Dance With the Devil

Ooops! "Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say."

This is probably worth keeping in mind as we read about rushed and ill-conceived plans to export the Anbar Awakening worldwide. Supporting violent groups you don't really control or understand who are driven by their own interests and ideologies can be a very dangerous game.

Comments

Invading Afghanistan heavily dependent on the Northern Alliance, on the other hand... BRILLIANT IDEA! Right, Matt?

Posted by Murph | January 15, 2008 8:48 AM

Isn't this how we got in this mess in the first place? Maybe arming and training a potential Al Qaeda 3.0 or whatever to fight the faux AQ 2.0 is not such a great idea.

Posted by John Nanney | January 15, 2008 8:58 AM

This is shocking and completely not in any way similar to anything that happened with various Islamic fundamentalist radical terrorists in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

Posted by El Cid | January 15, 2008 9:15 AM

Also, no one should ever anticipate that hiring terrorists and gangsters should ever lead to anything negative later on, because no one should never ever anticipate the obvious logical consequences of their activities.

Posted by El Cid | January 15, 2008 9:17 AM

In the Onion's ""Our Dumb Century," super-right-wing op-ed writer T. Herman Zweibel wrote "We must arm Iraq's Saddam Hussein" and "We must arm Panama's Manuel Noriega" in the early 1980s.

Today, we must arm Pakistan's ISI, and pay off every faction in Iraq.

The Bush Administration: Life Imitates Satire.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | January 15, 2008 9:30 AM

Uh yeah, Afghanistan in the 1980s. Hello!

Posted by Paul | January 15, 2008 10:22 AM

We are not training people to fight in the terrorist way, but in uniform under a chain of command.
Just another in 80 militaries around the world we advise - non particularly associated with terrorism - which tends to spring from Jihadi, warlord, or communist irregulars.

A little blowback on ISI is nice. It could be very good for us if it ends up with Pakis agreeing that we can help them kill AQ and Taliban leadership in their sovereign territory. With full ISI intel behind it,

I have no doubt that ISI knows where many of the foreign Islamoids are and which houses they are in. And if the Paks finally believe there is enough popular support and it is a matter of their national survival - we might get the go-ahead to assist by dropping bombs on several dozen homes and Pakistan's military directs if ISI can finger the houses and wipe out the AQ, Talibanis and friends & family members dumb enough to be with them.
ISI knows that AQ turned several provinces of Iraq into horror houses after locals stupidly thought they would just fight Americans and leave later. They are seeing, like the Iraqi Sunnis did - that the radical Islamists might have to be liquidated...

Posted by chris ford | January 15, 2008 10:34 AM

Supporting violent groups you don't really control or understand who are driven by their own interests and ideologies can be a very dangerous game.

A thousand points of al Qaeda, just in time for a Democratic administration.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | January 15, 2008 11:28 AM

This is shocking and completely not in any way similar to anything that happened with various Islamic fundamentalist radical terrorists in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

Our Very Serious Foreign Policy Establishment, like the Bourbons, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Posted by Steve LaBonne | January 15, 2008 11:41 AM

"We are not training people to fight in the terrorist way, but in uniform under a chain of command."

Whew. That's a relief.

Posted by cw | January 15, 2008 12:05 PM

Ford, you haven't the foggiest fucking notion what you're talking about on ANY subject, let alone Pakistan and the ISI, so just STFU.

The ISI practically CREATED the Taliban, you nitwit. They supported Al Qaeda from day one. At least some factions of it did. An ISI officer wired $100,000 to Mohammad Atta before 9/11. The goal of all this is to control Afghanistan and the heroin trade.

According to Wikipedia:

"Two contrasting narratives of the beginnings of the Taliban[12] are that the rape and murder of boys and girls from a family traveling to Kandahar or a similar outrage by Mujahideen bandits sparked Mullah Omar and his students to vow to rid Afghanistan of these criminals.[13] The other is that the Pakistan-based truck shipping mafia known as the "Afghanistan Transit Trade" and their allies in the Pakistan government, trained, armed and financed the Taliban to clear the southern road across Afghanistan to the Central Asian Republics of extortionate bandit gangs.[14]"

And who do you think is running the "truck shipping mafia" in Pakistan which deals mostly in heroin? You think the ISI doesn't have its hands in with that little industry?>

So, sure, the ISI is just gonna up and dump their primary source of income for the sake of the good ol' US of A. Or else we're gonna bomb 'em...a country of 175 million people who don't like the US as it IS.

Moron.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 15, 2008 10:49 PM