War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan Farrow
do you want to be able to get what we can provide? Then this is something you’re going to have to pay attention to …’ They were kind of looking at you out of the side of their eye saying, you know, ‘We’ll play along with this joke but let’s not forget it is a joke.’” He laughed again. I have never seen anyone laugh so much during a conversation about extrajudicial killings.
The region’s counterterrorism imperatives and Pakistan’s nuclear capacity conspired to strip the United States of its power. “No matter how much you would bitch about what they were doing, and the games they were playing, and the difficulty in the relationship, the bottom line was, you were dealing with a nuclear-powered country,” Panetta recalled. “As a result of that, there was always the danger that if you got on their wrong side, either because of their own carelessness or just the way they operated … that at some point a terrorist group would get their hands on one of these weapons,” he added. “You were always walking on glass when you were dealing with the Pakistanis.”
And so, the dynamics of the relationship remained unaltered. Bald-faced lies were its bedrock—and within the confines of counterterrorism cooperation, those lies were tolerated, or even encouraged. The entire strategy of drone strikes used to take out al-Qaeda leadership was premised on a mutual understanding that the Pakistanis would lie to their people out of political necessity. The culture of deception in the relationship sometimes felt impossible to roll back. “It was a hard place to get your head around,” Ambassador Anne Patterson later told me in her subdued Southern drawl. “It was so weird. It was just downright nonlinear.”
The typical rhythm of the relationship went something like this: the ISI would plant negative items about the US in the Pakistani media, including conspiracy theories about Indian operatives in Congress or the White House. The stories whipped up a frenzy of anti-American sentiment. Then the ISI would come back to the Americans and insist that public opinion prevented them from changing their approach to terrorist safe havens, or to supporting Islamist militias. “Which is actually true,” Patterson reflected. “But it’s public opinion that they themselves have generated.” Patterson had a frank, straightforward manner and was one of the few diplomats to try to confront the layers of deception head on. In one meeting, she told Zardari: “I come here, Mr. President, and talk to you, and then there’s a press release and it says something we never even talked about.” He looked at Patterson like she’d lost her mind and said, “Well you really wouldn’t want us to put out what we actually talked about!” A similar cycle was repeated in other hot spots where the United States relied on difficult foreign militaries, like Egypt.
Panetta said that after his meetings with General Pasha and the ISI, colleagues would often remark, “You do understand he’s lying?” Panetta did. “Oh yeah, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know … You had a pretty good sense … people often asked me why our operations were classified—the reason they were classified is because the Pakistanis wanted them to be classified so that they would never have to acknowledge what was happening!” Panetta was laughing again. General Pasha, in his curiously millennial manner, declined to respond to Panetta’s comments. “Sorry Ronan. I am not in it. Let Leon have his say!!!!”
ACCEPTING PAKISTAN’S DOUBLE GAME supposedly safeguarded cooperation, but even at a tactical level, the relationship could be fraught—sometimes for both sides. One Pakistani army commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he now serves in a more prominent position in the military, told me that joint operations were rife with deadly miscommunication. He’d lived through one such operation when he was an infantry commander during the initial series of failed counterterrorism efforts in Swat valley in early 2009. It was still winter, and the air in the mountainous valley was freezing. He was leading his unit of thirty-five men through the difficult terrain, pursuing a “very important” terrorist target chosen by the Americans. (How important, he never learned. “When you’re operating in the field, commanding a unit, you do not have the ability to figure out if it is a high-value target,” the commander reflected. “You’re just concerned about taking him out before he takes me out.”) Overhead, he could see American drones shadowing him. “Very few people know that we had a US technical team with us, that would have a certain control of Predator drones, flying overhead,” he said. “Of course with the consent of Pakistan.”
One such American technical team was some distance away from the combat operations in Swat, monitoring through the drones. The Americans’ presence was a matter of strict secrecy. Even the men in the commander’s own unit weren’t informed of the specifics. But the commander had an open line of radio communication with American officers, and was told Predator strikes could be called in as a force multiplier.
According to the commander, on the first night of the operation, his unit closed in on its target, only to watch him escape into a “hostile zone” they had been ordered against entering. The commander radioed the coordinates to the Americans. The drones had been in close proximity for hours. But no strike came.
The following night, another unit, operating about thirty-five miles away, had a similar encounter with a target, and called in a strike. This time, it came—targeting not the terrorists they were pursuing, but the Pakistani unit itself. “Our own soldiers,” he told me, planting a fist on the table in front of him, “We lost thirty-one of our men. And it was attributed to operator error … We never called for a drone strike ever again.” The Pakistanis told the American technical team they wouldn’t cooperate; less than two weeks later, the Americans left.
The story reflected a sentiment that came up often in conversations with Pakistani military brass. “There was an absence of sincerity,” the commander said, born of the narrow scope of the relationship and lack of communication. He found it galling how little the Americans seemed to share about the overarching goals of the operations for which he was risking his life. “The United States has never shared with us, in formal terms, its end state in Afghanistan,” he grumbled. “That is the classic example of strategic interaction between the United States and Pakistan. We have been working on the operative issues. We have not been talking about the grand strategic issues that the two nations should be talking to each other about.” Another Pakistani military official who was present while we spoke nodded vigorously. “Nobody is asking questions of what makes Pakistan do what it does,” that second official added.
OPINIONS VARIED as to whether the compromises of the relationship were worth it. Anne Patterson was of the opinion that “we had an extraordinary degree of cooperation with ISI on some of these CT issues, really very unique in the world,” a sentiment echoed by many other State, Pentagon, and intelligence officials. On the other hand, just as many had serious misgivings. Petraeus, reflecting on his time as CIA director, told me “ISI was not one of the greatest sources of intel … the bottom line is that there was a very transactional relationship.”
That debate was pressurized each time deficiencies in Pakistan’s counterterrorism cooperation were revealed. When a terrorist narrowly failed to detonate a truck bomb in Times Square in 2010, the FBI learned that the culprit, a thirty-three-year-old Pakistani-American named Faisal Shahzad, had trained in one of Pakistan’s terrorist safe havens in Waziristan. They quickly realized that the ISI had done nothing to alert them of the threat. Furious White House officials dressed down the Pakistanis and demanded that they share more intelligence, including passenger data from flights out of Pakistan, and that they stop holding up visas for Americans. In a characteristic show of cognitive dissonance, the Pakistanis insisted they were already sharing everything, then refused to hand over the flight data.
The blocking of visas was a particular point of difficulty. When I arrived at State in 2009, the Pakistanis