Double Game

By Patrick Cockburn

In December 2006, Carlotta Gall visited Quetta in Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan, to trace the
families of Taliban suicide bombers. Her investigations were not welcome to the powerful Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), the main intelligence arm of the Pakistan military, which was determined to hide its close
relations with the Taliban. Plainclothes intelligence agents smashed open the door of her hotel room and
seized her notebooks, computer and cellphone. She protested when one of the agents grabbed her handbag,
and he promptly punched her twice in the face, knocking her down. The officer in charge accused her of trying
to interview Taliban members, which he said was forbidden. She learned later that her rough treatment had
been ordered by the head of the ISI press department to discourage her from reporting ISI-Taliban links.

It is these links that are the central subject of this highly informed book by Gall, who was Afghanistan bureau
chief and correspondent for The New York Times between 2001 and 2011. The title of “The Wrong Enemy”
is a quotation from Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States special representative to Afghanistan and
Pakistan, who said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.” He was suggesting that
America’s real opponent was the ISI and the Pakistan Army.

This is not a new thesis. For all the efforts of the ISI to hide Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, some of it
was too blatant and large-scale to be concealed. In November 2001, the sudden collapse of the Taliban in
northern Afghanistan under the weight of American air attacks backed by local militiamen left thousands of
Pakistanis trapped with the Taliban in the town of Kunduz. For about 15 days, one or two Pakistani flights a
day rescued Pakistani military advisers, specialists, trainers and ISI members. Equally revealing about the
ISI’s continuing connection to Al Qaeda was the discovery 10 years later that Osama bin Laden was a long-
term resident of Abbottabad with a house close to the Kakul Military Academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West
Point. Gall makes clear the absurdity of imagining that nobody in the ISI, one of the most powerful and
suspicious intelligence services in the world, knew he was there. She quotes Ejaz Shah, a former Pakistani
domestic intelligence chief, as saying: “In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog.”

What makes Gall’s book so convincing is the way in which her long experience of Afghanistan and Pakistan
enables her to marshal the evidence for the Pakistan military being in control of the Taliban. Demonstrating
a connection between the two is easy enough, but proof that the Taliban are essentially under orders from the
ISI is more difficult, not least because Pakistani intelligence has operated through proxies and witnesses who
are either too frightened to speak or are dead. The assault on Gall in 2006 was nothing compared with the
punishment Pakistani journalists commonly receive for similar inquiries. “Saleem Shahzad, who wrote
extensively about militancy and the ISI, was found dead in 2012 after being detained by intelligence agency
personnel,” she says. “He was killed on the orders of Pakistan’s most senior generals.”

At times Gall may seem to labor the point about how Pakistan has masterminded the insurgency in
Afghanistan since 2001, but it needs all the laboring it can get because Pakistan’s covert role was and is so
central to developments there. It was never adequately realized in Washington that without confronting
Pakistan, the American intervention in Afghanistan could not succeed. Gall writes that “for years American
officials failed to recognize the huge investment in time, money and military effort that Pakistan had put into
the Taliban from 1994 to 2001.” This changed for a couple of years after 9/11, but the Pakistani security and
military establishment was still determined to dominate Afghanistan.

The United States never faced up to the fact that its most powerful ally in the region was also its most powerful
enemy. As a result, it fought a war that it could never win in which Gall estimates between 50,000 and 70,000
Afghans have died, as well as 3,400 foreign soldiers, including 2,300 Americans. Between 2001 and 2013
Pakistan received more than $20 billion in aid from Washington, most of which went to the military.
The refusal of the Bush and Obama administrations to treat Pakistan as anything but a loyal ally in the war on
terror seems as extraordinary in retrospect as it did at the time. Gall writes that “support for the relationship
with Pakistan became a mantra” for American officials. They made only low-key demands for Pakistan to do
something about cross-border infiltration. And only in 2007 did the United States begin keeping tabs on the
links between the ISI and the Taliban; previously the C.I.A. had concentrated wholly on Al Qaeda. But by
then religious schools in Pakistan were a common starting point for suicide bombers. When Gall asked the
brother of a Pakistani bomber if he blamed the Taliban or the ISI for the bombings, he said: “All Taliban are
ISI Taliban. It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the ISI.” A former Taliban commander,
who had fled to Pakistan after being arrested in Afghanistan, said that ISI agents had threatened to send him
to prison unless he returned to fight Americans.

Did American officials really underestimate Pakistani involvement or did they simply believe there was
nothing much they could do about it? Pakistan calculated correctly that as the American Army became bogged
down in a guerrilla war in Iraq, it would be unable to conduct a second counterinsurgency campaign in
Afghanistan. In 2004 Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, considered the ablest Pakistani general by Western
diplomats, became head of the ISI and three years later chief of army staff. Gall notes that it was during his
tenure that “the Taliban received consistent protection and assistance from Pakistan, and came to threaten the
entire U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.”

A reason for Western ignorance or self-deception was that Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan was largely
invisible or unprovable. By way of contrast, the failings of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and the Afghan
government were glaring and demonstrable. Corruption was pervasive, as shown by the gargantuan fraud at
Kabul Bank and, at another level, by the deployment of nonexistent policemen whose pay was pocketed by
their commanders. There was a vacuum of authority in Afghanistan that the Taliban were quick to fill.

The presence of a heavily armed foreign occupation army exacerbated the problem, and Gall gives vivid
accounts of wedding parties torn apart by American airstrikes. Still, on the future of Afghanistan, she is (with
reservations) unexpectedly optimistic. The Afghan government is not inevitably going to collapse as foreign
troops depart, she says, because a majority of Afghans detest the Taliban, even if they are often too frightened
to say so. All the same, she admits that the United States and its allies leave Afghanistan much as they found
it, with “a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists.”