On August 26, 2008, Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, touched down for a secret meeting on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Indian Ocean. The topic: Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The summit had been arranged the previous month. Mullen had grown anxious about the rising danger from Pakistan’s tribal areas, which Islamic militants were using as a base from which to strike American troops in Afghanistan and to plot terrorist attacks against the United States. He flew to Islamabad to see the country’s army chief of staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Kayani is Pakistan’s most important general, commanding its 550,000-man army. By some accounts, he is also the ultimate source of power in a militarized society that reveres its generals more than its politicians. Mullen had been blunt with Kayani: The United States needed Pakistan’s army to take on the militants flourishing along the border, he said. The days of Pakistan looking the other way--cutting deals and playing double games with the radicals--had to end.
It was hardly a painless request; the Pakistani military is organized for warfare against its arch-nemesis India, and many of its mid-level officers are sympathetic to the Taliban and, at best, wary of the United States. When the United States argues that smashing militants along Pakistan’s northwest border will improve the security of both countries, officials in Islamabad are often skeptical. In his conversation with Mullen, however, Kayani had agreed. He had even requested a second meeting, with other top Pentagon officials, to plot a comprehensive strategy.
Finding a location was tricky. The Pakistani army was already fighting militants in the Bajaur tribal area, and the general couldn’t be too far from the theater. But a parade of U.S. generals arriving in nearby Islamabad with marching orders for the army could inflame anti-Americanism. So Mullen proposed meeting on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was then patrolling the waters south of India and Pakistan. Several weeks later, the Joint Chiefs chairman alighted on the Lincoln in a C-2 Greyhound propeller plane. He was met by an impressive roster of American generals, including the top commander in Afghanistan, David McKiernan; Special Operations Command chief Eric Olson; and soon-to-be CENTCOM commander David Petraeus.
Landing by helicopter was Kayani, wearing green army fatigues and a black beret. Kayani has dark, sunken eyes, which lend him a mysterious air, one that matches his taciturn style. “He is sphinxlike,” says a congressional foreign policy aide who has dined with the army chief. “I wouldn’t want to play poker against the guy.” Together, the generals huddled for hours, as they planned how the U.S. and Pakistani militaries could cooperate in a crackdown on the radicals. (Kayani, a notorious chain smoker, emerged for regular cigarette breaks on the carrier’s deck.) “It was about this time that Kayani started to lay out in broad strokes what his strategy was going to be, how he was going to attack this,” says a Pentagon official.
Mullen was impressed. Unlike many of his countrymen, Kayani seemed to understand that, when it came to fighting the militants, Pakistan’s interests aligned with America’s. “[H]is principles and goals are to do what’s best for Pakistan,” Mullen told reporters when he returned from the Lincoln. “And everything he’s done … indicates that’s absolutely the case.”
Almost a year and a half later, Washington is still trying to assess Kayani’s reliability. His army has thrust into the tribal areas, as promised--most recently with an offensive into the Al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan. But that campaign has captured or killed precious few militants; most have simply fled to new havens nearby. It remains to be seen whether Kayani and his compatriots continue the fight in earnest, or whether their efforts have been designed mainly to impress their American patrons, who send billions of dollars in military aid to their impoverished country. Kayani, after all, has rejected America’s most important request: that he take on Afghan Taliban groups within his borders, especially the fearsome commander Siraj Haqqani, who operates largely unthreatened in the safe haven of North Waziristan, where he also provides shelter to Al Qaeda operatives. As recently as mid-January, Pakistani officials told U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates that any new offensive against militants would have to wait at least six months. Thus, a critical question remains unanswered: In the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, can Michael Mullen count on Ashfaq Kayani--and, by extension, Pakistan--as a reliable ally?
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