You wouldn't know from the title of this Bloomberg report that it contains interesting data on the thefts from NATO supply convoys, the openly-tolerated theft from the trucks and the resale racket of the stolen goods in Pakistan.
Pakistan Shuts Karachi-Kabul Route After Boom
By Shahan Mufti
Dec 15, 2011 2:00 PM ET
[...]
The Afridi family is one of hundreds that have enjoyed the boom from American military supplies through Pakistan after 2001. The gold rush started with the troop surge in Afghanistan that began soon after Obama won the election in 2008. When he took office there were just over 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By January 2010, the number had more than doubled to nearly 70,000. In May of this year, troop levels peaked at nearly 100,000.
More troops meant more supplies. Figures issued by the Pakistan Federal Tax Ombudsman show the spike in traffic at Karachi’s port. U.S. military equipment received at the port rose from nearly 16,000 shipping containers in 2005 to more than 54,000 in 2009. Halfway through 2010 the U.S. military had already shipped nearly 30,000 containers to Karachi.
In Pakistan the demand for trucks skyrocketed. “Everyone who had nothing to lose took out a loan and bought a truck,” Muntazir says. He invited many of his extended relatives from the tribal areas to come to Karachi and start driving.
The local “third party vendor” transport companies, to whom the international shipping lines subcontracted, were so desperate for drivers that Muntazir says they began lending money to people they had just met, so they would buy a truck and get supplies moving. “There was just no way the companies would be able to deal with truckers,” Muntazir says. “They couldn’t keep track of a thing.” Entire truckloads started going missing.
This is where Shakir, the elder brother, began to do work he describes as “brokering,” placing himself between truck owners and the local transport companies. He takes responsibility for the cargo and ensures it gets to U.S. and other ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Acting as a guarantor, Afridi receives a cut from the logistics companies when the cargo is picked up and again when it’s dropped off. The work has proved so profitable that Afridi has sold his entire fleet.
Increased Attacks
In November 2008, Hakimullah Mehsud, a commander of the newly formed Taliban Movement of Pakistan, invited the news media to Orakzai, a tribal agency in Pakistan, for his first press conference. Mehsud arrived riding in a brand new armored U.S. military Humvee. He told reporters he had captured a few American vehicles after attacking and looting a military convoy traveling through Pakistan. He boasted he would increase these attacks.
Such attacks started at the same time as the U.S. troop surge in late 2008. Fuel tankers began getting torched regularly and shipping containers were ripped open, looted, and left empty along highways. In the local press, Pakistani military officials told of groups in the tribal areas stealing helicopter parts. Militants who couldn’t get to the trucks took to bombing bridges and roads along the route, at times shutting the supply route for days.
The supply line was not just vulnerable to militants. In the past several years, the Pakistani and American visions for Afghanistan’s future have diverged so far that the relationship has turned hostile. Pakistan first cut off NATO’s supplies in September 2008, in response to the first-ever reported incursion of U.S. troops into Pakistan. Two months later, after a drone aircraft targeted Pakistan’s settled nontribal lands for the first and only time, 160 NATO trucks were burned in a nightlong rampage in Peshawar.
Vanishing Cargo
Many believed the event was staged by the Pakistani military and meant to send a clear signal. Vice Admiral Mark D. Harnitchek, deputy commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, said in a 2009 speech that 12 percent of the freight bound for Bagram in December 2008 had disappeared.
The supply line has been under consistent fire ever since. In 2009 there were 25 attacks on NATO supply lines in Pakistan, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, an online database tracking terror incidents in the region. In 2011, before the supply line was closed in November, there had already been a total of 111 reported incidents, destroying hundreds of supply vehicles. Even in times of calm, the Pakistani military has had its hand on the valve, as it alone decides how many trucks carrying U.S. military equipment to let through on any given day.
Driver’s Role
The spike in attacks is partly because of drivers and truck owners. Drivers, discouraged by the high risks involved, have taken to selling their loads of fuel on the black market, then setting fire to the tankers and collecting insurance money. Though the scam is a pain for the brokers, Muntazir says he feels for the truckers. “These guys risk their lives, and they get what? Thirty thousand, maybe forty thousand rupees for a trip?” That’s about four hundred dollars.
In June 2010, after an unsourced news report on Pakistani television said nearly 11,000 Afghanistan-bound shipping containers that had arrived in Karachi had gone missing, the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked another agency, the Federal Tax Ombudsman’s office, to investigate. The case went to Shoaib Suddle, a career police officer and Karachi’s police chief at the height of a war between several ethnic groups in the mid- 1990s. He has a doctorate in white-collar criminology from the University of Wales and has also served as the chief of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau.
Detailed Records
Suddle found that private container terminals in Karachi were keeping detailed records of the exact time containers would depart and return. Some trucks would never check back in. But thousands of mostly empty trucks were coming back too soon, sometimes a few hours after departing for Afghanistan.
“We found the mother of all scams,” Suddle said. In a report published by his office earlier this year, he described complex transnational networks bribing local customs agents and using crooked bureaucrats in Pakistan to forge documents and create fake companies. The intent of that corruption was to get goods labeled as Afghanistan-bound into the country, and then divert them for resale on the black market.
Suddle estimated that at least 7,992 shipping containers had never reached Afghanistan. The report called this “the tip of the iceberg.” A follow-up investigation, also ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, revealed that close to 29,000 cargo loads have gone missing in the country. There is no way of knowing precisely what disappeared.
Military Cargo
While many of these containers were loaded with commercial cargo destined for Afghanistan, military equipment for coalition forces accounts for nearly 40 percent of all trade to Afghanistan through Pakistan. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue estimates that 3,300 shipping containers full of military equipment were among those missing.
According to an agreement between the Pakistani and British ministries of defense signed in June 2002, Pakistan allows ISAF military equipment to arrive in Pakistan without inspection. The U.S. military is not required to file a customs declaration form describing contents inside shipping containers.
In the Khyber Agency, not far from Peshawar, the hemorrhaging U.S. supply line stocks a long bazaar the locals call Karkhano Market. Among the corrugated-iron storefronts, middle-aged women are shopping for “USA” branded oil and soap bars with the American flag printed on them. Fighters drop in from Afghanistan to sample the latest in the military technology available on roadside tables.
Military Manuals
Alongside old British rifles and Soviet AK-47s, American military gear like Kevlar vests, boots, camouflage suits, night- vision goggles, and knives hang from hooks. Tall stacks of large boxes carrying ammunition and weapons parts will not be opened without a good reference. In the bargain bins, thrown in with used fleece socks and shrink-wrapped copies of The Book of Mormon, are U.S. military operation manuals that restrict distribution to “DoD and DoD contractors only,” and carry instructions to destroy “by any method that must prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of documents.”
A sign for a shop on the second floor reads, “Haji M. Ikhlas USA traders,” with crude paintings of a U.S. military helmet and army boots. In 2009 a U.S. military laptop that the U.S. Army’s 864th Engineer Combat Battalion used for diagnostics and maintenance of military weapons systems and vehicles was found in this same market.
Shopkeepers say that much of their stock comes from Afghanistan or is brought in from elsewhere in Pakistan.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
With closing of Pak border crossings, NDN becomes even more important
Afghanistan: The Pressure Is Now on Central Asian Supply RouteBy Deirdre Tynan
EurasiaNet.org [H/T IPS News]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Dec 8, 2011 (IPS/EurasiaNet) - The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.
Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan's supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent "all systems go" test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org.
"It doesn't happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this," the source said.
The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins.
U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is "imperceptible" given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source.
The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defence to be a safer re-supply option than trucking goods and fuel through Pakistan. The Pakistani route has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years to Taliban attacks.
The NDN comprises of a rail link starting in Latvia going through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; a road route via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for goods initially delivered to the Manas Transit Centre near Bishkek; and a Caucasus pathway that ferrys cargo from the United States and Europe by sea to the Turkish port of Metin, as well as to Poti in Georgia, for onward delivery across the Caspian Sea into Afghanistan.
Pakistan has closed its re-supply route on two previous occasions to protest U.S. or NATO military activities - for almost two weeks in 2010 and again for three days in April 2011. This time, officials in Islamabad insist that the closure is permanent.
Policy-makers in Washington have long planned for such a contingency. Since 2005, many U.S. government contracts have specified that fuel should be sourced from countries north of Afghanistan. By 2010, northern sources were a requirement in tenders that cited potential "mission failure" due to disruptions in Pakistan.
"If you look at the trajectory, it's clear which way the relationship is going. It will be difficult to overcome yet another serious problem. The policy implication is that we need to diversify (transit routes) as much as we can and as quickly as we can. That's what the U.S. government has been all about recently," said a U.S. government official.
"But the real question is whether the NDN can fully compensate for what's happened in Pakistan. We have a good NDN, but we also have Central Asian roads that are not the best," he added. The NDN's rail component is expected to pick up most of the extra freight volume.
Editor's note: Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specialising in Central Asian affairs
EurasiaNet.org [H/T IPS News]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Dec 8, 2011 (IPS/EurasiaNet) - The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.
Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan's supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent "all systems go" test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org.
"It doesn't happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this," the source said.
The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins.
U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is "imperceptible" given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source.
The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defence to be a safer re-supply option than trucking goods and fuel through Pakistan. The Pakistani route has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years to Taliban attacks.
The NDN comprises of a rail link starting in Latvia going through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; a road route via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for goods initially delivered to the Manas Transit Centre near Bishkek; and a Caucasus pathway that ferrys cargo from the United States and Europe by sea to the Turkish port of Metin, as well as to Poti in Georgia, for onward delivery across the Caspian Sea into Afghanistan.
Pakistan has closed its re-supply route on two previous occasions to protest U.S. or NATO military activities - for almost two weeks in 2010 and again for three days in April 2011. This time, officials in Islamabad insist that the closure is permanent.
Policy-makers in Washington have long planned for such a contingency. Since 2005, many U.S. government contracts have specified that fuel should be sourced from countries north of Afghanistan. By 2010, northern sources were a requirement in tenders that cited potential "mission failure" due to disruptions in Pakistan.
"If you look at the trajectory, it's clear which way the relationship is going. It will be difficult to overcome yet another serious problem. The policy implication is that we need to diversify (transit routes) as much as we can and as quickly as we can. That's what the U.S. government has been all about recently," said a U.S. government official.
"But the real question is whether the NDN can fully compensate for what's happened in Pakistan. We have a good NDN, but we also have Central Asian roads that are not the best," he added. The NDN's rail component is expected to pick up most of the extra freight volume.
Editor's note: Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specialising in Central Asian affairs
Monday, December 5, 2011
US clandestine ops in Pakistan
The U.S.-Pakistani relations may be on the rocks, but the CIA’s secret friends in the country fight on in units, prisons, and bases the United States has been building up since 9/11 to counter the pro-Taliban side of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. Eli Lake reports exclusively.
America's Shadow State in Pakistan
By Eli Lake
December 5, 2011
The Daily Beast
Officially, America’s relations Pakistan’s military and intelligence services were in a tailspin in August. Furious at having been kept in the dark ahead of the Americans’ May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, Pakistan’s military had kept U.S. investigators out of the place until it was scrubbed for evidence and had refused them access to bin Laden’s wives for some time. And the Pakistanis had outed the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, putting his life at risk. Meanwhile, back in America, fears were rising over possible al Qaeda attacks on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.
But in the shadows, far from the public rancor, Pakistani-U.S. cooperation quietly continued. In Quetta, the Taliban’s capital in exile, U.S. intelligence was monitoring the cellphone of the presumed planner of any Qaeda anniversary attacks, Younis al-Mauritani, the group’s newly named external operations chief. The Americans’ tracking data—signals intelligence, or sigint, as it’s known in the profession—was being shared in real time with the local branch of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps. When his exact location was discovered, the Pakistanis smashed through the doors of his safe house and grabbed him along with two deputies.
Soon he was hundreds of miles away, at a special detention center in Punjab province, under intensive interrogation by a pro-U.S. faction of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The Americans began getting regular reports on potential threats connected to the anniversary. CIA officials were even given an “unofficial” visit to question Mauritani directly.
Many in the U.S. government regarded the capture as a crowning achievement of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar effort to build a secret network of Pakistani security forces, intelligence operatives, counterterrorism fighters, and detention centers. Its objective had been to create a friendlier, more trustworthy alternative to Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Now, however, just three months after Mauritani’s capture, the partnership is facing its most dire challenge. Relations between the two countries have been rocked by back-to-back incidents. First came what the media are calling “memogate,” in which President Asif Ali Zardari’s administration is accused of plotting with the U.S. to replace the leadership of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. And then, on Thanksgiving weekend, a NATO helicopter reported being fired upon by a Pakistani military outpost near the Afghanistan border. The chopper returned fire, killing two dozen Pakistani soldiers.
The reaction inside Pakistan has been white hot, and current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast they worry the CIA’s alternate security network will be the ultimate casualty. If that happens, America could be left blind to future threats emanating from Pakistan, and the task of rounding up or killing high-value Qaeda remnants could become more difficult, if not impossible.
“We’ve been trying desperately for the last 10 years to build elements of Pakistani society and its national security bureaucracy to support U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region,” says Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former manager at the National Counterterrorism Center. “This latest incident is a major test of that strategy.”
Former CIA director Mike Hayden says he has feared such an outcome for years as he watched U.S.-Pakistani relations drifting apart. “The space where American perceptions of strategic interests and Pakistani perceptions of strategic interests overlap has been diminishing,” he says.
In recent years, the relationship was kept afloat largely by the efforts of one man: Adm. Mike Mullen. Before his retirement as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman this September, he maintained a personal friendship with his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At tense moments for the two countries, such as the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis for killing two armed men in Lahore this past January, Mullen would be sent to smooth things over with Pakistan’s Army chief. One U.S. intelligence officer who works on Pakistan refers to Mullen as “the Kayani whisperer”: a man with a special knack for quietly and discreetly influencing Kayani at crucial points.
But the friendship soured in Mullen’s final days. The four-star admiral accused the ISI of supporting direct attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Haqqani network, a deadly faction and support network for the Afghan Taliban, according to most accounts. The accusation left a shocked Kayani insisting to the Pakistani media that his old friend was simply misinformed. But things had been unraveling ever since the Davis shooting. The CIA contractor was one of numerous U.S. operatives who worked with elements of the U.S.-aligned shadow forces in Pakistan to target and apprehend terrorists—Pakistan, after all, was the country where bin Laden had been living unmolested for years. Before the shooting, current and recently retired U.S. intelligence officials say, the pro-American shadow network in Pakistan was capturing on average one Qaeda suspect a month. Still, those captures were seldom cleared through the chain of command of the ISI or the Pakistani military, and since the Davis incident the job has gotten much harder and riskier, U.S. officials say.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, America got valuable assistance from the military under Pakistan’s then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. (It was Musharraf who handpicked Kayani as his replacement as Army chief shortly before stepping down from the presidency in August 2008.) Musharraf’s support enabled the Americans to bring a number of major Qaeda fugitives to justice, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But Pakistan’s cooperation gradually petered out as Qaeda-instigated insurgencies erupted around the country, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the wild mountain region along the Afghan border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers were killed before Musharraf finally caved in and signed peace deals with FATA warlords in 2006 and 2007, effectively creating a sanctuary where al Qaeda’s leadership could regroup.
America’s current partnership with the Frontier Corps dates back to the summer of 2008, when U.S. special forces began frequent cross-border raids into the FATA. (Before 2008 such raids were rare.) Since then the corps has helped target senior Taliban and Qaeda leaders for drone strikes, in addition to helping capture senior Qaeda operatives such as Mauritani and providing security for the Shamsi drone base, the headquarters of the CIA’s Pakistan drone operations. This is risky work as well. On Sept. 8, two suicide bombers killed 23 people at the home of Farrukh Shahzad, the deputy commander of the Baluchistan Frontier Corps that captured Mauritani.
Within the ISI, America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. U.S. officials say their hope was that the T Wing, which conducted Mauritani’s interrogation, might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to the same officials, America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners.
Over the past 10 years, Pakistan has received more than $20 billion in public U.S. funding for military and economic assistance. Washington’s secret subsidy of Pakistan’s intelligence and military could be much higher. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called attention to the CIA’s extensive secret funding during a recent Republican debate. “The money that we are spending right now is primarily intelligence money to Pakistan,” she declared. “It is helping the United States. Whatever our action is, it must ultimately be about helping the United States and our sovereignty, our safety, and our security.”
That’s not as easy as it may sound. It’s been necessary to pick and choose which elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus America should engage with, says Mark Lowenthal, a former House Intelligence Committee staff director and former CIA assistant director for analysis. “We do this because of the nature of the Pakistani state,” he says. “If it was a coherent government, then when we made a deal with the president or the prime minister, you would know as the orders come down the line they would be obeyed.” Nevertheless, he says, “That is not the nature of Pakistan. You have all these competing power centers. We are not doing this because we are trying to be too clever by half, we are doing this because this is the nature of the state we are dealing with.”
The death of two dozen Pakistani soldiers has made that challenge tougher than ever. “As bad as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is now, it’s only likely to get worse,” says Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA official and one of the co-authors of President Obama’s initial Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. So far, however, no one on either side knows what else to do but keep on.
America's Shadow State in Pakistan
By Eli Lake
December 5, 2011
The Daily Beast
Officially, America’s relations Pakistan’s military and intelligence services were in a tailspin in August. Furious at having been kept in the dark ahead of the Americans’ May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, Pakistan’s military had kept U.S. investigators out of the place until it was scrubbed for evidence and had refused them access to bin Laden’s wives for some time. And the Pakistanis had outed the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, putting his life at risk. Meanwhile, back in America, fears were rising over possible al Qaeda attacks on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.
But in the shadows, far from the public rancor, Pakistani-U.S. cooperation quietly continued. In Quetta, the Taliban’s capital in exile, U.S. intelligence was monitoring the cellphone of the presumed planner of any Qaeda anniversary attacks, Younis al-Mauritani, the group’s newly named external operations chief. The Americans’ tracking data—signals intelligence, or sigint, as it’s known in the profession—was being shared in real time with the local branch of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps. When his exact location was discovered, the Pakistanis smashed through the doors of his safe house and grabbed him along with two deputies.
Soon he was hundreds of miles away, at a special detention center in Punjab province, under intensive interrogation by a pro-U.S. faction of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The Americans began getting regular reports on potential threats connected to the anniversary. CIA officials were even given an “unofficial” visit to question Mauritani directly.
Many in the U.S. government regarded the capture as a crowning achievement of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar effort to build a secret network of Pakistani security forces, intelligence operatives, counterterrorism fighters, and detention centers. Its objective had been to create a friendlier, more trustworthy alternative to Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Now, however, just three months after Mauritani’s capture, the partnership is facing its most dire challenge. Relations between the two countries have been rocked by back-to-back incidents. First came what the media are calling “memogate,” in which President Asif Ali Zardari’s administration is accused of plotting with the U.S. to replace the leadership of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. And then, on Thanksgiving weekend, a NATO helicopter reported being fired upon by a Pakistani military outpost near the Afghanistan border. The chopper returned fire, killing two dozen Pakistani soldiers.
The reaction inside Pakistan has been white hot, and current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast they worry the CIA’s alternate security network will be the ultimate casualty. If that happens, America could be left blind to future threats emanating from Pakistan, and the task of rounding up or killing high-value Qaeda remnants could become more difficult, if not impossible.
“We’ve been trying desperately for the last 10 years to build elements of Pakistani society and its national security bureaucracy to support U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region,” says Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former manager at the National Counterterrorism Center. “This latest incident is a major test of that strategy.”
Former CIA director Mike Hayden says he has feared such an outcome for years as he watched U.S.-Pakistani relations drifting apart. “The space where American perceptions of strategic interests and Pakistani perceptions of strategic interests overlap has been diminishing,” he says.
In recent years, the relationship was kept afloat largely by the efforts of one man: Adm. Mike Mullen. Before his retirement as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman this September, he maintained a personal friendship with his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At tense moments for the two countries, such as the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis for killing two armed men in Lahore this past January, Mullen would be sent to smooth things over with Pakistan’s Army chief. One U.S. intelligence officer who works on Pakistan refers to Mullen as “the Kayani whisperer”: a man with a special knack for quietly and discreetly influencing Kayani at crucial points.
But the friendship soured in Mullen’s final days. The four-star admiral accused the ISI of supporting direct attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Haqqani network, a deadly faction and support network for the Afghan Taliban, according to most accounts. The accusation left a shocked Kayani insisting to the Pakistani media that his old friend was simply misinformed. But things had been unraveling ever since the Davis shooting. The CIA contractor was one of numerous U.S. operatives who worked with elements of the U.S.-aligned shadow forces in Pakistan to target and apprehend terrorists—Pakistan, after all, was the country where bin Laden had been living unmolested for years. Before the shooting, current and recently retired U.S. intelligence officials say, the pro-American shadow network in Pakistan was capturing on average one Qaeda suspect a month. Still, those captures were seldom cleared through the chain of command of the ISI or the Pakistani military, and since the Davis incident the job has gotten much harder and riskier, U.S. officials say.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, America got valuable assistance from the military under Pakistan’s then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. (It was Musharraf who handpicked Kayani as his replacement as Army chief shortly before stepping down from the presidency in August 2008.) Musharraf’s support enabled the Americans to bring a number of major Qaeda fugitives to justice, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But Pakistan’s cooperation gradually petered out as Qaeda-instigated insurgencies erupted around the country, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the wild mountain region along the Afghan border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers were killed before Musharraf finally caved in and signed peace deals with FATA warlords in 2006 and 2007, effectively creating a sanctuary where al Qaeda’s leadership could regroup.
America’s current partnership with the Frontier Corps dates back to the summer of 2008, when U.S. special forces began frequent cross-border raids into the FATA. (Before 2008 such raids were rare.) Since then the corps has helped target senior Taliban and Qaeda leaders for drone strikes, in addition to helping capture senior Qaeda operatives such as Mauritani and providing security for the Shamsi drone base, the headquarters of the CIA’s Pakistan drone operations. This is risky work as well. On Sept. 8, two suicide bombers killed 23 people at the home of Farrukh Shahzad, the deputy commander of the Baluchistan Frontier Corps that captured Mauritani.
Within the ISI, America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. U.S. officials say their hope was that the T Wing, which conducted Mauritani’s interrogation, might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to the same officials, America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners.
Over the past 10 years, Pakistan has received more than $20 billion in public U.S. funding for military and economic assistance. Washington’s secret subsidy of Pakistan’s intelligence and military could be much higher. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called attention to the CIA’s extensive secret funding during a recent Republican debate. “The money that we are spending right now is primarily intelligence money to Pakistan,” she declared. “It is helping the United States. Whatever our action is, it must ultimately be about helping the United States and our sovereignty, our safety, and our security.”
That’s not as easy as it may sound. It’s been necessary to pick and choose which elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus America should engage with, says Mark Lowenthal, a former House Intelligence Committee staff director and former CIA assistant director for analysis. “We do this because of the nature of the Pakistani state,” he says. “If it was a coherent government, then when we made a deal with the president or the prime minister, you would know as the orders come down the line they would be obeyed.” Nevertheless, he says, “That is not the nature of Pakistan. You have all these competing power centers. We are not doing this because we are trying to be too clever by half, we are doing this because this is the nature of the state we are dealing with.”
The death of two dozen Pakistani soldiers has made that challenge tougher than ever. “As bad as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is now, it’s only likely to get worse,” says Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA official and one of the co-authors of President Obama’s initial Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. So far, however, no one on either side knows what else to do but keep on.
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