The Eleventh Day

figures in the ISI. ISI recruits for the fight in Kashmir were trained in bin Laden camps. Bin Laden would still be saying, as late as 2000, “Whatever Pakistan does in the matter of Kashmir, we support it.”

Such action and talk paid off in ways large and small. The ISI at one time even reportedly installed the security system that protected bin Laden in one of the houses he used in Afghanistan.

The tracks of the ISI and al Qaeda converged in other ways. Months after the Taliban had begun hosting bin Laden in 1996, they had been, as Time magazine put it, “shoehorned into power” by the ISI—thus ensuring Pakistan’s influence over most of Afghanistan. The need to keep things that way, and to fend off rebellion on its own border, a Pakistani official told the State Department in 2000, meant that his government would “always” support the Taliban.

So powerful was the ISI in Afghanistan, former U.S. special envoy Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 Commission, that the Taliban “actually were the junior partners in an unholy alliance”—ISI, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. As it grew in influence, the ISI liaised closely with Saudi intelligence—and the Saudis reportedly lined the pockets of senior Pakistani officers with additional cash.

The ISI over the years achieved not only military muscle but massive political influence within Pakistan itself—so much so that some came to characterize it as “the most influential body in Pakistan,” a “shadow government.”

The United States, caught between the constraints of regional power politics and the growing need to deal with bin Laden and al Qaeda, long remained impotent.

By the late nineties, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Thomas Simons has recalled, American efforts to bring pressure on the Pakistanis and the Taliban over bin Laden resulted only in “a sense of helplessness.” Concern about the tensions between India and Pakistan loomed larger at the State Department than Islamic extremism—not least after both those nations tested nuclear weapons.

In 1999, then–Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif held out the possibility of working with the CIA to mount a commando operation to capture or kill bin Laden. Nothing came of it, the National Security Agency reported, because the plan was compromised by the ISI. In early 2000, though, after General Pervez Musharraf seized power, Washington made a serious effort to ratchet up the pressure.

President Clinton insisted on making a visit to Islamabad, the first by an American head of state in more than thirty years. He did so in spite of CIA and Secret Service warnings that a trip to Pakistan would endanger his life. Air Force One arrived without him, as a decoy, while he flew in aboard an unmarked jet. At a private meeting with Musharraf, Clinton recalled, he offered the Pakistani leader “the moon … in terms of better relations with the United States, if he’d help us get bin Laden.” Nothing significant came of it. Clinton had avoided pushing too hard about bin Laden at an earlier meeting—because ISI members were in the room.

The following month, when then–ISI director General Mahmoud Ahmed was in Washington, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering warned that “people who support those people [bin Laden and al Qaeda] will be treated as our enemies.” Later, at Pakistan’s interior ministry, Pickering confronted a senior Taliban official with evidence of bin Laden’s role in the embassy bombings in East Africa. The official said the evidence was “not persuasive.”

About this same time, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Sheehan suggested giving Pakistan an ultimatum: Work with the United States to capture bin Laden or face a cutoff of vital financial aid. Fears of the possible consequences—that Pakistan might opt out of talks to ensure that it did not share its nuclear know-how with rogue nations—loomed larger than concerns about terrorism. Sheehan’s idea went nowhere.

Come early 2001, the start of the Bush presidency, and his warning memo to Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke stressed how important it was to have Pakistan’s cooperation. He noted, though, that General Musharraf had spoken of “influential radical elements that would oppose significant Pakistani measures against al Qaeda.” Musharraf had cautioned, too, that the United States should not violate Pakistani airspace when launching strikes within Afghanistan.

Nothing effective was achieved by the Bush administration. At the CIA, director Tenet sensed a “loss of urgency.” It had been obvious for years, he wrote later, that “it would be almost impossible to root out al Qaeda” without Pakistan’s help. The Pakistanis, moreover, “always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative.” “We never did the Full Monty with them,” another former senior CIA official has said. “We don’t trust them.… There is always this little dance with them.”

On September 11, however, the dancing and the diplomatic dithering stopped. While no hard evidence would emerge that Pakistan had any foreknowledge of the attacks—let alone an actual role in the plot—Washington now issued a blunt warning. It was then—according to ISI director Ahmed, who was visiting Washington at the time— that U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage said the United States would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” should it now fail to go along with seven specific American demands for assistance.

Musharraf weighed up the likely consequences of failure to comply, not the least of them the fact that the U.S. military could pulverize his forces. With a couple of reservations—he says he could not accept the U.S. demands for blanket rights to overfly Pakistan and have the use of all its air bases and port facilities—he cooperated as required. “We have done more than any other country,” the former president has said, “to capture and kill members of al Qaeda, and to destroy its infrastructure in our cities and mountains.” Musharraf’s administration indeed cracked down on extremism, at a terrible cost in human life that persists to this day. In one year alone, 2009, 3,021 Pakistanis died in retaliatory terrorist attacks—approximately the same number as the American dead of 9/11. Musharraf’s army thrust into the tribal badlands near the Afghan border, and some 700 purported al Qaeda operatives were rounded up across Pakistan. As of 2006, according to Musharraf, 369 of them had been handed over to the United States—for millions of dollars in bounty money paid by the CIA.

The former CIA station chief in Islamabad, Robert Grenier, recently confirmed that Pakistani cooperation against al Qaeda did improve vastly after 9/11. The arrests of the three best-known top al Qaeda operatives—Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—were, it seems, made by Pakistani intelligence agents and police, in some if not all cases working in collaboration with the Agency.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was involved in operations on the ground in Pakistan during the relevant period, told the authors that this statement by Musharraf was “generally accurate.” He said, however: “The truth is, we allowed the Pakistanis to believe they were taking the lead. Certainly they were the first through the door, but on those high-profile captures we never told them who the target was. We were afraid they would leak the information to al Qaeda and the target would escape. The information leading to the captures was a hundred percent CIA information. The Pakistanis had no role in the intelligence.”

The biggest name of all, of course, long eluded pursuit. Last on the list of Washington’s post-9/11 demands, as Musharraf recalled it, had been to help “destroy bin Laden.” “We have done everything possible to track down Osama bin Laden,” Musharraf wrote in 2006, “but he has evaded us.”

No one, according to Musharraf, had been more anxious than the Pakistanis to resolve the mystery of bin Laden’s whereabouts. As the months and years passed, however, there were those who believed otherwise.

FROM THE TIME America routed al Qaeda after 9/11, information indicated that the ISI continued to remain in touch with bin Laden or aware of his location. ISI officials, former special envoy Tomsen told the 9/11 Commission, were “still visiting OBL [bin Laden] as late as December 2001”—and continued to know his location thereafter. In 2007 Kathleen McFarland, a former senior Defense Department official, spoke of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan as a fact. “I’m convinced,” military historian Stephen Tanner told CNN in 2010, “that he is protected by the ISI. I just think it’s impossible after all this time to not know where he is.”

Why would the ISI have allowed bin Laden to enjoy safe haven in Pakistan? The ISI, Tanner thought, would see him as a trump card—leverage over the United States in the power play involved in Pakistan’s ongoing dispute with India.

It went deeper, and further back than that. “You in the West,” the veteran London Sunday Times reporter Christina Lamb has recalled former ISI head General Gul telling her twenty years ago, “think you can use these fundamentalists and abandon them, but it will come back to haunt you.” It was clear to Lamb that “For Gul and his ilk, support for the fundamentalist Afghan groups, and later the Taliban, was not just policy but also ideology.” In spite of the vast sums in U.S. aid doled out to Pakistan, a 2010 poll suggested that a majority of Pakistanis viewed the United States as an enemy.

There was special suspicion of the S Section of the ISI, which is made up of personnel who are officially retired but front for certain ISI operations. S Section, The New York Times has quoted former CIA officials as saying, has been “seen as particularly close to militants.”