- Late last month, President Bush lost his greatest advantage
in his bid for reelection. A poll conducted by ABC News and The Washington
Post discovered that challenger John Kerry was running even with the president
on the critical question of whom voters trust to handle the war on terrorism.
Largely as a result of the deteriorating occupation of Iraq, Bush lost
what was, in April, a seemingly prohibitive 21-point advantage on his signature
issue. But, even as the president's poll numbers were sliding, his administration
was implementing a plan to insure the public's confidence in his hunt for
Al Qaeda.
-
- This spring, the administration significantly increased
its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy,
Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are
believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession
of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet
to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina
Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA
South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General
Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April,
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided
the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban
forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved
and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.
-
- This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable,
had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the
Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go
to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared
the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and
actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value
targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election,"
says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic
has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must
produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really
desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the
latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming]
U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is
a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to
a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]"
were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently
bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one
from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal
security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing
the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when
they are facing hard times in the coming elections." (These sources
insisted on remaining anonymous. Under Pakistan's Official Secrets Act,
an official leaking information to the press can be imprisoned for up to
ten years.)
-
- A third source, an official who works under ISI's director,
Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have
been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the]
election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that
Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they
have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten
days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad
and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm
aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White
House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest
or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or
twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National
Convention in Boston.
-
-
-
- The Bush administration has matched this public and private
pressure with enticements and implicit threats. During his March visit
to Islamabad, Powell designated Pakistan a major non-nato ally, a status
that allows its military to purchase a wider array of U.S. weaponry. Powell
pointedly refused to criticize Musharraf for pardoning nuclear physicist
A.Q. Khan--who, the previous month, had admitted exporting nuclear secrets
to Iran, North Korea, and Libya--declaring Khan's transgressions an "internal"
Pakistani issue. In addition, the administration is pushing a five-year,
$3 billion aid package for Pakistan through Congress over Democratic concerns
about the country's proliferation of nuclear technology and lack of democratic
reform.
-
- But Powell conspicuously did not commit the United States
to selling F-16s to Pakistan, which it desperately wants in order to tilt
the regional balance of power against India. And the Pakistanis fear that,
if they don't produce an HVT, they won't get the planes. Equally, they
fear that, if they don't deliver, either Bush or a prospective Kerry administration
would turn its attention to the apparent role of Pakistan's security establishment
in facilitating Khan's illicit proliferation network. One Pakistani general
recently in Washington confided in a journalist, "If we don't find
these guys by the election, they are going to stick this whole nuclear
mess up our asshole."
-
- Pakistani perceptions of U.S. politics reinforce these
worries. "In Pakistan, there has been a folk belief that, whenever
there's a Republican administration in office, relations with Pakistan
have been very good," says Khalid Hasan, a U.S. correspondent for
the Lahore-based Daily Times. By contrast, there's also a "folk belief
that the Democrats are always pro-India." Recent history has validated
those beliefs. The Clinton administration inherited close ties to Pakistan,
forged a decade earlier in collaboration against the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. But, by the time Clinton left office, the United States had
tilted toward India, and Pakistan was under U.S. sanctions for its nuclear
activities. All this has given Musharraf reason not just to respond to
pressure from Bush, but to feel invested in him--and to worry that Kerry,
who called the Khan affair a "disaster," and who has proposed
tough new curbs on nuclear proliferation, would adopt an icier line.
-
- Bush's strategy could work. In large part because of
the increased U.S. pressure, Musharraf has, over the last several months,
significantly increased military activity in the tribal areas--regions
that enjoy considerable autonomy from Islamabad and where, until Musharraf
sided with the United States in the war on terrorism, Pakistani soldiers
had never set foot in the nation's 50-year history. Thousands of Pakistani
troops fought a pitched battle in late March against tribesmen and their
Al Qaeda affiliates in South Waziristan in hopes of capturing Zawahiri.
The fighting escalated significantly in June. Attacks on army camps in
the tribal areas brought fierce retaliation, leaving over 100 tribal and
foreign militants and Pakistani soldiers dead in three days. Last month,
Pakistan killed a powerful Waziristan warlord and Qaeda ally, Nek Mohammed,
in a dramatic rocket attack that villagers said bore American fingerprints.
(They claim a U.S. spy plane had been circling overhead.) Through these
efforts, the Pakistanis could bring in bin Laden, Mullah Omar, or Zawahiri--a
significant victory in the war on terrorism that would bolster Bush's reputation
among voters.
-
- But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American
officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into
the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American
high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains
against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually
capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has
a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign
Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times
last year. Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just
can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford
a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official,
who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing
the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures
on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where
[Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."
-
- Pushing Musharraf to go after Al Qaeda in the tribal
areas may be a good idea despite the risks. But, if that is the case, it
was a good idea in 2002 and 2003. Why the switch now? Top Pakistanis think
they know: This year, the president's reelection is at stake.
-
- - Massoud Ansari reported from Karachi
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- Copyright 2004, The New Republic http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040719&s=aaj071904
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