Mixed Legacy for Departing Pakistani Army Chief

By DECLAN WALSH

When he leaves his post on Friday, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the inscrutable Pakistani Army chief and former spymaster, will end a nearly decade-long chapter as the focus of American fears and frustrations in Pakistan, the reluctant partner in a contentious and often ill-tempered strategic dance. Suspicious American officials frequently accused him, and the 600,000-member army he led, of double-dealing and bad faith: supporting the Afghan Taliban, allying with militant groups who bombed embassies and bases, and sheltering Osama bin Laden. Those accusations were made in private, usually, but exploded into the open in late 2011 when Adm. Mike Mullen, the American military chief who sought to befriend General Kayani over golf and dinners, issued an angry tirade to Congress about Pakistani duplicity. The taciturn General Kayani weathered those accusations with a sang-froid that left both allies and enemies guessing about what, or whom, he knew. But few doubted that he nursed grievances, too — about C.I.A. covert operations, the humiliating raid that killed Bin Laden, and perceived American arrogance and inconstancy. General Kayani, 61, steps down with those arguments still lingering. And reckoning with his legacy exposes a cold truth at the heart of the turbulent American-Pakistani relationship: that after years of diplomatic effort, and billions of dollars in aid, the countries’ aims and methods remain fundamentally opposed — particularly when it comes to the endgame next door in Afghanistan. “We have almost no strategic convergences with Pakistan, at any level,” admitted a senior American defense official. “You’ll never change that, and it’s naïve to think we can do it with an appeal to the war on terror.” Seen through Pakistani eyes, however, General Kayani was a more tangible, even positive, force. Despite his personal antipathy for the country’s civilian leadership, he restrained army meddling in politics and tolerated increased criticism in the news media. After the country’s first successful completion of a democratic election cycle, Pakistanis can dare to imagine that a long era of military coups might be over. Further, he was at least partly successful in refocusing the army’s monomaniacal attention on India, the old enemy, toward a new threat posed by the militants lurking in the country’s remote areas. Still, in other respects, Pakistan’s bullying military class has remained unchanged, particularly in its dismal record on rights abuses. General Kayani’s soldiers and spies have prosecuted a dirty war against separatists in Baluchistan Province, cultivated contacts with sectarian militias, and intimidated and bloodied rights campaigners and journalists. For all that, his authority was never seriously challenged. “He’s one of the most powerful generals Pakistan has ever had,” said Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Now, as he hands off to his successor, at a time of diminishing American engagement in the region, the largest question about the enigmatic general is how much of that legacy will endure. In many ways, General Kayani was the antithesis of the swaggering general and junta leader he succeeded, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and his mandate after taking the top army post in 2007 was to repair the prestige that was tarnished under General Musharraf’s watch. He has been quiet and philosophical where General Musharraf was loquacious and boastful. Foreigners complained that his reserve could be unnerving, and that he mumbled. In meetings, he sat like a perched eagle, occasionally darting out for a cigarette. Those who knew him well said his public reserve was simply a tactic: In private, with small groups he trusted or needed, he could be blunt and forceful. “He was the anti-Musharraf,” said Shuja Nawaz, the author of “Crossed Swords,” a history of the Pakistani Army. But the rise of the Pakistani Taliban posed an immediate challenge. The Taliban’s drive to destroy the security forces and central government shook the Pakistani military’s jihadist sympathies, through unprecedented violence: the beheading of soldiers, the assassination of senior generals, and even suicide bombings against the feared military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. An audacious assault on the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2010 was particularly worrisome: The attackers came within a few hundred feet of the general’s personal office, and were aided by army conspirators. General Kayani’s response to the Taliban included a successful military offensive in the Swat Valley in 2009, and orders to dust off the army’s creaky, India-centric military doctrine, which he infused with modern counterinsurgency doctrine. And he publicly acknowledged the country’s Frankenstein problem: Jihadist groups that the army had once nurtured to fight Indian interests in Kashmir and elsewhere had become a menace to Pakistan’s stability. “We as a nation must stand united against this threat,” he said in a widely acclaimed speech in August 2012. But the army only partly embraced this conversion, to the immense frustration of American officials, especially Admiral Mullen. No other American worked so hard to cultivate General Kayani, whom he visited 26 times in Pakistan — more than any other foreign military leader, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two generals played golf in America and held long working dinners in Rawalpindi. Some American officials joked about a “bromance.” But in September 2011, just before he left office, Admiral Mullen exploded with anger in testimony to Congress that suggested a personal betrayal. Despite years of cajoling General Kayani to cut the military’s ties with the Haqqani network, the Afghan Taliban’s most virulent allies, Admiral Mullen charged that the group was a “veritable arm” of General Kayani’s ISI. “He believed he had failed,” said an American official familiar with Admiral Mullen’s efforts, adding that the two men have not spoken since. But Admiral Mullen’s outburst reflected a broader American frustration with both Pakistan and Afghanistan after 2001: that despite warm handshakes and billions in aid, local leaders stubbornly refused to comply with American demands. With General Kayani, it came down to a confidence vote on the future of Afghanistan. He and his staff did not believe American assurances of a stable Afghanistan in which India, Pakistan’s main preoccupation, would be excluded, so he hedged his bets by refusing to turn the army’s guns on the Haqqanis, American and Pakistani officials said. “The problem with our Afghanistan strategy is that everything about it was anathema to Pakistan,” said Mr. Nasr, who previously served in the Obama administration. “You can’t have a partner who sees everything you do as a threat to his own interests.” Those contradictions unraveled most spectacularly in 2011, a year of serial crisis that plunged relations with Pakistan to their nadir: a C.I.A. contractor gunned down two men in Lahore, a Navy SEAL raid killed Bin Laden a few miles from the military’s main training academy just days after General Kayani had spoken there, and American aircraft mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border. General Kayani, under pressure from other generals, closed a C.I.A. drone base within Pakistan, froze military cooperation and temporarily closed NATO supply lines into Afghanistan. But through it all, American and Pakistani officials said, he kept the relationship going — even though it cost him politically within the angry Pakistani officer corps. General Kayani himself was furious with American leaks, like the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, undermining his standing in Pakistan. In one meeting with the American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, he produced an annotated copy of Bob Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” and demanded to know who had leaked the information about him that appeared inside. Incongruously for a country where generals have ruled for half of its 66-year history, General Kayani had greater success with Pakistani civilians. He closed the ISI’s infamous political cell, the traditional dirty-tricks unit for political interference, and oversaw largely successful elections in 2008 and last May. Douglas E. Lute, a former security adviser to President Obama, said General Kayani told him with pride about his participation in elections. “He described putting on his best business suit, going down to the station and voting,” he said. Still, General Kayani was hardly softhearted. He steadfastly wielded his unofficial veto power over the country’s foreign and security policy, often operating through pliable civilian ministers. He continued to expand the country’s nuclear arsenal — still in the direction of India — and his troops and intelligence operatives faced accusations of gross human rights abuses. Inside the military, his reputation was hurt by stories that corrupt relatives had grown rich on military supply contracts. “Did Gen. Kayani’s brothers make billions?” read one newspaper headline this week. Now, after an extended term as army chief, he is retiring at a time of institutional flux in Pakistan. President Asif Ali Zardari stepped down in September; the country’s mercurial chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, leaves next month. Whether General Kayani’s policy of militant restraint endures will depend partly on his successor — a choice that reflected a rare defeat for him, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ignored his recommendation in favor of the new army chief, Lt. Gen. Raheel Sharif. But for all General Kayani’s impenetrable airs, one thing seems clear. Pakistan’s core strategic doctrine — distrust of India, and an accompanying insistence on exerting control through proxies in Afghanistan — is likely to remain unchanged. It predated his rise to power. And in the end, his legacy may come to be seen as the general who protected that doctrine, for better and worse, through the stormy years of American involvement in the region. “He can say, ‘I survived the Americans,’ ” Mr. Nasr said.