The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [208]
The following month, when then–ISI director General Mahmoud Ahmed was in Washington, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering warned that “people who support those people [bin Laden and al Qaeda] will be treated as our enemies.” Later, at Pakistan’s interior ministry, Pickering confronted a senior Taliban official with evidence of bin Laden’s role in the embassy bombings in East Africa. The official said the evidence was “not persuasive.”
About this same time, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Sheehan suggested giving Pakistan an ultimatum: Work with the United States to capture bin Laden or face a cutoff of vital financial aid. Fears of the possible consequences—that Pakistan might opt out of talks to ensure that it did not share its nuclear know-how with rogue nations—loomed larger than concerns about terrorism. Sheehan’s idea went nowhere.
Come early 2001, the start of the Bush presidency, and his warning memo to Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke stressed how important it was to have Pakistan’s cooperation. He noted, though, that General Musharraf had spoken of “influential radical elements that would oppose significant Pakistani measures against al Qaeda.” Musharraf had cautioned, too, that the United States should not violate Pakistani airspace when launching strikes within Afghanistan.
Nothing effective was achieved by the Bush administration. At the CIA, director Tenet sensed a “loss of urgency.” It had been obvious for years, he wrote later, that “it would be almost impossible to root out al Qaeda” without Pakistan’s help. The Pakistanis, moreover, “always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative.” “We never did the Full Monty with them,” another former senior CIA official has said. “We don’t trust them.… There is always this little dance with them.”
On September 11, however, the dancing and the diplomatic dithering stopped. While no hard evidence would emerge that Pakistan had any foreknowledge of the attacks—let alone an actual role in the plot—Washington now issued a blunt warning. It was then—according to ISI director Ahmed, who was visiting Washington at the time—that U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage said the United States would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” should it now fail to go along with seven specific American demands for assistance.
Musharraf weighed up the likely consequences of failure to comply, not the least of them the fact that the U.S. military could pulverize his forces. With a couple of reservations—he says he could not accept the U.S. demands for blanket rights to overfly Pakistan and have the use of all its air bases and port facilities—he cooperated as required. “We have done more than any other country,” the former president has said, “to capture and kill members of al Qaeda, and to destroy its infrastructure in our cities and mountains.” Musharraf’s administration indeed cracked down on extremism, at a terrible cost in human life that persists to this day. In one year alone, 2009, 3,021 Pakistanis died in retaliatory terrorist attacks—approximately the same number as the American dead of 9/11. Musharraf’s army thrust into the tribal badlands near the Afghan border, and some 700 purported al Qaeda operatives were rounded up across Pakistan. As of 2006, according to Musharraf, 369 of them had been handed over to the United States—for millions of dollars in bounty money paid by the CIA.
The former CIA station chief in Islamabad, Robert Grenier, recently confirmed that Pakistani cooperation against al Qaeda did improve vastly