Bloodmoney by David Ignatius

intelligence unit was choosing its targets. And to do that, it was necessary to travel to the remote territory where the Karachi operation had been aimed. This was not a project he could delegate to one of his case officers, much less to one of the agents on the ISI’s string. For, in truth, he did not trust his colleagues on anything truly sensitive, especially involving the United States. So he made the phone calls himself, and sent messages by other channels, to be sure that the ground was prepared.
    The general set off with his driver at first light one June morning in his Toyota Land Cruiser. He winced when the SUV passed beneath the illuminated portrait of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and below it the words of the founder’s invocation in 1947: unity, faith, discipline. How little Pakistan had of all three, after nearly sixty-five years, but the general was a hopeful man, and at least he could be disciplined.
    They rolled along the Grand Trunk Road toward their first stop, the military air base just west of Peshawar. The trucks heading toward the Khyber Pass were decorated like the wagons of the Raj days: The drivers’ compartments were made of wood—intricately carved and then painted in rainbow colors and decorated with tiny mirrors and scarabs to ward off the jinns of the hills. In his younger days, the general had found these trucks colorful and charming, but today they seemed just another sign of his dear country’s backwardness. He closed his eyes and tried to understand the puzzle of what the Americans were doing.

    The general wanted to travel light, with as small a footprint as possible. So he had requested a one-engine Mashaq trainer, rather than the fat Mi-17 cargo helicopter the air wing commander recommended. The pilot still hadn’t been told the destination when the DG-ISI arrived. General Malik waited until the little propeller had started to whirl and then put on his headset and spoke into the microphone:
    “Do you know Wana garrison in South Waziristan?” he said. The pilot nodded. “Take me there.”
    The young pilot gave the thumbs-up sign. He was from Gilgit in the north, with the light skin and high cheekbones of the mountains. He had flown the Wana route often enough since coming to Peshawar, usually to ferry officers of the Frontier Corps to their garrison deep in this most remote of the tribal areas. But he had never, in all his flying days, transported a three-star general. The air wing commander filed a hasty flight plan for them, and they were off.
    The flight took nearly two hours. They bumped over the low mountain ranges south of Peshawar, toward Orakzai Agency and then south across the ancient princely states of Bannu and Tank, which had for centuries been way stations for caravans coming north from Karachi and the Arabian Sea. At Tank, the pilot banked west and steered the little plane into South Waziristan.
    The landscape below was a dry corrugated wilderness: desolate mountains, jagged ridges mile after mile toward the Afghan border. Think of the rolling sea in a typhoon, but with the endless brutal waves formed of dirt and rock. The heat of summer shimmered off these trackless hills, producing a low haze that made it look all the more like the devil’s land. It was a place for snakes and scorpions, bugs and vermin. A humble goat would get lost amid these rocks, let alone a human being. The region might be impassable to outsiders; but it was a fortress home to the Wazir, Mehsud and Darwesh Khel tribesmen. Farming was all but impossible in these barren lands, so the natives since the beginning of time had been fierce hunters and brigands.
    After the plane crested a last arid peak, almost at the Afghan frontier, a broad valley opened below, and in the middle of this flat ground, improbably neat, stood the town of Wana. Here was a small oasis of cultivation: There were apple orchards and wheat fields, and the fortlike compounds of the residents, each clan living behind high mud walls with