now the bureaucratic chairs had been reversed. It was State Department diplomats, along with some officers at the CIA, who resisted calls for a closer alliance with Ma.s.soud during 1999. Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser and political gatekeeper on foreign policy, endorsed their view. There were isolated, individual advocates for a new alliance with Ma.s.soud at State, the White House, and in Congress, but it was mainly at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center-especially in the bin Laden unit-that Ma.s.soud had the most ardent believers.

Whatever the doubts about his independent outlook, whatever the fears about his drug trafficking, the CIA's Manson Family knew one thing for certain: Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud was the enemy of their enemy.

COFER BLACK INITIATED paperwork and approvals with Richard Clarke's White House counterterrorism office late that summer. Black said he wanted to send a CIA team, led by his new bin Laden unit chief, inside Afghanistan to meet with Ma.s.soud and his lieutenants, in order to reenergize Ma.s.soud's efforts against bin Laden. This would be the fifth CIA mission to the Panjs.h.i.+r since the autumn of 1997, code-named JAWBREAKER-5. The mission's goal was to establish a renewed counterterrorism liaison. The CIA would offer to train, equip, and expand Ma.s.soud's existing intelligence service based in the Panjs.h.i.+r Valley and help it operate as widely and securely as possible in Afghan cities and provinces. The agency would offer Ma.s.soud more cash, more secure communications, listening devices, and other nonlethal spy gear.29 Black and his bin Laden unit hoped to establish with Ma.s.soud a robust program of intelligence exchange, concentrating on the daily mystery of bin Laden's whereabouts. Tenet and his colleagues overseeing technical collection moved a satellite to obtain better coverage of Afghanistan, and the National Security Agency developed intercept equipment for use inside the country. The bin Laden unit hoped Ma.s.soud would enhance these technical approaches on the ground. In his war against the Taliban and its allies, Ma.s.soud often maneuvered in battle against bin Laden's Arab brigade, Pakistani volunteers, and Chechen irregulars. Ultimately the CIA hoped Ma.s.soud would order his militia to capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and either kill him or hand him over to the United States.

The new CIA program would eventually complement commando training in Uzbekistan and Pakistan as well as continuing work with the longer-established tribal tracking team in southern Afghanistan, Black explained. The Counterterrorist Center hoped to surround al Qaeda militias with trained, equipped forces drawn from local populations. Then it would seek to locate bin Laden or his lieutenants and maneuver them into a trap.

Given the doubts about Ma.s.soud inside the Clinton administration, the Panjs.h.i.+r missions faced close legal and policy review. "It was all CIA initiated," recalled a senior White House official. The Counterterrorist Center needed approval to make its small cash payments to Ma.s.soud on each trip. "Well, how small is small?" the White House official asked. A few hundred thousand dollars, the CIA replied. Clarke and Berger a.s.sented.30 The intelligence policy and legal offices at the National Security Council drafted formal, binding policy guidance for the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. Black got involved; he wanted everything written down clearly so there would be no recriminations later if CIA gear or cash was misused by Ma.s.soud. "Put it down in 'Special English' so people can understand," Black would say sardonically to his colleagues. He wanted his men to be able to hold copies of the White House legal authorities in their hands when they met with Ma.s.soud and his intelligence aides in the Panjs.h.i.+r. He wanted the CIA officers to be able to literally read out their White House guidance in clear terms that were easy to translate. There would be no improvisation, Black said. The Counterterrorist Center chief occasionally cited the English king Henry II's famous attempt in 1170 to commission the a.s.sa.s.sination of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, by asking an ambiguous question. Henry II had asked open-endedly: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Black ranted sarcastically to his colleagues: The CIA is not in the "rid me of this priest" business anymore. He wanted presidential orders that were specific and exacting. "You've got to spell it out," he told the White House.31 Ma.s.soud was at war with the Taliban. The United States declared a policy of strict neutrality in that war. The White House also wanted to ensure that the CIA's counterterrorism mission to the Panjs.h.i.+r Valley did not become some kind of Trojan horse strategy for a rogue CIA effort to boost Ma.s.soud's strength and capability in his battles against the Taliban. Clinton said he was prepared to work with Ma.s.soud on intelligence operations, despite his record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance. The Pentagon and intelligence community both provided a.n.a.lysis to Clinton, as he recalled it years later, arguing that Ma.s.soud was receiving all the weapons he could handle from other suppliers, and that in any event he would never be able to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul. This certainly was Shelton's consistent view from the Pentagon. At Langley, the CIA was divided on the question. After absorbing the briefs, Clinton made clear that he was not prepared to have the United States join the Afghan war on Ma.s.soud's side, against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Clinton hand-wrote changes to a February 1999 authorizing memo to emphasize that Ma.s.soud's men could only use lethal force against bin Laden in self-defense. The National Security Council approved written guidance to authorize intelligence cooperation with Ma.s.soud, while making clear that the CIA could provide no a.s.sistance that would "fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield."32 Black underlined this point to the bin Laden unit as its chief prepared to fly to Central Asia. The CIA would be interpreting this White House policy rule at its peril. It would be up to the agency's colonel-level officers to decide, day in and day out, what kind of intelligence aid would "fundamentally alter" Ma.s.soud's military position against the Taliban and what would not. If they did not get this right, they could wind up in a federal courtroom, Black warned.

Rich, the Algiers veteran and bin Laden unit chief, led the JAWBREAKER team to the Panjs.h.i.+r in October 1999. They flew secretly to Dushanbe, the pockmarked capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, a desolate city recovering from postcommunist civil war. At an airfield where Ma.s.soud maintained a clandestine logistics base, they boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter and swooped toward Afghanistan's jagged, snow-draped northern peaks.

Beyond the Anjuman Pa.s.s, two miles high, they descended into the narrow, cragged river valley that was Ma.s.soud's fortress homeland. He had agreed to receive the CIA team at his princ.i.p.al residence, in a compound near where his family had lived for generations and where Ma.s.soud's own legend as an anti-Soviet guerrilla leader had been born. They stayed for seven days. Most of the time they worked with Ma.s.soud's intelligence officers on operations, equipment, and procedures for communication. The CIA set up secure lines between Ma.s.soud, his Dushanbe safehouses, and the Counterterrorist Center at Langley so that any fix on bin Laden's whereabouts could be instantly transmitted to CIA headquarters and from there to the White House.33 Rich and his team met with Ma.s.soud twice, once at the beginning of the visit and once at the end. The CIA officers admired Ma.s.soud greatly. They saw him as a Che Guevara figure, a great actor on history's stage. Ma.s.soud was a poet, a military genius, a religious man, and a leader of enormous courage who defied death and accepted its inevitability, they thought. Among Third World guerrilla leaders the CIA officers had met, there were few so well rounded. Ma.s.soud prayed five times a day during their visit. In his house there were thousands of books: Persian poetry, histories of the Afghan war in multiple languages, biographies of other military and guerrilla leaders. In their meetings Ma.s.soud wove sophisticated, measured references to Afghan history and global politics into his arguments. He was quiet, forceful, reserved, and full of dignity, but also light in spirit. The CIA team had gone into the Panjs.h.i.+r as unabashed admirers of Ma.s.soud. Now their convictions deepened even as they recognized that the agency's new partners.h.i.+p with the Northern Alliance would be awkward, limited, and perhaps unlikely to succeed.

The meetings with Ma.s.soud were formal and partially scripted. Each side spoke for about fifteen minutes, and then there was time for questions and answers.

"We have a common enemy," the CIA team leader said. "Let's work together."34 Ma.s.soud said he was willing, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near Kandahar and in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from where Ma.s.soud's forces operated. Occasionally bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to Ma.s.soud's lines. In these areas Ma.s.soud's intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.

Because he had a few helicopters and many battle-tested commanders, the CIA team also hoped to eventually set up a s.n.a.t.c.h operation in which Ma.s.soud would order an airborne a.s.sault to take bin Laden alive. But for now the Counterterrorist Center had no legal authority from the White House to promote lethal operations with Ma.s.soud. The initial visit was to set up a system for collection and sharing of intelligence about bin Laden, and to establish connections with Ma.s.soud for future operations.

The agency men recognized that in their focus on bin Laden they were promoting a narrow "American solution" to an American problem in the midst of Afghanistan's broader, complex war. Still, they hoped Ma.s.soud would calculate that if he went along with the CIA's capture operation, it might lead eventually to a deeper political and military alliance with the United States.35 Ma.s.soud told the CIA delegation that American policy toward bin Laden was myopic and doomed to fail. The Americans put all their effort against bin Laden himself and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about Pakistani intelligence? What about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

Even if the CIA succeeded in capturing or killing bin Laden, Ma.s.soud argued to his CIA visitors, the United States would still have a huge problem in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was now much bigger than bin Laden or al-Zawahiri alone. Protected by the Taliban, its hundreds and even thousands of international jihadists would carry on bin Laden's war against both the United States and secular Central Asian governments.

"Even if we succeed in what you are asking for," Ma.s.soud told the CIA delegation, as his aide and translator Abdullah recalled it, "that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing."36 This part of the conversation was tricky for the Americans. The CIA team leader and his colleagues privately agreed with Ma.s.soud's criticisms of American policy. The CIA men saw little distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They felt frustrated by the State Department diplomats who argued moderate Taliban leaders.h.i.+p might eventually expel bin Laden bloodlessly. This part of the conversation was tricky for the Americans. The CIA team leader and his colleagues privately agreed with Ma.s.soud's criticisms of American policy. The CIA men saw little distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They felt frustrated by the State Department diplomats who argued moderate Taliban leaders.h.i.+p might eventually expel bin Laden bloodlessly.

The Americans told Ma.s.soud they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The policy of the United States government now focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial. Yet this policy was not static. Already the CIA was lobbying for a new approach to Ma.s.soud in Was.h.i.+ngton-that was how they had won permission for this mission in the first place. If they worked together now, built up their cooperation on intelligence collection, the CIA-or at least the officers in the Counterterrorist Center-would continue to lobby for the United States to choose sides in the Afghan war and support Ma.s.soud. The CIA could not rewrite government policy, but it had influence, they explained. The more Ma.s.soud cooperated against bin Laden, the more credible the CIA's arguments in Was.h.i.+ngton would become.

Ma.s.soud and his aides agreed they had nothing to lose. "First of all it was an effort against a common enemy," recalled Abdullah. "Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S. to know better about the situation in Afghanistan." As the counterterrorism and intelligence work grew, the United States might finally intervene in the Afghan war more forcefully, "perhaps in the later stages," Ma.s.soud calculated, as Abdullah recalled it.37 Meanwhile, if Ma.s.soud's men found themselves "in a position to kill Osama bin Laden, we wouldn't have waited for approval from the United States," Abdullah recalled. "We were not doing this just for the U.S. interests. We were doing it for our own interests."38 In the end Ma.s.soud's men did not object to the discussions about legal limitations as much as they did to what they saw as the selfish, single-minded focus of American policy. "What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation, at times that a nation was suffering," recalled one of Ma.s.soud's intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, "they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us it was an element of the problem but not the problem."39 The CIA team pledged to push Ma.s.soud's arguments in Was.h.i.+ngton, but they sensed their own isolation in the American bureaucracy. They understood State's objections. They knew that backing Ma.s.soud's grinding war against the Taliban carried many risks and costs, not least the certainty of more Afghan civilian deaths. They had to make the case-unpopular and to many American officials still unproven-that the Taliban and al Qaeda posed such a grave risk to the United States that it required an extraordinary change.

26.

"That Unit Disappeared"

THE JAWBREAKER TEAM choppered out to Dushanbe, leaving Afghanistan clandestinely across the Tajikistan border. Within a few weeks, several hundred miles to the south, four young middle-cla.s.s Arab men who had sworn themselves to secrecy and jihad entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Taliban facilitated their travel and accommodation, first in Quetta and then in Kandahar.1 Mohammed Atta, thirty-one, was a wiry, severe, taciturn Egyptian of medium height, the only son of a frustrated Cairo lawyer who had pushed his children hard. He had just earned a degree in urban planning from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, completing a 152-page thesis on development planning and historic preservation in ancient Aleppo, Syria. Ziad Jarrah was the only son of a Lebanese family that drove Mercedes cars, owned a Beirut apartment, and kept a vacation home in the country. He had emigrated to Germany to attend the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, where he studied aircraft construction. He initially caroused and smoked has.h.i.+sh, fell tumultuously in and out with his Turkish girlfriend, and then grew intensely religious and withdrawn. His girlfriend challenged his Islamic beliefs; at times he hit her in frustration. Marwan al-Shehhi had been raised amid the prosperity of the United Arab Emirates in the years of the OPEC oil boom. He served as a sergeant in the U.A.E. army. His parents, too, could afford a German university education for him. Of the four conspirators, only Ramzi Binals.h.i.+bh, then twenty-five, could not rely on family money. Small, wiry, talkative, and charismatic, he excelled in school and won a scholars.h.i.+p to college in Bonn, but his widowed mother struggled at home in rural Yemen. The Binals.h.i.+bhs came from Amad, a town in the mountains of Hadramaut province-the province from which, six decades earlier, Mohammed bin Laden struck out for Saudi Arabia to make his name and fortune.2 The arrival of the four in Afghanistan suggested the complexity of al Qaeda just as American intelligence began to grasp more firmly its shape and members.h.i.+p. In their cla.s.sified reports and a.s.sessments, a.n.a.lysts in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center described al Qaeda by 1999 as an extraordinarily diverse and dispersed enemy. The mid-1990s courtroom trials in the World Trade Center bombing and related cases, and evidence from the Africa bombing investigations, had revealed the organization as a paradox: tightly supervised at the top but very loosely spread at the bottom. By 1999 it had become common at the CIA to describe al Qaeda as a constellation or a series of concentric circles. Around the core bin Laden leaders.h.i.+p group in Afghanistan-the main target of the CIA's covert s.n.a.t.c.h operations-lay protective rings of militant regional allies. These included the Taliban, elements of Pakistani intelligence, Uzbek and Chechen exiles, extremist anti-s.h.i.+a groups in Pakistan, and Kashmiri radicals. Beyond these lay softer circles of financial, recruiting, and political support: international charities, proselytizing groups, and radical Islamic mosques, education centers and political parties from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to the Gaza strip, from Europe to the United States.3 Al Qaeda operated as an organization in more than sixty countries, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center calculated by late 1999. Its formal, sworn, hard-core members.h.i.+p might number in the hundreds.4 Thousands more joined allied militias such as the Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. These volunteers could be recruited for covert terrorist missions elsewhere if they seemed qualified. New jihadists turned up each week at al Qaedalinked mosques and recruitment centers worldwide. They were inspired by fire-breathing local imams, satellite television news, or Internet sites devoted to jihadist violence in Palestine, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Many of the Arab volunteers from countries such as Algeria or Yemen were poor, eager, and undereducated; they had more daring than ability and could barely afford the airfare to Pakistan. Yet some were middle cla.s.s and college-educated. A few-like the four men who arrived secretly in Kandahar in the autumn of 1999: Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi, and Binals.h.i.+bh-carried pa.s.sports and visas that facilitated travel to Europe and the United States. These relatively elite volunteers moved like self-propelled shooting stars through al Qaeda's global constellation. Their reasons to join were as diverse as their transnational biographies. In many ways they retraced the trails of radicalization followed in the early 1990s by Ramzi Yousef and Mir Amal Kasi. They were mainly intelligent, well-educated men from ambitious, prosperous families. They migrated to Europe, studied demanding technical subjects, and attempted-unsuccessfully-to establish themselves as modern professionals far from the family embrace and conservative Islamic culture they had known in their youths. As they joined a violent movement led by the alienated, itinerant son of a Saudi construction magnate and a disputatious, ostracized Egyptian doctor, they pledged their loyalty to men strikingly like themselves. Thousands more joined allied militias such as the Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. These volunteers could be recruited for covert terrorist missions elsewhere if they seemed qualified. New jihadists turned up each week at al Qaedalinked mosques and recruitment centers worldwide. They were inspired by fire-breathing local imams, satellite television news, or Internet sites devoted to jihadist violence in Palestine, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Many of the Arab volunteers from countries such as Algeria or Yemen were poor, eager, and undereducated; they had more daring than ability and could barely afford the airfare to Pakistan. Yet some were middle cla.s.s and college-educated. A few-like the four men who arrived secretly in Kandahar in the autumn of 1999: Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi, and Binals.h.i.+bh-carried pa.s.sports and visas that facilitated travel to Europe and the United States. These relatively elite volunteers moved like self-propelled shooting stars through al Qaeda's global constellation. Their reasons to join were as diverse as their transnational biographies. In many ways they retraced the trails of radicalization followed in the early 1990s by Ramzi Yousef and Mir Amal Kasi. They were mainly intelligent, well-educated men from ambitious, prosperous families. They migrated to Europe, studied demanding technical subjects, and attempted-unsuccessfully-to establish themselves as modern professionals far from the family embrace and conservative Islamic culture they had known in their youths. As they joined a violent movement led by the alienated, itinerant son of a Saudi construction magnate and a disputatious, ostracized Egyptian doctor, they pledged their loyalty to men strikingly like themselves.

The Hamburg cell, as it came to be known, coalesced at a shabby mosque in the urban heart of Germany's gray, industrial, northern port city. A coffee shop and a gymnasium for bodybuilders squeezed the Al Quds Mosque where Arab men in exile gathered for prayers, sermons, and conspiracy. Prost.i.tutes, heroin dealers, and underemployed immigrants shared the streets. A 330-pound Syrian car mechanic who was a veteran of Afghanistan's wars championed bin Laden's message at the mosque. Mohammed Haydar Zammar was one of perhaps hundreds of such self-appointed soapbox preachers for al Qaeda scattered in city mosques and Islamic centers around the world. Zammar was well known to CIA and FBI counterterrorist officers based in Germany. The CIA repeatedly produced reports on Zammar and asked German police to challenge him. But German laws enacted after the Holocaust elaborately protected religious freedom, and German police did not see al Qaeda as a grave threat. The young men who came to pray with Zammar gradually embraced his ideas and his politics; Zammar, in turn, saw their potential as operatives.5 Even in the dim cement block dormitories and rental apartments of polytechnic Hamburg, the Al Quds crew saw themselves as members of a global Islamist underground. They used cell phones, the Internet, and prepaid calling cards to communicate with other mosques, guest houses in Afghanistan, and dissident preachers in Saudi Arabia, including Safar al-Hawali and Saman al-Auda, the original "Awakening Sheikhs" whose vitriolic attacks on the Saudi royal family in 1991 had stimulated bin Laden's revolutionary ambitions.6 Atta was among the oldest in the Hamburg group. Born in the Egyptian countryside, he had moved at a young age with his parents and two sisters to a small apartment in a crowded, decaying neighborhood of colonial-era Cairo. They could afford seaside vacations, but they did not live extravagantly. His striving, austere father created "a house of study-no playing, no entertainment, just study," a family friend recalled. His father saw Atta, with some derision, as "a very sensitive man; he is soft and was extremely attached to his mother," as he put it years later. Atta sat affectionately on his mother's lap well into his twenties. His father used to chide his mother "that she is raising him as a girl, and that I have three girls, but she never stopped pampering him," as he recalled it. Atta's older sisters thrived under their father's pressure; one became a botanist, the other a doctor. Atta shut out all distraction to follow them into higher studies, to meet his father's expectations or his own. If a belly dancer came on the family television, he shaded his eyes and walked out of the room. Worried that his son would languish forever in Egypt, wallowing in his mother's pampering, Atta's father "almost tricked him," as he later put it, into continuing his education in Germany. Once there, his son grew steadily more angry and withdrawn. He worked four years as a draftsman, never questioning his a.s.signments or offering ideas. His supervisor later said that Atta "embodied the idea of drawing. 'I am the drawer. I draw.' " His roommates found him intolerant, sullen, sloppy, and inconsiderate.While traveling in the Arab world Atta could be relaxed, even playful, but the Europeans who knew him in Germany found him alienated and closed. Increasingly he seemed to use Islam and its precepts-prayer, segregation from women, a calendar of ritual-as a s.h.i.+eld between himself and Hamburg.7 By late 1999, Atta and others in the Al Quds group had committed themselves to martyrdom through jihad. Ramzi Binals.h.i.+bh, who shared roots with bin Laden and seemed to know his people, helped make their contacts in Afghanistan. Binals.h.i.+bh ranted at a wedding that October about the "danger" Jews posed to the Islamic world. Handwritten notes made by Ziad Jarrah just before the quartet's autumn trip to Kandahar describe their gathering zeal: "The morning will come. The victors will come. We swear to beat you." A week later he wrote: "I came to you with men who love the death just as you love life. . . . Oh, the smell of paradise is rising."8 Bin Laden and his senior planners had already seized on the idea of using airplanes to attack the United States when Jarrah, Atta, al-Shehhi, and Binal-s.h.i.+bh turned up in Kandahar that autumn, according to admissions under interrogation later made by Binals.h.i.+bh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the plot's mastermind. A fugitive from an American indictment because of his earlier work with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, Mohammed found sanctuary in Afghanistan in mid-1996, just as bin Laden arrived from Sudan. He had known bin Laden during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad and used that connection to win a meeting. Mohammed pitched bin Laden and his Egyptian military chief, Mohammed Atef, on several plans to attack American targets. One of his ideas, he told interrogators later, was an ambitious plot to hijack ten pa.s.senger jets with trained pilots and fly them kamikaze-style into the White House or the Capitol, the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA and the FBI, the two towers of the World Trade Center, the tallest buildings in California and Was.h.i.+ngton state, and perhaps a nuclear power plant. Mohammed said he proposed to hijack and pilot the tenth plane himself. Rather than crash it into a target, he planned to kill all the male adult pa.s.sengers, land the plane at a U.S. airport, issue statements denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East, and then release the surviving women and children.9 By Mohammed's account, bin Laden and his aide listened to his ideas but declined to commit their support. Bin Laden had barely settled in Afghanistan. The country was in turmoil, his finances were under pressure, and he lacked a stable headquarters. Only after the Africa emba.s.sy bombings in 1998 did Mohammed realize that bin Laden might be ready to renew their ambitious talks-and he was right. They met again in Kandahar in early 1999 and bin Laden declared that Mohammed's suicide hijacking plan now had al Qaeda's backing. Bin Laden wanted to scale back the attack to make it more manageable. He also said he preferred the White House to the Capitol as a target and that he favored hitting the Pentagon. Mohammed pushed for the World Trade Center. His nephew had bombed the towers six years before but had failed to bring them down, and now languished in an American high-security prison; Mohammed sought to finish the job.

Bin Laden provided two potential Saudi suicide pilots who were veterans of jihadist fighting in Bosnia, as well as two Yemeni volunteers who ultimately were unable to obtain visas to the United States. Mohammed taught several of them how to live and travel in the United States, drawing on his own experiences as a college student there. He showed them how to use the Internet, book plane flights, read telephone directories, and communicate with headquarters. They practiced with flight simulators on personal computers and began to puzzle out how to hijack multiple flights that would be in the air at the same time. As this training proceeded the four volunteers from Hamburg arrived in Kandahar, traveling separately. They pledged formal allegiance to bin Laden. Binals.h.i.+bh, Atta, and Jarrah met with military chief Atef, who instructed them to go back to Germany and start training as pilots. After Atta was selected as the mission's leader he met with bin Laden personally to discuss targets. The Hamburg group already knew how to operate comfortably in Western society, but before returning to Europe some of them spent time with Mohammed in Karachi, studying airline schedules and discussing life in the United States.10 The four returned to Hamburg late that winter. Jarrah announced to his girlfriend that after years of drift he had at last discovered his life's ambition: He wanted to fly pa.s.senger jets. Atta used his Hotmail account to email American pilot schools. "We are a small group (23) of young men from different arab [sic] countries," he wrote. "Now we are living in Germany since a while for study purposes. We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots. In this field we haven't yet any knowledge, but we are ready to undergo an intensive training program." countries," he wrote. "Now we are living in Germany since a while for study purposes. We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots. In this field we haven't yet any knowledge, but we are ready to undergo an intensive training program."11 PERVEZ MUSHARRAF'S DAUGHTER married a doc.u.mentary filmmaker. His son worked in Boston as a financial a.n.a.lyst. His father was a successful civil servant of secular mind. His mother did not hide behind a veil. She was a lively, talkative woman who orchestrated her family like the conductor of a chamber symphony. Doctors, diplomats, businessmen, and modernizers filled her family alb.u.ms. Musharraf himself was typically called a liberal, which in Pakistan's political vernacular meant he did not blanch at whiskey, danced when the mood was upon him, and believed Pakistan should be a normal country-Islamic in some respects but also capitalistic and to some extent democratic. Yet Pervez Musharraf, chief of Pakistan's army staff, also believed firmly in the necessity of the Taliban in Afghanistan, for all of their medieval and illiberal practices. He believed, too, in the strategic value of their allied jihadists, especially those fighting in Kashmir.12 This was the aspect of the Pakistani officer corps that sometimes eluded American a.n.a.lysts, in the opinion of some Pakistani civilian liberals. Every Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox, and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb. To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban provided geopolitical "strategic depth" against India and protection from rebellion by Pakistan's own restive Pashtun population. For Musharraf, as for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life. Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox, and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb. To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban provided geopolitical "strategic depth" against India and protection from rebellion by Pakistan's own restive Pashtun population. For Musharraf, as for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life.

To the extent it was personal or emotional for him, it was about India. He was a small, compact man with round cheeks, a boyish face, a neat mustache, and graying hair parted in the middle. He exuded a certain puffed-up vanity, but he could also be disarmingly casual and relaxed in private. Born in New Delhi in 1943, the son of an imperial bureaucrat, he and his family migrated to Pakistan unscathed amid the bloodshed of part.i.tion. He attended elite Christian boys' schools in Karachi and Lah.o.r.e, then won a place at Pakistan's leading military academy. As a young officer he fought artillery duels in the second of his country's three wars with India. In the catastrophic war of 1971, when Pakistan lost almost half its territory as Bangladesh won independence, Musharraf served as a gung-ho major in the elite commandos. When he heard of the final humiliating cease-fire with India, a friend remembered, "he took off his commando jacket and threw it on the floor. . . . He thought it a defeat. We all did." Like hundreds of his colleagues, Musharraf's commitment to revenge hardened. On sabbatical at a British military college in 1990, now a brigadier general, he argued in his thesis that Pakistan only wanted "down to earth, respectable survival" while India arrogantly sought "dominant power status" in South Asia. As army chief in 1999, it was his role, Musharraf believed, to craft and execute his country's survival strategy even if that meant defending the Taliban or tolerating bin Laden as the Saudi trained and inspired self-sacrificing fighters in Kashmir.13 That spring, in secret meetings with his senior commanders at Rawalpindi, Musharraf went further. Perhaps it was his commando background. Perhaps it was the success his army had recently enjoyed in Afghanistan when it inserted clandestine officers and volunteers to fight secretly with the Taliban against Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud. Perhaps it was the unremitting popular pressure in Pakistan to score a breakthrough against Indian troops in Kashmir. In any case, as the U.S. emba.s.sy in Islamabad later pieced it together, Musharraf pulled off his shelf a years-old army plan for a secret strike against a fifteen-thousand-foot strategic height in Kashmir known as Kargil. The idea was to send Pakistani army officers and soldiers in civilian disguise to the area, seize it, and hold it against Indian counterattack. Then Pakistan would possess an impregnable firing position above a strategic road in Indian-held Kashmir, cutting off a section of the disputed territory called Ladakh. With one stiletto thrust, Musharraf calculated, his army could sever a piece of Kashmir from Indian control.14 He briefed this audacious plan to the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who approved. As one longtime a.n.a.lyst of the Pakistani army later observed, it was perhaps the greatest strategic error by an overmatched military since Pearl Harbor, yet neither Sharif nor Musharraf seemed able to imagine how India or the world would react.15 In early May, Pakistani commandos disguised as jihadist volunteers seized Kargil without a fight. The disaster unfolded quickly. Pakistani army officers summoned amba.s.sadors to a meeting in Islamabad and admitted the Kargil attackers were regular Pakistani army troops in disguise-even as other government spokesmen publicly insisted the incursion was an independent guerrilla uprising. Stunned, Bill Milam, the U.S. amba.s.sador, poured cla.s.sified cables into Was.h.i.+ngton reporting that Pakistan had in effect started a war. India launched aerial bombardments and a worldwide campaign to whip up outrage about Pakistan's aggression. Its politicians threatened a wider conflict to finish off Pakistan's army once and for all. Fearing nuclear escalation, Clinton delivered a dozen secret letters to Sharif and Pakistani generals in as many weeks, each time imploring them to see their folly and withdraw. He also pressured Sharif on the Taliban and al Qaeda. "I urge you in the strongest way to get the Taliban to expel bin Laden," Clinton wrote Sharif on June 19. But the crisis only deepened. In early July the CIA picked up intelligence that Pakistan's army was preparing nuclear-tipped missiles for launch against India if necessary.16 An overwhelmed Sharif feared he had lost his shaky grip. He flew hurriedly to Was.h.i.+ngton to meet with Clinton on July 4. He brought his wife and children, as if he might be flying into exile.17 At Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue, with only a National Security Council note taker present, Clinton ripped into Pakistan's prime minister. Clinton had "asked repeatedly for Pakistani help to bring Osama bin Laden to justice from Afghanistan," the president ranted. Sharif had "promised often to do so but had done nothing. Instead the ISI worked with bin Laden and the Taliban to foment terrorists." It was an outrage, Clinton said. He was going to release a statement calling worldwide attention to Pakistan's support for terrorists. Is that what Sharif wanted? Clinton demanded. Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to get ready for action? Did he realize how crazy that was?

"You've put me in the middle today, set the U.S. up to fail, and I won't let it happen," Clinton said. "Pakistan is messing with nuclear war."18 Doughy and evasive, Sharif gave in. He had already been working with Saudi Arabia, Europe, and by back channels with India to find a way to climb down. He announced a total withdrawal of Pakistani forces from Kargil. B