Word: kandahar
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Despite all that has been learned, mistakes are still made. Last week four U.S. soldiers died when a rocket they were destroying exploded prematurely in the desert near Kandahar. Later a U.S. Air National Guard pilot killed four Canadians and seriously wounded eight others after mistaking muzzle flashes from a Canadian live-fire nighttime exercise for an enemy attack. The pilot dropped at least one 500-lb. laser-guided bomb on the allies...
...More worrying than these outbursts was Ahmed's sympathy for the 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...
...practical level, Pakistani extremist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad shared terrorist camps near the Afghan towns of Khost and 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...
...Even after Sept. 11, Pakistani loyalties were still divided. At least five key ISI operatives?some retired, some active?stayed on to help their Taliban comrades prepare defenses in Kandahar against the Americans. None has been punished for this disobedience. And in New Delhi, Indian intelligence agents insist that during the battle for the Taliban bastion of Kunduz, Musharraf persuaded the U.S. to allow Pakistani C-130 planes to airlift out between 300 to 1,000 of its pro-Taliban fighters before American jets poured fire onto the northern Afghan town. Both Washington and Islamabad deny this happened. What...
...Even after Sept. 11, Pakistani loyalties were still divided. According to Western diplomats, at least five key ISI operatives - some retired and some active - actually continued helping their Taliban comrades prepare defenses in Kandahar against the Americans. Even now, with all the ISI's changes, none were punished for their disobedience. Midway into the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis were still allowing military and nonlethal supplies to flow across the border to the Taliban...