Pakistan's ISI is Stepping Up

As you read these words, Al Qaeda and the Taliban—with orders from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—are stepping up their terrorist activities in Afghanistan. They know that the Americans are confused and uncertain about both the short and long-term future of the war. They know that President Obama is reviewing America's policy in Afghanistan. They know that if they are able to successfully mount vicious attacks to kill Americans and Europeans in Afghanistan, they can pressure America to become discouraged and to forget about the war in Afghanistan. To this purpose, they are skillfully exploiting the American media for free and to their own advantage. That is why the month of October 2009 was one of the deadliest months since the beginning of the war. 

The war in Afghanistan is taking a toll on us. We are tired and confused and disillusioned, because we don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. Statements such as "Afghanistan is the graveyard of superpowers," are made more often in the news lately, as an excuse for our problems in Afghanistan. As an Afghan, I can assure you that Afghanistan is not the graveyard of the superpowers. In the case of the Soviet Union, if Afghans were to accept that honor, make no mistake that it was only because we as a nation fought together with everything we had against the Soviets, and in point of fact, the whole world was helping us as well. 

By contrast, when the United States went to Afghanistan in 2001, perhaps 80% of the people in Afghanistan supported them. Within two and a half months, the US flag was waving even on the top of the Taliban compound. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers belonging to the Northern Alliance were poised to follow the Taliban and Bin Laden anywhere they had to in order to bring them to justice, free of charge. Unfortunately, and sadly, the United States, heavily influenced by Pakistan and General Musharraf, rejected their aid. When we had Bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, even then we did not use the help of the Northern Alliance. Instead, we used the same local forces that previously were with the Taliban and ISI. That is exactly why Bin Laden escaped. Wasn't capturing Bin Laden the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place? We are not losing the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban are making the biggest IEDs. We are losing because we made huge mistakes and we are paying the price for it now.

Can we turn this war around? Easily! To do so, we need to take action swiftly and pervasively. No, we don't need any more troop surges. We have already had too many. We need to change our policies. Here is what we need to do in order to win: (1) Pull American and NATO forces from the front line. (2) Allow the Afghans to take over. Re-enlist the same Afghans who were fighting against the Taliban before 9/11. Help them financially and with weapons. We need about 200,000 of them to replace American and NATO forces. Give them the privilege to clean their own country from the germ of the Taliban and Bin Laden. It is their country, and they will clean it. (3) We need to cut the poppies to the last plant. It is critical that we realize and understand that opium is the reason for this war. (4) We must absolutely stop talking about sharing the government with the Taliban. This is the biggest mistake we have made from day one of the war in Afghanistan. 

Instead of engaging the help of the Afghan people and pounding the Taliban out of existence, we coined the term "moderate Taliban" and started to share the government with them. We confused the Afghan people. Today, 90% of Afghans think that the US is in league with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Afghans also believe that if the US wants to capture Bin Laden, we can do it easily, and that the only reason that we have not done so is that Bin Laden is with us. The Afghan people believe that Americans will soon leave and then the Taliban will come back with a deadly vengeance. They fear for their lives—and rightly so—and therefore they will not dare to side against the Taliban. We need to regain their trust. If we fail to do all of the things I have listed in this article, we could send a million more troops and it would not do one bit of good. Soon the US will leave Afghanistan just like the Russians, broken and frustrated.

Taliban Leaders Arrested in Pakistan

March-15-2010

For several months, President Karzai has been bragging about making peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and through all of this time, secret negotiations were going on between parties. Suddenly, starting in February 2010, the Pakistani secret service started arresting some key Taliban leaders. The naive American media quickly got very excited - was this a bold new shift in Pakistani policy? But then as Pakistan made even more arrests of key Taliban members, the news broke that in fact these Taliban were the ones participating in those secret peace talks with the CIA or the Afghan government.

All those years, when these murderers were fighting in Afghanistan and were sending suicide bombers to target allied troops and innocent Afghans, they were living freely in Pakistan, and nobody was arresting them. Why now? Quite simply, the Pakistan government realized that the peace talks with Afghan government were inevitable, and that they might very well lead to a stabilized government in Afghanistan that would threaten their opium trade. So they came up with a diabolical plan. On the one hand they started arresting those Taliban leaders who were engaged in those secret talks with the Afghan government to prevent any American or Afghan intervention, and on the other hand they hand-picked their own representative to participate in those so-called peace talks. That person was Gulbuddin Hykmatyar! ISI has 30 years of experience with Hykmatyar. He was responsible for shelling Kabul in 1992 for several months to help ISI gain the control of Afghanistan. He was the one that, when ISI asked him to leave all of his arsenal and fighters to the Taliban, he obeyed and did so.

So, after all of these years that Hykmatyar and his guerrillas were busy targeting American and allied forces, as ISI wanted, when ISI needed someone to engage in those so-called peace talks (I would suggest that they needed someone to disrupt those peace talks), Hykmatyar was picked to trick the allied forces. ISI's calculation, perhaps accurate, was that the Americans by that time were tired of being in Afghanistan, and desperately were trying to create some kind of new unified government in Afghanistan so that they could leave, just like Gorbachev had done in the late 1980s. In other words, they wanted to exploit growing American sentiment against continued involvement in Afghanistan. Furthermore, at about the same time, Bin Laden boasted that he would spend 30 billion dollars to modernize the Afghan army.

Naturally, ISI would want to have their agents already in place within the Afghan government, so that as soon as the Americans leave, the Afghan army would simply fall into their hands, and then of course ISI would reap the benefits of this huge arm deal. That is the multi-billion dollar dream of ISI. As an expert, I can categorically state that these peace talks will not in any way help Afghanistan or bring peace to the region, nor will they help American and European long term interests.

A Ten Thousand Toilets Shrine for Osama

The fate and the future of America's war against terrorism depends on who will build Osama's grave monument and turn it into a shrine. Who will it be: the extremists, who would build a ten thousand stars shrine, or Americans, who would build a ten thousand toilets shrine. The more the US and the west insists on emphasizing Osama's 9/11 crimes, the more we unite Muslims around Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the ISI, and the more we help them to build that ten thousand stars shrine. It is human nature—if we were to see a silverback Gorilla fighting with a little monkey, deep inside we all sympathize with the monkey—especially if that monkey shows some courage and fights back.

To the Islamic world, Osama and Al Qaeda are a lot like that little monkey, and unfortunately the US and the west are, to many Muslims, seen to be just like that silverback Gorilla. And because we are supposedly the silverback bully, Osama and Al Qaeda are our little monkey. And Muslims will not sympathize with Americans, as much as they cry about 9/11. Deep inside they even push us toward praising Osama. But if we in the US and the west stop talking about and dwelling on 9/11, at least for a while, and if we instead start talking about the crimes that are Osama, his gang of Al Qaeda, his accomplices (the Taliban) and his bosses (the ISI) have all committed against Muslims, we will be able to turn the tide. Because then Osama becomes that silverback, against the poor, helpless, Afghan people. He and his accomplices are responsible for killing tens of thousands of poor Muslims in Afghanistan alone. What for? For drug money! That is what the war in Afghanistan is really about.

Afghanistan was turned into opium farms by Pakistan, as soon as the Russians left Afghanistan, and especially when their puppet regime fell apart (1992). Since then Osama and his resources were all used for that purpose. Yes, and when the Muslims realize this, then they will look at that face of Osama and Al Qaeda and Taliban and ISI, and they will not sympathize with him, or them, anymore. They will stand up against all of them. Isn't that what we want? Yes, and then the Muslims themselves will build a ten thousand toilets shrine for Osama, and they will bury Al Qaeda and the Taliban and the ISI in that same grave.

  Read my book Afghan Hearts and Minds. Go to my web site Afghan-expert.com. This is now at least 25 years that I am reciting this. Can some of you hear me finally?  

Osama

General Musharraf's neighbor, was killed.

All these years while we were trying to find Osama in N.W. Waziristan, lo and behold, he was General Musharraf's neighbor, and President Zardari's hometown boy, an Islamabadi! He was not hiding in a filthy cave, he was living in a million dollar mansion! I knew it all these years! I remember just like yesterday: Dave Russell, a radio talk show host here in Seattle, in December of 2001, asked me in an interview, "Where do you think we can find Osama?" I answered, "Under Musharraf's desk!" Yes, that is why I call myself an Afghan expert. I even have a website, Afghan-expert.com. 

Should we celebrate Osama's death? Of course! After ten years and six hundred billion dollars? It deserves a huge celebration. But wait a minute, stop the music for a moment, and let's ask why it took ten years? And why 600 billion dollars? That is exactly the reason why Pakistan was not informed about this whole operation until it was over. Finally we realized that if we want to do something serious against Al Qaeda, we should not inform ISI. 

This operation raises yet another question about Pakistan, a nuclear power: Two American helicopters fly from a military base in Afghanistan, go through Pakistani N.W. Waziristan, all the way to the capitol of this nuclear power country in Islamabad, attack a compound, kill Osama, take his body and leave as fast as they came. Only after all of that does Pakistan's army get a call from Americans that "the operation is over!" and only then do they discover it! Yes, now the question is "Is Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear weapons safe?" If their army was not able to detect this whole operation on their own, then why should we believe that the extremists don't have access to nuclear material? That is why Pakistan is the most dangerous place in this whole world for the entire human race.

As Americans, we can celebrate Osama's death, because at least it brings some small measure of closure to the 9-11 tragedy, and at least symbolically we believe that justice was taken to the mastermind behind the 9-11 attacks. However, as Afghans, we should not expect any relief for Afghanistan and the Afghan people, because after all, Osama, while we would love to believe that he was the mastermind, the plain fact is that he was only a puppet at the hands of ISI who quite simply used him and his resources for their express evil purposes. ISI is intact, Taliban will be intact and no changes should we expect.