From the CIA to the ISI to the Lashkar-e-Taiba: By PAUL FITZGERALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

From the CIA to the ISI to the Lashkar-e-Taiba: Mumbai Terror’s Afghan Roots

The roots of the Pakistani military’s complicity in acts of terror in both India and Afghanistan go back many decades

By PAUL FITZGERALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

After early speculation that the recent Mumbai attacks were linked to Pakistan, a former U.S. Defense Department official now asserts that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) had a hand in training the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists.

Earlier this year Afghan president Hamid Karzai blamed Pakistan for a brazen assassination attempt from which he barely escaped, and U.S. officials contend that the July 7, 2008 bombing of India’s Kabul Embassy, which claimed 41 lives, had also been aided by the ISI.

The roots of the Pakistani military’s complicity in acts of terror in both India and Afghanistan go back many decades. In 1981 for CBS News we interviewed a Soviet- sponsored Afghan president Babrak Karmal, who assured us that Soviet troops would leave Afghanistan if the U.S. and China stopped the war from Pakistan. Today, a U.S.- sponsored Afghan president Hamid Karzai faces a similar fate.

But efforts to pressure Pakistan’s military into dissolving its terror linkage to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and a dozen other terrorist groups will consistently fail, until Washington redresses its own role in fueling Pakistan’s extremist-connected military, while constructing a viable conceptual framework for engagement that favors the interests of both the Afghan and Pakistani people.

Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a mujahedeen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987.

The United States owes its policy framework in Central Asia to failed nineteenth-century policy objectives left over from the British Empire. Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was created by British Major General R. Cawthorne who stayed on after partition in order to help Pakistan wage a more effective terrorist war against India.

The CIA itself was modeled after British India’s Political and Secret Service from the days of the empire (the Raj). In the 1980s, Britain’s foremost military historian, Sir John Keegan, would compare it in nineteenth-century-Kiplingesque terms as having “assumed the mantle once worn by Kim’s masters, as if it were a seamless garment.” In addition to the mantle, the CIA would adapt a century-old British political strategy for putting pressure on the Russian empire’s southern flank. Applied to Afghanistan, that strategy soon found the U.S. aligning itself with Pakistan’s British-trained military establishment, which was by 1948 emulating Britain’s aggressive “Forward Policy” of Afghan destabilization in the Northwest Frontier Province.

Britain’s bias towards Pakistan was reflected in the 1950s by Secretary of State Allen Dulles, who in 1953 delivered Afghanistan’s Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud into Soviet arms by denying Daoud the military modernization necessary for maintaining order in the tribal areas bordering Pakistan. That unstable border would eventually provide Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United States with the resources needed to conduct a secret war against the Afghan government and lure the Soviet Union into their own Vietnam.

But the war would also destroy any semblance of a cohesive Afghan state while empowering an extreme Islamist movement bent on a historic conquest of Asia. Enthusiastically embraced by Pakistan’s military establishment as part of its ongoing war with India, this Pakistan-ISI-terrorist “monster” now threatens to fulfill that promise. But unless the U.S. can establish itself as a force for progress and change, there is little doubt that Mumbai will only be a sample of what is to come.

The U.S. cannot hope to serve western commercial interests, pacify Afghanistan, and secure peace in Pakistan by resurrecting Cold War policy goals or dreaming up new ways to rekindle nineteenth-century British and Russian imperialist games for the “soft underbelly” of Eurasia.

In a sign that things are changing, U.S. officials have reportedly asked the United Nations Security Council to place four former ISI officials, including former ISI chief Major-General Hamid Gul on its international terrorist list. Gul has a long history of supporting the Islamists’ radical agenda while heaping praise on the Taliban.

But neutralizing four aging ISI officials will have little effect unless the CIA is willing to relinquish some of its Anglo-Saxon bias. As former U.S. ambassador Leon B. Poullada once wrote describing the overthrow of Afghan King Amanullah in 1929, “Some British officials saw a modernizing of Afghanistan as a threat to British rule in India since it offered an example of the kind of progress free Asians could achieve. . . . This was especially true among the British military.”

If the United States wishes to free itself from the growing terrorist threat, it can begin by freeing itself from Central Asia’s colonial past.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are authors of "Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story," which will be published in January by City Lights.

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                                                                        Who We Are

                                     Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould  

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, have been a husband and wife team since 1977. In 1981 we were the first American journalists permitted to enter Afghanistan behind Soviet lines. We covered the war first for CBS News, produced a documentary for PBS. We returned in 1983 for ABC’s Nightline with Harvard’s "Getting to Yes" negotiations expert, Roger Fisher in the hopes of advancing the prospects for negotiating the Soviets out.

By 1987 we knew the time was not right foretelling the Afghan story. We started to develop reality based screenplays out of the accumulated materials and research. By the end of the 1980's, we had completed four. The EX-FILE* was one. Written in 1989, it was based on a real US government Black Project that used military personnel for mind-control experiments. As the new decade arrived, we began to experience a consciousness shift. Our geopolitical perspective became the key to discovery into the deeper motivations of the players behind the most important event of our time, the war in Afghanistan.

Ultimately we found a psychic link to a blood world of Norman Geraldine (Fitzgerald) holy warriors linked to the Crusades and the holy warriors of Afghanistan today.

We met Oliver Stone in 1992 to introduce him to The Voice, a research paper we developed after years of struggling to tell the unknown geopolitical story of our experience with Afghanistan. With Stone’s encouragement and through his power of dreams we brought our mythic dream world into waking reality.

The story eventually became the holographic door through which the geopolitics of Afghanistan in the current era walked to meet the spiritual ground of its existence; a world with rules of its own, playing out in our time. It reveals the mystical struggle for the future that underlies and drives our consciousness and goes right to the heart of understanding the true destiny of the Western Dream.

Our story will take you back to the birth of the ancient Grail quest 5500 hundred years ago, what that means for the restoration of the Grail through electronics today and why this will restore the Grail for eternity.

A story based on our dreams and visions, The Voice is our answer to the question, what is the meaning of life?

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Fulcrum of Evil – ISI, CIA, Al Qaeda Nexus INR795.00

 BOOK REVIEW Fulcrum of Evil: ISI-CIA-Al Qaeda Nexus

ISBN No.: 8170492785 By: MK Dhar Hardback Fulcrum of Evil is the first detailed research based book on the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. The ISI and the CIA are known as rogue intelligence agencies which were born around the same time in global history after the Second World War for churning out intelligence about external enemies. For USA, the main enemy was the communist Russian Block countries. For Pakistan India has been the perennial enemy survival elixir. However, both the agencies earned notoriety for extra legal and constitutional operations at home and abroad in utter disregard of international laws and diplomatic protocols. Th

Author- M.K.Dhar. Review by  A.K.Verma           

The NDA Govt. had planned to publish a white paper on Pakistan’s intelligence and subversive activities in India. The document was prepared but not finally released, probably to preempt unwarranted conclusions by interested sections of the polity. However, none may remain disappointed now. ‘Fulcrum of Evil’ can admirably substitute for the white paper. It contains the fullest possible account of various Pakistani conspiracies in India and is authored by a very senior former member of the Indian Intelligence Establishment who dealt with many of such activities first hand.  

ISI was fashioned by Pakistan to be the main instrument against India for its nefarious designs but in no time it developed into a formidable tool of extra-constitutional governance within Pakistan also. All the Chief Executive Officers of Pakistan from Ayub Khan onwards to promote their own and their party’s interests exploited it. Zia-Ul-Huq’s introduction of sweeping strains of fundamentalism in Pakistan infected ISI also, which, over time, made it a solid pillar of international Islamic fundamentalism.  

Within Pakistan, ISI is often referred to as the 3^rd Estate, sometimes getting promoted to the status of second Estate when it has supplanted the entire bureaucratic establishment. Its advice remains an important constituent of the internal and external policies in Pakistan. It has made and demolished Governments in Pakistan, working with the military brass. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto used it for crushing the Baluch struggle for self-determination. Earlier, it had served as an instrument of repression against Bengali aspirations in East Pakistan. Within Pakistan, the role of ISI has been akin to Gestapo in Nazi Germany or NKVD in Stalin’s USSR. But, its main focus since its inception has been India. 

It is necessary to understand that the historical process of creating a Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent had certain inevitability about it. The two great civilizations, Hindu and Muslim, co-existed uneasily with each other in the sub-continent. With creation of Pakistan, the rulers of that country did not think that a final solution had been crafted. For them, the agenda of partition will stand fulfilled only when more Muslim areas are carved out in the sub-continent. For more than a half century the ISI has been operating to achieve such goals.
Naturally, it identified India’s fault lines and started working on them. Various tribal groups in India’s North East, after independence, had felt troubled over questions concerning their ethnic and geopolitical identity. ISI was quick to step in to stoke insurgencies in these areas by providing inspirations and weapons. In all disaffected movements of North East, Naga, Mizo, Meiiti, Bodo, Ulfa, NLFT etc. ISI’s footprints were clearly visible. All its activities were in the nature of proxy wars. It is incorrect to think that Pakistan embarked on a proxy war against India for the first time in J&K in the late 1980s. Such tactics have been followed from 1956 when Ayub Khan directed the ISI to develop links with Phizo. Thereafter, sponsoring subversion became a standard policy. Soon it was to morph into promotion of terrorism.  

The Khalistan imbroglio also owed much to the machinations of ISI though it must be added that the ISI was never in total comfort with the Sikhs or believed that a war of liberation could be started in Punjab. The exercise was commenced with the intention of creating a holding ground in Punjab so that a free hand could be available in J&K. The Khalistan idea is dead today but there can be no doubt that ISI will try to revive it should the scenario in Punjab deteriorate.  

ISI has succeeded in the intelligence encirclement of India through linkages in Nepal and Bangladesh. Through them its current efforts are directed towards developing fissure lines in several states like Assam, West Bengal, UP, Gujerat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka etc. Through support to Madrassa education and Jehadi minded groups, it seeks to convert the nationalism of Indian Muslims into trans-Arab Islamism. The Saudi effort to disseminate Wahabism worldwide helps this effort. ISI funds a number of websites to carry forward such propaganda and indoctrination. Talibanisation of Bangla Desh is proving to be a great asset for it.  

The author points out that the symptoms of Jehadi infection in India are becoming all too visible. These include formation of underground tanzeems, infiltration of Madrassas and prominent religious institutions, collaboration between Mafia dons and ISI operatives, growth of Wahabi religious organizations and NGOs, proliferation of secret modules, rapid retaliatory and preemptive responses to perceived acts of injustice etc. The author claims personal knowledge about several individuals being picked from India for training in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Arab Afghans who, on return, set up secret Jehadi modules. It should, however, be noted that vast numbers of Indian Muslims reject the Jehadi philosophy but the ISI does not get deterred.
  

The reason is to be found in the ISI’s belief that Islamic fundamentalism has become a worldwide unstoppable phenomenon. Ironically, the kick-start came from the US when President Carter in 1979, authorized the CIA to disseminate Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia to destabilize the Soviet Union.


 Later, when the US converted the push into a Jehadi war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the ISI’s collaboration was sought.


 It was quick to take a ringside seat in the operations and became the coordinator and distributor of war materials received from US, UK, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc. for conducting the Jehad. The ISI forged a strategic friendship with Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. To them, Jehad in Afghanistan was not only for the purpose of expelling the Soviets from the country, but, more important, to strengthen the staunch Islamic base in Afghanistan. Not long after, Pakistani rulers and sections of civil society started identifying with Jehadist world programme of Al Qaeda.

Taking a lead from the Marxist theory of spontaneous revolutions by the proletariat, the two embarked on the concept of spontaneous Jehad by Muslims all over. ISI became an exporter of terror to many Muslim regions like Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan, Phillipines, Kazakhastan, Xinqiang, South Thailand etc.


 The modus operandi was to collaborate with fundamental Tanzeems and Madrassas and to train their Jehadi volunteers in camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Though many Muslim majority areas felt the need to carve out a new identity through religion as in Bosnia and Kosovo, ISI and pro Al Qaeda groups stepped in with messages of Jehad and weapons, hoping to convert the spurt towards a nationalist identity into an Islamist one.  

The Pakistani link is common to almost all the Islamist organizations that have gained prominence in recent times. An opportunity has also been seen in the Islamic resurgence in Europe.


 There is a desire to see an Islamic nation emerging in South East Asia, comprising all Muslim majority areas, under the nomenclature of Nausitara Raya.

Such objectives conflict with the US aims of combating international terrorism and capping the growth of Islamic fundamentalism.


Therefore, ISI now plays a double role. While the Pakistani rulers provide lip service to controlling international terrorism, ISI quietly supports resurgent Talibans in Afghanistan, provides shelters to hunted Islamists and remains a protector of Salafist Wahabism.
  

Its convictions arise from a strong belief that a new world force in the shape of Wahabi and Deobandi Islam has arisen which cannot be countered by any other world force. It has made its presence felt in many countries. This force must continually use Jehad to consolidate itself and advance further. In its calculations this is the only way to fulfill the Islamic quest of converting Indian Dar-Ul-Harb to Dar-Ul-Islam.

The author has indeed painted a grim picture of ISI and Pakistani designs but the dangers, on past record, seem all too real. All those who have an interest in national security matters, will do well to go through the book. The important question thrown up is what is the fate of Indo Pak dialogues if ISI will not turn a new leaf.  

Fulcrum of Evil: ISI-CIA-Al Qaeda Nexus- Published by Manas Publications, New Delhi. 402 Pages.

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Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould: America’s Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan

As the U.S. economy grinds down to a finish, it becomes increasingly difficult to measure whether Washington understands the importance of how to deal realistically with the worsening crisis in Afghanistan. Left off the front pages during the recent obsession with the debt crisis, Afghanistan has lurched back onto the scene in ways that are reminiscent of the Soviet collapse of two decades ago. After ten years of war, it seems Washington not only continues to lack a comprehensive understanding of Afghanistan, but it lacks an understanding of its own role in creating both the economic and political catastrophe it now faces.

Even less understood is how the political decisions of the late 1970s are tied to the current simultaneous financial and foreign policy crisis. Nor is it understood how Washington and Wall Street set the stage for America’s financial downfall by using Afghanistan as an investment bank throughout the 1980s to renew the Cold War instead of reinvesting in America’s civilian economy.

Much like today, the America of 1979 faced a crossroads. Vietnam, two oil shocks, a disintegrating infrastructure, a beleaguered manufacturing base and the loss of strategic ally Iran had shown that America was a vulnerable colossus. Thirty five years of economic Cold War against the Soviet Union and China had produced a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons that were proving as useless as they were unusable. World War II had set the stage for the happy marriage of war production to business — pulling the U.S. out of the depression by doubling the Gross National Product in one year (1940). The Cold War ushered the financial benefits of the 1940s into the 1950s and 1960s. But these expenditures came at a massive expense to the civilian economy and not just in terms of tax dollars. Weapons development of the post World War II years lured America’s best and brightest away from the civilian economy and even the real world of guns, tanks and armies into a world detached from time, space and money. While Germany and Japan rebuilt their civilian industries free from defense spending, the U.S. moved into ever higher levels of technology, glorifying and expanding the influence of the defense industry into every fabric of American life.

Originally termed Military Keynesianism to describe the buildup of the German defense industry prior to World War II, America’s military Keynesianism of the Cold War was the unseen hand of government supporting the American economy, balancing the cyclical ups and downs of the market by providing 16 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 1950s and 9 percent in the 1960s. By 1963 defense spending accounted for 52 percent of all the research and development done in the United States. But by the mid-1970s, a stagnant American economy combined with the Arab oil embargo and inflation brought on by the Vietnam War exposed the weakness in the system. As German and Japanese manufacturers battered their American competition in the marketplace, the defense-heavy American economy faltered.

Born of necessity, diplomatic overtures to China and détente with the Soviets offered the first chance since World War II to get off the wartime treadmill. To that end, for most of the decade the U.S. and Soviet Union pursued Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

Endorsed by President Nixon in 1972, it was hoped that the agreement signed by President Carter and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev would enable the United States to back away from weapons manufacturing and reinvest those resources in the civilian economy. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan changed all that.

Our involvement in this story began in the summer of 1979 when we began production of a documentary we called Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During the next months numerous experts including economist John Kenneth Galbraith lent their experience to our understanding of the unseen damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and capital investment would represent to the civilian economy. The arms race wasn’t just about defending the United States. The arms race was also about jobs and money in a dark world of business, science, and politics ruled over by a self-described “priesthood” of experts. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War, which the neoconservative right was lobbying hard for at the time, would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already helped rigidify the capitalist system by bureaucratizing a large part of production for non-productive uses. He saw American industry becoming more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment immune from reality, living in a planned economy designed to suit its own needs at the expense of society.

Galbraith jokingly referred to his “First Law of Executive Talent” that he had formulated to describe the thinking of America’s military-industrial leadership. “It was that all great executives come to resemble intellectually the products they manufacture. Until you had done business with top officers of the steel industry, you didn’t really appreciate the intellectual qualities of a billet of steel.” So it was with the defense department. America’s militarized economy was already in essence a Soviet-style “planned economy,” to make it an even larger part of the economy would only lock the U.S. into the same dismal fate.

That fall, in Washington, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was one of the last holdouts of sanity in a rolling sea of hysterical accusations about American security. Was the Soviet Union really planning a sneak attack on the United States with nuclear weapons as the right wing claimed? Was SALT II really just a public relations scheme by Moscow to put the U.S. off its guard?

In hindsight we know that these claims were absurd. The Soviet Union was dying, driven to SALT by its weakness, not its strength. But when the Soviets crossed their southern border into Afghanistan that December of 1979 it played out on America’s TV screens like a World War II Hollywood B movie. Afghanistan was a far off South Asian country of no particular interest to the United States. A half dozen administrations had refused Afghan requests for military assistance. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s callous and careless diplomacy drove Afghanistan towards Moscow in the mid 1950s and its politics followed close behind. A low priority remnant from Britain’s colonial empire, President Carter labeled the invasion, “the greatest threat to peace since the second World War.” But the script had already been written long before the Soviet’s crossed their southern border on December 27, 1979.

A trap had been set to give the Soviets their own Vietnam and the Soviets had taken the bait. But no one outside a handful of policy experts and Wall Street wizards were supposed to know that. Instead, a crop of neoconservative experts appeared on the scene claiming the Soviets were running out of oil and using Afghanistan as a staging ground for Middle East conquest.

By the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The U.S. had stepped into the mirror with the media echoing a return to 1947 style Cold War rhetoric, and the debate refocused not on whether, but on how much was to be spent to counter Soviet aggression.

In the planning stages for most of the decade, the new right’s military stimulus program regained for them a strategic hold over the economy, raising American investment in new weapons systems to a new high, while setting in motion a series of changes to the fundamental economic order endemic to the previous iteration of the Cold War.

As it had in the 1950s and 1960s, military spending once again drove the American economy, accounting for up to 6.2 percent of GDP by 1984. But where previous defense spending had been carefully balanced against America’s industrial output as a percentage of GNP, the so-called Reagan agenda or Reaganomics required massive borrowing to finance the military budget while reducing regulation and oversight of where it was spent. This change would transform American thinking about the economy, sending it into a star wars unreality and more importantly from a creditor to a debtor economy.

Always detached from the real economy, the Reagan budgets lifted the arms race and its Wall Street backers into the stratosphere, focusing the nation’s attention away from the depression era roads, bridges, dams, schools and industry that were in desperate need of attention. Instead, America became transfixed by the phantom of an ever present danger of Soviet troops in Afghanistan and a stock market driven by the military’s expansion.

Copyright © 2011 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here. .

e CIA and the ISI collaborated even before they were conjuncted in the killing field of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s evolutions as a jihad exporting country all over the world, especially to India have been chronicled by the contemporary historians. Fulcrum of Evil is a solid data based account of the jihad breeding intelligence agency of Pakistan. A state within the state the ISI continues to the nemesis of Pakistan which is lurching under military rule and jihadi violence.