Author: K.P. Nayar
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: March 1, 2004
The Bush administration's chumminess
with Pervez Musharraf did not start after the September 11, 2001, attacks
in New York and Washington and the imperatives it created for a revived
alliance between the US and Pakistan as generally believed.
Early in 2001, soon after President
George W. Bush took office, the White House sent a confidential letter
to Musharraf "that contained many encouraging signals about the future
of the US-Pakistan alliance", which included debt relief, sanction waivers
and security cooperation.
That letter was in response to a
three-page confidential memo delivered by Musharraf to Bush outlining common
ground between Islamabad and Washington and pressing for closer ties.
That memo was the result of alarm
in Islamabad over advocacy within the Republican party for a "strategic
shift towards India" by Robert Blackwill, then a foreign policy adviser
to the incoming President, and others in the Bush election team.
This and several other startling
revelations about the recent twists and turns in America's ties with Pakistan
are contained in a book by Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington
Post, published here last week. Coll was earlier the paper's correspondent
in New Delhi.
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of
the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September
10, 2001, published by Penguin, also offers the first clue to why Ashraf
Jehangir Qazi was posted as Pakistan's ambassador to Washington after Delhi
asked Islamabad to pull him out as high commissioner in Delhi.
Coll says that among the documents
recovered from Pakistan's embassy in Kabul after the Americans overthrew
the Taliban was a secret cable sent by Qazi from Delhi to Islamabad in
advance of a meeting called by Musharraf of all Pakistani ambassadors abroad.
Arguing strongly in favour of ditching
the Taliban, Qazi wrote in that cable about Pakistan's support for Mullah
Omar, the one-eyed Taliban supremo: "We find practical reasons to continue
with policies that we know are never going to deliver and the eventual
costs of which we also know will be overwhelming... Thus we are condemned
to ride a tiger."
Pakistan, he argued, had "no choice"
but to "resolve the OBL (Osama bin Laden) problem before addressing any
other issue". The cable would have been written at a time when Qazi was
feeling the heat in Delhi after the Taliban cooperated with hijackers of
an Indian Airlines plane taken to Kandahar and released in exchange for
terrorists jailed in India for holy war in support of Kashmir's freedom.
Qazi, it would have been clear to
the Americans from the cable and other such evidence, was among those in
the Pakistani foreign office who had questioned the support of the Army
General Headquarters in Rawalpindi for the religious zealots in Afghanistan,
a factor that would have endeared him to the Washington establishment.
The book reveals that contrary to
the popular belief that Musharraf was reining in the Taliban, it was the
other way round. Mullah Omar wrote a threatening letter to Musharraf on
January 16, 2001, urging him to "enforce Islamic law... step by step".
He warned Musharraf of instability in Pakistan if this was not done.
"This is our advice and message
based on Islamic ideology," Omar wrote to the general. "Otherwise you had
better know how to deal with it."
The letter and Qazi's cable were
reported in Survival, the journal of the London-based International Institute
for Strategic Studies, in 2002 but Coll's book puts such facts into the
context of Pakistan's web of ties with the Taliban and the evolution of
Washington's alliance with Musharraf during the Bush presidency.
The book reveals that after Musharraf
wrote his confidential three-page memo to Bush, Condoleezza Rice, now the
national security adviser, met Maleeha Lodhi, then Pakistan's ambassador
to the US, to discuss parameters of US-Pakistan ties, including resolution
of the bin Laden problem, under a Republican presidency.
Rumours of the meeting had then
swirled around the Indian embassy here: the conventional wisdom at the
mission during the presidential campaign was that Al Gore would become
President in the 2000 election.
During a visit to Washington, national
security adviser Brajesh Mishra was alarmed that India had not worked adequately
on contacts with Republicans during the presidential campaign. He took
the initiative to fly to the west coast and meet former Republican secretary
of state George Schultz in an obvious effort to negate Lodhi's influence
on Rice, which was then reported to be growing.
0 0 0 0 0
Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll,
managing editor of The Washington Post (and SAJA Convention headliner in
2002) has an important new book out on the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan,
bin Laden, et al (I have been seeing him on various TV and radio shows).
Coll, a former WP South Asia bureau chief, wrote a book about the Grand
Trunk Road that I consider mandatory reading for anyone who wants to be
a journalist in the region: "On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South
Asia."
Below you will find the press release
about the new book
GHOST WARS
The Secret History of the CIA,
Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
by Steve Coll
"During the 1980's, Soviet conscripts
besieged by CIA-supplied Afghan rebels called them dukhi, or ghosts.
The Soviets could never quite grasp and hold their enemy. It remained that
way in Afghanistan long after they had gone. From its first days
before the Soviet invasion until its last hours in the late summer of 2001,
this was a struggle among ghosts."
--from GHOST WARS
Looming large in the minds of the
American people since the devastation of September 11, 2001 - and perplexing
their political analysts, media, and elected leaders - are two unsettling
questions: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp
the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? And, Who tried to stop
bin Laden and why did they fail? Later this month, and for the first time,
Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, provides answers in
a news-breaking account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in
Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's
al Qaeda. The Penguin Press will publish GHOST WARS: The Secret History
of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September
10, 2001 on February 23, in a national one-day on-sale.
For nearly the past quarter century,
while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field
for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible
wars that sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and that provide
its context. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer
of 2001, the CIA, KGB, Pakistan's ISI, and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence
Department all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed
Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces,
funded propaganda, and manipulated politics. In the midst of these struggles
bin Laden conceived and then built his global organization.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Coll provides
the only comprehensive account to date of the secret history of the CIA's
role in Afghanistan, including its covert program against Soviet troops
from 1979 to 1989, and examines the rise of the Taliban, the emergence
of bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to
capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Based on extensive
firsthand accounts, GHOST WARS is the inside story that goes well beyond
anything previously published on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, chronicling
the roles of midlevel CIA officers, their Afghan allies, and such top spy
masters as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al Faisal, and George
Tenet; heated debates within the American government; and the often poisonous,
mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Winner of a 1990 Pulitzer Prize
for explanatory journalism, Steve Coll has been managing editor of The
Washington Post since 1998 and covered Afghanistan as the Post's South
Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992. Coll is the author of four books,
including On the Grand Trunk Road and The Taking of Getty Oil. He
lives with his wife and three children in Maryland.
