http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/060327roco02?print=true
McGary sits down on a rock under an apple tree and tells Mike to gather the village men around him. As usual, McGary lets a moment pass, and then another, and then he begins to speak. “My name is Captain McGary. I’m the coalition commander in Daychopan District,” he begins quietly. Mike translates every few sentences. “And for all you hardworking honest men here, I apologize for what happened this morning; it brings me no pleasure to pull you from your beds in the morning. But unfortunately as we drove in here to check on your village the enemy blew up one of our trucks, so our mission of peace and help became a mission of war. I apologize for bringing war to your valley.”
The men sit cross-legged on the grass, rapt.
“Your government has sent me food and supplies to feed this valley for five years. It sits in Baylough, but I can’t get it here, because they shoot at us. Do they not want you to eat? I can bring the food here, but I need you to talk to these men in the mountains. Ask them what they fight for—why? If they want us to leave Afghanistan, the fastest way is to stop fighting. Believe me, we’re ready to go home. I have a four-year-old son, and he asked me if he can go to Afghanistan sometime. I want to bring him here to see a strong Afghanistan, all the tribes united under Islamic law. That’s what’s in my heart. So please, if you see those men in the mountains, tell them what’s in my heart.”
McGary takes off his helmet and puts it on the ground next to him. “The men in the mountains are getting paid by Pakistan,” he says. Mike translates; heads nod. “Pakistan wants to see Afghanistan remain weak. So fight for Afghanistan and don’t be a puppet of Pakistan!”
If you want to make an American intelligence officer blanch, ask him whether the Pakistani military is supporting the Taliban. Officers like McGary seem willing to talk about it all day long—it’s their men who are dying, after all—but intelligence officers inhabit that awkward world where politics and war intersect, and the wrong question can literally set them to stammering.
On the one hand, Washington considers Pakistan a staunch American ally in the War on Terror, and for a mid-level intelligence officer to suggest otherwise would be professional suicide. On the other hand, suspicions about Pakistani involvement in the Taliban are so commonplace that a blanket denial would almost serve to confirm that it is true. When the topic comes up, American intelligence officers invariably slip into a question-and-answer format that seems intended to impart a message of reasonableness: “Do Pakistanis slip across the border to join the Taliban? Of course. Is the government of Pakistan aware of this? Undoubtedly. But can they put a stop to it … ?”
Pakistan’s relationship with militant groups in Afghanistan goes back to the early 80s, when the C.I.A. went through Pakistani intelligence to funnel $2 billion to $3 billion in weapons and cash to mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet Army. It was up to the ISI, as the Pakistani intelligence service is known, to decide which commanders would receive the aid, and they invariably chose Islamic radicals, who could be counted on to fight not only the Russians but also the Indian Army in the disputed region of Kashmir. In addition, the Pakistani government fostered the creation of thousands of religious schools, called madrassas, which were strung along the Afghan border like coils of razor wire. The most extreme of these madrassas indoctrinated tens of thousands of young Afghans and Pakistanis with radical Islam, and it was in these theological furnaces that the Taliban militias were forged.
A cooperative Taliban regime in Kabul was part of Pakistan’s plan to build “strategic depth” in the region, but unfortunately Osama bin Laden became part of that plan as well, and after 9/11, Pakistan watched in dismay as the United States bombed their wayward creation out of existence. Surviving Taliban and al-Qaeda forces fled across the border into Pakistan and sought refuge in the supposedly “lawless” tribal areas along the Afghan border. Their presence in his country forced Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to make a choice: he could either round up all the Taliban and al-Qaeda elements and provoke the ire of religious extremists at home or leave them alone and provoke the ire of the United States. In a brilliant move, he decided to do both.
Every few months, it seems, the ISI catches some al-Qaeda figure—Ramzi bin al Shibh, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah—and hands him over to the United States. These operations don’t cost Musharraf much politically, because the foreign jihadists are not particularly beloved in Pakistan. In return, the ISI seems to receive some degree of indulgence from the United States when it comes to the Taliban. Since 9/11, not a single mid- or high-ranking commander of the Taliban has been turned over to the United States. The official explanation for this—one repeated by both Washington and Islamabad—is that the Pakistani military is simply not powerful enough to control the scattered Pashtun tribes of the border area where the Taliban are located. And if they did attempt it, President Musharraf would be quickly toppled by an uprising of Islamic radicals.
This vision of a Pakistan teetering on the brink of anarchy simply doesn’t square with reality, however. In recent parliamentary elections, no candidate, including Islamic radicals, got more than 11 percent of the vote—hardly a threat to a military dictator. And the Pakistani military is configured to repulse a land invasion from India that would involve airpower, armored divisions, and hundreds of thousands of men; the idea that they cannot control Pashtun tribal areas that start a few hours’ drive from Islamabad is laughable. And even if that were true, Taliban commanders are hardly hiding in caves up in the mountains; they live in villas in the suburbs of Quetta. They use cell phones, they drive cars, they go to mosques—they are easy to find, in other words. The Pakistani government is simply choosing not to.
Meanwhile, an average of nearly two American soldiers now die every week in Afghanistan—proportionally almost the same casualty rate as in Iraq, where there are seven times as many troops. They are being killed by Taliban fighters who are recruited, financed, and trained in Pakistan and whose commanders have ongoing relationships with elements of the Pakistani military. To put this in context, consider that in 1983 Hezbollah agents with links to the Iranian government drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, and killed 241 servicemen. Now imagine that same scenario but with Iran as an American ally rather than as her sworn enemy. You have just imagined the current situation with Pakistan.
“The cost of not pressuring Pakistan is that it really hurts our efforts in Afghanistan, and in my view the security environment is moving in the wrong direction,” says Seth Jones, a Rand Corporation analyst who advises the U.S. government on Afghanistan. “If you look at the number of insurgent attacks, in the proliferation of I.E.D.'s, in their sophistication, in the use of suicide attacks, it’s very clear to me that not only is the insurgency not being defeated, but in many ways it’s increasingly able to cause violence.”
If I had had any doubts about the depth of Pakistan’s role in the resurgent Taliban, those were gone by the time I left Afghanistan. In a situation that I can say almost nothing about because of risks to the people involved, I was able to interview a former member of the Taliban government who said that after 9/11 he was recruited by the Pakistani military to fight the Americans. He says that he turned the job down, but that the Taliban still consider him to be “one of them.” Since then, Afghan intelligence has looked into his claims and decided that he was, in fact, telling me the truth when we met. They believe he did not approach American intelligence agents with his information out of fear that they would just send him to Guantánamo.
Not only is the Pakistani military allowing the Taliban to operate freely in Pakistani territory, this man said, but they themselves are training some of the Taliban recruits. He gave me the name, home address, phone numbers, and code name of the ISI major who had tried to recruit him after 9/11. (“You can tell his house because of the razor wire around the wall,” he said about the man’s residence, on a certain street in Quetta.) He also gave me the name and phone number of another ISI agent, who brings recruits from a certain region of Afghanistan and places them in training camps in western Pakistan, then sends them back across the border to fight. Then he gave me the names of 10 Afghans who are currently part of a larger group working for the ISI as a sort of government-in-exile. (In February, President Karzai submitted a similar list of known Taliban leaders—many with addresses—to the Pakistani government, demanding that they be arrested.) He said that bin Laden was not working closely with the ISI, but neither were they entirely separate. Then he made this surprising claim: “However much money Pakistan is taking from the United States to catch bin Laden, they are also taking from bin Laden to not capture him.”
I had only about half an hour with this man, and most of it I spent just scribbling down names and addresses. I did notice something odd about him, though. The whole time we were talking he never once looked at me; he just stared straight ahead while his hands worked through his prayer beads.