THE ATTACK
At about eleven-thirty on the morning of December 13, 2001, a white Ambassador with tinted glass and a flashing red light on top—the distinctive car of Indian officialdom—arrived at Parliament House in New Delhi. Five men were inside. They carried three pistols, four automatic assault rifles, spare ammunition, a grenade launcher, fifteen grenades, several handmade bombs of medium size, and, in the trunk of the car, a large bomb made from ammonium nitrate. A forged Home Ministry sticker had been pasted on the car’s windshield; on the back of the sticker, it was later discovered, someone had scrawled a vow to “destroy” India. The men passed through an outer gate and approached Gate No. 1, a sandstone portico opposite an enormous statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
Parliament House, which was designed and built in the last decades of the British Raj, is a graceful, russet oval with unusually thick walls. Twelve gates lead to a circular inner hallway, and within that ring are the two airy chambers that house the country’s raucous bicameral parliament. That morning, the assemblies were in session, and among those in attendance was the country’s Vice-President, Krishan Kant; his motorcade stood in the driveway, ready for a quick departure. As the white Ambassador maneuvered, it crashed into the Vice-President’s car, and the five attackers, who were South Asian in appearance, scrambled out. Some began to lay wires and set up bomb detonators; others immediately opened fire.
Jaswant Singh, who was at that time India’s foreign minister, was at work in his office, Room 27, just off the main hallway, about twenty-five yards from Gate No. 1. Singh, an ardent Hindu nationalist from the desert state of Rajasthan, is an elegant, white-haired former soldier with prominent black eyebrows. When he heard the shooting, he rushed toward the sound, but his bodyguards stopped him. “Sir,” one explained, as Singh recalled it, “you are being targeted.”
The gun battle lasted almost thirty minutes. When it ended, smoke curled above Parliament House and hundreds of empty shell casings lay scattered on the ground. The attackers shot to death eight security guards and a gardener before all five were killed themselves. They had failed to reach the interior hallway or to detonate their explosives; the Vice-President’s motorcade, which had been blocking the building’s entrance, was “a fortuitous circumstance,” the justices of India’s Supreme Court later wrote. Except for that, and strong resistance from the security guards, the raid might have been remembered as the greatest catastrophe in independent India’s history—the murder of much of its elected leadership. “Had the attack succeeded,” an Indian trial-court judge concluded, “the entire building with all inside would have perished.”
The members of India’s Cabinet Committee on Security, which was then led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, assembled late on the day of the assault. Little was known about the five attackers or their motives; a police investigation into their backgrounds and support networks had just begun. Still, the raid appeared to be part of a pattern. Brajesh Mishra, then India’s national-security adviser, told me recently that he and other committee members had no doubt who was behind it: the government of Pakistan and, in particular, its external intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.
Since the late nineteen-eighties, I.S.I. has covertly funded and armed violent Islamic groups in the Indian-occupied areas of Kashmir. By 2001, two of the larger jihadi groups—Lashkar-e-Taiba_,_ or the Army of the Pure, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Muhammad’s Army—had also developed ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, mainly through shared training camps and safe houses. The evidence in similar attacks in major Indian cities, and Pakistan’s ongoing support for these groups, led the Cabinet Committee to decide “that Pakistan must be given a very serious warning,” Mishra recalled. “We debated, we talked, and we came to the conclusion that the threat of military action should be held up.” Vajpayee ordered the country’s armed forces to mobilize for war.
By supporting jihadi groups in Kashmir, Pakistan’s generals, who have governed the country since a coup d’état in 1999, have sought to advance what they regard as a righteous cause, and to pressure India’s government to negotiate over the future of Kashmir, which was divided after the partition of the subcontinent, in 1947. Pakistan’s military has tried to avoid a wider war, but, time and again, it has found that managing jihadi groups can be an inexact art. On December 13th, the United States Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, happened to be visiting the two-star Pakistani general in command of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, at his headquarters in Quetta, in the western province of Baluchistan. During their meeting, the general kept his television tuned to a satellite news channel, with the sound muted. As reports of the parliament attack crossed the screen and the magnitude of the event became clear, Chamberlin asked her host for his reaction. According to a written record of the meeting, the general offered a one-word reply: “Oops.”
The parliament attack received little attention in the United States, where, just three months after September 11th, the Bush Administration and the media were focussed on the war in Afghanistan. In India, however, the Parliament House raid was a deeply shocking event, one that stirred the public and the media into a fury.
As India and Pakistan headed toward confrontation, it quickly became clear that more was at issue than Pakistan’s covert support for jihadi groups or the dispute over Kashmir. This was the first nuclear crisis of the twenty-first century, and it was characterized by a very modern problem—that posed by stateless religious networks with millenarian ideas. Even during the early years of the Cold War, when some high-ranking generals in the United States and the Soviet Union believed that atomic bombs should be viewed as routine weapons of war, neither side had to cope with religiously motivated insurgents in its midst. And, for all the nuclear brinkmanship and bumbling of the nineteen-fifties and early sixties—culminating in the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962—neither the United States nor the Soviet Union supported groups that carried out provocative terrorist attacks on the other’s home territory. Pakistan’s support for jihadi groups that launched attacks in India had a rational premise: the groups offered a potent, cost-effective way for Pakistan’s generals to tie down India’s large force in Kashmir. But they also had a religious aspect, because some officers in Pakistan’s Army had come to identify with the global ambitions of the jihadi cause.
After December 13th, the two governments were implicitly exploring new areas of nuclear strategy. “In all of the game theory and everything else considered in the West, it was always based on the assumption of rational actors on both sides,” K. Subrahmanyam, a writer and national-security strategist who is regarded as an intellectual father of India’s nuclear-weapons doctrines, told me. Pakistan’s generals had a similar view, according to Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani brigadier general, who helped develop Pakistan’s nuclear policies—except that the Pakistani generals included India’s Hindu nationalists among the irrational actors. In developing their nuclear doctrines, Khan told me, Pakistani generals knew that “Western deterrence theory had never encountered the wild cards of the jihadis and the Hindu fundamentalists.” As it turned out, these challenges were compounded in Pakistan by breakdowns in its system for securing its nuclear technology.
The Parliament House attack also seemed to illustrate another unnerving feature of the nuclear age: while nuclear weapons had created a new form of military parity between India and Pakistan, they had also seemed to stimulate a rise in terrorism, particularly on Indian soil.
India declared itself a nuclear power on May 11, 1998, after it exploded several devices at the Pokhran test site, in the Rajasthan desert, including what the government claimed was India’s first successful test of a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. Pakistan “settled the score,” as the Prime Minister put it, by detonating five nuclear bombs at an underground site in the western Ras Koh mountain range on May 28th. Leaders in both countries issued statements about the possible use of nuclear weapons in war; their posturing represented the first attempt by two adversarial states to establish an open system of nuclear deterrence since the end of the Cold War.
Yet, even as the deployment of nuclear weapons made a conventional war on the subcontinent more risky—and therefore, perhaps, less likely—Pakistan’s generals seemed to find their covert war in Kashmir more plausible. In 1999, the generals authorized a secret military incursion to seize high ridges in an Indian-held area of Kashmir called Kargil, setting off a two-month international crisis. (The Pakistanis were eventually forced to withdraw.) Afterward, jihadi groups in Kashmir began to mount bolder attacks, and to strike in Indian cities. “The Pakistanis felt that the risk of conflict with India was reduced by their adoption of overt deterrence,” Sir Hilary Synnott, who was then Britain’s high commissioner to Pakistan, told me. “I do think this tempted some of them into adventurism.”
Indian and Pakistani leaders had a poor understanding of each other’s plans for the use of nuclear weapons during war, and this presented an additional complication as the two militaries mobilized. In the days after the Parliament House strike, John McLaughlin, then the deputy C.I.A. director, reported to the Bush Cabinet that C.I.A. and other intelligence analysts believed that, because of confusion among Indian and Pakistani decision-makers about when and how a conventional war could escalate, there was a serious risk of the first hostile use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki.
The sense of urgency within the Bush Administration was heightened by what was then a closely guarded secret. Early in 2001, the Bush White House had been briefed on an extraordinary intelligence investigation into Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program, one that appeared to show that a leading nuclear-weapons scientist, A. Q. Khan, had become a sort of international nuclear entrepreneur. In the fall of that year, the C.I.A. also learned about meetings between a second Pakistani nuclear scientist and Osama bin Laden. As the Bush Administration groped for a way to prevent a possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan, it had to consider the possibility that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might not be under firm government control. And, with its focus on the Afghan war, it was easy for the Administration to overlook the fact that the problem of jihadi terrorism was not confined to Afghanistan.
THE DIPLOMATS
The United States Ambassador to India in late 2001 was Robert Blackwill, a former professor at Harvard, who had taught, among other things, the history of the Cuban missile crisis. Blackwill is a large, jowly, articulate man with a reputation for high energy and a willingness to engage in intense, bullying bureaucratic battles. He had had no experience in India before his appointment, but he had worked closely with Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national-security adviser, and he had extensive contacts within the White House and the Republican Party. Based on private conversations with Bush, Blackwill told colleagues, he understood that his mission was to coax the United States and India into a closer strategic alignment. After September 11th, Blackwill concluded that the United States had common cause with India in the struggle against jihadi terrorism, and he believed that the issue offered an important opportunity to bring the two countries together.
On the morning of December 14th, India’s government held a memorial service at Parliament House for the men who had died in the previous day’s attack. Without consulting his superiors in Washington, Blackwill decided to attend. He drove over with bodyguards and entered the second-story observation gallery reserved for diplomats. Prime Minister Vajpayee, Foreign Minister Singh, and others in the Indian Cabinet had assembled in the chamber of the Lok Sabha, or lower house, along with many members of parliament. In the observation gallery, Blackwill was conspicuous not only because of his bearlike size but because he was the only diplomat—the only outsider of any kind—in the hall. “We really didn’t expect anybody,” Jaswant Singh told me. “For years—decades, in fact—we had been plowing this field alone.” After the service, Blackwill approached a cluster of television cameras. “The United States and India are as one in this outrage,” he declared. “The tragic event that occurred yesterday and that was perpetrated by terrorists was no different in its objective from the terror attacks in the U.S. on September 11th.”
Later that day, Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the parliament attackers as “murderers,” but his tone was restrained. From New Delhi, Blackwill sent the State Department a series of urgent cables outlining his views about the Kashmir jihadi groups and the support that they received from Pakistan. Among other things, he argued that the Bush Administration should add several of the larger groups to its various lists of banned terrorist organizations. Within days, the Administration followed his advice. It was not the first time that the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism was reinvented as it went along, but it was a particularly consequential intervention, coming at a time when India was citing jihadi terrorism in Kashmir as a cause for war.
Shortly after September 11th, Pakistan’s President and Army chief, Pervez Musharraf, was presented with an ultimatum by the United States, and agreed to abandon his support for the Taliban. He agreed to coöperate fully with the American-led campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and he provided the U.S. military with access to Pakistani air and naval bases. (India had also offered extensive basing rights, but the Pentagon turned down this offer, partly out of deference to Musharraf.) Musharraf also agreed to coöperate with the C.I.A.—among other things, joint covert teams were established to hunt down terrorist fugitives—and he ordered Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops to set up a blocking force along the Pakistani-Afghan border, to capture Al Qaeda and Taliban members if they tried to flee east from Afghanistan.
However, all this coöperation in the fall of 2001 did not address Pakistan’s support for jihadi groups operating in Kashmir and India. That issue seemed too sensitive and too complicated, American and Pakistani officials involved in the negotiations told me recently, and so it was set aside. George Tenet, who was then the C.I.A. director, informed colleagues that remote areas of Kashmir might offer a hiding place for Al Qaeda leaders, but, apart from this worry, the C.I.A. felt that it had too much on its agenda in Afghanistan to press Musharraf on Kashmir. “We did not treat it as a part of the global war on terrorism,” Ashley J. Tellis, a scholar of South Asian military strategy, who was the senior adviser to Blackwill at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, recalled. “We would have preferred not to answer how Kashmir fit.” Lalit Mansingh, who was then India’s Ambassador to Washington, said, “The message we got from the State Department was the ‘best bet’ theory”—that Musharraf was India’s best bet, because he was a relatively moderate general who had decided to back the Bush Administration’s counter-terrorism agenda. “We greeted this with some skepticism,” Mansingh said.
After September 11th, one of the main tasks of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, was to assure Musharraf and his senior generals that their interests were being protected. Because of his decision to embrace the United States, Musharraf had complicated his political life; he faced dissent not only from his generals but from lower-ranking officers and from Islamic religious groups and their violent jihadi affiliates. Colonel David Smith, the U.S. Army attaché in Islamabad, assessed the crisis after the Parliament House raid; there was, he wrote, “growing frustration” with Ambassador Blackwill—“first to publicly criticize Pakistan for the militant attack, and then to engage in what appeared to be a blatant attempt to manage Washington’s response to the crisis from New Delhi.” Smith went on, “There was a clear perception both in Islamabad and in some quarters in Washington that Blackwill was using the crisis as a vehicle to attain his own goals for U.S.-Indian relations, and that little consideration was being given to the potential adverse impact on the war on terrorism.” And yet, as Christmas approached, according to Smith, both the Pentagon and the State Department “seemed to accept implicitly the Blackwill thesis that India had the moral high ground and its military response was justified.” Smith and others in Islamabad noted that India was hardly blameless, and that it had long tried to destabilize Pakistan.
After the battle against Al Qaeda fighters at Tora Bora, in early December, Pentagon officials described Pakistani troops along the Afghan border as the “anvil” in a hammer-and-anvil squeeze on Al Qaeda. But Pakistan’s generals could see that India was shifting divisions from as far away as Calcutta, in the east, to the western frontier with Pakistan; it looked like the largest military mobilization in Indian history. The generals told the Bush Administration that Pakistan would have no choice but to shift its own troops to the border with India. They soon redeployed the regular Army troops that made up the “anvil”; in total, more than seventy thousand troops and their equipment—two full corps, or four divisions—were moved away from the Afghan border, according to American officials. (Pakistan left some soldiers and its paramilitary forces along the border, but the paramilitaries were tribal soldiers who had clan ties to the Taliban and were less professional than Pakistan’s regular Army.) American diplomats and military officers were distraught about the effect of this troop transfer on their war effort in Afghanistan, but, when they met with Musharraf and his senior generals, “there was nothing we could say to them that would sound persuasive,” Colonel Smith told me. The threat from India was undeniable. “It was a matter of national survival, and we understood that.”
Pakistan’s military told the Americans that India was manipulating and deceiving the Bush Administration, and argued that the parliament attack had been staged by India’s intelligence services to generate international pressure on Pakistan. On December 21st, Colonel Smith met with two senior Pakistani generals, one of whom oversaw intelligence analysis at I.S.I. “Both officers called into question the nature of the militant attack in New Delhi,” Smith recalled, and one of them dismissed the attack as “typical Indian ‘stage management.’ ” Three days later, Les Brownlee, the Under-Secretary of the U.S. Army, arrived in Islamabad and met with Pakistan’s vice-chief of the Army, General Muhammad Yusuf Khan, who told Brownlee that he, too, suspected Indian manipulation in the Parliament House assault. Feroz Khan, the retired Pakistani brigadier general, who remains close to Musharraf, told me that, even at high levels of the Pakistani government, officials think that India regularly cooks up such incidents for international effect. “This is their firm belief,” Khan said.
American and British officials who heard these arguments were incredulous, even though they recognized that India’s government was using the December 13th attack to call attention to Pakistan’s general support for jihadi groups. Citing the confessional statements of some co-conspirators arrested in New Delhi and Kashmir shortly after the attack, Indian officials claimed that Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad were responsible. (India’s Supreme Court later ruled that some of these confessions had been obtained improperly and should be disregarded.) The Indian government publicly blamed I.S.I. for sponsoring not just the December raid but a series of devastating terrorist attacks against civilian targets on Indian soil, dating back to the early nineteen-nineties.
Analysts at the C.I.A. and Britain’s intelligence service felt that they had evidence that I.S.I. provided systematic support to Kashmir jihadi groups, including weaponry, religious instruction, and military training at camps in Pakistan and in areas of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan’s Army. I.S.I. also helped these jihadi volunteers to slip across the Line of Control, the informal but well-guarded border that divides Kashmir. By late 2001, Hilary Synnott, the British high commissioner, recalled, “I had absolutely no doubt that I.S.I. had been supporting infiltration and had been assisting with camps, and that this should stop.”
Yet intelligence about whether or how I.S.I. directed particular terrorist strikes within India was less certain; according to officials familiar with C.I.A. intelligence reports, the agency did not have evidence of direct instructions from I.S.I. controllers to jihadi cells to carry out attacks such as the raid on Parliament House. Nor could India offer specific evidence about what role, if any, Pakistan’s Army or its intelligence services had played in that raid.
I.S.I. is organized as a division of Pakistan’s military. Some of its departments focus on the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence, while others conduct covert operations; it is also subject to military discipline, and Pakistani generals are proud of the professionalism they maintain in their ranks. Still, the close collaboration between some I.S.I. officers and their jihadi clients made American analysts, and even some Pakistani generals, doubt the loyalty and reliability of some of the I.S.I. officers working on the front lines of the Afghan and Kashmir conflicts.
India’s leaders—a tight-knit band of Hindu-nationalist politicians who, during the nineteen-nineties, rose from obscurity to power by appealing to national pride and fanning popular fears about Muslim militancy—were convinced that the Parliament House raid was sanctioned at high levels of the Pakistani government. Whether Musharraf himself was briefed on the attack before it occurred “I can’t say,” Mishra, the national-security adviser, told me, but, as for other senior generals in the Pakistani Army, he said, “certainly they knew.” L. K. Advani, India’s home minister, who was deeply skeptical of Pakistan, travelled to Washington that winter, where he spoke with Vice-President Dick Cheney and, according to Mansingh, the Indian Ambassador, told him, “A dog can’t cross the Line of Control without being confronted by at least three layers of Pakistani security.” For his part, Mansingh said he believed that “there is absolutely no doubt that the Pakistani official establishment was deeply involved in these incidents.”
THE ESCALATION
By Christmas Day of 2001, C.I.A. and other intelligence analysts in Washington had concluded that an invasion of Pakistani territory by Indian forces could escalate to nuclear conflict. Statements by Pakistani military and political leaders have made clear that, in the face of India’s much larger military and industrial power, Pakistan might, in a conventional war, resort to the use of nuclear weapons against Indian troops or cities to stave off a total military or economic collapse. Yet the generals were always deliberately vague about how much of a setback they would endure before resorting to nuclear arms; it was in their interest to convince India that the threshold was relatively low. At the same time, many of India’s leaders believed that, as long as they did not allow an invasion to threaten Pakistan’s survival, the threat to use nuclear weapons was a bluff. Although Mishra anticipated widespread combat that winter, he was “sure there would be no nuclear use,” because Pakistan’s generals knew that even if they struck several Indian cities with nuclear weapons India would still be able to retaliate with overwhelming force. “Pakistan knows India is far too big, and a second strike would destroy it,” Mishra said.
Bush Cabinet members conferred regularly over the holidays. John McLaughlin, George Tenet’s deputy at the C.I.A., was at Langley while Tenet spent Christmas in New Jersey, and McLaughlin elaborated on the significant danger of nuclear war. From its analysis of past Indo-Pakistani wars and intelligence reports, the C.I.A. stated that India might try to seize the Pakistani city of Lahore, and that, if this occurred, it might well provoke Pakistani commanders to use nuclear weapons.
U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni, who had grown close to Musharraf while serving as commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, told me that the comparative weakness of Pakistan’s conventional forces had put Musharraf and his generals “in a position where they had to be serious about early use” of nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear stand, was, in essence, “Use it or lose it,” Zinni said. Richard Armitage, at that time the Deputy Secretary of State, whose diplomatic and military contacts in Pakistan dated back two decades, told me that he was “absolutely” convinced that Pakistan’s generals would use nuclear weapons if they felt seriously pressed by India’s Army. “The fear was that both India and Pakistan would try to have a controlled military action, but you can’t control military action once it starts,” Armitage said. Colonel Smith, who was providing the Pentagon with analysis from Islamabad during this period, agreed with Armitage. “I lived in Pakistan for seven and a half years, mostly talking to military people,” Smith said. “Cross the red line, they would use it. No question in my mind. If their country was destroyed, so be it. They would take India down with them.”
Colin Powell telephoned Musharraf repeatedly, “general to general,” as Armitage put it, urging him to take visible steps to end his military’s support for jihadis in Kashmir. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was paying close attention to the crisis, pressed the Bush Administration to intervene directly with Musharraf and Vajpayee. In early January, he travelled to New Delhi and Islamabad to meet with the two leaders; he urged Pakistan’s government to repudiate its jihadi clients in Kashmir, so that India would have reason to show restraint.
On January 12, 2002, in a lengthy speech that was broadcast on Pakistani national television, Musharraf denounced religious extremists, pledged to reform Islamic schools in Pakistan, and announced a formal ban on five jihadi groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. “Kashmir runs in our blood,” Musharraf said, and he pledged to continue “moral, political, and diplomatic support” for Kashmir’s liberation from Indian rule. But, for the first time, he also condemned the attack on India’s parliament as a “terrorist act” and equated it with September 11th, as Blackwill had done. And he said, “No organization will be allowed to indulge in terrorism in the name of Kashmir.”
It was a clear break, at least in rhetoric, with Pakistan’s recent past, and for a time the danger of war receded. India’s leaders were struck by the tone of Musharraf’s pledges, but the Cabinet Committee on Security remained uncertain about whether he was sincere. “I had to deal with Musharraf and his many incarnations,” Jaswant Singh recalled. Powell, meanwhile, kept calling to tell Singh, “Please don’t undermine our war in Afghanistan.” The pressure fell most heavily on Prime Minister Vajpayee, the final decision-maker, a Hindu nationalist then in his late seventies. Vajpayee is a rotund, laconic man who is also a poet. He can speak very slowly in meetings, sometimes pausing for minutes between sentences, during which he appears to be meditating or napping. He had a difficult history with Musharraf; after a summit meeting in Agra, in July 2001, when the two leaders appeared to be making bold moves toward peace, Vajpayee had felt betrayed, according to his colleagues, by what he saw as Musharraf’s arrogance and unreliability as a negotiating partner. Still, as Vajpayee reviewed the January 12th speech, there was some reason to hope that Pakistan’s senior generals, too, had been shocked, at least in retrospect, by the ambitions of the Parliament House strike, and that they intended to change their tactics in Kashmir. Within days, Vajpayee told his generals that there would be no attack, at least for now.
ive months later, on May 14, 2002, another suicidal terrorist cell revived the prospect of all-out conflict. A public bus halted before an Army garrison at Kaluchak, eight miles from the Indian city of Jammu, and three young men in Indian Army uniforms alighted. They approached the Army camp’s entrance, pulled out weapons, rushed inside, and made their way to a residential area, where they shot dead twenty-two soldiers’ wives and children. Later, the attackers were themselves shot to death. In all, during their spree, they killed thirty-four people and injured at least fifty.
Particularly within the military, the murder of the women and children at the camp was seen as an affront to the Army’s honor. The Army chief pressed Vajpayee and his security cabinet for permission to attack Pakistani military targets. “The Army was itching to go across, and it had elaborate plans,” Ashok Mehta, a retired Indian general who is writing a book about the crisis, told me. As Armitage recalled it, the Kaluchak massacre “is what triggered for us that this was going very much south. By that time, the messages were hardening on both sides.”
This time, India’s Cabinet was far less willing to believe the argument that diplomatic pressure on Musharraf could halt Pakistan’s support for the jihadists in Kashmir. His follow-up to the January 12th speech struck the Cabinet as weak, if not evidence that the speech had been disingenuous. Musharraf refused to extradite any of the terrorist leaders sought by India, and he allowed Lashkar to continue to operate as a charity, under a new name. Pakistani courts released from prison the leader of Jaish-e-Muhammad, Maulana Masood Azhar—a particularly notorious figure in India because of the role of his supporters in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet and the murder of a honeymooning passenger. And, early that spring, jihadi militants began crossing the Line of Control again.
Musharraf and his generals felt that the United States was treating them unfairly after the January 12th speech. As Colonel Smith recalled, the generals would complain, “We are the only ones that you can rely on in order to get these guys in Afghanistan—you can’t do it without our help, and we’re helping you in every way we can. You’re putting tremendous pressure on us, and you’re doing nothing on the Indian side.”
In late May of 2002, the Indian and Pakistani militaries remained fully mobilized; the tenor of statements in India’s press, and information collected through intelligence channels, suggested that an Indian invasion might again be imminent. Ambassador Blackwill met with Vajpayee and gave him a distilled version of his Harvard lectures on the Cuban crisis. At a private lunch in Islamabad on May 25th, Smith asked the Pakistani Army officers at his table about the chance of war; they rated it fifty-fifty. “Sometimes you get so fed up you just want to say, ‘Go to hell! Let’s go for it!’ ” one officer declared. That week, Pakistan staged a conspicuous test of its nuclear-capable missiles. “We were compelled to show that we do not bluff,” Musharraf later said.
At a round-table discussion in London, a Pakistani general involved with his country’s nuclear program discussed the crisis with Indian civilian participants. “They said, ‘We can live with losing Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, but we will wipe out Pakistan,’ ” the general recalled. “I said, ‘That’s easier said than done. Losing Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay, it would be very difficult for India to survive.’ ” Such talk unnerved British and American officials, and in late May Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, called Armitage, asking him to visit Islamabad and New Delhi; he was hoping that a new round of diplomacy might at least slow down India’s war planners. Armitage agreed, and he invited analysts from the State Department’s intelligence and regional bureaus to his office. He asked for a show of hands: “How many think we’re going to war?” Everybody’s hand went up but his.
Armitage is a bulky, blunt man who played football during college and then served several Republican Administrations in sensitive national-security posts. He was Colin Powell’s most loyal ally in the Bush Administration’s internecine conflicts over foreign policy. Armitage told me that he and Powell felt that neither India nor Pakistan really wanted a war, yet they needed the United States to provide a way out. “These were proud leaders who had got themselves out on a limb and needed to find a way back,” he said. Blackwill sent Armitage a book of Vajpayee’s poems, in the hope that the verses might help him express his message.
Blackwill and his British counterpart in New Delhi, Sir Rob Young, had become so concerned about the risk of a nuclear exchange that they began to discuss plans for an evacuation of embassy personnel. Blackwill and his staff identified about a dozen volunteers, including the Ambassador, who would stay after a war began. Initially, Blackwill’s staff investigated whether it might be possible to construct a hardened bunker in the embassy compound, where they might have a chance of surviving a nuclear strike. When they reviewed the likely blast effects, they concluded that they would all certainly be killed, and so they abandoned the idea.
On May 31st, the State Department and the British Foreign Office issued travel warnings to the public. Diplomats and dependents began to leave the British and American embassies—the first time in State Department history that American diplomats had been evacuated because of a fear of nuclear war. Indian officials later accused Britain and the United States of concocting their travel warnings and evacuations as a ploy to shock India’s public and rattle the country’s stock markets, in the hope of persuading Vajpayee to refrain from military action. Americans involved in the decision insist that they never had such a gambit in mind.
Armitage arrived in Pakistan on June 6th and met with Musharraf for nearly two hours. “These jihadist groups may be seen as serving your interests now,” Armitage recalled saying to him, “but eventually they will turn against you.” Musharraf insisted that he had meant what he said on January 12th, but his references to jihadi infiltration were carefully articulated in the present tense—“Nothing is happening on the Line of Control” was a preferred phrase, both with Armitage and in public. Armitage felt that this was enough for him to work with. A permanent solution to the problem of jihadi terrorism or insurgency in Kashmir was “a bridge too far,” Armitage told me. His objective was to find an immediate formula to prevent war.
In New Delhi, Armitage met with Vajpayee and, separately, with the other members of India’s Cabinet Committee on Security. He emphasized the solemnity of Musharraf’s promise to Bush, through him, that Pakistan would crack down on the Kashmir jihadis. “I believe him,” Armitage told Vajpayee and his colleagues, as he recalled it. According to Mishra, the Indian side interpreted Armitage’s remarks as a serious commitment, if not a guarantee. “The impression we had was that Armitage was transmitting a message to us from Musharraf”—about a significant change in Pakistan’s Kashmir policy, Mishra said.
Armitage wanted India to take a step that would let Musharraf know that the crisis was easing. After he had dinner with the Indian defense minister, George Fernandes, at Blackwill’s residence, the Indians said that they would move some naval vessels away from Pakistan, and Powell called Musharraf to reinforce the message that India was responding. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scheduled a visit to New Delhi and Islamabad to follow up.
“We almost went” in May, Mishra told me, but Prime Minister Vajpayee, when he faced the final step, concluded that, at the end of a long political career, he wanted to be remembered as a man of peace. For some of Pakistan’s generals, Vajpayee’s decision seemed to offer a clear lesson: nuclear deterrence works. “Suppose Pakistan had been nonnuclear in 2002,” a Pakistani general told me. “There might have been a war. If there’s one single lesson I’ve learned, it’s that possession of a nuclear weapon has not been a bad idea.”
THE BREAKDOWN
The Pakistani military’s Strategic Plans Division, the office that oversees the country’s nuclear-weapons systems, is headquartered in a colonial-era compound of whitewashed bungalows, rose bushes, and trimmed lawns in the Chaklala garrison, a military base in the northern city of Rawalpindi. The base itself is a small city, filled with scenes of civilian life—gardens and traffic jams and family outings. The division sits across the street from the Joint Staff Headquarters, where a decommissioned Pakistani fighter jet tilts up from the front lawn. Lieutenant-General Khalid Kidwai, a former artillery officer, has commanded Strategic Plans since it was formally established, in 2000. The division’s mandate, according to Feroz Khan and other Pakistani generals, was to gain firmer control over a nuclear program that, during its long, secret gestation, had developed somewhat haphazardly. And yet it was the breakdown of control in Pakistan’s nuclear establishment that created a terrifying context for the 2001-02 crisis, and the fears have not abated, at least among some members of the Bush Administration, in the few years since the crisis ended.
Strategic Plans had its origin in a covert section of the Pakistani Army’s General Headquarters, which was created in the early nineteen-nineties. The department coördinated the Army’s nuclear work with that of other government agencies, including the two scientific laboratories that oversaw weapons development, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and a rival facility, the Khan Research Laboratories, which was headed by A. Q. Khan. In the spring of 1999, according to Feroz Khan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif approved a reorganization that led to the birth of the Strategic Plans Division as a joint nuclear-combat organization, staffed by officers from the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy. The division was given authority, at least on paper, over all the components of Pakistan’s nuclear program.
Each of the division’s directorates, including one devoted to security and one to arms-control issues, is commanded by a general who reports to General Kidwai. In the sensitive and sometimes mutually suspicious interactions with the United States over Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program, Kidwai and his senior staff have emerged as important points of contact. When they have met with American delegations, according to people who have attended the meetings, they have typically offered well-organized briefings about what the Pakistani generals described as security-conscious management of nuclear weapons. “Our intent here is to reassure the world that our command and control is safe and under institutional controls,” Kidwai said, according to a record of a meeting with visiting Pentagon officials in January, 2001. “There will be no accidents related to our program, no unauthorized use within our program, and no uncontrolled individuals permitted to have access within the program. . . . There are no loose cannons.”
As it turned out, Kidwai was mistaken. A. Q. Khan was a national hero, whose largely autonomous laboratory had helped build Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. By early 2001, British and American intelligence officers had discovered that Khan seemed to have accumulated great personal wealth. But the investigation into his activities was still incomplete, and, at this point, a former Bush Administration official told me, “certain parts of his transactions were well understood, certain parts were not”; the intelligence showed what nuclear technology Khan was acquiring, but not very much about who was acquiring it from Khan. “The uncertainties included who else in Pakistan understood what he was doing, and who else was getting his stuff,” the official said.
The small circle of American officials who were briefed about Khan in 2001 had to decide whether it would be wiser to continue to monitor his activities, in the hope of learning more about his customers, or to move against his network, with the aim of halting his operations. Bush and his advisers initially decided to let the investigation develop more fully. There was no evidence then or at any later stage that Khan was selling nuclear technology to Al Qaeda. Khan’s motives appeared to be rooted in greed, egotism, and nationalism, tinted with a pride in Islam, but he did not seem to share Al Qaeda’s radical philosophy of total war against Western governments.
As the United States and its allied militias began to overrun Taliban and Al Qaeda positions in Afghanistan, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon obtained a series of crude drawings from Al Qaeda camps. The drawings were difficult to interpret, but they appeared to have something to do with designs for weapons, possibly with a nuclear aspect. In this same period, the C.I.A. learned that at least two mid-level Pakistani nuclear scientists were involved with a charity that had worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The scientists had not been directly employed in the fabrication of nuclear bombs, but they had knowledge that might be useful to someone trying to build a crude device. After being detained by the Pakistani government, at least one of these scientists admitted that he had met with Osama bin Laden, although he insisted that the encounter involved discussions only about charitable works in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had previously declared his interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, and he had encouraged Pakistan to develop a nuclear arsenal, to “terrorize the enemy.” As C.I.A. and Pentagon analysts assessed these fragments of evidence about possible nuclear leakage to Al Qaeda, it was not clear how the pieces fit together, or whether they indicated an imminent threat. Still, few doubted that Al Qaeda intended to use nuclear weapons if it could acquire them.
In late 2001, in Room 208 of the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, an interagency group of nuclear-weapons specialists urgently reviewed the security of Pakistan’s nuclear program. The group, led by Robert Joseph, a senior director at the National Security Council, assessed the entire Pakistani nuclear complex and concluded that the greatest danger of theft or misuse would occur in wartime, or during the mobilization for war. “We hypothesized that the weapons were relatively well guarded until they were put on alert and dispersed,” the former Bush Administration official, who was familiar with the review, told me.
This assessment made the war footing all the more worrisome, since every division of Pakistan’s military had been put on alert. There were reports—at times contradictory—about how far Pakistan had gone in actually preparing its nuclear weapons for possible use. Pakistani generals told me that they had taken no significant steps. Given the gamesmanship between India and Pakistan, though, it is difficult to know how much preparation might have occurred on either side.
At the same time, the National Security Council’s interagency group was debating whether the United States could legally offer Pakistan equipment that might make its nuclear weapons less vulnerable to theft or unauthorized use. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty first took effect in 1970, and it names the United States, the Soviet Union (later Russia), China, Britain, and France as the only authorized nuclear-weapons states. The treaty holds that all other nuclear aspirants are illegitimate; its principles have been enacted into a series of American laws. The interagency group, in assessing its options with Pakistan, talked with lawyers from several U.S. government departments, and it ultimately concluded that America could legally offer Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division access to nuclear-security items such as radiation-suppressing Kevlar blankets, high-grade fencing, and surveillance radars, because these items might have multiple uses, but could offer no equipment that would be solely for nuclear-weapons use, such as the bomb locks known as Permissive Action Links. Colin Powell first raised the possibility of American assistance with Musharraf in the autumn of 2001, but Musharraf rejected the idea; the Pakistani side “just said no,” the former Bush Administration official recalled. The Pakistanis said they “had it all under control themselves.”
Many of Pakistan’s ruling generals fear that, given an opportunity, the United States might stand by as India attempted to preëmptively destroy Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons facilities. In the view of Musharraf and his senior generals, Feroz Khan told me, “the United States is not hostile to Pakistan, but they do know that the U.S. was inimical to the Pakistani program from the beginning, so they would not assume any sympathy” if India attacked. Pakistan’s military has gone to great lengths to keep the operational details of its nuclear-weapons systems secret, several well-placed American officials told me. To accept U.S. nuclear-security assistance, the generals would have to be convinced that the aid would not be used to collect intelligence or undermine Pakistan’s control of its nuclear arsenal.
Late in 2002, after the threat of a major war between India and Pakistan receded, investigations into A. Q. Khan’s rogue nuclear sales produced a series of breakthroughs. It became clear that Khan was selling nuclear knowledge and technology to the governments of Iran and Libya. Toward the end of 2003, the United States revealed its dossier on Khan to Musharraf. The Pakistani government arrested Khan, but Musharraf quickly pardoned him, praising his service to the country. However, the public disclosure of Khan’s activities—some of which occurred after his laboratory had been placed under the supervision of the Strategic Plans Division, in early 2001—gave the Bush Administration an opportunity to renew discussions with Pakistan about its nuclear security.
Last fall, several Pakistani generals familiar with the country’s nuclear-weapons program agreed to be interviewed, on the condition that they not be further identified. They emphasized that, since Khan’s arrest, the Strategic Plans Division has tightened supervision of the country’s nuclear scientists and workers. “The central theme of our doctrine is restraint and responsibility,” a general told me. “This capability is for Pakistan’s sovereignty alone and we will not share it with any outside states or others.” Previously, he said, the security procedures of the country’s main scientific laboratories and civilian-led fissile-material plants rested “with the head of the organization.” He added, “A. Q. Khan betrayed that trust. That’s where we went wrong.”
In the reformed system, the Strategic Plans Division is in charge of all security procedures, and the total manpower of its security directorate has been expanded to about eight thousand people, mainly active and retired military personnel. The general also said that Pakistan has developed its own nuclear-bomb locks, using codes derived from complex combinations of letters and numbers. (American specialists later told me that these locks, as far as they could tell, would likely make it more difficult, but not necessarily impossible, for a terrorist to make use of a stolen Pakistani weapon.) As for control over the weapons during mobilization for war, “there is a command-and-control system that goes right down to the pilot or missile battery,” the Pakistani general said. “In this, the famous two-man rule is followed, and there are places where a three-man rule is followed”—that is, no single Pakistani officer can authorize the use of nuclear weapons or their delivery systems.
contd...
Since Khan’s exposure, some advocates of nuclear disarmament in South Asia have argued during internal Bush Administration debates that providing security equipment for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would only make it more difficult to persuade Pakistan to give up its nuclear arms. According to Feroz Khan, Pakistan’s generals “would want American technical assistance as long as it does not compromise their weapons designs or their management capabilities.”
In March, President Bush will visit Pakistan and India for the first time. In New Delhi, his main purpose, according to officials involved in planning the trip, will be to demonstrate his commitment to the emerging economic and diplomatic partnership between the United States and India. Last July, the Administration signed a preliminary agreement to supply technology for nuclear power plants, which the Indian government says are needed to help address the country’s energy shortages. Although the power plants would be under international nonproliferation safeguards, the offer, which requires congressional approval, is a break with precedent, one that some nonproliferation advocates regard as an endorsement of India as a legitimate nuclear-weapons state. Late last month, the current Ambassador to India, David C. Mulford, warned that, unless India supported efforts to censure Iran over its nuclear program, Congress might reject the deal. Bush has praised the agreement as evidence of a new, more trusting American commitment to India that will bring economic benefits to both sides without increasing the danger of nuclear war.
Since late 2002, the governments of India and Pakistan have reached a number of modest agreements, such as the establishment of bus service between the two countries. A series of cricket matches between the national teams has created particular public excitement. In both India and Pakistan, officials told me that they hoped that this preliminary détente would be reinforced by public opinion. Yet the causes of the 2001-02 crisis—jihadi terrorism, mutual suspicion, and a relatively young and unstable system of nuclear deterrence between the countries—have not disappeared. If anything, the pace of terrorist attacks has recently quickened.
On July 5th, a jeep loaded with explosives rammed into a security fence surrounding a Hindu temple in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya; five attackers then ran through the breach. Security guards killed them before they could enter the temple, which they apparently intended to destroy. A regional police chief said that the attackers belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba_._ The temple is an especially sensitive site, because it was erected after Hindu-nationalist cadres destroyed a mosque in the area in 1992, setting off widespread religious riots that claimed as many as three thousand lives.
On the evening of October 29th, just before a major Hindu festival, sixty shoppers in two crowded markets in New Delhi died when bombs hidden in small satchels detonated at the height of the holiday rush. Within days, Indian police had arrested Tariq Ahmed Dar, a Kashmiri travelling salesman with a pharmaceutical company, and said that he had been involved in organizing the attack. K. K. Paul, the commissioner of police in New Delhi, who is leading the investigation, told me that Dar “received a lot of money” from sources in the Middle East, particularly from the Persian Gulf, and that the explosives appeared to be of military origin. Discussing the New Delhi attacks, Paul said, “There is substantial evidence to show that it is indeed Lashkar_,_” and that that group receives direct support from “a foreign government.” Paul would not name the government, but other Indian officials, who asked not to be identified, believe that Pakistan bears responsibility. Then, in late December, a gunman attacked a scientific conference in Bangalore, the center of India’s booming information-technology industry, killing one leading Indian scientist and wounding five others. A senior Indian official said that the evidence “suggests the Pakistani Army is still involved.”
In Pakistan, the generals I interviewed dismissed such accusations. Musharraf has asked India to provide his government with leads on the October 29th bombings, and has pledged to coöperate in any investigation. Indian officials, though, do not trust Musharraf’s government to help conduct a reliable investigation. Americans who monitor intelligence about terrorism on the subcontinent agree that Musharraf has not taken definitive steps to halt aid to jihadi groups, and that infiltration by militants into India has not ended. In an interview with Lally Weymouth, published last month in the Washington
Post, Musharraf described the jihadists striking India as “independent groups acting without any guidance or support from anyone, following their own agendas.”
If Pakistan is continuing to support jihadists, its generals may feel that they have new reasons to stoke insurgent violence in India, believing that India has increased covert support for insurgent groups in Pakistan, such as the violent separatists in Baluchistan. In interviews, several Indian strategists close to the government openly advocated support for such groups as a fitting response to the Pakistani Army’s aid to jihadi groups.
To some extent, the jihadists seem to have developed their own nuclear-weapons doctrine, based not on the acquisition of nuclear devices, the scenario most commonly feared in the United States, but on carrying out spectacular strikes in India—attacks that might draw India and Pakistan into a major war. Judging by the occasional public statements of their leaders and their strident Web sites, groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad contain at least some members who both oppose the Musharraf government and seek India’s destruction. Pakistani officials have said that a breakaway faction of Jaish-e-Muhammad, along with some dissident members of the Pakistani military, participated in at least one of the two assassination attempts made against Musharraf since 2003. Lashkar-e-Taiba has been more coöperative with Musharraf’s government, but when I spoke with two former Lashkar military commanders, last autumn, they told me that many younger volunteers regard Musharraf as an apostate. These volunteers, the former Lashkar commanders said, also hope that attacks in India’s heartland will ultimately destroy the regional peace process.
This involvement by jihadists is “something new, in comparison to the forties, fifties, and sixties,” Stephen P. Cohen, an American scholar of South Asia and nuclear-deterrence theory, says. Richard Armitage believes that there is “a large possibility” that jihadi groups want to set off a war on the subcontinent, because “it would serve the interests of these groups to have a conflict.” At least as worrisome is the prospect that this sort of nuclear equation may spread to the Middle East, where Iran may acquire nuclear arms and a neighbor such as Saudi Arabia or Syria or Egypt might then do the same, and where one might easily imagine the emergence of collaborations between stateless terrorist or religious groups and insecure, dissent-ridden, nuclear-armed governments.
For those governments which feel particularly vulnerable to catastrophic jihadi terrorism—the United States, India, Russia, and Israel, among others—the 2001-02 nuclear crisis and its unstable aftermath can look like the sort of thing that used to be found only in thrillers. The growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal (now estimated at as many as a hundred weapons; India is thought to have about the same number), doubts about the arsenal’s management, and the continuing problem of jihadi terrorism, appear deeply threatening. The rising strength of remnant Al Qaeda and Taliban cadres along the Afghan border is equally unsettling.
Nor is it clear that India and Pakistan have learned the right lessons. The Indian military is now advocating a new doctrine of “cold start” for the country’s armored divisions along the Pakistan border, an approach that would allow India to strike offensively—and immediately—after a terrorist provocation. The purpose, Indian military strategists say, would be to avoid the extended period of mobilization for war that allows American and British diplomats to intervene and negotiate for restraint.
Still, some Indian and Pakistani military officers and civilian officials I spoke to say that the 2001-02 war scare was their Cuban missile crisis—a confrontation that came so close to catastrophe that it shocked both sides into a new approach to nuclear deterrence, one that is grounded in military restraint, political patience, and negotiations about underlying grievances. “There has been a tacit decision” to react defensively and by nonmilitary means in the face of continuing jihadi terrorist strikes, Manoj Joshi, a member of India’s National Security Council Advisory Board, told me. “We’ll take what they can throw across. That remains the thrust of Indian policy.” A senior Indian official said, “I think what you have to do is cope with terrorism as best you can, knowing that there is always going to be one that comes through. I think that is something that we have to live with, and cope with using our own resources.”
The difficulty with that approach, the official continued, is India’s democracy, which is open, noisy, and competitive; public outrage after a jihadi terrorist attack might force any government to mobilize for war, as the United States did after September 11th. “There is a threshold of violence that may tip things to the other side,” the senior official said. For example, if the death toll in the October 29th market bombings in New Delhi had been “five hundred, rather than fifty, it would have tipped to the other side. We try to emphasize this to our American friends.”
If India and Pakistan face another crisis (and even a cursory reading of their history suggests that this is likely), they will make their choices with diminished trust in the United States as a mediator. The Bush Administration’s embrace of India, symbolized by its offer of nuclear coöperation, has left Pakistan’s generals with “an absolute certainty that the U.S. is not an honest broker,” a U.S. Defense Department official who has recently talked extensively with Pakistan’s generals said. Indeed, in the next crisis Pakistan’s generals will assume that any steps toward war by India will be taken “with the involvement of the United States.” At the same time, many Indian officials believe that the United States did not push Musharraf hard enough to end support for jihadi groups in Kashmir. For his part, Armitage said that he never promised an end to all Pakistani aid to Kashmiri groups, and that American pressure had reduced Musharraf’s covert support. “Did the infiltration stop? No. Did it lower? Yes, it did. Did aid to the separatist groups in Kashmir decline? Yes. Did it stop? No. But I would say to them, three years afterward, look where we are—I think we’re demonstrably quite better off.”
One recent evening, I visited Jaswant Singh in his airy office inside Parliament House, just down the hall from where he escaped the December 13th assault. The former foreign minister is now the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house. (Singh’s party was voted out of office in May of 2004. The current government is a coalition led by the secular Congress Party.) Singh said that a lesson he had taken away from 2002 was: “Hereafter, I really will never ask the United States for anything as far as Pakistan is concerned.” And during a crisis, he added, “obviously now I won’t even send messages” through the United States to Pakistan.
Singh is a thoughtful man and a prolific writer; in conversation, he can digress into historical narratives or stir himself into oratory. Reflecting on the relationship between the post-September 11th United States and post-December 13th India, Singh concluded that India must try to develop its own model for a campaign against terrorism. “Your experience has led you to an excessive militarization,” he said. “I’m not sure that is the answer.” The United States is a relatively young society, he observed; India has been coping with religious and sectarian violence, some of it quite terrible, for more than a thousand years. As he continued, Singh became emotional. “I must go down my path undeterred, containing whatever comes at one, in whatever forms of terrorism,” he said. “The absolutely unconquerable attribute of this land is its unmatched resilience. I don’t say this out of arrogance. But India absorbs—and absorbs simultaneously—so many shocks, and it goes on. Unperturbed? No, not unperturbed—at times troubled, and sometimes angry.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/the-stand-off/amp
