[American military officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with Afghanistan’s government.]
By Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane And
Alissa J. Rubin
 |
| The Haqqani network attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from this building. |
WASHINGTON
— They are the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war, a ruthless crime family that built an empire out of
kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, even trucking. They have trafficked in
precious gems, stolen lumber and demanded protection money from businesses
building roads and schools with American reconstruction funds.
They safeguard their
mountainous turf by planting deadly roadside bombs and shelling remote American
military bases. And they are accused by American officials of being guns for
hire: a proxy force used by the Pakistani intelligence service to carry out
grisly, high-profile attacks in Kabul and throughout the country.
Today, American
intelligence and military officials call the crime clan known as the Haqqani
network — led by a wizened militant named Jalaluddin Haqqani who has allied himself over the years with the C.I.A., Saudi
Arabia’s spy service and Osama bin Laden — the most deadly insurgent group in
Afghanistan. In the latest of a series of ever bolder strikes, the group staged
a daylong assault
on the United States Embassy in Kabul, an attack Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, charged
Thursday was aided by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services
Intelligence, or ISI. According to two American officials, cellphones used by
the attackers made calls to suspected ISI operatives before the attack,
although top Pakistani officials deny their government played any role.
But even as the
Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in
the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a
growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they
represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds
of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops
in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting
stops.
American military
officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the
Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the
group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern
that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with
Afghanistan’s government.
“Whoever is in power in
Kabul will have to make a deal with the Haqqanis,” said Marc Sageman, a former
C.I.A. officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. “It won’t
be us. We’re going to leave, and those guys know it.”
When their threat was
less urgent, the Haqqanis — estimated at 5,000 to 15,000 fighters in the
mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan — were not a top priority for the
Americans. But even then the United States also had little leverage against
them. The Haqqanis have expanded their reach and numbers as top American
officials have tried repeatedly over the last decade to berate and cajole
officials in Pakistan to cut ties to a group it considers essential for its own
security, all with little effect.
“Some have become
convinced that after 10 years, it’s a bridge too far to try to change
Pakistan’s strategic calculus,” said Col. Bob Cassidy, who recently returned
from Kabul after serving as a top aide to Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, a senior
American commander in Afghanistan.
Now largely run by two
of Mr. Haqqani’s sons, who experts say are even more committed Islamists than
their father, the network is in a position of strength as the United States
tries to broker a peace deal in Afghanistan before pulling its troops from the
country.
In recent days, top
Haqqani network leaders have indicated that they are willing to negotiate, but
on their own terms. The group maintains close ties to the Taliban, but often
works independently, and some intelligence officials see Haqqani operations
like the American Embassy attack this month as a very public message from the
group that it will not be cut out of any grand bargain.
One former American
intelligence official, who worked with the Haqqani family in Afghanistan during
the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, said he would not be surprised if the
United States again found itself relying on the clan.
“You always said about
them, ‘best friend, worst enemy.’ ”
Militia and Ministate
With a combination of
guns and muscle, the Haqqani network has built a sprawling enterprise on both
sides of a border that barely exists.
The Haqqanis are Afghan
members of the Zadran tribe, but it is in the town of Miram Shah in Pakistan’s
tribal areas where they have set up a ministate with courts, tax offices and
radical madrasa schools producing a ready supply of fighters. They secretly run
a network of front companies throughout Pakistan selling cars and real estate,
and have been tied to at least two factories churning out the ammonium nitrate
used to build roadside bombs in Afghanistan.
American intelligence
officials believe that a steady flow of money from wealthy people in the gulf
states helps sustain the Haqqanis, and that they further line their pockets
with extortion and smuggling operations throughout eastern Afghanistan, focused
in the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika. Chromite smuggling has been a
particularly lucrative business, as has been hauling lumber from Afghanistan’s
eastern forests into Pakistan.
They are also in the
kidnapping business, with a mix of pecuniary and ideological motives. In May,
the group released the latest of a series of videos showing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl,
an American infantryman held by the network since June 2009, with a Haqqani
official. David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, was held hostage
by Haqqani operatives from November 2008 to June 2009.
Over the past five
years, with relatively few American troops operating in eastern Afghanistan,
the Haqqanis have run what is in effect a protection racket for construction
firms — meaning that American taxpayers are helping to finance the enemy
network.
Maulavi Sardar Zadran, a
former Haqqani commander, calls this extortion “the most important source of
funding for the Haqqanis,” and points out that a multiyear road
project linking Khost to Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan was rarely attacked by insurgent
forces because a Haqqani commander was its paid protector.
“The Haqqanis know that
the contractors make thousands and millions of dollars, so these contractors
are very good sources of income for them,” he said in an interview.
Other road projects in
the region have been under constant assault. According to an authoritative
report written by Jeffrey A. Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War, Haqqani
militants “repeatedly targeted road construction projects which, if completed,
would provide greater freedom of movement for Afghan and coalition forces.”
But the group is not
just a two-bit mafia enriching itself with shakedown schemes. It is an
organized militia using high-profile terrorist attacks on hotels, embassies and
other targets to advance its agenda to become a power broker in a future
political settlement. And, sometimes, the agenda of its patrons from Pakistan’s
spy service, the ISI.
Last month,
Afghanistan’s National Intelligence Directorate released recordings of phone
calls intercepted during the June 28 attack
on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. In the exchanges, Haqqani network leaders in Pakistan
instruct their operatives in the hotel to shoot the locks off rooms, throw in
grenades and make sure no one escapes.
Later, as a fire blazes,
the recordings capture the voice of Badruddin Haqqani, one of Jalaluddin’s
sons, who the State Department says is in charge of kidnappings for the
network.
On the tape, Mr. Haqqani
asks: “How is the fire?”
A militant named Omar
replies: “It’s a big fire, and the smoke is blinding me.” Omar says he will not
be able to move away from the fire, and Mr. Haqqani asks if he has bullets.
“Yes, I have a lot of
ammunition,” Omar says. “God willing, I’m very relaxed, lying on this mattress,
waiting for them.”
Mr. Haqqani laughs and
says: “God will give you victory.” More than a dozen people were killed in the
attack, which American officials say they think was carried out with some ISI
help.
A NATO officer who
tracks Haqqani activities in southeastern Afghanistan gave a blunt assessment
of the Haqqanis’ brutal ways of intimidation, saying: “They will execute you at
a checkpoint, or stop you and go through your phone. And, if they find you’re
connected to the government, you’ll turn up in the morgue. And that sends a
message.”
According to a senior
American military official, cross-border attacks by the Haqqanis into
Afghanistan have increased more than fivefold this year over the same period a
year ago, and roadside bomb attacks are up 20 percent compared with last year.
For years, American
officials have urged Pakistan to move against the Haqqanis’ base of operations
in North Waziristan. They typically are rebuffed by military and intelligence
officials in Islamabad, who say that Pakistan’s military is overstretched from
operations elsewhere in the tribal areas and is not ready for an offensive
against the Haqqanis.
As a result, the United
States has fallen back on a familiar strategy: missiles fired from armed drones
operated by the C.I.A. But because the Haqqani network’s leaders are thought to
be hiding in populated towns like Miram Shah, where the C.I.A. is hesitant to
carry out drone strikes, American officials said that the campaign has had only
limited success against the group’s leadership.
1980s Allies
A quarter-century ago,
the Haqqani fighters were not the targets of C.I.A. missiles. They were the
ones shooting C.I.A.-supplied missiles, the shoulder-fired Stingers that would
devastate Soviet air power over Afghanistan.
Jalaluddin Haqqani was
in temporary alliance with the United States against its greater adversary, the
Soviet Union, just as his network today is allied with a Pakistan that sees
Afghanistan as a critical buffer against its greater adversary, India. His
clan’s ruthlessness and fervent Islam were seen then as marks of courage and faith
on the part of men Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters.
Representative Charlie
Wilson, the late Texas Democrat who made the mujahedeen his cause, called the
elder Mr. Haqqani “goodness personified.”
American intelligence
officers who worked directly with Mr. Haqqani had a somewhat less starry-eyed
view. “He was always a wild-eyed guy,” said the former American intelligence
official who worked with the Haqqanis. “But we weren’t talking about getting
these guys scholarships to Harvard or M.I.T. He was the scourge of the
Soviets.”
The Haqqani fighters
would roll boulders down mountains to block passing Soviet convoys, said the
official, who requested anonymity because he remains a consultant for the
government. “Then they would sit up in the hills and pick the Russians off all
afternoon,” he said.
Jalaluddin Haqqani’s
fierce temperament was matched by his devotion to the rules of Islam, the
official said. Shot in the knee one time during the daytime fast of Ramadan,
Mr. Haqqani had medics dig the bullet out without anesthesia rather than
violate a religious tenet by swallowing pain medication, the official said.
There is little doubt in Afghanistan that if the family were to gain power, it
would institute strict Islamic rule.
For Americans who worked
with them in the 1980s, the fact that the Haqqanis are now fighting their
former American allies is no shock. The Russians were the foreign occupiers
before; now the Americans are.
“The Haqqanis have
always been the warlords of that part of the country,” said Mr. Sageman, the
former C.I.A. officer. “They always will be.”
Limited U.S. Options
On Feb. 19, 2009, the
day before Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s new senior military commander,
was due in Washington for his first meetings with the Obama administration, the
American Embassy in Islamabad sent a classified cable to the State Department.
American officials
believed that General Kayani, Pakistan’s onetime spymaster, had for years
overseen Pakistan’s covert support for militant groups like the Haqqani
network, and the cable offered blunt advice about the coming talks.
“The single biggest
message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end,” said
the cable, written by Ambassador Anne W. Patterson.
In the 30 months since,
few in Washington believe that Pakistan’s support of armed militia groups has
diminished. American officials who were once optimistic they could change
Pakistani behavior through cajoling and large cash payments now accept a sober
reality: as long as Pakistan sees its security under threat by India’s far
larger army, it will rely on militant groups like the Haqqanis, the Taliban and
Lashkar-e-Taiba as occasional proxy forces.
The new urgency for a
political settlement in Afghanistan has further limited Washington’s options
for fighting the Haqqani network. During high-level discussions last year,
Obama administration officials debated listing the group as a “Foreign
Terrorist Organization,” which allows for some assets to be frozen and could
dissuade donors from supporting the group. While some military commanders
pushed for the designation, the administration ultimately decided that such a
move might alienate the Haqqanis and drive them away from future negotiations.
Officials chose to take
the more incremental step of naming individual Haqqani leaders as terrorists,
including Badruddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. Senior American officials said
there was once again a fierce debate inside the Obama administration about
whether to put the entire group on the terrorist list.
But as Washington
struggles to broker an endgame for the Afghan war, there is widespread doubt
about whether the Haqqanis will negotiate, and whether their patrons in
Islamabad will even let them. After a decade of war, there is a growing sense
among America’s diplomats, soldiers and spies that the United States is getting
out of Afghanistan without ever figuring out how a maddeningly complex game is
played.
“Is there any formula
for Pakistan to agree to stop supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan and
instead help broker and be satisfied with a political settlement?” asked Karl
W. Eikenberry, who served as both America’s top military commander in
Afghanistan and its ambassador to the country.
“We don’t know the
answer to that question,” he said.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane reported from
Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Eric Schmitt
contributed reporting from Washington.
