You can't wake a man feigning sleep

Violence without limits and Pakistan�s challenge January 2009

By: A H Nayyar & Zia Mian

ADAM J WEST

The murderous assault on Bombay by Islamist militants, at least some of whom were from Pakistan, has exposed once again the grave danger that radical Islamist movements pose to Pakistan, its neighbours and the world. The urgent challenge now is for Pakistan and its neighbours, together with the international community, to work together to confront the risk of Pakistan spiralling into chaos and collapse.

Ten years ago, the political thinker and activist Eqbal Ahmad wrote that “conditions for revolutionary violence have been gathering in Pakistan since the start in 1980 of the internationally sponsored Jihad in Afghanistan.” He argued that “revolutionary violence in Pakistan is likely to be employed by religious and right‑wing organizations which have not set theoretical or practical limits on their use of violence.” He then warned that Pakistan “is moving perilously toward a critical zone from where it will take the state and society generations to return to a semblance of normal existence. When such a critical point of hard-return is reached, the viability of statehood depends more on external than internal factors.”

Pakistan’s leaders have failed for a decade to heed this warning. Sadly, the recognition of the need to act against the Islamist violence that now imperils Pakistan has come not from the terrible war that jihadi groups have unleashed on state and society, wreaking havoc from remote border areas to the heart of the capital city, targeting both the powerful and the powerless. It has come due to external pressure. The Americans demanded action against the Islamists following the attacks of 11 September 2001. The attack on India’s Parliament in December 2001, and the military crisis that followed, generated new demands for action. The 2005 attacks on London’s underground system and buses triggered further pressure. The list is long. The assault by Islamist militants on the people of Bombay in December 2008 is only the most recent, and is unlikely to be the last. All point in the same direction: Pakistan’s failure is a threat to its neighbours and to the world.

The threat facing Pakistan is broad and deep. There is on the one hand the armed Islamist groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), its parent organisation Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JD), and similar Pakistani groups, many originating in the Punjab, but with a presence in towns and cities across the country. They are radical Islamist nationalists with a goal of turning Pakistan into a fundamentalist Islamic state. They are opposed to the democratic process. Created by the Pakistani state as a proxy army to wage war with India over Kashmir, these groups oppose any peace process with India and seek to heighten the conflict. They see the United States and its allies as a threat to their ambitions.

Then there are the Taliban militants in the tribal areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. These are essentially local religious warlords who have established theocratic rule in their respective areas of influence, with unheard of brutalities and barbarism. While each Pakistani Taliban group has its own base in the respective tribal agency, they have organised themselves into the Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (the Taliban Movement of Pakistan). They are inspired by the Afghan Taliban, who were created by Pakistan in the 1990s as a proxy army to achieve Pakistani military and political ambitions in Afghanistan. These groups have given sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces that fled Afghanistan after the US invasion. They now fight alongside them against the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

These two movements, which Pakistan now needs to confront, are not necessarily separate. They represent two heads of the same monster. Many fighters in both groups were spawned in the madrassas, and have been nurtured and sheltered by Pakistan’s mainstream Islamist political parties and missionary orders. The first generation of these groups – from the key leaders and activists to the model for their organisation, strategy and tactics, their politics and vision of success – were nurtured by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the war against the Soviet Union. In recent years, the Punjabi groups have taken shelter with and provided training to their Taliban brothers in the tribal areas as well as access to their networks in the towns and cities of Pakistan. Both groups are part of an even larger network that includes the Islamist sectarian militias in the country, hard-line activists in Pakistan’s mainstream Islamist political parties and organisations, and sympathisers in government institutions and across social classes.

Crunch time
Pakistan’s leadership has talked about the danger of the jihadi groups for a long time. As prime minister in 1999, Nawaz Sharif escaped an assassination attempt; Pervez Musharraf survived at least three attacks; Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz survived at least one; Benazir Bhutto was not that fortunate; and, thousands of ordinary people have been killed, their names never reported. Regardless, the jihadi groups have endured and their leaders have flourished.

The government of Asif Ali Zardari claims that the war against the jihadis is now Pakistan’s war (and, for Zardari, a personal war), and that it will be waged with all the capacities of the state. But even today, not all in Pakistan seem convinced that confronting the jihadist movement is an urgent need for Pakistan’s survival as a democratic country. For some hardline nationalists, and even some on the left who are concerned more about defying the imperialist agenda, the external pressure to defeat the Islamists should be resisted. Among the more pragmatic, the view is that Pakistan should accommodate the world, but without directly confronting the jihadist groups. There are also the cynical strategists. Only very recently, on a popular TV programme, a former chief of Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI advocated that Pakistan secretly support and protect the Pakistani Taliban to confront NATO forces and counter the increasing Indian presence in Afghanistan. He suggested that Pakistan deny such support in public.

A brutal confidence underlies the continuing commitment to Pakistan’s strategy of waging a war by proxy, the attendant defiant face to the world and the denial of the terrible violence within. It is founded upon two pillars. The first is the belief in the Pakistan Army’s ability to crush any insurgency if it really decides to do so. This is, after all, an army that has ruled the country for half its life, and has warred against its own people more than once and without mercy. This conviction was expressed most clearly in General Musharraf’s statement in 2005 to the insurgents in Balochistan that he would “sort them out,” and that “They won’t know what hit them.” This iron fist was evident in the ferocious army action in Bajaur, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, earlier this year, where the army used artillery and helicopter gunships to turn the town of Loe Sam into what was described as a “heap of grey rubble.” The intense violence in Bajaur forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

The second source of confidence is Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Many in Pakistan’s army and political leadership believe that these weapons protect Pakistan from the outside world. Indian restraint during the 1999 Kargil War, in which Pakistan sent militants and troops into Jammu & Kashmir and during the 2001-2002 stand-off after the militant attack on India’s Parliament, is held up as evidence of the power of Pakistan’s nuclear shield. This was evident again after the Bombay attacks. Many in Pakistan expected and braced themselves for some kind of punitive strike from India on ‘terrorist’ targets, and a possible reaction from Pakistan. Policy analysts were speculating that a military strike on militant training camps would engender an immediate military response from Pakistan, which could lead to heightened tensions and perhaps war. But they were comforting themselves with the belief that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would deter India from an all-out war.

India’s moves to mobilise international demands to force Pakistan to act, rather than launching an attack itself, offers little solace for the Pakistani establishment. The United Nations has placed sanctions against the top leadership of LeT. Pakistan will be obliged to seal Lashkar offices, arrest its leadership and freeze their assets. The UN has also required these actions against the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Pakistan has acted against JD by storming one of its camps, arresting a few leaders, and locking up its offices. But the fact is that LeT, as an organisation, has been banned in Pakistan for some years. The leaders of LeT/JD, including the chief, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, were arrested at the time of the ban, but were later released without charge. The recent arrest of Hafiz Saeed suggests that this pattern will continue. The New York Times described a local Pakistani police commander announcing that Hafiz Saeed was under house arrest, confined to his home and banned from going outside. Journalists report: “Mr. Saeed emerged moments later from the mosque across the street.” The police commander then claimed, “I’m just following instructions.”

Pakistan may be facing the most crucial moment of its existence. But its policymakers even now seem unwilling to fully recognise the dangers and are reluctant to confront them. The struggle becomes more difficult with each delay, every prevarication, and every subterfuge.

To truly confront the threat, the first challenge is for Pakistanis to agree that they want to live in a modern, democratic and plural society. To achieve this goal, the jihadi movement will have to be faced and overcome. The resort to indiscriminate and overwhelming force will not serve, it will make things worse. It will require what Eqbal Ahmad described as “a carefully planned and methodically executed programme of reform aimed at removing the root causes of the proliferation of violence in society, and improvement in the investigative, preventive, and prosecution capabilities of security and intelligence agencies, and the administration of justice.” Put simply, to effectively meet the Islamist challenge, the Pakistani state must finally accept and fully exercise its responsibility to maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy and participation, and make available in an equitable manner the resources necessary for economic and social development. Pakistan’s neighbours and the world will need to help.

A H Nayyar is the executive director of Developments in Literacy, a non-profit group supporting education for the poor in Pakistan.
Zia Mian directs the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.
http://www.himalmag.com/Violence-without-limits-and-Pakistan%E2%80%99s-challenge_nw2758.html

Scenic Pakistani valley falls to Taliban militants

In a year from today, we will be talking about Lahore and Islamabad in the same vein. Peshawar, Karachi and Quetta 6-8 months from now.

Either the people of Pakistan are blind to what is happening to their country or they have thrown up their hands and given up on Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.

The deteriorating situation in the former tourist haven comes despite an army offensive that began in 2007 and an attempted peace deal. It is especially worrisome to Pakistani officials because the valley lies outside the areas where al-Qaida and Taliban militants have traditionally operated and where the military is staging a separate offensive.

"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."

The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier.

Militants began preying on Swat's lush mountain ranges about two years ago, and it is now too dangerous for foreign and Pakistani journalists to visit. Interviews with residents, lawmakers and officials who have fled the region paint a dire picture.

A suicide blast killed 40 people Sunday at a polling station in Buner, an area bordering Swat that had been relatively peaceful. The attack underscored fears that even so-called "settled" regions presumptively under government control are increasingly unsafe.

The 3,500-square-mile Swat Valley lies less than 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

A senior government official said he feared there could be a spillover effect if the government lost control of Swat and allowed the insurgency to infect other areas. Like nearly everyone interviewed, the official requested anonymity for fear of reprisal by militants.

Officials estimate that up to a third of Swat's 1.5 million people have left the area. Salah-ud-Din, who oversees relief efforts in Swat for the International Committee of the Red Cross, estimated that 80 percent of the valley is now under Taliban control.

Swat's militants are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric who rose to prominence through radio broadcasts demanding the imposition of a harsh brand of Islamic law. His appeal tapped into widespread frustration with the area's inefficient judicial system.

Most of the insurgents are easy to spot with long hair, beards, rifles, camouflage vests and running shoes. They number at most 2,000, according to people who were interviewed.

In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas.

They have also set up a parallel administration with courts, taxes, patrols and checkpoints, according to lawmakers and officials. And they are suspected of burning scores of girls' schools.

In mid-December, Taliban fighters killed a young member of a Sufi-influenced Muslim group who had tried to raise a militia against them. The militants later dug up Pir Samiullah's corpse and hung it for two days in a village square — partly to prove to his followers that he was not a superhuman saint, a security official said on condition of anonymity.

A lawmaker and the senior Swat government official said business and landowners had been told to give two-thirds of their income to the militants. Some local media reported last week that the militants have pronounced a ban on female education effective in mid-January.

Several people interviewed said the regional government made a mistake in May when it struck a peace deal with the militants. The agreement fell apart within two months but let the insurgents regroup.

The Swat insurgency also includes Afghan and other fighters from outside the valley, security officials said.

Any movement of Pakistani troops from the Swat Valley and tribal areas to the Indian border will concern the United States and other Western countries, which want Pakistan to focus on the al-Qaida threat near Afghanistan.

On Friday, Pakistani intelligence officials said thousands of troops were being shifted toward the border with India, which blames Pakistani militants for terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month that killed 164 people. But there has been no sign yet of a major buildup near India.

"The terrorists' aim in Mumbai was precisely this — to get the Pakistani army to withdraw from the western border and mount operations on the east," said Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author who has written extensively about militancy in the region.

"The terrorists are not going to be sitting still. They are not going to be adhering to any sort of cease-fire while the army takes on the Indian threat. They are going to occupy the vacuum the army will create."

Residents and officials from the Swat Valley were critical of the army offensive there, saying troops appeared to be confined to their posts and often killed civilians when firing artillery at suspected militant targets.

The military has deployed some 100,000 troops through the northwest.

A government official familiar with security issues estimated that some 10,000 paramilitary and army troops had killed 300 to 400 militants in Swat since 2007, while about 130 troops were killed. Authorities have not released details of civilian casualties, and it was unclear if they were even being tallied.

The official, who insisted on anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, disputed assertions that militants had overrun the valley, but said a spotty supply line was hampering operations. He said the army had to man some Swat police stations because the police force there had been decimated by desertions and militant killings.

A Swat militant boasted that "we are doing our activities wherever we want, and the army is confined to their living places."

"They cannot move independently like us," said the man, who was reached over the phone and gave his name as Muzaffarul Haq. He claimed the Swat militants had no al-Qaida or foreign connections, but that they supported all groups that shared the goal of imposing Islamic law.

"With the grace of Allah, there is no dearth of funds, weapons or rations," he said. "Our women are providing cooked food for those who are struggling in Allah's path. Our children are getting prepared for jihad."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081229/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_valley_of_fear

Pakistan's Thinking in their own words.

Takeaways.
1. India has no actionable evidence that the Mumbai attack was planned or backed by terrorists in Pakistan. By blaming Pakistan India is attempting to de-legitimize the Kashmir insurgency.
2. Western support is encouraging Indian hawks to attack Pakistan but as in 2002, Pakistan has a formidable army and air force and can and will retaliate thus assuring mutually assured destruction. (If Pakistan goes down, she will take India with her)
3. The vast majority of Pakistanis believe India is the bigger enemy not the Taliban who have taken over Swat and now surrounded Peshawar.
4. It is naïve for the West to believe that the Pakistan government will forcibly suppress the militant groups which support Kashmir’s liberation struggle at least until Pakistan’s strategic differences with India, including Kashmir, are resolved.
5. The west have little political and economic influence on Pakistan as long as Pakistan can count on support from China.
6. Terrorism and extremism does not pose an existential threat to Pakistan.
7. There is no possibility of an extremist or jihadi government assuming office in Islamabad because neither the Pakistani electorate nor the Pakistan Army would accept this.

Two important points to be re-emphasized.
1. Munir frankly states that Pakistan is using militant groups within Pakistan to influence events in India and will NOT change unless mutual issues are resolved to Pakistan's satisfaction.
2. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban can never take over Pakistan because the army and electorate says so.


OPINION: The India-Pakistan challenge —Munir Akram

Despite Western media prognostication, there is no possibility of an extremist or jihadi government assuming office in Islamabad. Neither the Pakistani electorate nor the Pakistan Army would accept this

The India-Pakistan confrontation following the Mumbai attacks is the fourth such crisis in the last two decades. While India says it has provided enough evidence to Pakistan, Islamabad says what it has been given cannot be taken to a court of law for prosecution. Also, there is still no solid evidence that the Mumbai attacks were planned by a Pakistani group; or that the attackers were all Pakistanis. The audio recording of one of the attackers, available online, includes the use of Hindi words not in the Pakistani lexicon.

There is a strong sense in Pakistan that the Indian government’s allegations are designed to deflect attention away from India’s own security lapses, to safeguard against erosion of electoral support for the ruling party and to utilise the crisis to further de-legitimise the Kashmiri insurgency.

Western support for India’s largely unsubstantiated allegations has encouraged Indian hawks advocating military actions against Pakistan, especially airstrikes against alleged jihadi training camps. They see the continuing US Predator strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan’s Western frontier as the example and precedent. But India is not the US and drone strikes have a more complex configuration.

No Pakistan government can acquiesce in such Indian strikes. As the Pakistan army chief has warned, any Indian attack will invite “a befitting response”. During the previous three crises, Pentagon game planners reportedly reached the conclusion that an India-Pakistan conflict is likely to escalate rapidly, including possibly to the nuclear level. Hopefully, as in 2002, the present Indian government will also reach the same conclusion and not allow the hawks to propel it into creating a South Asian catastrophe.

An Indian military strike, and consequent Indo-Pakistan conflict, would also imply the immediate termination of Pakistan’s cooperation with the US and NATO regarding Afghanistan. The use of the Pakistani airbase at Jacobabad; the NATO supply convoys through Pakistan to Afghanistan; intelligence cooperation on Al Qaeda and Taliban operations; the Pakistani military deployments and operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the western frontier, would all end abruptly.

This is all the more likely because Pakistan’s collaboration with the US-NATO “war in Afghanistan” is highly unpopular in Pakistan and seen as the principal cause of the recent terrorist attacks on security and civilian targets within Pakistan.

Nor can President-elect Obama or New York Times editorials convince the vast majority of Pakistanis that the Taliban, not India, is the real enemy.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars. Indian military intervention dismembered Pakistan in 1971. India continues to brutally suppress the Kashmiri freedom movement and tolerates the systemic discrimination and occasional pogroms against its Muslim minority. It has deployed over 70 percent of its huge armed forces against Pakistan (not China) and seeks to establish its strategic dominance over South Asia and beyond. Indian intelligence agencies are supporting, if not organising, violence and terrorism in Balochistan and perhaps even helping some of the Islamist militants in the Frontier.

It is, therefore, naïve for the West to believe that the Pakistan government will forcibly suppress the militant groups which support Kashmir’s liberation struggle at least until Pakistan’s strategic differences with India, including Kashmir, are resolved.

Nor should there be Western expectations that political pressure and economic incentives would persuade any government in Pakistan to compromise on vital national issues, in particular its nuclear and strategic programmes that provide credible deterrence against Indian and any other foreign aggression.

Western discrimination against Pakistan on strategic issues, epitomised by the Indo-US nuclear deal, and the periodic unrealistic demands for the surrender or elimination of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, reinforce the common Pakistani view that the West is conspiring with India to weaken and destabilise, if not dismember Pakistan.

Also, Western chancelleries should not exaggerate their political and economic influence over Pakistan, even with the present government. Pakistan does not need to rely on US or Western military support. The most advanced Western hardware and technology will not be made available to Pakistan. The rest it can get, more reliably and cheaply, from China.

Economically also, a West preoccupied with saving its own broken financial institutions is in no position to provide Pakistan with the magnitude of financial and development assistance it requires for economic stabilisation and rapid growth. Here again, it is China, which has the financial reserves to come to Pakistan’s rescue.

This is not to argue that terrorism and extremism do not pose a threat to Pakistan, to its socio-economic development and its strategic objectives. However, unlike the threat posed by India, the threat of terrorism and extremism is not existential.

Despite Western media prognostication, there is no possibility of an extremist or jihadi government assuming office in Islamabad. Neither the Pakistani electorate nor the Pakistan Army would accept this. Ending extremism and its terrorist tactics, in Pakistan and the region will require a comprehensive and painstaking process of police and intelligence action and cooperation as well as the elimination of the political and economic grievances which create the justification for terrorism.

In this context it should be noted that all four recent India-Pakistan crises — January 1990, June 1999, January-December 2002 and this one — were linked, directly or indirectly, to the Kashmir dispute. Unless this dispute is resolved, such periodic confrontations will continue to erupt. Such a solution must be one that is acceptable, first and foremost, to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

Finally, a comprehensive strategy against terrorism in South Asia must also seek to end state terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and Islamic as well as Hindu extremist violence, including that perpetrated by Hindu fascist organisations like the RSS, against Muslims in India.

The writer is a former ambassador. The article is based on comments prepared for a discussion on the Mumbai attacks at the Asia Society in New York which could not be delivered because the organisers, at the last minute, excluded Ambassador Akram from the panel. The panel included the author Salman Rushdie and two Indian nationals

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\12\29\story_29-12-2008_pg3_5

Kissinger on the India Pakistan 1971 war

TILT! THE INDIA-PAKISTAN WAR

In 1971 Pakistan was disintegrating. The Bengali-dominated East, separated by 1,000 miles of India from the less populous but long-dominant West, was moving toward autonomy, if not outright independence. Civil war loomed. The East's 75 million people had been under martial law since 1969. Now Pakistani President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's troops, most of them Punjabis from the West who were offended by the East's separatist demands, went on a murderous rampage. Bengali refugees began streaming into India, eventually numbering some 8 million. India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, protesting that the refugees were placing an intolerable burden on her country, soon began hinting strongly at a move against Pakistan. In Kissinger's view, the refugee situation was merely a pretext for Mrs. Gandhi to seize the opportunity to dismember her hated neighbor. (Kissinger points out that the U.S. gave some $92 million in refugee aid, far more than any other single country.) The U.S. objective, says Kissinger, was "an evolution that would lead to independence for East Pakistan." But India, he adds, was too impatient to accept so gradual a solution. In August, "nonaligned" New Delhi aligned itself with Moscow by signing a Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty. "With the treaty," writes Kissinger, "Moscow threw a lighted match into a powder keg." By November, when Mrs. Gandhi visited Nixon in Washington, rumors of an India-Pakistan war were rampant.

Nixon and Mrs. Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, were not intended by fate to be personally congenial. Her assumption of almost hereditary moral superiority and her moody silences brought out all of Nixon's latent insecurities. Her bearing toward Nixon combined a disdain for a symbol of capitalism quite fashionable in developing countries with a hint that the obnoxious things she had heard about the President from her intellectual friends could not all be untrue. Nixon's comments after meetings with her were not always printable.

Without a doubt the two most unfortunate meetings Nixon had with any foreign leader were his conversations in the Oval Office on Nov. 4 and 5 with Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi began by expressing admiration for Nixon's handling of Viet Nam and the China initiative, in the manner of a professor praising a slightly backward student. Her praise lost some of its luster when she smugly expressed satisfaction that with China Nixon had consummated what India had recommended for the past decade.

Nixon had no time for Mrs. Gandhi's condescending manner. Privately, he scoffed at her moral pretensions, which he found all the more irritating because he suspected that in pursuit of her purposes she had in fact fewer scruples than Nixon.

He considered her, indeed, a cold-blooded practitioner of power politics. On Aug. 11 Nixon had admitted to the Senior Review Group that in Mrs. Gandhi's position he might pursue a similar course. But he was not in her position—and therefore he was playing for time. He, as did I, wanted to avoid a showdown. A war would threaten our geopolitical design, and we both judged that East Pakistani autonomy was inevitable, if over a slightly longer period than India suggested.

Mrs. Gandhi had no illusions about what Nixon was up to. She faced her own conflicting pressures. Though she had contributed no little to the crisis atmosphere, by now it had its own momentum, which, if she did not master it, might overwhelm her. Her dislike of Nixon, expressed in the icy formality of her manner, was perhaps compounded by the uneasy recognition that this man whom her whole upbringing caused her to disdain perceived international relations in a manner uncomfortably close to her own.

My own views of Mrs. Gandhi were similar to Nixon's, the chief difference being that I did not take her condescension personally. To be sure, I did not find in Indian history or in Indian conduct toward its own people or its neighbors a unique moral sensitivity. In my view, the moral pretensions of Indian leaders seemed to me perfectly attuned to exploit the guilt complexes of a liberal, slightly socialist West.

All the reasons that led Nixon to play for time led Mrs. Gandhi to force the issue. The inevitable emergence of Bangladesh [the Bengali name for East Pakistan] would eventually accentuate India's centrifugal tendencies. It might set a precedent for the creation of other Moslem states, carved this time out of India. This dictated to New Delhi that its birth had to be accompanied by a dramatic demonstration of Indian predominance on the subcontinent.

Attack in the East

Yahya made numerous concessions at the urging of the U.S., most important his agreement to restore civilian government in East Pakistan before the end of 1971; this in turn would surely lead to autonomy. To calm the situation, he also agreed to withdraw his troops from the borders with India. Yet New Delhi rejected the moves as inadequate. On Nov. 22, just 17 days after Mrs. Gandhi left Washington, Pakistani broadcasts reported that India had launched "an all-out offensive against East Pakistan. " I was sure that we were now witnessing the beginning of an India-Pakistan war and that India had started it. There was no pretense of legality. There was no doubt in my mind—a view held even more strongly by Nixon—that India had escalated its demands continually and deliberately to prevent a settlement. To be sure, Pakistani repression in East Bengal had been brutal and shortsighted; and millions of refugees had imposed enormous strain on the Indian economy. But what had caused the war, in Nixon's view and mine, was India's determination to establish its pre-eminence on the subcontinent.

Yet our paramount concern transcended the subcontinent. The Soviet Union could have restrained India; it chose not to. It had actively encouraged India to exploit Pakistan's travail in part to deliver a blow to our system of alliances, in even greater measure to demonstrate Chinese impotence. Since it was a common concern about Soviet power that had driven Peking and Washington together, a demonstration of U.S. irrelevance would severely strain our precarious new relationship with China.

Nor were we defending only abstract principles of international conduct. The victim of the attack was an ally—however reluctant many were to admit it—to which we had made several explicit promises concerning precisely this contingency.

Clear treaty commitments reinforced by other undertakings dated back to 1959. One could debate the wisdom of these undertakings, but we could not ignore them. Yet when Pakistan invoked the 1959 bilateral agreement between us as the basis for U.S. aid, the State Department was eloquent in arguing that no binding obligation existed. The image of a great nation conducting itself like a shyster looking for legalistic loopholes was not likely to inspire other allies who had signed treaties with us.

The issue burst upon us while Pakistan was our only channel to China; we had no other means of communication with Peking.

A major American initiative of fundamental importance to the global balance of power could not have survived if we colluded with the Soviet Union in the public humiliation of China's friend —and our ally. The naked recourse to force by a partner of the Soviet Union backed by Soviet arms and buttressed by Soviet assurances threatened the very structure of international order just when our whole Middle East strategy depended on proving the inefficacy of such tactics and when America's weight as a factor in the world was already being undercut by our divisions over Indochina.

There was no question of "saving" East Pakistan. Both Nixon and I had recognized for months that its independence was inevitable; war was not necessary to accomplish it. We strove to preserve West Pakistan as an independent state, since we judged India's real aim was to encompass its disintegration. We sought to prevent a demonstration that Soviet arms and diplomatic support were inevitably decisive in crises.

It was nearly impossible to implement this strategy because our departments operated on different premises. They were afraid of antagonizing India; they saw that Pakistan was bound to lose the war whatever we did; they knew our course was unpopular in the Congress and the media. If there was a "tilt" in the U.S. Government at this stage, it was on the side of India.

In this atmosphere the Washington Special Action Group assembled on Dec. 3 to chart a course. It was a meeting memorialized in transcripts that were leaked to Columnist Jack Anderson. Out of context these sounded as if the White House was hell-bent on pursuing its own biases, but they can only be understood against the background of the several preceding months of frustrating and furious resistance by the bureaucracy to the President's explicit decisions. "I've been catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the President, who says we're not tough enough," I commented in what I thought was the privacy of the Situation Room. "He really doesn't believe we're carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt toward Pakistan, and he believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way." That was of course a plain statement of the facts.

My sarcasm did nothing to affect departmental proclivities. When I transmitted the President's instruction to cut off economic aid to India, State suggested a similar step toward Pakistan—in spite of the President's view that India was the guilty party. This provoked me in exasperation into another "tilt" statement: "It's hard to tilt toward Pakistan, as the President wishes, if every time we take some action in relation to India we have to do the same thing for Pakistan."

Dismembering the West?

On Dec. 7 Yahya informed us that East Pakistan was disintegrating. The issue had gone far beyond self-determination for East Pakistan. A report reached us, from a source whose reliability we have never had any reason to doubt, that Prime Minister Gandhi was determined to reduce even West Pakistan to impotence: she had indicated that India would not accept any U.N. call for a cease-fire until Bangladesh was "liberated"; after that, Indian forces would proceed with the "liberation" of the Pakistani part of Kashmir and continue fighting until the Pakistani army and air force were wiped out. In other words, West Pakistan was to be dismembered and rendered defenseless. Mrs. Gandhi also told colleagues that if the Chinese "rattled the sword," the Soviets had promised to take appropriate counteraction. Other intelligence indicated that this meant diversionary military action against China in Xinjiang (Sinkiang). Pakistan could not possibly survive such a combination of pressures, and a Sino-Soviet war was not excluded.

Against this background I gave a press briefing in which I emphasized that we had not condoned the Pakistani repression in East Bengal in March 1971; military aid had been cut off, and major efforts had been made to promote political accommodation between the Pakistani government and Bangladesh officials in Calcutta. In our view India was responsible for the war. The resolution we supported at the U.N., calling for cease-fire and withdrawal of forces, won overwhelming backing, passing 104 to 11. Here was an issue on which we enjoyed more support in the world community than on practically any other in a decade. But neither our briefings nor the overwhelming expression of world opinion softened media or congressional criticism.

On Sunday morning, Dec. 12, Nixon, Al Haig and I met in the Oval Office, just before Nixon and I were to depart for the Azores to meet with French President Georges Pompidou. It was symptomatic of the internal relationships of the Nixon Administration that neither the Secretary of State nor of Defense nor any representative of their departments attended this crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship was taken.

At 11:30 a.m. we sent a message over Nixon's name on the hot line to Moscow—its first use by the Nixon Administration. (Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev later used it during the October 1973 Middle East war.) Actually, this Moscow-Washington telegraphic link worked more slowly than did the communications of the Soviet embassy. But it conferred a sense of urgency and might speed up Soviet decisions. The one-page hot line message declared that the President had "set in train certain moves" in the U.N. Security Council that could not be reversed. It concluded: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that time is of the essence to avoid consequences neither of us want."

Just when we had finished dispatching the hot line message, we received word that Huang Hua, then China's U.N. Ambassador, needed to see me with an urgent message from Peking. It was unprecedented, the Chinese having previously always saved their messages until we asked for a meeting—a charming Middle Kingdom legacy. We assumed that only a matter of gravity could induce them into such a departure. We guessed that they were coming to the military assistance of Pakistan. If so, we were on the verge of a possible showdown. For if China moved militarily, the Soviet Union—according to all our information—was committed to use force against China.

Nixon understood immediately that if the Soviet Union succeeded in humiliating China, all prospects for world equilibrium would disappear. He decided—and I fully agreed—that if the Soviet Union threatened China we would not stand idly by.

A country we did not recognize and with which we had had next to no contact for two decades would obtain some significant assistance—the precise nature to be worked out when the circumstances arose. To provide some military means to give effect to our strategy and to reinforce the message to Moscow, Nixon now ordered an aircraft carrier task force that had been alerted earlier to proceed through the Strait of Malacca and into the Bay of Bengal.

In the event, the Chinese message was not what we expected. On the contrary, it accepted the U.N. procedure and the political solution I had outlined to Huang Hua during a secret trip to New York City 48 hours earlier—asking for a ceasefire and withdrawal, but settling for a standstill ceasefire. But Nixon did not know this when he made his lonely and brave decision. Had things developed as we anticipated, we would have had no choice but to assist China in some manner against the probable opposition of much of the Government, the media and the Congress.

Margin of Uncertainty

Our fleet passed into the Bay of Bengal and attracted much media attention. Were we threatening India? Were we seeking to defend East Pakistan? Had we lost our minds? It was in fact sober calculation. We had some 72 hours to bring the war to a conclusion before West Pakistan would be swept into the maelstrom. It would take India that long to shift its forces. We had to give the Soviets a warning. We had to be ready to back up the Chinese if they came in. Moving the task force into the Bay of Bengal created precisely the margin of uncertainty needed to force a decision by New Delhi and Moscow.

On the return flight from the Azores meeting I said to the press pool on Air Force One that Soviet conduct on the subcontinent was not compatible with the mutual restraint required by genuine coexistence. If it continued, we would have to re-evaluate our entire relationship.

The message got through to Moscow. By the morning of Dec. 16, we were receiving reliable reports that the Soviets were pressing New Delhi to accept the territorial status quo in the West, including in Kashmir. Later that day, Mrs. Gandhi offered an unconditional cease-fire in the West. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a reluctant decision resulting from Soviet pressure, which in turn grew out of American insistence. The crisis was over. We had avoided the worst—which is sometimes the maximum statesmen can achieve.

'The India:Pakistan war of 1971 was perhaps the most complex issue of Nixon's first term. What made the crisis so difficult was that the stakes were so much greater than the common perception of them. I remain convinced to this day that Mrs. Gandhi was not motivated primarily by conditions in East Pakistan. India struck in late November; by the timetable that we induced Yahya to accept, martial law would have ended and a civilian government would have taken power at the end of December. This would almost surely have led to the independence of East Pakistan—probably without the excesses of brutality, including public bayoneting, that followed.

Our conduct was attributed to personal pique, anti-Indian bias, callousness toward suffering, or immorality. Had we acted differently, Pakistan, after losing its eastern wing, would have lost Kashmir and possibly Baluchistan and other portions of its western wing—in other words, it would have disintegrated.

The crisis also demonstrated the error of the myth that Nixon, aided by me, exercised an octopus-like grip over a Government that was kept in ignorance of our activities. The reality was the opposite of the folklore: not widening White House dominance but bitter departmental rearguard resistance; not clear-cut directives but elliptical maneuvers to keep open options; not the inability of the agencies to present their views but the difficulty faced by the Chief Executive in making his views prevail. The administrative practices of the Nixon Administration were unwise and not sustainable in the long run; fairness requires an admission that they did not take place in a vacuum.

Nixon deserves great credit for tough decisions taken in the face of enormous public pressures; for his strategic grasp; for his courage. His administrative approach was weird and its human cost unattractive, yet history must also record the fundamental fact that major successes were achieved that had proved unattainable by conventional procedures.

Run with hare and Hunt with the hounds

Killing ourselves in Afghanistan

In a secret meeting with a Taliban commander, I learned how Bush administration aid to Pakistan helps fund insurgents who kill U.S. troops.

By Matthew Cole

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/10/taliban/print.html

Mar. 10, 2008 | On a recent bitterly cold winter day, I sat huddled on a red Persian carpet in an unheated Kabul office, waiting for a visitor who, I was told by a trusted friend, would help me understand why America is not winning its war in Afghanistan.

A stocky, bearded figure in a gray vest, a faded brown shalwar kameez and a cream-colored Pashtun shawl appeared at the door. He removed his shoes and walked on cracked, callused feet over the carpet to sit cross-legged beside me. Our meeting was conducted in secrecy. My guest was, until early 2007, a Taliban commander of 50 fighters in North Waziristan, Pakistan, one of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) near the Afghan border where both al-Qaida and Taliban insurgents operate. Ever since he left the Taliban, he has been living in fear of assassination for treason. I thanked him in English for his willingness to meet, and he answered me in Pashto, the chief language of southern and eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's Tribal Areas, without a trace of emotion.

"If you had tried to interview me this time last year," he said, "I would have killed you." Then he reached past my feet and poured himself a glass of sugary green tea.

Over the course of several hours in the Kabul office, "Haji Muhammed," as we agreed he would be called, spun a gemstone ring absently around his finger and ran his hands through his thinning hair as he described for me his firsthand experience of an American foreign-policy debacle. The U.S. is paying for both sides of the war in Afghanistan. As is becoming increasingly clear, for at least two and a half years, and perhaps far longer, the Pakistani government has been receiving massive U.S. aid while its intelligence agency and elements of its military have been pursuing their own anti-American agenda within Afghanistan. The U.S. has given the Musharraf regime $10 billion since Sept. 11, 2001, but Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and factions within the Pakistan army, while helping the U.S. track al-Qaida with one hand, have been aiding the Taliban with the other, both inside Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border in Tribal Areas like North Waziristan. In part because of Pakistani help, the Taliban have made a steady comeback and American and Afghan casualties are at their highest annual levels since the war began.

Islamabad has denied complicity and Washington has maintained official silence, but the double-dealing is not surprising. It's just the continuation of the Pakistani government's former alliance with the Taliban, which was itself an outgrowth of a decades-old Pakistani policy of trying to exert control over the internal affairs of its chaotic neighbor. It was the recognition of Pakistan's motives that drove Muhammed to defect. "I left the Taliban because I could no longer stand Pakistan's hand in Afghanistan," Muhammed told me through a translator. "For years we were trained and helped, and fought alongside ISI and [Pakistan] army officers. But they are not mujahedin, they want to keep Afghanistan weak."

Muhammed said the ISI had helped train and arm him to fight inside Afghanistan against U.S. and international coalition forces since 2002. "If the world can know what happens inside the Tribal Areas, maybe Afghanistan has a chance to survive," he said. "Like this the war will not end."

For nearly two years now, the military situation inside Afghanistan has deteriorated. Violence has increased, security has shrunk and the Taliban have brought the war to Kabul. Coalition casualties increased more than 20 percent last year and estimates of civilian deaths for 2007 range as high as 6,000. My own repeated trips to the country have convinced me that not only are Haji Muhammed's assertions about Pakistan's role in the violence true, but that the U.S. -- or at least its representatives on the ground in Afghanistan -- has long been aware of the problem.

Interviews with Afghan and U.S. intelligence officials involved in covert U.S. operations along the border suggest that U.S. intelligence operatives have known since 2005 that the Pakistan army and the ISI have been training and arming insurgents in the Tribal Areas who cross into Afghanistan to kill Afghan, U.S. and coalition forces. "Our guys are getting killed because Pakistan has a double policy," said an American policy advisor who travels frequently to U.S military and CIA bases near the border. But the same advisor says intelligence officials have only recently gotten through to their superiors in Washington that Pakistan is part of the problem.

On my own trip to an American military base near the border in Afghanistan's Kunar province in October 2006, I was asked on arrival to have an off-the-record conversation with a U.S. Army public affairs officer. He explained a few rules about avoiding sections of the base that were run by the CIA and Special Forces. Then he told me that although we could literally see Pakistan from where we stood, I should ask no questions about what role Pakistan played in Afghanistan's war. "You might as well pretend it doesn't exist," he said. He understood reporters were interested, and acknowledged that most of the insurgents operating in Kunar were based across the border in Pakistan. But the Army's orders were, essentially, to ignore the problem. "Pakistan," he said, smiling, "is a committed ally in the war on terror."

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The sweet tea could not keep us warm, so our host brought in an electric space heater. I listened as Muhammed detailed Pakistani help in attacking U.S. forces in Afghanistan. While it is impossible to verify all of his claims, parts of his story have been confirmed by a senior Western diplomat and Afghan and U.S. intelligence officials.

Muhammed is a Pashtun Afghan who joined the Taliban as a young fighter in 1993. He viewed the Taliban, which would rule Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, as a principled force bringing needed national stability. He fought against the Taliban's main rivals, the Northern Alliance, who would become instrumental in the American effort to roust the Taliban after 9/11.

The U.S. began bombing Taliban and al-Qaida sites in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, when the Taliban would not hand over Osama bin Laden. The aerial campaign was meant to support the Northern Alliance's push against the Taliban. After Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance and U.S. Special Forces in November, Muhammad retreated with other Taliban fighters across the border, to Miran Shah in North Waziristan, one of the southernmost of Pakistan's Tribal Areas.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are a collection of seven "agencies" and six "frontier districts" that share 250 miles of mountainous border with Afghanistan, and make up an area about the size of Massachusetts. Nearly all of the 4 million residents are Pashtun, like their neighbors across the border in southern and eastern Afghanistan. The arid, craggy region is less Pakistan than it is "Pashtunistan," an area run by millennia-old tribal customs rather than the central government in Islamabad. Since U.S. forces occupied Afghanistan and the anti-American insurgency began, the Tribal Areas have been headquarters for al-Qaida, and a refuge for the Taliban. The region has also been the site of most of the conflict's guerrilla and terrorist training camps, many of which Haji Muhammed attended, visited or helped conduct. Many of the worst terrorist incidents of recent years, the 7/7 suicide bombings in London, the failed Heathrow airline attacks, the German attacks and the recent train bombing attempts in Barcelona, involve individuals with significant ties to the Tribal Areas.

From the time Muhammed arrived in North Waziristan in 2001 until his recent defection, he worked, he says, under Siraj Haqqani. Siraj, now the leader of the North Waziristan-based Taliban, is the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was one of the seven main Afghan mujahedin leaders of the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s, and a direct recipient of the U.S. and Saudi aid that was funneled to all seven of those leaders via the ISI.

Jalaluddin Haqqani had also fled into North Waziristan in late 2001. He had suffered serious wounds to his shoulder and leg. For six months after the fall of the Taliban, as the elder Haqqani recuperated, Haji Muhammed and his comrades did nothing, though they very much wanted to expel Afghanistan's new foreign occupiers, the Americans, and the American-installed government in Kabul. "We waited to see how the Americans were fighting," Muhammed told me. "And we waited for money and supplies. We had very little."

According to Muhammed, the fighters who regrouped in North Waziristan after the fall of Kabul were a complex and ever-shifting alliance of Afghan Talibs, al-Qaida of various nationalities, Pashtun tribal militias and Pakistani jihadists. Within the mix, he said, there were two main and distinct groups. One was largely domestic and made up of Afghan and Pakistani Talibs. The other one was, and is, led by foreign fighters -- Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens. This was Muhammed's organization.

Though he served under an Afghan Pashtun, Siraj Haqqani, he worked and trained with Abu Layth-al Libi, a Libyan national in his 40s who's considered by many in the U.S. intelligence community to be al-Qaida's No. 3. Abu Layth is best known for being the man who informed the world in July 2002 that bin Laden was still alive, and was also seen in video footage from 2004 leading an apparent attack on an Afghan military outpost. Abu Layth was reportedly killed by a CIA predator drone strike this January.

Despite fighting alongside Layth, Muhammed did not consider himself al-Qaida -- he insisted to me, quite forcefully, that he was Taliban -- but the goal was the same. All wanted to attack the Americans inside Afghanistan.

Some of the cash and weapons needed to carry the fight to the Americans finally appeared after Jalaluddin Haqqani reached out to his previous handlers in the ISI. Beginning in 2002, according to Muhammed, the Pakistani intelligence agents who had underwritten his struggle against the Soviets and had continued to fund him up until the U.S. invasion begin helping Haqqani again. Haqqani and his men were able to stockpile Russian and Chinese light arms provided by the Pakistanis, and Muhammed, not then a commander, helped organize small groups of fighters for additional training. In the winter months, Muhammed and the other fighters lived in the North Waziristan lowlands; when the snows melted, they headed for their training camps in the hills.

By 2004, Muhammed was a platoon leader. But supplies were still inconsistent and his platoon's efforts inside Afghanistan's eastern provinces against Afghan, U.S. and coalition forces remained sporadic. That changed later that year when Pakistan army trucks began arriving in Miran Shah to collect fighters. "We were put in the back of the trucks at night," Muhammed said. "There were about 40 or so men loaded into the trucks with the top covered. We were driven to Nowshera" -- a town far north of Waziristan in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province where the Pakistan army has many training facilities -- "and we stayed for a few days for training. After, they drove us back to Miran Shah." European and American analysts believe Pakistan stepped up aid to the insurgents in 2004 because the Musharraf regime saw that U.S. forces were achieving no better than a stalemate in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban's stronghold. The Pakistanis stepped into the resulting power vacuum by aiding the Taliban.

The ISI also began to provide assistance in the Taliban's own training camps. The training camps inside both North and South Waziristan, said Muhammed, required new recruits to go through all the same training. After the ISI began helping, the labor was divided. In addition to leading attacks inside Afghanistan, Muhammed helped train young Afghan and Pakistani men in basic weapons. "I was good at some things, like teaching how to fire weapons." While he did that, an Arab or Uzbek trainer might school a smaller group in remote-controlled bombs or IEDs. An ISI officer, meanwhile, might teach an even smaller group how to gather intelligence.

Combined, it was an excellent education in guerrilla warfare, the same methods and tactics taught in the camps in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. And Muhammed intimated that because of Pakistani protection, the fighters in the North Waziristan training camps didn't fear American air power. "We were never scared or worried about American airstrikes. We were only worried about the men who entered. We had very serious security. You had to have proper paperwork and permission to get inside the camps. We worried about spies, but not missiles."

Muhammed himself also received training from the ISI that allowed him to launch more sophisticated attacks across the border. During late 2005, Muhammed and his platoon operated on the Shawal mountain range in North Waziristan. From the Shawal peaks he and his men could see Afghanistan just a few miles away. An ISI captain named Asif Khan trained him to use a 6-foot rocket called the Sakar-20, a Russian-made device that is roughly 6 feet long and requires several days to perfect firing.

The rockets were delivered at night by an ISI logistics officer to a house in Miran Shah. The next morning, Muhammed's men would retrieve them and transport them to the Shawal peaks. Capt. Khan never wore a uniform and kept his beard long. The ISI and army personnel who worked with the Taliban, Muhammed said, almost never wore uniforms, the better to blend in. "From their looks they were mujahedin," he said.

Capt. Khan, who took orders from another ISI officer whom Muhammed knew as "Major Doctor Sajit," spent a week teaching Muhammed how to position the rocket on the Shawal's ridgeline to get its maximum range of 30 kilometers. Khan, Muhammed said, also gave the Taliban fighters GPS devices, taught the men how to calibrate them, and then paid Afghans to take the device across the border to nearby American and Afghan bases to pinpoint their locations. With those coordinates, Muhammed could fire the Sakar-20 with decent precision. "Once I was taught, then I trained my men."

In 2005 and 2006, Muhammed fired the Sakar-20's at U.S. and Afghan posts inside Khost, the Afghan province just across the border from North Waziristan. "We fired rockets inside Afghanistan whenever we could get supplied," said Muhammed. He did not tell me what he hit with the rockets. In late 2006, he began to consider defecting, and in 2007 he made the leap, fleeing to Kabul and the protection of the National Directorate for Security, or NDS, the Afghan government's intelligence agency.

On a second meeting in the same Central Kabul office, Muhammed and I again sat cross-legged on the red rug and drank tea. This time I spread before him some maps of Pakistan's Tribal Areas, so he could help me understand where he had been and what he had done.

He pointed out the mountain range where he used to fire rockets into Afghanistan, and the village where one of the training camps was situated, and from which he and Abu Layth led an attack on a small American fire base across the border.

I asked Muhammed why he really left the Taliban, why he had abandoned his friends and colleagues after 15 years. He sighed and looked at his feet for a few moments, suddenly looking much older than his years.

I joined the Taliban when I was young," he finally answered, "very young. They wanted to get rid of corruption and to end the fighting between the warlords. Afghanistan needed this and I wanted to help. I became a soldier, but when we fled to Waziristan we relied too much on the Pakistanis. And we were corrupted. Land disputes inside Afghanistan were settled by Pakistanis, and by the man with the most money. This isn't just. And fewer Afghans made decisions about how and where and when to fight inside Afghanistan."

Muhammed has come to terms with his new station in life. "I worked many years with Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens. I have accepted that they must be killed for Afghanistan's sake. I don't feel bad." But he still draws the line at helping those other foreigners. "I won't work for the Americans. Twice NDS has asked me to meet with them. I said no. If I do that I am surely a dead man."

While Muhammed was contemplating defection, U.S. intelligence officials were growing frustrated with the duplicity of a supposed ally in the war on terror, and with the limitations placed on them by Islamabad and Washington. But much of the problem was due, initially, to the way the CIA conducts its business, and to the rules of engagement in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

The CIA rotates most of its officers in the area every three to six months, giving them insufficient time to learn the contours of Pakistan's problems. Virtually no operational officers speak Pashtun, nor can they travel without an official Pakistani escort.

Also, until recently, the CIA division of labor has made officers in Afghanistan responsible for attacking and thwarting Taliban inside Pakistan. Officers based in Pakistan are primarily tasked with tracking al-Qaida and Arab terrorists inside Pakistan.

Since the war began the general rules of engagement for U.S. forces -- be they CIA or other -- was that military attacks inside Pakistan could extend only six miles from the border, and only in pursuit. Attacking or even surveying training camps and any insurgent movements aided by Pakistan army units more than 20 miles inside the border was an impossibility.

Simply understanding the political dynamics of the Tribal Areas and the rest of Pakistan's frontier region to the north was therefore slow and laborious for American officials. Interference from the Pakistanis has made it still more difficult. CIA officers in Pakistan, who outnumber those stationed in Afghanistan, are not allowed to travel in Pakistan's frontier areas without ISI accompaniment. A retired CIA officer, who still works on contract for the agency, told me that in early 2006, he was based in Dir, a restive area north of North Waziristan in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, and not far from several U.S. bases in Afghanistan. The contractor was part of a joint CIA-ISI team hunting for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. Before his rotation ended he asked the ISI brigadier if they could fly still farther north to the town of Chitral to watch some of the region's famed polo tournaments. "This guy told me straight up, 'I ain't letting you go north.'" The American persisted and was again rebuffed. "I realized that the only two reasons he wouldn't let me travel north was because he either was afraid of what I would see, or he was afraid of what he would see."

The Americans were quickly aware that the Pakistanis had no enthusiasm for fighting the Islamist insurgency. Gary Schroen, a former senior CIA official who led the first U.S. team into Afghanistan days after 9/11 and a former station chief in Islamabad, told me recently that where the Pakistan army does engage in battle against militants, they do so without vigor. "The Pakistanis don't want to fight a counter-insurgency inside their own country," he said. "They don't want to fight against Muslims, they want to fight against India."

According to a former senior government official responsible for U.S.-Pakistani policy, many American policymakers took for granted Musharraf would work harder going after al-Qaida than going after the Taliban. "I always assumed that, strategically, Pakistan would want to hedge its bets for the day the U.S. decided to pull out of the region." Pakistan had helped create the Taliban years earlier as an element of its regional security plan, meaning, in part, as an additional Muslim counterweight against perennial foe India. The U.S. expected a certain lack of enthusiasm from the Pakistanis for pursuing the Taliban, or at least a greater enthusiasm for dealing with al-Qaida. But Pakistan actually remained committed to keeping the Taliban active inside Afghanistan. What's more, said the former senior official, the White House had no mechanism for determining whether the ISI or other factions within the Musharraf regime were aiding the Taliban. Washington was conducting a "see no evil" foreign policy.

Ultimately, the Americans came to realize that the ISI was not just avoiding conflict with the insurgents, or shielding them, but actively abetting them. The senior American policy advisor told me that U.S. intelligence concluded that the ISI support -- often in the form of medical aid, signals intelligence and military strategy -- is not the work of rogue officers within Pakistan intelligence. "Injured Taliban fighters have been sent to military hospitals for good medical care," he said. "That doesn't happen inside Pakistan unless the military knows." Some ISI agents were attempting to help the Americans catch insurgents, but the most powerful faction within the agency was doing precisely the opposite.

The ISI has two main divisions. The CIA works primarily with Directorate C, the ISI's version of a counter-terrorism branch. According to a former senior CIA official who still reads intelligence reports from the region, Directorate C has been penetrated by American intelligence and its leader vetted by the CIA.

A second and much larger division of the ISI, however, is Directorate S, which is responsible for external operations, such as Afghanistan, Kashmir and India. It takes precedence over Directorate C, and often works at cross-purposes. The CIA has no working relationship with Directorate S, and no means to assess the loyalty of its personnel. A retired CIA officer who once served in the Tribal Areas recounted an exchange with his ISI partner from Directorate C. "He told me that he had just gone to a tribal shura in Peshawar and sat across from a man he'd arrested and imprisoned a few weeks earlier. He was convinced the man was a Pashtun terrorist. He said that one of his peers from Directorate S had released him within a few days -- with no notice or paperwork.

"This guy was trying to commiserate with me about how difficult it was to get anything done in the Tribal Areas," said the CIA officer. "He was truly frustrated. A few weeks after nabbing a bad guy, he had to sip tea and negotiate with him."

But the Americans discovered that the ISI was able to create some plausible deniability for its role in promoting the Taliban insurgency by relying on a Pakistani version of Blackwater. After 9/11, some ISI officers who were deemed too sympathetic to Islamic extremism were purged from the agency as a condition of American aid. These officers were never truly purged, however, and with other former and retired ISI agents form an extra-governmental conduit for ISI aid to the anti-American insurgents in the border area. Newsday reported last year that "the ISI offers the insurgents tactical advice and information about the deployment of U.S. forces."

As an example, the CIA learned that since 2005, a retired ISI officer who lives within 10 miles of the Afghan border, not far from a U.S. fire base, and who helped arm Afghan jihadists against the Soviets in the 1980s, was again working for the ISI -- this time on contract. According to U.S. and Afghan sources, this man, whom the CIA refers to as "General Yusef," recruits and organizes Afghan men to fight in Afghanistan's Nuristan and Kunar provinces. He is officially retired but reports to an ISI office in Chitral and receives a monthly stipend. For the ISI, General Yusef and his privatized peers are the perfect tools to help destabilize Afghanistan, since they don't officially work for the ISI.

General Yusef was responsible for procuring some of the fighters based at a training camp in Chitral that was the source of a spate of attacks on U.S. bases. The ISI, meanwhile, was responsible for the camp's very existence. In late 2006, Taliban and insurgent attacks on U.S. forces were escalating along the northern Afghan-Pakistani border. CIA officers stationed in northeast Afghanistan began to receive raw intelligence that a small but effective training camp had opened across the border in Chitral. The camp was run by the terrorist group Laishka-e-Taiba (LeT), which had been formed in the late 1990s by the ISI as a proxy force of jihadists to fight hundreds of miles to the east against the Indian government in Kashmir, the province over which India and Pakistan have been fighting for 60 years.

After the U.S invaded and occupied Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, it demanded that Islamabad stop supporting LeT. The fighters, many of them Afghans from Nuristan Province, filtered back from Kashmir to their homes in Nuristan or settled just across the border from Nuristan in Pakistan's Chitral and Dir districts. By 2005, however, the LeT network was alive and well again, this time in Chitral, and the Pakistanis were apparently redirecting their old proxies at the new foe right next door. Insurgents were being driven at night from the Chitral training camp to a Pakistan army outpost in Pakistani trucks, their flatbeds covered and the headlights turned off. Once at the outpost, they were given Chinese-made weapons, mostly small arms and automatic rifles, and sent on separate mountain trails into Afghanistan to attack Americans.

Despite the mounting evidence that their Pakistani counterparts could not be trusted, American intelligence attempted to take action against insurgents sheltering on the Pakistani side of the border. But on at least two occasions, they were apparently thwarted by interference from elements within the Pakistani military or the ISI who were sympathetic to the insurgents.

In December 2006, a few months after reports about the LeT camp in Chitral had begun trickling in, a team of roughly 20 CIA and Afghan paramilitary officers drove pickup trucks from a CIA base in Chitral to an Afghan border post. They parked their vehicles and struck out on foot through small goat trails back over the border into Pakistan. It was nearly 2 a.m and all the men were outfitted with night-vision goggles, Kevlar helmets and vests, and plenty of automatic weapons. Their target was a Pakistani mullah named Hari Yusef. The CIA believed he was an IED expert, and used his compound in the Pakistani border town of Arandu as a safe house for dozens of insurgents.

But when the team kicked in the front gate to Mullah Yusef's mud-walled compound and entered, they found nothing. Neither Yusef nor any fighting-age men were there. They conducted a search, but left empty-handed within a half-hour. All they accomplished was burning a small footbridge that Yusef's men had used to cross the Kunar River into Afghanistan out of sight of the official border post.

Also in 2006, while Haji Muhammed was still with Taliban leader Siraj Haqqani, CIA officers at a Pakistani military garrison in Miran Shah, North Waziristan, attempted to capture Haqqani. Siraj's father, Jalaluddin, had grown too sick and weak to lead an insurgency. His son, however, had developed into a dangerous Taliban commander. Much as his father had done to the Soviets 20 years earlier, Siraj, with Haji Muhammed's help, was punishing foreign troops inside Afghanistan with effective guerrilla attacks. The CIA had long known about a mosque and madrassa that the Haqqanis used as a headquarters in Miran Shah. The CIA readied a plan to raid the mosque when surveillance indicated Siraj Haqqani was present.

The CIA plan required approval of a Pakistan Army commander in Peshawar. But there was never any Pakistani response, which killed the plan.

This refusal to cooperate, however, was no longer a surprise to American operatives. A year earlier, it had been. The CIA's first attempt to raid Haqqani, in 2005, had netted nothing. CIA officers discovered that an ISI officer had warned Haqqani in advance about the raid.

"Our guys couldn't believe it," the former CIA officer told me. "CIA had worked on this thing for some time, and the son of a bitch tipped Haqqani off." They presented their evidence to the ISI general in charge, who responded with embarrassment and apologies. "He told us that they were punishing the officer, but all we could verify is that he was no longer working with us. He could have been thrown in prison, or he could have been sent to another field office. We had no way of knowing."

The frustrated intelligence officers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may finally be getting some traction in Washington. While they have long been telling their superiors back home that there is a problem, their bosses seem to have chosen to believe that any Pakistani aid to the Taliban was the work of a few rogue officers and not policy. But the recent disclosure that the White House was considering giving CIA officers based in Afghanistan more freedom to operate unilaterally -- that is, without Pakistani approval -- is a result of accumulating intelligence reports such as the one about the LeT camp and reports about retired officers such as Yusef.

The U.S. recently announced plans to send 100 military trainers to the Pakistani frontier to aid the Pakistanis in the fight against al-Qaida. But recent American proposals to enter the Tribal Areas with U.S. troops, and to increase CIA efforts inside Pakistan, have been rebuffed by Pakistan's President Musharraf. He told Newsweek in January that Americans would "curse the day they came here" if they crossed the border without Pakistani permission. He continued, "I know American troops. I know our troops. This is not easy. American troops don't have any magic wands. Our troops, who are the locals, who understand groups and customs, are very hardy. Our troops can go on roti and water. American troops would need chocolate."

The outlook seems bleak for any real cooperation from the Pakistanis in stopping cross-border attacks. But in the end the Americans actually derive some benefit, however small, from the fact that the Musharraf regime is pursuing its own agenda. Sometimes the needs of the Americans and the Pakistanis coincide.

Haji Muhammed explained to me that when fighting rekindled along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2002, the two main branches of the Taliban had slightly differing goals. The foreign-led fighters, though they were aiding the Afghan fighters looking to take back their country from the U.S., were really focused on the "Far-Enemy," training for terrorism missions against the West. The ISI-led Taliban were focused primarily on attacking the Americans inside Afghanistan, the "Near-Enemy."

Of late, however, the foreign-led Taliban factions in the Tribal Areas, the ones believed to shelter al-Qaida's Arab leadership, have begun focusing more attention on destabilizing Islamabad than Kabul. Now Pakistani intelligence has reason to work with the Americans, at least when it comes to some jihadis, including those known locally as "the Arabs."

Many of these insurgents were once aligned with the ISI, but no more. "The Arabs no longer trust the ISI," Muhammed told me. "They refuse to let the ISI know where they are because they are afraid the ISI will sell them out to the Americans." So while the ISI continues aiding Pashtun Taliban insurgents in North Waziristan, as long as those insurgents keep focusing their activities across the Afghan border, they are now simultaneously fighting other Talibs farther to the north.

The Pakistani government is particularly concerned with Baitullah Mehsud, whom both Musharraf and the CIA have identified as responsible for Benazir Bhutto's assassination in December. Mehsud, who operates in South Waziristan, is, like Haji Muhammed, a former lieutenant to Jalaluddin Haqqani. When he fought under Haqqani, he received ISI aid. He became the head of a Taliban group with branches in five of the seven Tribal Areas, which the ISI allowed to operate unimpeded as long as their military actions were directed at Americans in Afghanistan. Now, however, since Mehsud has become a threat to Islamabad's stability, Pakistani authorities are far more dedicated to killing him than they are to catching Osama bin Laden. The ISI and the Pakistani army are now at war with a powerful, many-tendriled insurgent band they helped to create. The ISI's history of double-dealing has come back to haunt it.

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