By NAHAL TOOSI May 04, 2014
The morning the news broke that the United States had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, three years ago this weekend, I was pursuing a very different kind of story
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My Pakistani colleagues and I were traveling to Chakwal, an area about 90 minutes south of Islamabad, to visit a school with chronically absent teachers for an article about Pakistan’s dilapidated education system. It was the type of idea my editors usually rolled their eyes at — not enough blood and intrigue — but they’d relented this time because nothing else was going on.
We never reached the school. Instead, we made a U-turn and returned to Islamabad before being dispatched to Abbottabad, where The Story, the one reporters across the region kept renewing their Pakistani visas for, was finally unfolding. We spent days roaming outside the al Qaeda chief’s compound, interviewing neighbors, dodging checkpoints and trying to stay ahead of Pakistani intelligence agents.
Yet, despite our best efforts, security officials never let us inside Bin Laden’s house. Key details about what had happened there came instead out of Washington, often through unnamed sources. And after what seemed to be an initial burst of credulity, many Pakistanis quickly latched on to conspiracy theories about what happened, and their amazement at the notion that the terrorist leader had lived among them morphed into anger over the U.S. intrusion on their soil.
It’s all just a drama—Osama never existed, some told us. “This is all so Barack Obama can get reelected,” one man said. Then, there was this gem: “Osama had a body double, and that’s who the U.S. killed.”
It was exhilarating and frustrating, illuminating and mystifying. Those few days in Abbottabad epitomized what it was like to report from Pakistan in general: Something (usually violent) happens somewhere, but access to the site and the players is restricted; the Americans and the Pakistanis, true to their decades-long dysfunctional relationship, each try to control the narrative, thus feeding the conspiracy theorists; and in the end, you are never sure how much of what you write is really true.
I thought I was ready for Pakistan.
I read books. I interviewed people. I looked at maps. I soaked up every bit of information I could before landing there in April 2008 as an Associated Press correspondent. (My posting was actually a return: I’d lived in Pakistan as a child for about a year after my family fled Iran, and I had always wanted to go back under better circumstances.)
But it’s hard to be truly prepared for a country so full of contradictions, divisions and delusions that some argue it is barely a country at all. By the time I left — actually, long before the Bin Laden raid — I was a wreck, prone to emotional outbursts, extremely cynical about religion and disillusioned by practically every actor involved in the Pakistani drama. I loved so much about Pakistan – the color, the spice, the beauty of its landscape and the generosity of its people. But I hated it for not being able to get its act together.
This is, after all, a country that has dozens of nuclear weapons but can barely keep the electricity going; where countless lawmakers — never mind ordinary people — don’t bother to pay their taxes, then complain that the United States doesn’t give Pakistan enough money; where some 8 year olds go to school and others go to work; where tossing away the business card of a man named Muhammad can get you tossed in jail on a blasphemy charge; where musicians make some of the most beautiful music in the world, and where they could get killed for it; and which technically is an Islamic democracy but where the generals still hold the real power. Even Pakistan’s legal system is confused: It has secular and Islamic sections, neither of which seemed able to convict any of the terrorists tearing the country apart. Nearly 70 years after it was carved out of India, many who live in Pakistan still identify themselves by their tribe or ethnicity before they call themselves Pakistani.
The author in South Waziristan, a tribal region in northwest Pakistan where the army was battling Taliban militants.
I was ready for the bombs, a few of which hit a bit too close. Those I felt I could handle, even if they probably scarred my psyche more than I care to admit. What really got to me was the more quotidian violence — the acid attacks, the rapes, the honor killings, the beatings — as relentless as the summer heat, as common as the call to prayer. One day early in my stay, a newspaper ran a photo of a crowd gathered around three alleged thieves. The men had been caught and set on fire, their bodies stacked like logs.
Decades of policies that promoted austere, harsh versions of Islam — brought about largely thanks to funding by the Saudis, the cowardice and rapaciousness of Pakistani leaders, and strategic silence on the part of U.S. leaders eager to see insurgents push the Soviets out of neighboring Afghanistan— had seemingly made some forms of violence increasingly acceptable, or at least tolerable, to mainstream Pakistanis. That meant daily life was ever-more frightening for Christians, Hindus and other non-Muslims, as well as Muslims deemed too secular or the wrong sect. Anyone who dared speak out in support of these oppressed groups risked death, so fewer and fewer did.
After leading liberal politician Salmaan Taseer was murdered in January 2011 because he dared criticize Pakistan’s extreme blasphemy laws, a British friend of Pakistani descent despaired: “What kind of a country is this?”
“The kind of country where people like Salmaan Taseer won’t give up,” I replied.
“Yes, but those people all get killed,” he said.
***
Reporting in Pakistan can be a logistical nightmare. The country is huge, the infrastructure spotty, the security tenuous and the population of nearly 200 million very diverse, including on the linguistic front. Major areas are essentially off-limits to foreigners, including the tribal regions where the central government has little control and where several militant networks are based. Even those of us with fairly expansive visas would find ourselves trailed by security forces in places we technically were allowed to go. Our landlords and drivers were interviewed by intelligence workers eager to learn details about our lives. Early on in my stay, a guy who simply had to be a spook showed up at our office and interviewed me; to my surprise, he spoke to me in Farsi, my mother tongue. It was bizarre.
After that initial encounter, whenever I knowingly ran across an intelligence agent (they would usually say they were from the Interior Ministry), I would, in jest, ask for a business card. The truth was, though, I was never entirely sure who was or wasn’t working for the intelligence services. “They are everywhere,” a Pakistani friend told me. “They could be the guy selling flowers on the corner or your gardener. Just assume they are everywhere.”
As a woman, I had advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, Pakistani women would often talk to me but not to men; at the same time, Pakistani men would often dismiss me, or, even worse, call me up the next day in hopes of becoming “friends.” (My phone’s contact list included a series of male callers labeled Freaks 1 through 13.)
Many areas were simply too dangerous for a foreigner to travel, legal restrictions or not. The threat of kidnapping or death was no joke. I once asked a Pakistani colleague if I could visit Darra Adam Khel, a town in the northwest that was legendary for its production of weapons. He just laughed at me.
The dangers didn’t come only from militants. There was one political party that some journalists feared more than the Taliban. And if you crossed the state security apparatus, you could be in serious trouble. This was usually a much bigger problem for Pakistani reporters, but I’ve known foreign correspondents who were attacked by government thugs, too.
In fall 2009, I was returning to Islamabad after doing some reporting in the Swat Valley, where the army still had a heavy presence after launching an operation against the Pakistani Taliban. We kept running into checkpoints, which added hours to the usual journey, and at one stop one of my Pakistani colleagues mouthed off to the soldiers.
Next thing I knew, he and our driver were taken away while I was left in the car on the side of the road. A soldier came over a short while later, asking me questions to see if my story contradicted my colleagues’ account. At one point, he asked, with a controlled menace: “Are you carrying any arms, ammunition or explosives? Because it would be bad if any such thing was found in your car.”
I understood his implied threat. Bullets can magically appear where they weren’t before. But I simply said: “No. Feel free to check.” He declined.
Later, he nodded in the direction of my Pakistani colleagues: “You know, I could have shot those two. I have the right to shoot them, because they insulted me. They questioned my authority. But out of respect for you, I will not do that. You are a woman and a foreigner, and if I take action against them, it would have a big impact.”
The soldiers eventually let us go, after I made a show of yelling at my colleagues and threatening them with even worse punishment than what the army could mete out. I was furious, but also quite relieved to be “a woman and a foreigner.”
The limits on movement meant that you had to rely a great deal on what people in powerful positions told you. But as a reporter, I never knew what to believe because so many actors in the Pakistani drama were willing to lie, mislead or obfuscate. This includes the Americans.
Perhaps the biggest farce revolved around the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwest tribal regions.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy — at least on the record, and for a long time even off the record — had no idea what we reporters were talking about! Drone strikes? What drone strikes? Pakistani authorities, meanwhile, condemned the drone strikes in public, while – according to U.S. Embassy cables revealed through WikiLeaks — privately gave the Americans the go-ahead.
The drone strikes began under the presidency of George W. Bush, but during his first term President Barack Obama dramatically escalated the use of the missile-armed, unmanned aircraft; 122 drone strikes were reported in Pakistan in 2010, a peak, according to the New America Foundation. The CIA-led strikes have killed a few thousand people; the targets included some top Pakistani Taliban commanders that Islamabad was happy to see die, even though it publicly complained about the U.S. “violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.” But precise figures are impossible to nail down, and it’s never been clear how many of the dead were militants versus civilians. The United States, in the rare instance when it even acknowledged the super-secret program existed, would downplay the civilian casualties to the point of statistical hilarity, while ordinary Pakistanis would sometimes claim that nearly every person killed was an innocent victim. I filed dozens of drone-strike stories, sometimes from bed in the middle of the night, and always with strict attribution. But most of the time I wasn’t sure I believed the information our sources were providing.
As people lied and people died, the Pakistani public learned to have contempt for all sides involved. To this day, I’m not entirely sure how ordinary Pakistanis feel about the drone strikes. Public opinion polls – not always reliable in Pakistan – suggested a broad dislike, and there was little doubt the strikes spurred some young Pakistani men to pick up weapons. But some academics and officials would privately insist that many Pakistanis, especially in the tribal areas gripped by militants, actually supported the drone strikes because they were relatively accurate, at least when compared to bombardments by the Pakistani army. But those supporters were too frightened to admit their stance publicly.
Watching the Americans and the Pakistanis do their little frenemy dance was amusing at best, revolting at worst. At times, it was tragedy and comedy rolled into one.
Take the Raymond Davis incident. On Jan. 27, 2011, Davis shot dead two Pakistanis he is said to have thought were trying to rob him in the eastern city of Lahore. The United States insisted he was a diplomat — and thus covered by immunity — as it sought to free him from Pakistani custody. OK, maybe on paper Davis was billed as a diplomat. But he was a CIA contractor — anyone remotely close to the story could see that Davis, a beefy ex-soldier with apparently excellent aim, was not exactly negotiating treaties or processing visas — so it wasn’t surprising that Pakistani officials, under domestic pressure, weren’t eager to simply let him out on the next flight.
Davis left Pakistan after an Islamic law-based agreement that involved compensation for the families of the men he shot. It was what happened afterward that stunned me.
The day after Davis was freed, U.S. drones — which had been silent for a good stretch of the CIA contractor’s time in custody — fired a barrage of missiles at dozens of men gathered in the North Waziristan tribal region, killing more than 30. Pakistan’s army chief issued a — very rare — statement condemning the strike, saying it killed a slew of innocent people gathered for a tribal council, something subsequent media reports supported.
But the Americans were flip.
“There’s every indication that this was a group of terrorists, not a charity car wash in the Pakistani hinterlands,” one unnamed U.S. official told the AP. The New York Times quoted an unnamed official as saying: “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. They were terrorists.”
It’s entirely likely there were some Taliban militants at the meeting. But it’s also highly unlikely that, after years of trying to evade the drones raining missiles on them, more than 30 Pakistani militants would gather in one place at the same time.
Was the United States ordering drone strikes out of spite over the Davis affair? Had the relationship between Islamabad and Washington really come to this? Did the Americans working in Pakistan really understand what they were dealing with? Did they even care?
Even now, years later and at a time when drone strikes in Pakistan are far more rare, I am still amazed when I recall those callous remarks from the unnamed U.S. officials. After everything that had happened with Davis, the Americans didn’t seem to understand something very basic: Pakistanis don’t like being humiliated. That disconnect has a lot to do with the relationship’s unending dysfunction.
As an American, I wish I could say that the U.S. operation in Pakistan is a well-oiled machine staffed by highly competent individuals with a deep knowledge of the South Asian nation and a commitment to trying to further American interests in a fashion that helps both countries.
Instead, I recall the embassy staffer who, in all seriousness and clearly without a clue about cultural sensitivities, asked if I could hook her up with a handsome Pakistani restaurant owner. I recall the communications officer who told me that the Americans could learn a lot about how to deal with Pakistanis from studying the methods of British colonialists. (Perhaps he hadn’t read the whole history: Those methods were at times brutal, and their views of South Asians deeply flawed; the colonialist legacy in the region is mixed at best.) I recall the numerous horror stories I heard from Pakistanis about how rudely they were treated by the visa section of the U.S. Embassy. One Pakistani friend, who already had a visa to visit the United States, was dazed as he relayed his experience to me. He’d wanted to take his young son along with him for a visit. The embassy refused to issue the boy a visa, while suggesting that my friend might be a child trafficker.
When I would bring up such complaints to the Americans, they would blow them off, effectively accusing all Pakistanis of being liars. (The Americans could be real jerks, but their frustrations with Pakistanis were not entirely unfair or unique to them; an Australian diplomat once told me he feared he was turning into a racist after encountering double-dealing Pakistanis so much.)
The most ridiculous aspect of the American operation in Pakistan was the transient nature of the embassy staff. They’d stay for a year, maybe two, then head to their next assignment. Many barely left the embassy compound, much less Islamabad. Security was a legitimate concern, but I doubt that many of them wanted to learn any more than they had to about a country they would soon be leaving. There were plenty of decent Americans working in Pakistan, but few really cared about the place, and too many had a sense of cultural superiority that infuriated Pakistanis.
Perhaps my favorite phrase used by the Pakistani military was “This fight will be pursued to its logical conclusion.” The army meant, of course, that it would defeat whoever it was battling, but its definition of logic has not always dovetailed with that of its supposed allies.
The military, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, is believed to have long nurtured armed insurgents to gain the upper hand in its regional rivalries, especially against the country it considers its top foe: India. So over the decades, many Pakistanis have grown comfortable with the concept of the jihadi, or “holy warrior”—so long as those militants were fighting on their country’s behalf.
For the army, there are “bad Taliban” and “good Taliban.” During my time there, the army would alternate between fighting the Pakistani Taliban, which was trying to overthrow the government in Islamabad, and trying to negotiate with them. But it simply would not go after Afghan Taliban fighters who had bases in Pakistan because those militants were not staging attacks on Pakistani soil—infuriating U.S. officials.
Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, often seemed genuinely confused about who the real enemy was. “They’re just local boys!” I remember one Pakistani journalist saying when questioning why the army was battling Pakistani Taliban fighters who had taken over the Swat Valley. If the civilian death toll in a suicide attack was especially high, many Pakistanis would insist that the Americans — or even the Israelis — carried it out because, as they put it, “A Muslim would never kill other Muslims.” The concept of the meddling “foreign hand” was raised so often by Pakistani officials that someone created a Twitter account for it, though, in all honesty – or maybe this was the point? – @foreignhand has recorded no activity.
It was never easy to push Pakistani officials over their country’s alleged support for certain militants. They’d quickly point out that the United States supported Afghan insurgents – the mujahideen – back in the 1980s when it deemed them a useful tool against the Soviets. They’d also look to the future, especially this year, when American troops are due to leave Afghanistan.
“The U.S. is going to leave this neighborhood, but we have to live with what’s left,” Pakistani officials would tell me. It was a veiled way of saying: “Hey, we need the Afghan Taliban not to hate us once they’re back in charge in Kabul.”
***
I won’t deny I was delighted to have the biggest story on the planet land in my lap the morning of May 2, 2011.
I wasn’t surprised that Bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan; after all, the United States had long suspected he was there, sympathy for anti-Western Islamist militants runs high in many parts of the country and there are plenty of places to hide. Besides, I never got the sense Pakistani authorities were looking for him in the first place – on a number of occasions when I’d ask Pakistani officials about Bin Laden, they’d suggest he was already dead. In many ways, the quest for the al Qaeda chief was a forgotten story, though among some reporters there was constant paranoia that he’d be found while we were on vacation or otherwise indisposed.
What startled me was that Bin Laden wasn’t living in a cave along the Afghan border dodging drone-fired missiles. Oh no … he was sheltered in a three-story house in a lovely, leafy town that was also home to a major military academy. I’m pretty sure the Islamabad press corps had a collective heart attack when initial reports, sourced out of Washington, flashed that Bin Laden had been killed in a “mansion” in a suburb of the capital. (One colleague yelled at me in disbelief when I called him with the news.) I kept wondering if I’d ever driven by the place.
But the “suburb,” though roughly 35 miles away as the crow flies, took two-and-a-half hours to reach on road from Islamabad, a journey that takes you past hills and fields and other gorgeous scenery that, under different circumstances, could make Pakistan a tourists’ paradise. Even in my adrenaline-fueled, Blackberry-clicking state, I kept staring out the window to find moments of peace on the drive to the town where the world’s most wanted man had just been killed.
When my Pakistani colleagues and I reached Abbottabad, our first task was to try to find the “mansion.” Thanks to assistance from a clever local driver, we managed to evade the security cordons and reach the neighborhood. There were lots of large houses but the police wouldn’t tell us which one was Bin Laden’s. Finally, some of the neighbors pointed out the walled compound to us, but we were kept well away from it thanks to the security forces flooding the area. The guards ordered us to stop taking pictures, even from a distance. At one point, I kept pretending to talk on my Blackberry while surreptitiously pointing it toward the house and snapping photos. (It was a big house, but the word “mansion,” used by American sources, was a stretch. It definitely didn’t seem luxurious.)
As we started interviewing neighbors, some of whom had awoken overnight as U.S. helicopters descended on the scene and rattled their roofs, I was struck at the start by people’s willingness to believe the immediate news, even if they were genuinely shocked that Bin Laden had been among them.
“I think it’s the best thing to happen to all the Muslim world!” one man said.
Within hours, the mood shifted. It might have had to do with the growing presence of intelligence agents in the area — I’m not entirely sure. In my case, it involved a man in a checkered shirt. He showed up, looking somewhat nervous, and watched as I interviewed a group of young men not far from Bin Laden’s compound. When they spoke to me, the men seemed willing to accept that the al Qaeda leader had been there. Next thing I knew, the nervous man intervened in my interview, pulled the young men aside and spoke to them quietly. He then came back to me and asked me to leave while trying to block my attempts to take pictures. He wouldn’t tell me who he was or who he worked for. So I brushed him aside and went back to talk to the young men. This time, they had something new to say: “It was all innocent women and children who were killed. There were no men in that house.”
What did they know? What did anyone really know? In a place like Pakistan, where half the population is illiterate and crossing the wrong person can mean being “disappeared,” the truth is a victim, too.
Over the next few days, security forces eased the cordons a bit, allowing reporters and others to at least stand next to the compound if not enter it. Some people eagerly walked around picking up small, charred pieces of a U.S. chopper that had crashed during the raid, as if to have a souvenir. One old man set up a watermelon stand nearby, taking advantage of what he called “the festivities.”
The experience was madly enhanced by social media, an irony considering how careful the man who once lived in the house the world was now obsessively watching had been about his own communications. One area resident had unwittingly live-tweeted the raid, becoming instantly famous (though he ignored my interview requests).
My own Twitter following exploded, and whatever I tweeted was suddenly fodder for other media to use. At one point, after I tweeted a rebuttal to the Pakistani army’s claims about the distance of the military academy from Bin Laden’s place, a close friend called me: “What the hell are you doing? Don’t piss them off!”
My Pakistani colleagues and I drove all over town in search of scoops and new angles on the story. I was restless, to the frustration of my far wiser team members. “Cover your hair! Cover your hair!” one growled at me as we neared a checkpoint.
We spent hours trying to track down a doctor who’d sold to Bin Laden’s aides the land the house was built upon. We walked into his clinic and got his attention by saying I had a severe headache — which was completely true, my head was pounding — then sprang a few questions on the poor guy. The Bin Laden aide (a “very simple, modest, humble type of man,” the bewildered doctor told us) had said he was purchasing the land for an “uncle.”
Many of the people we met in Abbottabad were generous, inviting us into their homes and offering us tea, bread and dal, the traditional lentil dish. The mostly middle-class residents who lived near the notorious terrorist’s “mansion” said they’d never seen him, though some had encountered the aides who lived with him. One elderly woman described how one of the men had given her a lift in his car once when it was raining and she needed to go to a store. The men were courteous but very private, people said, chalking that up to conservative tribal traditions that weren’t unusual in Pakistan.
I encountered some sympathy for Bin Laden (“Osama bin Laden is a great Muslim hero. America is the terrorist,” a local teacher said). But for the most part, the Pakistanis in Abbottabad were worried about how the sudden tumult would affect their lives and their community. I couldn’t blame them. With its gorgeous hills and quiet, orderly feel, Abbottabad really was a nice town.
As the Pakistani government, in full defensive mode, began castigating the United States for launching the operation without giving it a heads up, questions swirled over whether anyone in Pakistan had aided Bin Laden in hiding. Was Pakistan complicit somehow in sheltering him? Or was it merely incompetent in not noticing he was there?
Every time I ponder that question today — like so many stories out of Pakistan, there’s never really a firm conclusion — I am reminded of something an Abbottabad bread-maker told a Pakistani colleague of mine: “It’s possible to be both complicit and incompetent.”
When I think of my time in Pakistan, I can’t help but feel that I wasted too much of it writing about the wrong things. Yes, there were bombs and drones and political theatrics. But there was also an awful health care system, failing schools, huge levels of poverty, a sclerotic judiciary and terrifying abuse of women and children. Above all, I regret not writing more about the spreading religious intolerance among ordinary Pakistanis – a trend fueled by radical clerics and governments who preferred appeasement to denouncement. Think about this: By some estimates, Pakistan’s population is projected to rise to a staggering 380 million by the year 2050 – and extremism is increasingly infecting the mainstream.
When Salmaan Taseer was killed, I was rattled. The Punjab province governor was gunned down by one of his security guards because he dared to support a Christian woman accused of insulting Islam. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws carry the death penalty, and they are so vaguely worded that the most innocent of actions can lead to automatic imprisonment. (A schoolgirl was once accused of blasphemy because she misspelled a word.) Oftentimes, the laws are used to persecute religious minorities or as retribution in, say, a business dispute. Even though the courts have generally found ways to avoid executions, the accused can lose years of their lives in prison, and upon release still face the potential of death at the hands of angry mobs. Taseer wanted to stop the abuse of the blasphemy laws, but even suggesting anything was wrong with the statutes was deemed blasphemous by some in Pakistan.
So after Taseer’s murder, crowds rallied in honor of his killer. Lawyers threw rose petals on Mumtaz Qadri, the man who fired the gun at the politician he was supposed to be protecting. Clerics wouldn’t say prayers for the slain governor. The ruling party, clearly terrified of the street, said it had no intention of touching the blasphemy laws. One of my drivers said Taseer deserved to be killed. Many people who, in their hearts, might have opposed the assassination were too afraid to speak out against it.
I hoped, foolishly, that this was all an aberration.
Then, a couple of months later and a few months before Bin Laden’s death, gunmen assassinated Shahbaz Bhatti, the only Christian member of the federal cabinet, who had also called for reforming the blasphemy laws. By all accounts, Bhatti was a good and decent man, and in my encounters with him I’d always walk away impressed by his calm and his patience. His loss was a severe blow to Pakistan’s Christians, who, along with other non-Muslim minorities, make up less than 5 percent of the population, have very little political power and live in fear of the blasphemy laws.
“We have been orphaned today!” Rehman Masih, a Christian living in Islamabad, wailed to an AP colleague. “Now who will fight for our rights? Who will raise a voice for us? Who will help us?”
A few days after Bhatti was killed, I went home in a foul, angry mood, shaken by how I couldn’t look the Christian man who cleaned our offices in the eye. I called a friend in the United States, and, within seconds of him answering, I started to cry. “Things are just so bad! They keep killing all the good people!” I said, over and over. Even now, the mentions of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti make me emotional, because their deaths made it clear to me that Pakistan had gone crazy.
Today, the government in Islamabad is once again considering negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban, a strategy that has never worked before. Osama bin Laden remains dead, and his house has been demolished. The Americans are untangling themselves from Afghanistan, while their drones keep hovering. The bombs still go boom. And Pakistan’s very soul keeps turning far darker than the bloodstains left behind in Abbottabad.
Nahal Toosi is deputy politics editor for Politico. She was an Associated Press correspondent in Pakistan from April 2008 through August 2011.
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