The State Department and the Pentagon Are Battling the Deep State Over the Future of India and China
Pulling on the thread of a flagrant lie inserted into Trump’s congressional address unravels a hidden clash in Washington.
During his joint address to Congress, President Donald Trump announced what he described as a major victory. “America is once again standing strong against the forces of radical Islamic terrorism,” he intoned. “Three and a half years ago, ISIS terrorists killed 13 American service members and countless others in the Abbey Gate bombing during the disastrous and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Trump’s comments referenced an infamous ISIS attack that targeted fleeing U.S. troops and Afghan citizens at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, during the waning days of the U.S. occupation of the country. The attack killed 13 U.S. troops and over 170 Afghan civilians. In his speech, Trump dubbed the attack, “perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” before telling Americans that he had brought the perpetrators to justice—with the help of a particular foreign government. “Tonight, I am pleased to announce that we have just apprehended the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity, and he is right now on his way here to face the swift sword of American justice,” said Trump, before adding, “And I want to thank the government of Pakistan for helping arrest this monster.”
Pakistani security forces, he alleged, had caught the ostensible mastermind of the deadly bombing—Mohammad Sharifullah, also known as “Jafar”—and rendered him to the U.S. to face justice. For the Pakistani military, which is currently leading the country, and its allies in the CIA, Trump’s small aside was cause for jubilation. It also signaled a win for the military government in its efforts to build ties with the Trump administration, after years of an eroding relationship with the U.S.
The claim that Sharifullah was the mastermind of the attack, however, does not hold up to scrutiny. And not everyone was pleased by the rapprochement between Trump and Pakistan; at the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department, and at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, Pakistan—the current home of ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan—the reaction was quite the opposite. According to sources with knowledge of the debate now unfolding inside the U.S. government, Sharifullah’s rendition and Trump’s claims about it now sit in the center of a confrontation between the American intelligence community and its military allies in Pakistan on the one side and the Pentagon and State Department on the other. The outcome of that confrontation will set American policy in the region for years to come.
Senior officials at the Pentagon and State Department want to pivot away from the military and empower civilian leadership and democratic rule in Pakistan, and Richard Grenell, who now serves as Trump’s envoy for special missions, has been outspoken in his calls to free Khan and restore democracy to Pakistan. But the CIA, which has worked closely with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), based in Rawalpindi, for decades, sees the military and security establishment as a more reliable partner than the country’s civilian authorities.
“This is an interagency battle regarding who gets what responsibility under the upcoming new national security policy that is slated to come into effect around late April and early May,” said one source close to the discussions. “The CIA is trying to make sure that there is no major shift in policy on Pakistan.”
Abbey Gate
Sharifullah did not have a planning role in the Abbey Gate attack, let alone was he a “top terrorist,” but instead was at the time a low-level member of ISKP, the Central Asian branch of the terror group the Islamic State, who himself had escaped detention days earlier amid the fall of Kabul. We know that thanks to reporting first in an Afghan-based news outlet sympathetic to the Taliban. But we don’t need to take the Taliban’s word for it. Despite Trump’s splashy announcement, at a March 10 court hearing for Sharifullah, an FBI agent confirmed that he had had not been “among the top-level planners of the attack on Abbey Gate,” alleging instead that he had been tasked by ISKP leaders to conduct reconnaissance on a nearby road and determine if any roadblocks existed. The agent added that Sharifullah had been “living near Quetta, Pakistan, where he was raising livestock, including chickens,” prior to his arrest.
The Trump administration would have required heavenly powers to have killed the top men involved in the Abbey Gate attack, given that those men were already killed several years ago. Indeed, it was widely reported in 2023 that the Afghan Taliban had already taken out the two main plotters of the attack. Indeed, the U.S. government itself confirmed that the Taliban had already killed the suspect behind the Abbey Gate bombing. "Experts in the government are at high confidence that this individual…was indeed the key individual responsible,” a senior Biden administration official told CBS News at the time, with the White House itself describing him as the “mastermind” of the bombing. “The ISIS-K terrorist who was the mastermind of the horrific attack at Abbey Gate that killed 13 brave American servicemembers and many others has been removed from the battlefield,” said then National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
Al-Mersaad, the Afghan outlet, published an article essentially confirming the Justice Department’s conclusion presented in court. According to sources who spoke with the publication, Sharifullah had been a “low-ranking observer” in ISKP who had been incarcerated in 2019 and only escaped from prison on August 15, 2021, just eleven days before the Abbey Gate attack. It was a rare moment of agreement between the DoJ and the Taliban, both of which contradicted Trump’s address. A video interview published with Sharifullah after his capture also showed him describing his role in the group while under incarceration by the previous Afghan government, with Sharifullah again describing himself as a small-time member of the group who only carried out specific tasks as instructed. He said he was not made aware of the nature of the operation, but merely told to look out for American or Taliban forces, and he did as he was told. For obvious operational security reasons, it is common not to tell low-level participants in such operations about details beyond what they need to know.
The U.S. government under multiple administrations has repeatedly had strong motivation to claim that an individual who is killed or captured on the battlefield was potentially the “mastermind” of an unavenged recent terrorist attack. Trump’s incentive was all the greater, as he wanted the opportunity to one-up Biden on a high-profile issue. The withdrawal from Afghanistan made for complicated politics for Trump, as he had promised to withdraw himself, and made plans to do so, but was never able to accomplish it against the resistance of his military leadership. Biden succeeding where Trump failed was an embarrassment. But the chaotic nature of the withdrawal gave Trump a way back in, to say that had he done it, it would not have been the debacle it was. Pakistan’s gift of Sharifullah perfectly played into Trump’s needs, and the CIA was happy to serve it up.
Since the start of the Global War on Terror, the Pakistani ISI has repeatedly helped the U.S. government in this public relations exercise, regularly renditioning alleged terrorists to U.S. forces, often based on spurious accusations. For years, maintaining this politically useful cooperation has been a priority for the CIA, even in the face of intense pressure to upend the status quo inside Pakistan and support a civilian government with a democratic mandate.
Meanwhile, the America First wing of the Trump administration has a rationale for upsetting that status quo, military-led relationship with Pakistan. As the U.S. seeks to contain China, this faction believes that a civilian-led Pakistan will have a mandate to resolve its long-simmering conflict with India, freeing New Delhi to focus more directly on its eastern borders and act as a counterweight to China, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
Grenell in particular has been a vocal advocate for Khan, stating in January on social media, “Watch Pakistan. Their Trump-like leader is in prison on phony charges, and the people have been inspired by the US Red Wave. Stop the political prosecutions around the world!”
A return of Khan to power would undo efforts by the Biden administration to shore up a military-run regime in Pakistan friendly to the CIA. Biden’s State Department urged Khan’s removal from power in March 2022, directly citing his trip to Moscow for a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as Khan’s “aggressively neutral” stance in the Russia-Ukraine war, a contradictory phrase coined by former diplomat Don Lu, who left the State Department in January. Trump’s allies in the State Department and the Pentagon have no such qualms about Khan’s position on the war or his willingness to do business with Russia.
ISI’s Man in DC
The ISI and CIA have been locked into a mutually beneficial relationship for years, extending back to the early days of the War on Terror and even the U.S.-backed insurgency against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Despite its embattled position inside Pakistan, as Drop Site News reported recently, the ISI is planning for another war across its border in Afghanistan fought in the name of counterterrorism, hoping to make itself useful once more to its old friend in Langley.
The history of much of this relationship is wrapped up in the person of Robert Grenier, a long-time ISI friend and veteran of the CIA. Grenier registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act after signing a contract in July 2021 with Iftikhar Durrani, a member of Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, the party of then-Prime Minister Khan.
PTI had no knowledge of the contract, Durrani later said, and the true client was the Pakistan military. In 2023, after Khan was removed as prime minister, Durrani came forward and claimed in a TV interview that the main purpose of the contract was a Washington lobbying campaign to build up Pakistan’s military and the position of the then-army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa against Pakistan’s democratically elected civilian leadership. According to Durrani, using him as a frontman allowed the military to launch a lobbying campaign in Washington even while Imran Khan was still president.
“I was told at that time that this firm is being hired for lobbying for Pakistan, so I signed the contract, I learned much later that our Prime Minister wasn’t even aware. It is impossible to do this without cabinet approval, but now that we look at it there was no cabinet approval, and I was not in the cabinet,” Durrani said in his 2023 television interview.
“I was asked by the people from the Pakistani establishment,” he said, referring to the Pakistani military.
Grenier, in a statement to Drop Site, confirmed Durrani’s key allegation. The military, he said, was indeed the true client. “I signed a contract with the Pakistan government in July, 2021. The engagement ended in August, 2022. My client was the Pakistan Army,” Grenier told Drop Site. Grenier took at least $150,000 from that contract, the records show, and also subcontracted Pakistan’s former ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, for the job.
“As made clear in my FARA registration, this was not a lobbying contract. I never lobbied anyone or did any PR work on behalf of Pakistan. I provided no materials to U.S. officials, and never set up any meetings for Pakistani officials. I registered out of an abundance of caution, as I was working for a foreign government with interests in the U.S.,” Grenier said.
Grenier described his role as providing “the government of Pakistan with a broad understanding of opinion and attitudes in the U.S., both within the government and outside, regarding Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other regional issues of concern,” and helping to “rebuild trust and establish at least some measure of cooperation with the U.S., particularly in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.” He also confirmed hiring Haqqani as a subcontractor to do research on his behalf, stating that the subcontract was also unrelated to lobbying or public relations.
“My work had nothing to do with civil-military relations in Pakistan,” Grenier added, “or which part of the government should predominate in dealings with the U.S. I have my own views on those topics, but never discussed them with either American or Pakistani officials.”
Durrani also said that members of the Pakistani establishment had approached him to sign the FARA contract with Grenier, but that the civilian part of the Pakistani government was unaware of it. Grenier confirmed this. “I would have happily provided advice to the civilian government as well under this contract, but they apparently were not a party to it,” Grenier told Drop Site.
A few months after blowing the whistle on the contract in the TV interview, Durrani was kidnapped from his home by dozens of masked, armed men in Islamabad on the orders of senior Pakistani military officials. Durrani was detained for nearly two weeks in a facility typically reserved for interrogating terrorists, where family members say that he was subjected to severe torture, including electrocution, sexual humiliation, and forced to wear an orange Guantánamo Bay-style prison uniform. His family’s electronic devices were confiscated, and he was interrogated about his connections to high-ranking military officials, their political affiliations, and financial matters.
Grenier did not comment at the time on Durrani’s kidnapping, and told Drop Site he was unaware of it and did not know him personally.
“Mr. Durrani signed the contract on behalf of Pakistan. I didn’t know why then, and don’t know now. I do not know Mr. Durrani. I have never met him, nor interacted with him in any way, in person or electronically,” Grenier said. “I have no idea what he might have said to anyone about the contract. The treatment he describes of himself and his family is horrific, if true. I had never heard of it until I received your message.”
The outcome of Pakistan’s internal political struggles, which have pitted Khan and his embattled political party against Pakistan’s powerful military establishment and its allies in the U.S. intelligence community may now be decided based on how other factions aligned with Trump choose to recalibrate U.S. views on the country.
“Everyone is fighting their corner,” a source privy to the internal debates stated. “Both the Department of Defense and State Department want a radical change in Pakistan-U.S. relations.”
The article says Trump lied, the CIA knew he lied, the courts confirmed the guy was a nobody and still treats the arrest like a geopolitical earthquake. So… what are we reading? An exposé or a political sci-fi novella?
The guy they called the “mastermind” of Abbey Gate was literally raising chickens in Quetta. FBI confirmed he did recon on a road. That’s it. And yet, we’re told his arrest is shaping U.S. grand strategy. Someone’s overdosing on symbolism.