Wikileaks: Pakistan

From the deluge of leaked military documents published Sunday, a former Pakistani spy chief emerged as a chilling personification of his nation's alleged duplicity in the Afghan war -- an erstwhile U.S. ally turned Taliban tutor.

[...]

In an interview Tuesday, Gul dismissed the accusations against him as "fiction" and described the documents' release as the start of a White House plot. It will end, he posited, with an early U.S. pullout from Afghanistan-- thus proving [Lt. Gen. Hamid] Gul, an unabashed advocate of the Afghan insurgency, right.

  WaPo

Well, I think he's giving our government too much credit for having the sense to figure a way out of Afghanistan, but if it were true, I'd say, good. Whatever.

But I want to visit a little more closely this business about Pakistan – our "ally" – aiding the Taliban.

According to some of the [recently leaked military] documents, [Gul] possessed dozens of bombs for Taliban fighters to detonate in Kabul, instructed militants to kidnap United Nations workers, hatched a plan for a suicide bombing in Afghanistan to avenge an insurgent and assured fighters that Pakistan would provide them haven.

Just what is the deal with the US and Pakistan? There was AQ Khan who was (and may still be) a one-man nuclear proliferation show . OBL was permitted to "escape" from Afghanistan into Pakistan where he presumably remains to this day, fat and free. I put escape in parentheses, because I was reminded today that the US army had full knowledge of his army's whereabouts in Tora Bora and set up a perimeter blockade to snag him, but, oh so conveniently, left a gaping hole in that ring through which they could travel. They oh-so-conveniently bombed one escape route while leaving a second one open. So escape probably isn't the most accurate word, but it is the official one. It's pretty obvious from the evidence that the US – perhaps only in the body of the CIA, perhaps with other government blessings as well – has an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship with Mr. Bin Laden. Or maybe he has some leverage in damning evidence. Whatever, there's a deal there that has allowed him safe passage and freedom from capture, and which will not likely be withdrawn.

And what about the ex-Pakistani intelligence chief, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who visited Washington for several days surrounding 9/11 and who was found to have financed the 9/11 terrorists to the tune of $100,000 and was implicated in the murder of Daniel Pearl?

Our government has known about each of these Pakistani connections to terrorism. Why is it again that we are allied with Pakistan? Perhaps we (or an agency of ours) is also aiding the terrorists.

Back to Lt. Gul:

Gul said he was singled out in the reports because of American fears that he will expose U.S. "cavities" -- corruption, poor planning and complicity in the opium trade -- in the Afghan conflict.

I don’t doubt that he could drum up some proof of that.

[Gul] readily acknowledged that he has maintained friendships with former mujaheddin such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, a onetime CIA-backed fighter whose network is now viewed as the coalition forces' most lethal foe.

God bless the CIA. If they're good at nothing else, they're good at backing people who later become our lethal foes.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.