Wrong Enemy

Whale, behind sight is like 20/20, right?

Imagine - just for a sec - that after 911 - Great Satan went kinda crazy, mean and scary. Nailed the Royal Whahabbi Saudis hair to the floor so tight they couldn't blink, knocked out the Taliban and stomped on Pakistan so bad she never recovered.

The diff ways of doing sump like that keep popping up in the mind's eye like an ancient Steely Dan tune that you can't ditch. Especially after czeching out Carlotta Gall's hot book "Wrong Enemy"

1st hand accounts of Taliban warlords, Pakistani intelligence thugs, American generals, Afghani politicians, and the many innocents who were caught up in this long war are riveting.

The real reason Kharzai is such a flake is that Pakistan has been a deceitful unAlly and has stymied Great Satan and Afghanistan at every turn:

President Musharraf was aiding and abetting the Taliban at first, organizing a meeting right after — in 2001, right after the fall of the Taliban, to how to regroup them and get them back on their feet, and to divide up areas of responsibility to go back in and run an insurgency against American troops.

And the idea was to trip America up. And that — that sounded strange to — when he was being an ally of the West in the war on terror, and he was handing over some al-Qaida people that were caught in Pakistan. But the real idea was to keep the Taliban going as a proxy force, which is, you know, aimed to then, in the end, have influence in Afghanistan for Pakistan, so they could control them or have them as a client state.

And that’s always been the aim of Pakistan, in fact, since right the beginning of the Taliban, and you could argue even before, when they supported the mujahideen against Russia, that they wanted a stake in what they regard as their backyard.

We learned in Quetta that families give their sons to the madrasas. They go because — they go for the religious instruction and because it is free.

So they give their sons, and then their sons have disappeared. And they will be told they have gone off on a training exercise or some — to some other course somewhere. And, in fact, then they have been sent into Afghanistan. And then days later or weeks later, they would be told, your son is being martyred in a suicide attack.

And it was a complete shock to these families. And we — I went around to try and find out what was happening. And I was amazed how these families didn’t know, and then they were also terrified to speak. So, it really showed me that there was some covert war that had to be exposed.

Money Shot:

According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden.

The Pakistani military was still set on dominating Afghanistan and was still determined to use the Taliban to exert influence now that the United States was pulling out.

When I remember the beleaguered state of Afghanistan in 2001, I marvel at the changes the American intervention has fostered: the rebuilding, the modernity, the bright graduates in every office. Yet after 13 years, more than a trillion dollars spent, 120,000 foreign troops deployed at the height of the war and tens of thousands of lives lost, Afghanistan’s predicament has not changed: It remains a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists. This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but to pull out now is, undeniably, to leave with the job only half-done.

Meanwhile, the real enemy remains at large.

Pic - "That Valuable Ally"