Word: isis
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...Musharraf's first step in reining in the ISI was to dump its chief, Ahmed. He and the President were once close friends and fellow plotters in the 1999 coup that brought Musharraf to power. But former comrades say that Ahmed experienced a battlefield epiphany up in the Himalayan peaks during the 1999 Kargil offensive against India. After that, he began to pursue his own radical Islamic agenda. At a Cabinet meeting, he once yelled at an official: "What do you know? You don't even go to prayers...
...Taliban. When the President sent him down to Kandahar last Sept. 17 to persuade Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over bin Laden, the spymaster instead secretly told Omar to resist, an ex-Taliban official told Time. Word of this double-talk reached Musharraf, who replaced him as ISI boss with General Ehsan ul-Haq, a trusted friend and ex-military intelligence chief who shares Musharraf's more Westernized views. His orders were to weed out "the beards," as the Islamic extremists are nicknamed inside the agency, and make the ISI more obedient to the President. "For us, Sept...
...course, the old ISI helped create that extremist danger. Since nationhood in 1947, Pakistan has tried through war and guile to pry the remainder of Kashmir, a former princely state with a Muslim majority, away from India. Borrowing a page from the cia's proxy war?backing local mujahedin against the occupying Soviets in Afghanistan?the ISI began in 1989 to encourage Islamic militant outfits inside Pakistan to cross over the mountains and snipe at Indian troops in Kashmir. As a combat tactic, it was brilliant: on any given day, more than 300,000 Indian troops are busy chasing...
...Kandahar with al-Qaeda, according to Western diplomats and intelligence officials in Islamabad. In turn, bin Laden's agents relied on these comrades to provide a network of safe houses for al-Qaeda agents as they crossed Pakistan on their way to and from their Afghan headquarters. The ISI also vetted new recruits and laundered terrorist funds through the hawala global network of informal money changers. Says Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia: "All these Pakistani groups were closely linked to the ISI through Kashmir." It was no surprise to foreign spooks that...
...catching bin Laden a top ISI priority. In early 1999 the U.S. pressed the Pakistanis to establish a snatch team that could go into Afghanistan to grab the al-Qaeda chief. The Pakistanis did set up the commando unit, under the aegis of the ISI and with training by the cia. But according to one U.S. official familiar with the operation, in the end the Pakistanis didn't do "squat...