[iwar] [fc:Pakistani.Intelligence.Had.Links.To.Al.Qaeda,.U.S..Officials.Say]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-29 07:13:12
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 07:13:12 -0800 (PST)
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New York Times
October 29, 2001
Pakistani Intelligence Had Links To Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say
By James Risen and Judith Miller
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The intelligence service of Pakistan, a crucial
American ally in the war on terrorism, has had an indirect but longstanding
relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye for years to the growing
ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to American
officials.
The intelligence service even used Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to train
covert operatives for use in a war of terror against India, the Americans
say.
The intelligence service, known as Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.,
also maintained direct links to guerrillas fighting in the disputed
territory of Kashmir on Pakistan's border with India, the officials said.
American fears over the agency's dealings with Kashmiri militant groups and
with the Taliban government of Afghanistan became so great last year that
the Secret Service adamantly opposed a planned trip by President Clinton to
Pakistan out of concern for his safety, former senior American officials
said.
The fear was that Pakistani security forces were so badly penetrated by
terrorists that extremist groups, possibly including Mr. bin Laden's
network, Al Qaeda, would learn of the president's travel route from
sympathizers within the I.S.I. and try to shoot down his plane.
Mr. Clinton overruled the Secret Service and went ahead with the trip,
prompting his security detail to take extraordinary precautions. An empty
Air Force One was flown into the country, and the president made the trip in
a small unmarked plane. Later, his motorcade stopped under an overpass and
Mr. Clinton changed cars, the former officials said.
The Kashmiri fighters, labeled a terrorist group by the State Department,
are part of Pakistan's continuing efforts to put pressure on India in the
Kashmir conflict. The I.S.I.'s reliance on Mr. bin Laden's camps for
training came to light in August 1998, when the United States launched a
cruise missile attack against Al Qaeda terrorist camps near Khost,
Afghanistan, in response to the bombings of two American Embassies in East
Africa. The casualties included several members of a Kashmiri militant group
supported by Pakistan who were believed to be training in the Qaeda camps,
American officials said.
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11,
the Pakistani government, led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has turned against
the Taliban and Al Qaeda in favor of the United States.
One element in that shift was General Musharraf's decision to oust the chief
of the intelligence service, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who may have been
reluctant to join an American-led coalition against the Taliban government
that his organization helped bring to power.
Still, American officials said the depth of support within elements of the
I.S.I. for a war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda remained uncertain, and a
former chief of the agency has become one of the most vocal critics of
American policy in Pakistan.
The former director general, Hameed Gul, complained in an interview with a
Pakistani newspaper that the Bush administration was demanding that the
agency be placed at the disposal of the Americans, as if it were a mercenary
force.
"The I.S.I. is a national intelligence agency, whose potential and ouput
should not be shared or rented out to other countries," Mr. Gul said.
American officials acknowledged that recent American policies toward
Pakistan had fueled such attitudes. In the 1990's the Central Intelligence
Agency failed to maintain the close ties it had developed with the I.S.I. in
the American agency's covert action program to support the Afghan rebels
fighting the Soviet army of occupation in the 1980's.
The close personal relationships that had developed between C.I.A. and
I.S.I. officials - General Gul among them - during the war against the
Soviets withered away.
"After the Soviets were forced out of Afghanistan," said Shamshad Ahmad,
Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations and a former foreign secretary,
"you left us in the lurch with all the problems stemming from the war: an
influx of refugees, the drug and gun running, a Kalashnikov culture."
In recent years, in fact, American officials said, the United States offered
few incentives to the Pakistanis to end their relationship with the Taliban.
Washington gave other issues, including continuing concerns about Pakistan's
nuclear weapons program and its human rights record, much greater emphasis
than the fight against terrorism.
Those priorities were illustrated by the apathetic reaction within the
United States government to a secret memorandum by the State Department's
chief of counterterrorism in 1999 that called for a new approach to
containing Mr. bin Laden.
Written in the the wake of the bombings of two embassies in East Africa in
1998, the memorandum from Michael A. Sheehan, the State Department's
counterterrorism coordinator, urged the Clinton administration to step up
efforts to persuade Afghanistan and its neighbors to cut off financing to
Mr. bin Laden and end the sanctuary and support being offered to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Sheehan's memo outlined a series of actions the United States could take
toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and
Yemen to persuade them to help isolate Al Qaeda.
The document called Pakistan the key, and it suggested that the
administration make terrorism the central issue in relations between
Washington and Islamabad. The document also urged the administration to find
ways to work with the countries to curb terrorist money laundering, and it
recommended that the United States go public if any of the governments
failed to cooperate.
Mr. Sheehan's plan "landed with a resounding thud," one former official
recalled. "He couldn't get anyone interested." As the threat from Al Qaeda
and Mr. bin Laden grew and the United States began to press Pakistan harder
to break its ties to the Taliban, the Pakistanis feigned cooperation but did
little, current and former American officials say.
One former official said the C.I.A. "fell for" what amounted to a stalling
tactic aimed at fending off political pressure. The C.I.A. equipped and
financed a special commando unit that Pakistan had offered to create to
capture Mr. bin Laden. "But this was going nowhere," the former official
said. "The I.S.I. never intended to go after bin Laden. We got completely
snookered."
The C.I.A. declined to comment on its relationship with the Pakistani
agency, saying it did not discuss its ties with foreign intelligence
services. But a former senior Clinton administration official disagreed with
the idea that the United States had had unrelaistic expectations about the
commando proposal.
"There were some concerns about the penetration of the I.S.I., and a lot of
uncertainty about whether it would work," the official said. "But all of us,
including the intelligence community, thought it was worth doing. What was
there to lose?"
What is most remarkable about the tensions that have grown in recent years
between the United States and Pakistan's security service is that it was one
of the C.I.A.'s closest allies just over a decade ago.
In the 1980's, when the C.I.A. mounted the largest covert action program in
its history to support Afghan rebels against the Soviets, the Pakistani
agency served as the critical link between the C.I.A. and the rebels at the
front lines.
While the C.I.A. supplied money and weapons, it was the I.S.I. that moved
them into Afghanistan. The Americans relied almost entirely on the Pakistani
service to allocate the weapons to the rebel leaders, and the senior C.I.A.
officials involved developed close relations with their counterparts.
But when the Soviet Army finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the
C.I.A. ended its support for the Afghan rebels, the agency's relationship
with the Pakistani agency was neglected and Washington began to complain
more openly about the Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
By the early 1990's, officials of the Pakistani agency became resentful over
the change in American policy. In 1990, just one year after the Soviets
pulled out of Afghanistan, Congress imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its
nuclear program.
Faced with turmoil in post-Soviet Afghanistan - which the United States had
no interest in addressing in the early 1990's - Pakistan moved in to support
the Pashtun ethnic group in southern Afghanistan as it created the Taliban
movement.
With Pakistani support, the Taliban gradually took control of most of the
country. By 1996, Mr. bin Laden, who had been in Afghanistan in the 1980's,
helping to pay for Arab fighters to battle the Soviets, returned and quickly
forged a close alliance with the Taliban.
American officials do not believe that the I.S.I. was ever directly involved
with Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda in terrorist activites against the United
States. But the Pakistani agency used Afghan terrorist training camps for
its Kashmiri operations, and the Pakistani leadership failed to act as it
watched the the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Taliban grow ever
closer.
The I.S.I. did cooperate with the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on several
counterterrorism operations in the 1990's. Most notably, the Pakistanis were
instrumental in the capture in Islamabad in 1995 of Ramzi Yousef, the
mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the arrest
in Pakistan in 1997 of Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two C.I.A. employees on a
shooting rampage outside C.I.A. headquarters in 1993.
American officials now believe that the Pakistanis were finally starting to
become alarmed in the last year or two by the extent to which the Taliban
had been co-opted by Mr. bin Laden. Still, the I.S.I. did little to
extricate itself from its relationship with the Taliban - until Sept. 11.
"I think the Pakistanis realized as time went on that they had made a bad
deal," one State Department official said. "But they couldn't find an easy
way out of it."

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