BOOK REVIEW. How Pak played a number on the US

In February 2006, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai and his spy chief personally handed over a file to the then Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, containing evidence on al-Qaeda operatives hiding in safe houses in the military town of Abbottabad.

Musharraf looked anxious, but did not act, writes Carlotta Gall in her book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.

Five years later, US special forces killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan, raising questions about Pakistan’s complicity in the whole issue.

Double role Gall, who had covered the Afghan conflict for a decade for The New York Times , is, however, certain about Pakistani authorities’ complicity in protecting Bin Laden. Gall says the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, had been sheltering him all along.

The ISI had even assigned a special desk to the al- Qaeda chief, Gall says, brushing aide the Pakistan military’s defence that they were unaware of Bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad. “In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog,” a former intelligence chief tells Gall.

Bin Laden’s youngest wife told Pak investigators after his death that they had lived in the Swat valley for six months, then two years in Haripur before moving to their last home in Abbottabad in 2006.

“Each move happened under Musharraf’s watch, just as he was proclaiming to the world that the trail had gone cold,” she writes. Didn’t the Americans know about this complicity? They did, but preferred to remain silent about it to save Washington’s special relationship with its nuclear-armed South Asian ally.

This is one of the several assertions Gall makes about Pakistan’s dual role in America’s war on terror in Afghanistan in The Wrong Enemy , which is a well-crafted reconstruction of what went wrong during the American occupation of Afghanistan.

The central thesis of the book is fairly simple: Pakistan has been supporting and bankrolling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, while at the same time helping the Americans to fight the Taliban.

“Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbors and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy,” she writes.

Why this double game? In Gall’s view, “American officials should have realised that it was inconceivable for Pakistan to give up on so much time and investment, or that the military and security establishment could change its institutional thinking so easily.”

Playing with fire Pakistan had been supporting several militant groups in Afghanistan at least since the 1970s, which Gall calls part of Pakistan’s “30 years of strategic thinking”. It had allowed its territory to be used for training camps of the Mujahideen in the 1980s, when the US, Saudi Arabia and itself were running a proxy war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal, it threw its weight behind the Taliban, which emerged as the most potent force out of the civil war in Afghanistan.

But the power equations in Afghanistan changed after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent US bombings. Pakistani President Parvez Musharraf came under huge pressure from the Americans to take their side in their “war on terror”.

Two years after coming to power through a coup, lacking any major international recognition and grappling with a sanctions-hit economy, Musharraf saw the American war as an opportunity.

He was rewarded, too. He soon became America’s strongest non-Nato ally in the war against terror. Besides, Pakistan got more than $23 billion in American assistance since 9/11. But these carrots were not good enough to alter Pakistan’s “institutional thinking” that militants can be used as part of an expansionist foreign policy strategy, says Gall.

When the Taliban was thrown out of power in Afghanistan and a government critical of Pakistan was formed in Kabul in 2001, Pakistan started worrying about losing its influence completely in Afghanistan. The 2002 elections in Pakistan, in which religious parties came to power in the border regions under the blessings of Musharraf, set the stage for the regrouping of the Taliban.

When the US was focused on its Iraq war in the coming years, it provided Pakistan room to help the Taliban regroup themselves. This policy continued all along. The end result is today’s Afghanistan.

In the last 13 years, the Western alliance has spent $1 trillion on Afghanistan, while they lost around 3,400 soldiers (more than 2,300 of them American). On the other side, tens of thousands of Afghans lost their lives.

The Kabul government’s influence is now very limited. The Taliban is controlling much of the territory in the South and East, and is capable of launching attacks against Afghan and US troops anywhere in the country. In Gall’s own words, Afghanistan is now “a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbours and extremist Islamists.” This is what the US invasion has achieved in Afghanistan after 13 years of military operations.

Gall’s efforts to reconstruct the Afghan war with even minute details are really laudable. But the focus of that reconstruction is the double game played by the Pakistani establishment.

While there’s no doubt about Pakistan’s involvement in promoting insurgencies in its neighbouring countries, a vital question remains unanswered in the book. Is Pakistan solely responsible for the mess Afghanistan is in today? What about the mistakes committed by the US?

The misgivings The heavy use of force by the Americans had turned a large number of Afghan people in the tribal areas against the war, giving space for the Taliban to remerge.

The incompetence and corruption of the post-Taliban Afghan governments and their failure to ensure law and order in several parts of the country forced the people to look for alternatives, and Taliban exploited the situation.

This wider picture is missing in the book. Besides, the Americans were as involved in the creation of Mujahideen militancy in Afghanistan as Pakistan during the 1980s, which the book hardly acknowledges.

Moreover, Gall’s narrative is mostly based on her conversations with Afghan intelligence and army officials. Afghan authorities’ acrimony towards Pakistan is not a secret.

The author fails to balance out the views aired by Afghan officials. Had these issues been addressed, this otherwise well-researched, well-written and well-edited book would have carried more conviction.

Carlotta Gall has worked for the New York Times since 1999, including over 10 years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She has worked for the Financial Times and The Economist . In 2007, she was featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side . She is the co-author with Thomas de Waal, of Chechnya: A Small Victorious War .

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