Word: cia
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...Popolzai tribe, Karzai was a prominent leader in Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, which is also the social base of the Taliban. Still, his power base was limited, and creating an effective government forced him to cut deals with all manner of unsavory characters. The CIA, it should be remembered, was doing the same thing: the hundreds of millions of dollars in suitcases that the agency took into Afghanistan in the early days of the invasion was not aimed at funding women's literacy projects; its purpose was to buy off the local warlords who control...
...terrorism against sensitive targets. On March 31, a militant identified as Qari Hussein - considered the head of the Taliban's squad of suicide bombers - told the English-language daily Dawn that the Taliban would "refresh memories of the attack on the Khost base" in Afghanistan, which left seven CIA agents dead. (See TIME columnist Robert Baer's assessment of the damage to the CIA after the Khost attack...
...Palace insiders say that before Obama's surprise visit, Afghan-U.S. relations had strained to the point where Karzai would speak to only three Americans: Ambassador Karl Eikenberry; General Stanley McChrystal, commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan; and the unnamed CIA station chief. Of those three, Karzai is said to trust only the CIA chief, who reportedly led the special-forces team that protected Karzai on his first forays into southern Afghanistan to turn the Pashtun tribes against Taliban rule. Karzai is said to be leery of Eikenberry, ever since the media leaked the contents of cables...
...There may be more to Hekmatyar's outreach than simply a whipping at the hands of the Taliban in Baghlan. The warlord has kept close ties with Pakistan spy agency the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ever since he was the main recipient of the CIA and Saudi aid that was channeled by the ISI to anti-Soviet Afghan rebels in the 1980s. And despite the fact that since 2002, the U.S. has considered Hekmatyar a terrorist, the Hezb-i-Islami chief operates more or less openly inside Pakistan. He maintains houses for his family in Peshawar and Islamabad...
...talk concluded with a discussion of some of the topics covered in his books, including the inner-workings of a crack cocaine gang, alternative strategies for climate change, CIA and terrorism, and the business side of prostitution...