The Scalphunters of the Hindu Kush
21 July 2013
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[Mark Mazzetti’s book not only talks about Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, but also deals with the rapid transformation of the Central Intelligence Agency from being a mere spy agency into a brutally efficient killing machine, writes MK Bhadrakumar]
[Mark Mazzetti’s book not only talks about Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, but also deals with the rapid transformation of the Central Intelligence Agency from being a mere spy agency into a brutally efficient killing machine, writes MK Bhadrakumar]
'The Way of the Knife: The Untold Story of USA’s Secret War'
Author: Mark Mazzetti
Publisher: Penguin
Rs 499
Wars are known to be vengeful in the ways they change men, especially unjust wars. The story of the United States’ war on terrorism is all the more gripping when it is read in these troubled times when the Obama Administration is desperately hoping to kickstart talks with the Taliban in Doha — with an enemy who according to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s wry admission recently should never have been an enemy in the first instance.
But the fascinating story in Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife is not all about Afghanistan, not even half of it. It is also about Somalia and Yemen; but, principally, it is about the rapid transformation of the Central Intelligence Agency from being a mere spy agency into the brutally efficient killing machine during the period since the 9/11 attacks.
The CIA had humble origins in World War II, but as the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Timesreporter Mazzetti recounts, it had acquired a dark history by the 1960s thanks to the Cold War and became synonymous with notorious black-bag jobs so much so that President Gerard Ford signed an executive order barring it expressly from assassinations of foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro who stood in the way of the US’s regional policies. To cut a long riveting story short, a culture of reluctance to use the knife since persisted in the agency all the way down to the Bill Clinton Administration when the President actually had to settle for taking out Osama bin Laden with a Tomahawk missile rather than a bullet because the CIA insisted, “We’re not Mossad.”
Then came 9/11 and George W Bush signed the executive order restoring to the CIA the powers needed to hunt down Al Qaeda fugitives. But within the CIA’s bowels acute churnings erupted between the Old Guard and the Young Turks as to whether the agency should delve into the dark alleys of the past to move on to the future war on terrorism. Then, there is the subplot of Pentagon’s resentment over the CIA’s rise as a rival.
Ironically, it has been under Barak Obama that the CIA’s unassailable ascendancy got established, finally. The zest with which Obama embraced black operations once he arrived at the Oval Office comes as a stunning revelation in Mazzetti’s book. Obama, who during his election campaign lambasted the drone attacks and so on, came to rely on the CIA and the Special Operations Command “in ways that not even George W Bush and Dick Cheney had, as America’s primary tool to conduct lethal operations”.
Not only that, Obama “calibrated and refined” the tools of secret war to create the window of opportunity “to wage war without the staggering costs of the big military campaigns that topple governments, require years of occupation, and catalyse radicalisation throughout the Muslim world”. Thus, what happened in Libya became possible — and Syria too may be happening.
Mazzetti quotes Obama as saying in a close-door meeting, “The CIA gets what it wants.”
He approved every targeted drone strike that former CIA director Leon Panetta proposed. Under Obama, the CIA morphed into a military organisation so much so that in a smooth reshuffle, he simply shifted Panetta to the Pentagon and brought in Gen David Petraeus at the CIA — the jobs became interchangeable.
But in the process, the US war machine acquired newer dark arts — hiring contractors such as the Blackwater to do the killing and so on — and “the patient ‘gentle’ work of intelligence gathering and espionage” at the agency became the stuff of folklore. True, it now spares the CIA of scandalous reputation such as its failure to anticipate the fall of the Berlin Wall or Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
However, for the Indian reader, the most absorbing chapters of Mazzetti’s book concern the CIA’s deeply flawed relations with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, which becomes a keyhole to peer into the despairing panorama of the Afghan war and comprehend the brilliant outmanoeuvring of the US by Pakistani military leaderships under Pervez Musharraf and Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
Mazzetti’s insightful account confirms the worst Indian fears regarding post-2014 Afghanistan. As a story-teller, Mazzetti is at his best in piecing together the CIA’s hunt for bin Laden and its cat-and-mouse games with the ISI played out in Pakistan’s inhospitable tribal areas, which finally climaxed in the showdown over Raymond Davis in February last year and the Abbottabad operation to kill bin Laden.
Thumbing the way through Mazzetti’s expose of the “crooked and deadly game” played by the generals in Rawalpindi, it is apparent that even with all the King’s men and all the King’s horses, restoring trust and mutual confidence between the respective security and military establishments of the US and Pakistan is a long haul. The deeply perplexing question, therefore, is just what is it that the US and Pakistan could hope to work out via the Doha talks.
Pakistan never really believed that the US military was going to be around for long in Afghanistan and as early as 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began, it turned to reviving its “strategic assets” to fill a power vacuum that was going to arise in Kabul as surely as night follows sunset. Interestingly, the full-throttled revival of the Taliban insurgency began when Kayani was heading the ISI. Mazzetti painstakingly digs into a 98-page thesis that Kayani, a Major in the army at that time, wrote while at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 1988 on the Afghan jihad by the mujahideen, which ultimately turned out to be “the playbook for how Pakistan could hold the strings in Afghanistan during the occupation of a foreign army”. Curiously, American spy agencies even intercepted one telephone call in 2008 — the year of the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, incidentally — during which Gen Kayani referred to the Haqqani Network as “strategic asset”. (By the way, New York Times bureau chief in Islamabad Declan Walsh at whose house Mazzetti stayed while working on the book was expelled from Pakistan in May soon after the book was published.)
The wealth of information that Mazzetti reveals underscores the remarkable consistency of the Pakistani policies and makes one wonder what is the basis of the current euphoria by senior US officials that there has been a “genuine shift” in the thinking in Rawalpindi.
The Doha talks are ultimately about exploring the viable frontiers of the divergent American and Pakistani agenda.
The result could well turn out to be the deal that Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned against recently after the talks with Cameron in Kabul — namely, that Pakistan and some foreign countries are working toward carving Afghanistan into “fiefdoms”.
The reviewer, former Ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey, writes extensively on Afghanistan and Pakistan