You can almost hear the Republican right smacking their lips in willful anticipation of another terrorist attack on American soil. Sad to say but so true. Never mind the fact that even George Tenet, while still DCIA, was amazed that jihdi terrorists hadn't at least walked into a US mall and unloaded with an AK-47. In your article you mentioned Spain and Britain had recently and successfully prosecuted terrorists. However, in my neighborhood, Indonesia, they have not only mounted one of the best anti-terror campaigns in the world, with civil courts and convictions but according to a friend in Indonesian intelligence, marched the 3 convicted Bali bombers Samudra, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, and Ali Ghufron out to black wooden crosses and shot them.

Just to address your earlier post:

“Masoud was no fool.”

Massoud was a survivor, a poet and a warrior. Personally I liked him and the way he took care of his people.

“One of the reasons the CIA "favoured" Hekmatyar was that they bowed to ISI wishes. Rabbani was also on the favoured list.”

It was my experience while there that not only the Agency but the ISI had serious problems motivating the various groups. Many of them became fat and content to wait out the war in the comfort of their compounds in Peshawar. Hekmatyar and the Hezbi were the most ruthless and motivated, but even they were not cut of the same rabid cloth that I saw in some of the foreign fighters that were there.

“I don't seen how you can call that anything else than acquiescence (even if the CIA did do some small stuff, unauthorised, through back channels).”

“Sounds about right. As I said, we let the ISI run the show.”

See, here’s where we disagree the most. No one has been a bigger critic of the ISI than I have. But at the start of the Afghans resistance against the Soviets there were no other serious options to Pakistan and the ISI. The US was not about to deploy forces, the Agency was stretched thin with their SAD elements, the very elements that you propose to eliminate altogether, there was not much political will to become very involved in any of this affair. So what was the realistic alternative, that is if one thought we should’ve been there at all. There are a lot of 20/20 hindsight pundits that are saying that the US spawned Al Qaeda and others through it’s support in Afghanistan. That’s way off the mark and over simplistic in my view. The ISI has had it’s own agenda almost from it’s inception and the recent attack in Mumbai clearly demonstrates that it will have to be dealt with seriously by the new US administration.

“I didn't say they should. I've laid out the "argument" for such, but I don't subscribe to that, in part because the CIA has been so incompetent in its covert operations for so long that I don't see the utility of covert ops (particularly of the militaristic kind as opposed to cloak'n'dagger skulking). As Weiner recounts, over the decades (even in the heady Helms/Colby years), the vast majority of CA agents (not officers, but some there too) have simply been caught and killed (in part, thanks to double agents and moles, but, for instance in China insertions, simply through incompetence).

The debate over the value of covert ops has been a long and storied one and there is certainly more documented history of it’s failures than it successes, which makes it difficult to make an accurate judgment of what actually worked and what didn’t. Although it is undisputable that the Agency has had some spectacular failures, there are also a number of amazing successes that have never been revealed. Even at a much less secured level, I mentioned to you earlier about USAF planes flying into Kandahar during the Soviet occupation. To my knowledge that has never been reported anywhere in the world’s press. My point is this, that these were relatively low level ops that have never ever seen the light of day, then how much do we really know. Were you aware of them?