Pundita quotes and analyzes an article by Mark Mazzetti written more than a year ago describing the CIA’s relationship with Pakistan. Mazzetti basically asks the question who is running who? According to Mazzetti the question of what the CIA in Islamabad is doing is uppermost in the minds of CIA station in Kabul.
As American and allied casualty rates in Afghanistan have grown in the last two years, the I.S.I. has become a subject of fierce debate within the C.I.A. Many in the spy agency — particularly those stationed in Afghanistan — accuse their agency colleagues at the Islamabad station of actually being too cozy with their I.S.I. counterparts.
There have been bitter fights between the C.I.A. station chiefs in Kabul and Islamabad, particularly about the significance of the militant threat in the tribal areas. At times, the view from Kabul has been not only that the I.S.I. is actively aiding the militants, but that C.I.A. officers in Pakistan refuse to confront the I.S.I. over the issue.
The issue has flared up again with accusations by the Washington Times that Mullah Omar is hiding in Karachi. Pakistani officials have denied the accusations. But the Washington Time’s sources seemed credible enough.
Two senior U.S. intelligence officials and one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Times that Mullah Omar traveled to Karachi last month after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He inaugurated a new senior leadership council in Karachi, a city that so far has escaped U.S. and Pakistani counterterrorism campaigns, the officials said.
The officials, two of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, helped the Taliban leaders move from Quetta, where they were exposed to attacks by unmanned U.S. drones.
Karachi is outside the “boxes” of surveillance described by Mazzetti in his 2008 article. “The Pakistani government has long restricted where the C.I.A. can fly Predator surveillance drones inside Pakistan, limiting flight paths to approved “boxes” on a grid map. The C.I.A.’s answer to that restriction? It deliberately flies Predators beyond the approved areas, just to test Pakistani radars. According to one former agency officer, the Pakistanis usually notice.” Supposing that the Pakistanis knew where the Americans could not look, then you could suppose they would know where to put things.
The debate over how far to trust the Pakistanis and just who is working for who is part of the context of President Obama’s expected announcement of his newer Afghan strategy. The Pakistanis have advised Obama not to surge, but to talk to the Taliban. The Christian Science Monitor writes:
The Pakistani government has some advice the Obama administration may not want to hear as it contemplates sending additional US troops to neighboring Afghanistan: Negotiate with Taliban leaders and restrain India.
Pakistan embraces US efforts to stabilize the region and worries that a hasty US withdrawal would create chaos. But Pakistani officials worry that thousands of additional American soldiers and Marines would send Taliban forces retreating into Pakistan, where they’re not welcome.
A cynic might think the Pakistanis — and some in the CIA — want to have it both ways. Pakistani intelligence is already the beneficiary of bounties paid for the heads of Taliban operatives. Greg Miller, writing for the LA Times says that up to 1/3 of the ISI’s budget already comes from the CIA. “The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.” An American strategy that emphasized negotiating” (that is paying off) the Taliban would mean more money for the ISI via their Taliban proxies and more money from the State Department bounties to keep the Taliban down. It’s like paying to fertilize the grass and hiring someone to whack it down and gives the word “assets” a wholly new meaning.
The LA Times article hinted that Washington is worried about who is working for whom. When millions of dollars floating around, loyalties are often similarly adrift on the wind.
Congress recently approved an extra $1 billion a year to help Pakistan stabilize its tribal belt at a time when Obama is considering whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.
The ISI has used the covert CIA money for a variety of purposes, including the construction of a new headquarters in Islamabad, the capital. That project pleased CIA officials because it replaced a structure considered vulnerable to attack; it also eased fears that the U.S. money would end up in the private bank accounts of ISI officials.
In fact, CIA officials were so worried that the money would be wasted that the agency’s station chief at the time, Robert Grenier, went to the head of the ISI to extract a promise that it would be put to good use.
“What we didn’t want to happen was for this group of generals in power at the time to just start putting it in their pockets or building mansions in Dubai,” said a former CIA operative who served in Islamabad.
The scale of the payments shows the extent to which money has fueled an espionage alliance that has been credited with damaging Al Qaeda but also plagued by distrust.
The complexity of the relationship is reflected in other ways. Officials said the CIA has routinely brought ISI operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina, even as U.S. intelligence analysts try to assess whether segments of the ISI have worked against U.S. interests.
But the results of the investigations were inconclusive. The leaks to the Washington Times suggest that America’s Afghan strategy reflects a high-level debate in Washington between those who feel Afghanistan can be “handled” via Pakistani proxies and those who fear that those proxies may simply manage Jihadi assets to keep the money machine turning. It also raises interesting questions about the relative cost-effectiveness of using “intelligence” instead of military methods to fight terrorism. The costs of open war are well known. But the price of endless, shadow conflicts is only improperly understood.
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18 Comments
1. docbill:While not a Vietnam vet, I know those who were intel./clandestine types who participated in that scout campout. They tell tales of similar things happening in Laos and S. Vietnam. The clandestine stuff is always subject to fuzz happening. The real answer is to just get the war on and damn the borders. If we don’t the alligators will just grow larger in the protected part of the swamp and wait until we grow tired and leave. In fact they are bidding their time for just that to happen.
Managing a war is not WINNING it. Ask an AIDS patient if they would like to get rid of the disease or just manage it. We know the answer; the issue is do we have the will? And Whiskey will answer only after they nuke several US cities with container bombs; and I AGREE.
Nov 25, 2009 - 11:00 am 2. Limpet6:Pakistan has always looked covetously on Kashmir saying essentially, “a good number of those folks in at least one section of Kashmir are more like us Pakistanis than like you Indians. Islamic Kashmir should be ours.”
Trouble is, some Afghanis have looked at the Pashtoon section of Pakistan and said much the same thing. There should be a Pashtunistan and it should be part of Afghanistan.
That is at least part of the problem between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The scariest alternative is for Pakistan and Afghanistan to merge under some Islamic radical strongman who has nuclear weapons at his fingertips.
We have intentionally avoided any kind of confrontation with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia because each of those countries had internal divisions and competing factions that kept them somewhat in check, but who knows how long that can last.
We can not ignore this part of the world for the near future. We must be the 800 lb. gorilla in the Middle East room for at least a generation.
Nov 25, 2009 - 11:43 am 3. Josh:Well hey, it’s the Central Intelligence Agency, not the Central Confront Pakistani Malefactors Agency, isn’t it.
Nov 25, 2009 - 12:06 pm 4. Eggplant:docbill 1 said:
“Managing a war is not WINNING it. Ask an AIDS patient if they would like to get rid of the disease or just manage it. We know the answer; the issue is do we have the will? And Whiskey will answer only after they nuke several US cities with container bombs; and I AGREE.”
Limpet6 2 said:
“The scariest alternative is for Pakistan and Afghanistan to merge under some Islamic radical strongman who has nuclear weapons at his fingertips.
We have intentionally avoided any kind of confrontation with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia because each of those countries had internal divisions and competing factions that kept them somewhat in check, but who knows how long that can last.
We can not ignore this part of the world for the near future. We must be the 800 lb. gorilla in the Middle East room for at least a generation.”
These are wise words from Docbill and Limpet6.
If we stop killing Islamic fascists and allow them some breathing room then it is assured that a very large nuke in a shipping container will appear in New York and/or Long Beach (probably at the same time). I’m becoming frustrated with people arguing that because the economy is damaged, we no longer have the resources to kill Islamic fascists.
This is false economics.
The damage already experienced by our economy would be insignificant compared to the damage inflicted by a 5 megaton nuke going off in Long Beach harbor with the fallout plume passing over the Los Angeles basin. People need to maintain the perspective of 9/11 and the incredible evil of Islamic fascism.
This problem will not go away if we ignore it.
Nov 25, 2009 - 12:38 pm 5. dan:No counterintelligence in Karachi? What? Presumably there are other ways than Predators to kill Omar. Right?
There must be some alternative to playing catamite for Pakistan’s absurd rulers. Is this somehow normal, this paying hundreds of billions in cash, arms and credits for 10% of the help they could give us fighting their own enemies? There aren’t a few moles inside ISI we could buy? What is going on here?
Nov 25, 2009 - 1:11 pm 6. E. Nigma:From my very limited understanding (acquired by reading only) it is a very difficult and tricky operation to “run” agents in a country, especially one as different from the US as Pakistan is. Thus, the CIA in Islamabad is happy to have the ISI feeding it intelligence, and at least some of it has appeared to be accurate and actionable.
But ultimately, as Limpet6 noted, our interests diverge. Pakistan has been fighting “the long war” with India over disputed territory. At least part of the reason the ISI had in the creation/subsidization of the Taliban in Afghanistan was to create a cadre of deniable “Islamic soliders” to attack the Hindus in India. In essence, Taliban -ruled Afghanistan was a cut-out for Pakistan, until things sorta ‘got our of control’, re 9/11 in NYC. There is an analogous relationship between the PRC and North Korea. And that relationship has also gotten ‘out of control’, so to speak.
That part of the world is a mess, and has been for some time. If the US and NATO walk away out of ennui or from fatigue or from some post-modernist ‘rationalization’, the entropy will not automatically reverse itself. Things will get worse.
I wish we could walk away from Afghanistan. Part of me thinks we should. There is little ‘tangible’ that will be gained by our staying there, which is in contrast to our presence in Iraq. That helped to stabilize a key center of worldwide oil production to keep the world economy moving, while also removing an extremely ugly tyranny (Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship) fueled by oil money.
I would like a more subtle strategy engaging the locals that want to resist the Taliban which are mainly Pashtun (Pushtun, whatever), rather than the “big” solution involving 100K Americans and a long logistical tail to keep a warfighting force there. And as others have noted, the money that is used to buy protection and ‘grease the palm’ of the locals to allow “reconstruction” to take place is also a big source of money for the Taliban and ‘insurgents’. These bandits aren’t stupid; they and their ancestors have been playing this game since before the time of Jesus Christ.
This is a hard, poor and desolate country. The land has shaped the people to be hard, warlike and cruel (to outsiders, mainly). We are not going to be able to reform them and turn Afghanistan into our notion of a Westphalian nation state in the next five years, or even the next 50.
But with the right application of force and coordination, we could create a tribal federation the would resist the Taliban and their al-Qaeda fellow travelers.
Pakistan is a much larger and less solvable mess.
Nov 25, 2009 - 1:13 pm 7. Darren:We must be the 800 lb. gorilla in the Middle East room for at least a generation.
This assessment is probably true. Too bad our current administration’s strategy as to how to act as the 800 lb gorilla consists of grunting and flinging poo.
Nov 25, 2009 - 1:27 pm 8. Captain Ramen:Afghanistan doesn’t need to be a binary proposition – either committing all our reserves to stabilize it or walking away completely forever. Both choices are foolish. Pay off the local militias like we did before in the 80s and be done with it.
I am unsure of why we should care that the Taliban rules Afghanistan again any more than the communists (a far more murderous bunch) run China.
Assured nuclear sneak attack? Really? I understand that is your worst nightmare (mine too, since I live here) but realistically what are the chances of AQ getting one without us knowing about it?
Meanwhile terrorists – either coming across the unsecured border with Mexico or homegrown – going to various shopping malls on Black Friday or the Day After Christmas and spraying shoppers with AK-47s is easier for them to pull off and IMO far more likely to occur.
Only the hubris of a decadent people would lead them to believe their treasury was an endless source of funds. Resources are limited and should be allocated proportionally to the level of the threat.
Nov 25, 2009 - 1:47 pm 9. Marty:For all the assurances by some that if we give Gen. McChrystal what he asks for everything will be OK, notwithstanding that every soldier there becomes hostage to unfriendly countries that control the supply line, or by others that we can succeed with a counterterror rather than a COIN strategy notwithstanding that with no boots on the ground we are totally dependent on ISI for actionable intelligence, and there’s no way to secure the population, I keep coming back to one image–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IruUSNql5JM
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A_LYDMIDEE
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
I don’t pretend to have the right answer and this is one of very few issues where I sympathize with Obama (tho he created a lot of his problem by cynical short-term political posturing).
My gut tells me that back in 2001 we should have treated it as what used to be called a “Punitive Expedition”. Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule, “You broke it, you bought ir,” makes no sense as an analogy when applied to a country where there was/is almost nothing to break. Had we caught Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Mullah Omar, maybe leaving would have been viable. But, we didn’t (thanks, Mr. Rumsfeld, for not putting any real boots on the ground in Tora Bora)… so the “punitive” part wasn’t really executed.
the acronym FUBAR comes to mind.
Nov 25, 2009 - 2:47 pm 10. visitor:“it is a very difficult and tricky operation to “run” agents in a country,”
difficult and easily a career (and freedom) ender. Given that CIA officers will be prosecuted for any infraction comitted by their agents…
You may only recruit alter boys as agent… and they don’t know anything.
Given the perfidios nature of the Democrats in DC, It will only get worse.
Nov 25, 2009 - 3:26 pm 11. RWE:“The White House says President Barack Obama is placing heavy emphasis on how the United States eventually will withdraw from Afghanistan even as he plans to announce a troop increase next week.”
I think that attitude speaks for itself.
Nov 25, 2009 - 5:01 pm 12. RWE:Marty #9:
Suggest you read the book “Kill Bin LAden” by the officer who commanded the Delta force unit that went to Tora Bora. No way we could have gotten any large number troops in there. The terrain would not have allowed it and a large force of US troops likely would have been opposed as invaders by the Afghan forces there who were our “allies.”
Now, a blocking force of Marines along the Paki border to cut off Bin Laden’s escape might have done it, but once again, that would have required Paki cooperation and that was not forthcoming.
Nov 25, 2009 - 5:40 pm 13. Eggplant:Captain Ramen 8 said:
“Assured nuclear sneak attack? Really? I understand that is your worst nightmare (mine too, since I live here) but realistically what are the chances of AQ getting one without us knowing about it?”
Captain Ramen is correct (and I stand corrected). Nothing is assured when dealing with a terrorist group like al Qaeda. However try to get inside bin Laden’s head. To maintain street-cred with the Islamic masses, bin Laden is more or less obligated to one-up 9/11 and that’s very hard to do with anything short of a nuke. New York and Los Angeles are the obvious targets outside of Israel. Bin Laden can get his weapon from rogue elements in Pakistan, Iran or North Korea if he can come up with the cash (easy to do with dissident Saudi money). The hard part with a nuke is the fissile transuranics for the pit. It actually requires more fissile transuranics for a primitive gun type bomb than a Tsar Bomba (deuterium and depleted uranium are relatively easy to obtain). Consequently a Tsar Bomba in a shipping container really is bin Laden’s most logical next option.
Nov 25, 2009 - 6:49 pm 14. Buck smith:With Obama an CinC it may be better to walk from Afghaistan or just keep a small footprint with air power.
Nov 25, 2009 - 6:53 pm 15. Eggplant:Buck Smith 14 said:
“With Obama as CinC it may be better to walk from Afghaistan or just keep a small footprint with air power.”
With the Messiah as CinC, no correct decisions are likely. Until 2012, the US is walking around with a “Kick Me” sign attached to its hind end. The moonbats are smiling but the rest of us will just have to grit our teeth. Maybe the Chosen One will get frustrated and resign like Nixon did (I can dream can’t I?).
Nov 25, 2009 - 7:12 pm 16. Captain Ramen:Eggplant,
There’s no doubt in my mind that OBL has the will to nuke an American city. It is his ability to do so relative to the cost of maintaining a large military presence in a landlocked country with money borrowed from our adversaries that concerns me.
Furthermore I am not convinced that any of our activity in Afghanistan post Tora Bora has helped increase our security, any more than me taking of my shoes at the airport.
I think getting bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan after the initial raids was a mistake. Our forces are tied down there now. We have a diminished capacity to conduct similar raids against Iran or Syria for example. We can’t tell those guys ‘hey, this could happen to you too if you don’t knock it off,’ because they know we are overstretched.
Nov 25, 2009 - 8:43 pm 17. Armaggedon Rex:Captain Ramen #16:
The fact that we have so many of our conventional ground forces tied up doesn’t stop the U.S. from striking a heavy or indeed devastating blow against Syria or Iran to name just two. Of the USAF and USN, transport and support functions have mostly been tasked for both Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. For the entirety of both operations only a tiny fraction of conventional air power or sea-based power has been utilized. Both Syria and Iran have serious coastlines to defend. Both have largely antiquated and second rate air defense systems that can be taken down by our forces. Both have some very expensive and time consuming to replace assets on or near their coasts. Iran’s entire economy could be crippled for years or decades in 45 minutes worth of bombing, missiling, shelling, and commando direct action. Syria is only less vulnerable because all their economic eggs aren’t in the oil basket.
Nov 25, 2009 - 11:12 pm 18. Bob:We have plenty of options, but no will power to pursue any of them anyway….under the current administration.
Captain Ramen:
“Assured nuclear sneak attack? Really? I understand that is your worst nightmare (mine too, since I live here) but realistically what are the chances of AQ getting one without us knowing about it?”
I think (hope?) that the chances of AQ getting a nuke are relatively low, and certainly not “assured.” But should they manage to do so “under the table,” do you really trust the US intelligence agencies to know about it? (Prior to the wee giveaway of a mushroom cloud, that is.)
Nov 26, 2009 - 7:27 pm