Four years ago, as I spoke to a Taliban leader about peace negotiations with the Afghan government, the conversation took an unusual turn: the Taliban leader wanted to talk about an American hostage named Bowe Bergdahl.
The official, whom I met in Islamabad, Pakistan, was a leader of the Haqqani network, a branch of the Taliban waging a long war to expel Americans from Afghanistan. The group had captured Bergdahl, an American soldier who had disappeared from a base in eastern Afghanistan a year before.
The Taliban official told me that Bergdahl had managed to escape briefly from his Taliban captors. At the time, the official said, Bergdahl was being held in Pakistan. He had apparently been unable to find his way back to American-controlled territory. “He didn’t know where he was—he didn’t have a G.P.S.,” the Taliban leader said, referring to the sort of hand-held device that could have helped him find his way. “You Americans are so dependent on technology. He didn’t know how to navigate by the stars, like we can.” The Taliban leader laughed. Bergdahl, he said, was quickly recaptured. It was impossible to verify the Taliban leader’s account, though at the time it didn’t seem implausible. Now that Bergdahl has finally been released—traded for five Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo—our discussion resonates for another reason: what it says about the role of the Pakistani government in the Bergdahl affair.
I had gone to Islamabad to investigate a bizarre and disturbing chain of events that had led to the capture, earlier in the year, of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the military commander of the Afghan Taliban. When Baradar was caught, by a team of C.I.A. and Pakistani agents, the arrest was hailed as a great moment of American and Pakistani cooperation. But, as with almost everything that involves our Pakistani allies, things were not as they seemed. It turned out that Pakistani agents had maneuvered the C.I.A. into arresting Baradar because he was involved in secret peace talks with the government of Afghanistan, which the Pakistani intelligence service wanted to scuttle. Sure enough, the Americans had taken the bait, and the talks had come to an end.
So far, Pakistani officials have been silent about any role they played in either Bergdahl’s captivity or his release. But there are many questions that need to be answered. The Haqqani network, the group that was holding Bergdahl, maintains especially close ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, or I.S.I. (The Taliban official who told me about Bergdahl was a leader of the Haqqani group.) That a Taliban-aligned guerrilla unit would be so closely tied to the government of our ostensible ally—to which we give more than a billion dollars each year—has long raised troubling questions about American policy in the region.
It’s worse than that. It was the Haqqani group that attacked the American Embassy in Kabul in September, 2011, killing five Afghan police officers and eleven civilians. Following that attack, Admiral Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the Haqqani network acted as “a veritable arm” of the I.S.I. American military commanders often describe the Haqqani network as the most lethal group operating against American soldiers, and it is believed to be behind many suicide attacks inside the capital.
The Haqqani group has a complicated history. It’s run as a mafia-like enterprise, with smuggling and protection rackets at its core, with Jalaluddin Haqqani, the grand old man of the network, presiding as its head. Haqqani, who is now close to seventy years old, once had close relations with the United States, and particularly with the C.I.A., during the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation, which took place between 1979 and 1989. (This association has given rise to a thousand conspiracy theories—among them, that the U.S. created the Taliban—but Haqqani and the United States have now been foes for much longer than they were ever friends.)
Given the close connections that the I.S.I. maintains with the network, it seems inconceivable that the organization wasn’t well aware of Bergdahl’s condition, status, and whereabouts. Did the I.S.I. try, over the years, to free him? We don’t know. Could Pakistani intelligence officials have done more to help him? Did they do nothing? Likewise, we don’t know. Were they involved, and perhaps even instrumental in, gaining his final release? We don’t know. But, given the amount of American money that flows into Pakistan, we’re entitled to ask.
Did fears about Bergdahl’s location complicate the C.I.A.’s drone war in Pakistan? During talks to free Bergdahl, Taliban officials apparently told Qatari officials that drone strikes nearly killed Bergdahl at least three times. Last year, there were twenty-three strikes in Pakistan, according to the New America Foundation. Did Bergdahl’s captivity present dilemmas to American intelligence officials? Given the secrecy still surrounding the C.I.A.’s drone program, we may never know.
Video still of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, guarded by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan, by Voice of Jihad Web site/AP.
