There was “no discussion at all of diplomacy and a political settlement,” Vali Nasr recalled. “Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying it. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.”
IT WAS RAMADAN in 2010, and Umar Cheema, a Pakistani journalist, woke up in the middle of the night to spend time with friends while they waited for suhoor, the predawn meal with which observant Muslims break fast. They hung out at Daman-e-Koh park, which in the day overlooks spectacular views of Islamabad and at night turns into a warren of romantic courtyards and gardens, bathed in golden light. The group left at around 2:30 a.m., crowding into Cheema’s car for a ride to their respective homes. He had dropped off the last of his friends and was on his way home when he noticed two cars had been following him. One, a white Toyota Corolla, fell in line behind him. Another, a black Jeep, pulled in front of him.
As he stopped, three men in police uniform jumped out of the Jeep. They said, strangely, that he’d run over a man and fled the scene. Cheema, who wrote for Pakistan’s The News and had won the Daniel Pearl Fellowship for foreign journalists and worked for the New York Times, had never been involved in a crime in his life. He had, however, written a series of hard-hitting articles about the powers that be. He exposed army controversies, including allegations that court martialed officers were being denied fair trials. He dug into evidence that Pakistani intelligence was behind a series of disappearances of civilians. He reported that intelligence agents were letting suspects in a major terrorist attack go. He told the officers there’d been a mix-up, but let them lead him into their car. That’s when they blindfolded him and took away his phone.
When they pulled off his blindfold, Cheema was seated in a bare room with peeling green cement walls. It was lit by a single, exposed light bulb. A fan turned slowly in a corner. When he asked where he was, his captors told him to shut up. In the dim light, he could see three of them, their faces covered with children’s party masks. They tore off Cheema’s clothes, threw him on the floor, and beat him with wooden rods. They shaved his head and eyebrows, and took pictures of him cowering. They didn’t mince words about their motivations. “You’re here because of the stories,” said one. “This will teach you to be obedient.”
“I had been reporting about the missing persons, so that gave me the idea of the horrifying stories the families had been through,” he told me. “I thought of my son, he was two years old. I realized if I didn’t make it back, my son would grow up alone.” Cheema steeled himself against the pain. “I told myself, ‘I am being punished for doing something good, for being truthful.’” Cheema’s captors beat him on and off for nearly seven hours, then dumped him, naked and bleeding, by the side of the road outside Islamabad. His car had been left there. They gave him 100 rupees to cover tolls back into the city. The operation was a well-oiled machine of intimidation; Cheema had the distinct sense that they’d done it before. His case was unusual solely in that the intimidation didn’t work: he immediately went public.
There was little question, in Cheema’s mind, who was behind the attack. His night from hell was preceded by a series of meetings with the ISI—which had gotten in touch before and after his stories with ominous “advice.” The agency had a history of “dealing with” disobedient people, agents would remind him. Being a journalist in Pakistan can be a death wish. Reporters there are routinely beaten, and sometimes worse. The year after Umar Cheema’s beating, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who had been reporting on links between the ISI and Islamist militant groups, was beaten to death. His corpse was found floating in a canal outside of Islamabad. The CIA later intercepted telephone calls that suggested the killing was directly ordered by the ISI—likely by General Pasha himself. Since 1992, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented sixty murders of reporters with motives related to their work in Pakistan. Stories about human rights, the war in Afghanistan, and corruption are all dangerous, but the single most deadly beat, comprising 67 percent of deaths, is politics: often, stories about the ISI or the military. Pakistan was a paradox in this respect—the country had a sophisticated twenty-four-hour TV news cycle. It had spirited columnists and commentators. But the military and ISI still ruled with an iron fist. Countless reporters were even on intelligence payroll, paid to write favorable stories and as insurance that they wouldn’t write harsh ones.
The plight of the journalists, like the disappearances and extrajudicial killings they sometimes died covering, underscored the waning space for conversation in the US-Pakistan relationship. At the State Department, I found that raising the disappearing reporters and verboten stories was an uphill battle. It was another fight not worth picking at the height of counterterrorism cooperation. Such moral compromise was a familiar—some would say inevitable—feature of national-security-sensitive relationships. But the growing list of subjects that the United States appeared to be powerless to raise was alarming. This was the challenge Richard Holbrooke faced when he stepped into the job: a relationship in which no one talked about anything outside of tactics.
Cheema related his experience to several State Department officials, who were sympathetic, but not interested. “There was literally no word about these human rights violations, unless there are tensions going on between ISI and CIA,” he told me. “Washington has its own interests. Why would they bother if there is any problem as long as the ISI is cooperating with them?” The human rights issues threw the power imbalances of the American government into sharp relief. The bilateral relationship with Pakistan was almost entirely run between intelligence agencies and militaries. But neither of those entities felt it was within their mandate to raise human rights.
“It never entered into my conversations” with the Pakistanis, General Hayden said of the murders and disappearances. “When I went to Islamabad, I had very specific asks. I was going for a purpose. ‘We need to go to do this. I need your help to do this. Here’s what we’re going to offer. Can I count on your assistance here?’” Hayden sighed. “We already know that the ISI were apparently killing journalists. Alright? That may affect my overall view of ISI, but it doesn’t affect my working with ISI to try and capture an al-Qaeda operative in Wana or Mir Ali.” This was a common sentiment among intelligence and military leaders overseeing the Pakistan relationship. These kinds of broader conversations were, they felt, someone else’s problem. But because the power within the US policy process was so skewed away from civilian leadership, it was hard to know who could meaningfully raise such issues.
Hayden’s successor at the CIA, Leon Panetta, found his attempts to confront these issues frustrating. Panetta was a former politician and veteran of the executive branch but an outsider to the intelligence community when President Obama appointed him to the agency job. He was heavyset and bespectacled, with an avuncular manner and an easy laugh. He said he was conscious of the legal requirement to stop assistance to military units engaging in human rights abuses—the so-called Leahy Law. “When we found out that they were obviously implementing extrajudicial approaches,” he said, chuckling at the turn of phrase, “it raised some real concerns. So the approach that we decided on was to, rather than slam them down, try to see if there were ways to improve their own process.”
The Pakistanis tended to be less than receptive. “They kind of looked at me with a whimsical look as if to say, ‘You know you guys don’t get it’”—more laughter—“‘You’ve got all these nice laws and rules, but the fact is these people are killers, they’ve killed people, they’ve