weapon, an act that would drastically escalate tensions in the region — and the world.
In an effort to persuade the Pakistanis not to test, the State Department planned to send Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot and the Assistant Secretary for the region, Rick Inderfer, to meet Prime Minister Sharif and the senior Pakistani leadership. I was to accompany them.
The mission was not going to be easy. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan were already tense. The Pakistanis had backed our efforts in Afghanistan during the Afghan rebellion against the Soviets; there were now a large number of refugees — and a state of chaos — on their western border as a result; and we had (in their view) dumped them.
Their bitterness had increased when we imposed sanctions over their WMD program. Specifically, we had refused to deliver F-16s they had bought and paid for, or even to return their money; and then we’d deducted storage fees for the planes from what they had paid. No surprise: They were enraged. (The anger was compounded after many pilots flying older planes were lost, which wouldn’t have happened if they’d had the F-16s.)
Our treatment of Pakistan was working against our interest. This was a state on the edge; the government was shaky and badly corrupt; and politically powerful Islamists inflamed the population. If Pakistan failed, or turned into an Iranian- or Afghan-style theocracy, we would have major problems in the region… and beyond. We did not want nuclear-armed Islamist radicals. Then or now.
The delegation flew to Tampa to join me on the twenty-two-hour flight to Islamabad. As we prepared to board the CENTCOM 707, word came that the Pakistani government had decided not to approve the visit. This triggered a flurry of diplomatic calls from the waiting room at our air base… made more urgent by the approach of our drop-dead takeoff time. If we didn’t get in the air within two hours, our crew time would run out.
When the calls kept getting negative results, I decided to propose to Secretary Talbot a back-channel approach. If I called General Jehangir Karamat, the chief of staff of the Pakistan military, I thought he would okay the trip. Karamat was a man of great honor and integrity, and a friend. Relations with Pakistan hung on the thin thread of a personal relationship that General Karamat and I agreed to maintain.
“Go ahead,” the Secretary told me, though his face was skeptical.
But when I called General Karamat, he promised to take care of the problem; and a few minutes later we were in the air… further proof, if the Secretary needed it, that the relationship between our two militaries remained strong, in spite of the strained relationships elsewhere. Though Washington had severely limited the military-to- military connections I could make, I had insisted on maintaining that personal connection to General Karamat.
In Pakistan, we met several times with Prime Minister Sharif and his ministers, but were unable to convince them not to test. The domestic pressure to respond to the Indian tests was too great.
As we left, I had a few private moments with General Karamat, who shared with me his frustration with his corrupt government. Pakistan’s military leaders had more than once seized power from the elected government. Though others in the military had urged him to follow that tradition, he assured me he could never do that. He kept his word; but that did not stop a military coup later that year.
In mid-May, shooting incidents in Badime, a disputed border area between Ethiopia and Eritrea, had caused the Eritreans to attack in force and seize the area. The Ethiopians were mobilizing for a counterattack.
On the eighteenth, I called General Tsadkan, to get his take on the situation. According to my Ethiopian friend, his old friend General Shebat had been visiting him to celebrate the belated graduation of his wife from college (after leaving college decades before to join the political struggle, she had finally returned to complete her degree). According to Tsadkan, Shebat had abruptly walked out of the celebration; and the attack had come the next day. It was a stab in the back. He was predictably outraged.
Needless to say, when I called General Shebat on the twentieth, he gave me a different version of these events. He claimed the attack had come in response to a series of violent incidents staged by the Ethiopians.
Wherever the truth lay, it was tragic that these two old friends, who had suffered so much side by side, couldn’t work out this quarrel peacefully.
As tensions worsened, Susan Rice, the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, asked me to intervene; and she and I worked together to try calm everybody down… but with no success. Over the next months, the crisis grew to critical mass and exploded. All we could do in response was plan a precautionary Non- combatant Evacuation Operation.
Happily, many of our relationships in the region were actually improving — some after years of conflict. One of the more notable turnarounds came from Yemen. After years of civil war had devastated the country, the nation was now united. But a stupid decision to support Iraq during the Gulf War had soured relations with the U.S. Earlier that year, however, Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, had sent word that he was looking to mend fences and begin a cooperative military-to-military relationship with the U.S. This was good news. Yemen was a strategically vital country in serious danger of becoming a failed state. Helping Yemen was critical to our security interests in the region.
I visited Yemen on May 22, spending several days with President Saleh and his ministers. Because he had no ability to control his borders and coast, or to effectively act against the terrorist groups who freely transited the country and used it as a base, Saleh desperately needed help in training his counterterrorist forces. And of course, he desperately needed a Coast Guard.
I added several other Security Assistance programs to his wish list, as well as an intelligence-sharing program.
Again, these actions brought forth little support from Washington. I was nevertheless determined to build this relationship. It was in the region’s, and our own, security interests.
While I was in Yemen, I toured the port of Aden, where new construction and refueling sites were being examined by our naval component as a potential replacement for the refueling stop at Djibouti, where there were significant security problems. I liked what I saw. The refueling site was away from any piers; the actual refueling could be accomplished out in the harbor at a secure distance from sea traffic; and initial reports from the DOD experts about fuel quality and quantity were encouraging.
In July, we received two notable visitors at CENTCOM headquarters — Prince Abdullah of Jordan and General Altynbayev, the Kazakhstan Minister of Defense.
A bright, vibrant young leader with innovative ideas, Abdullah was at that time the head of the Jordanian Special Forces. Inevitably, our conversation turned to the failing health of his father, King Hussein, who had long been fighting cancer. The cancer was worsening; it was clear the king would soon be dead.
For many years, Hussein’s brother had been designated as next in line to the throne; but that was soon to change. Though the king was about to change his pick to Abdullah, the prince had had no indication of that. It was a splendid choice. He has proved to be one of the most enlightened leaders in his part of the world.
General Altynbayev was the first Central Asian official I had met since the five former Soviet states were assigned to the CENTCOM AOR. As he and I talked, I quickly realized that these states were going to pose very different problems from the other subregions of our AOR — problems that were more related to their former rule by Moscow than to their religion or ethnicity (though these issues were also very much present). I looked forward to a visit to the Stans later that year.
At the end of July, on another trip to Pakistan, I visited some of the more remote and rugged parts of the country — the Line of Control Area of Kashmir and the nearby Siachen glacier, and the fabled Khyber Pass on the western border with Afghanistan. In these wild mountains, Pakistani and Indian troops had faced off against each other for decades at altitudes in excess of twenty thousand feet. If the fighting didn’t kill you, the weather and altitude did. To my surprise, the two countries had, for the most part, succeeded in containing the fighting to this dangerous and volatile, yet well-defined, area. But that “happy” situation was going to change in a matter of months.
At the Khyber Pass, I gained a greater understanding of Pakistan’s rugged western border with Afghanistan- remote hostile tribes, a territory not fully subject to Pakistani law or control, and a truly tough mountainous terrain. By then, I had a solid sense of how the ruinous rule of the Taliban was destroying that country and the sanctuary they provided extremists like Al Qaeda presented a growing and exceptionally dangerous threat.
