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• Wednesday, January 7, 2009 09:18 AM

  @Arne Langsetmo

  I noticed that Panetta fell off the radar. At any rate Coll wrote his fine history with the advantage of already witnessing the radicalization of some of the mujahedin and the Taliban movement.

  “We didn't support Masoud much. That's part of the problem; we let pretty much all the aid get funneled through the ISI, and they gave it to the folks they wanted to support; that is to the Pashtuns (and the militant ones), in hopes that Afghanistan would become a client state and resolve their own security problems.”

  If you go back and read Coll, he goes into detail as to why the Agency favored Hekmatyr over Massoud, not the least of which he notes that Massoud often would not uphold his agreements to attack at agreed times and would in fact sometimes make deals with the Soviets. We didn’t “let” the aid get funneled through the ISI, the ISI and Zia insisted that all training and funds go through them, that was a prerequisite that held from Carter and through the Reagan, Bush and Clinton terms. In fact, no American “advisors” trained any Afghans on Stingers, instead they trained the ISI, who in turn trained the Afghans. Massoud if my memory serves me right got 8.

  “We gave up after the Russians left, and just let the ISI do what they wanted. Many people (including in the CIA) were quite upset about that. So were others who were trying to forge a republican Afghanistan, perhaps of a federal nature. The U.S. sat on the sidelines and let the Taliban take over and consolidate their position ... with immense help from the ISI.”

  Obviously the US made a serious mistake in walking away from Afghanistan when it did. But you over simplify the case of what would’ve been necessary to bring down the ISI and it’s full on sponsorship and direction from the Pakistani government. Plus we haven’t even begun to speak of the heroin trade that fuels so much of the former and current crisis. I’ve been aware of the ISI and their myriad of deceit since 1987, so I don’t need any lessons in their underhanded dealings. We’ll see if Panetta has what it takes to take these guys on, but most likely he’ll be too busy cleaning house. You and Glenn still haven’t’ addressed the question of why the DCIA would have to come from the DO instead of another branch of the intel community.

  For excellent updates on the ISI check out B. Raman's site (former RAW Intel Director) at:

  http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/default.asp

  —asiashooter Read asiashooter's other letters
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