The ISI began at the time of the birth of Pakistan . At that time, British officers were still advising the Pakistani and Indian armies, and the British officer advising the Pakistan military suggested an interservices intelligence organization that would serve all three services in the Pakistani military. So that was established.

Later on, . ISI began to blossom, assuming many responsibilities outside the military intelligence area. In fact, you could combine CIA, FBI and military intelligence under the umbrella of ISI....

In terms of ISI's power, it . was enormously expanded during the jihad, when you had [a] huge flow of resources via the CIA, which was ISI's counterpart into Pakistan .

There was a category in the CIA budget at that time which dealt with infrastructure of ISI, and ISI received hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars for its own infrastructure. That was in addition to weapons going to the mujahideen, transportation of the weapons from China or Egypt or elsewhere in the world. This was a separate budget category. It amounted to an awful lot of money, which poured into ISI coffers and . permitted ISI to expand its involvement not only inside Pakistan , but also outside of Pakistan .

Now, of course, [former Pakistani President Gen. Mohammad] Zia [ul-Haq] wanted to use the ISI as the point organization to handle Afghanistan . It was a time when Pakistan was a front-line state....

So he chose to use this very secretive organization to conduct the jihad against the Soviet Union inside Afghanistan . . He also insisted that all U.S. weaponry be handed over to the ISI at Karachi when these ships came in laden with weapons, and that ISI would then take control of the ordnance and move it to the frontier and then organize distribution.

That was very important to Zia to, of course, control what goes on in Pakistan and not let the, for instance, thousands of American logistic experts be running around the country. It helped the deniability side, because ISI was able to clandestinely move....

Everything was run by the ISI. And I would add another point: ISI knew everything that was going on, not only on the frontier on the Pakistani side, but over the frontier inside Afghanistan , certainly in the Pashtun areas, but also beyond. Inside of Pakistan , of course, in the tribal agencies they knew what was happening in every square meter of that area.

I would say that the ISI created the Taliban. Let's always remember that the ISI operates on the instructions of the army leadership.

The ISI was trying to create a puppet state in Afghanistan ?

Yes.

And they created the Taliban in order to facilitate that?

That's right. In fact, it's a tragedy for Afghanistan -- indeed for the world -- that for all of these years, for three decades now, you've had first the Soviets attempting to set up a puppet government in Kabul , and then, when the Soviets left, the Pakistanis attempted to establish a puppet government in Kabul . First Hekmatyar -- that failed. When that didn't work, the Taliban were created with Pakistani and ISI help. .

We should remember that the Taliban leaders grew up in Pakistan , and they went to Pakistani schools. They of course spoke Pashto, but their second language was Urdu, and it was not Farsi, which Afghans learn as they grow up in Afghanistan .

They had ration cards distributed by the Pakistani government. They went to madrassas, and their teachers were clerics from radical Muslim parties in Pakistan . So when they went into Afghanistan , they had spent most of their life in Pakistan . The Taliban movement more or less moved across the border from Pakistan to Kandahar first and then up to Kabul .

Throughout this whole period, the ISI played the major role in military matters, from organizing offenses to equipping the forces that were fighting, and even putting out public statements. . There was a colonel in Herat and there was a major in Kandahar -- they were coaching Mullah Omar and other Taliban, who were for the most part semiliterate, on how to administer their areas and how to proceed militarily. .

We should add here, of course, Osama bin Laden. When he arrived from Sudan , you then had a ménage à trois. You had an unholy alliance combining ISI, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But then [and] right up until 9/11, this unholy alliance was dominated, directed, guided mostly by ISI in Pakistan .

The relationship then between the ISI and Al Qaeda was as tight as the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

Yes. It was more or less Al Qaeda plugging into the Taliban and the ISI-run Taliban. The Taliban were the front; the ISI was managing things from the background....

Why did they bet on extremists to take over Afghanistan ? Why the bet on the Taliban rather than a bet, say, on some other warlord -- a Pashtun, like an [Afghan resistance commander] Abdul Haq, for instance?

There were two reasons. One was . the ISI and the Pakistanis wanted to emphasize the Islamist Afghan side over the nationalist Afghan side, secular tribal leaders in Afghanistan that had come out of the ruling establishment that was running the country for the previous 300 years, . because the nationalist side, the secular side, had always stressed the need to recapture Afghanistan as it existed in the last part of the 18th century and part of the 19th century, which included the Pashtun areas of Pakistan.

The tribal areas?

And Pakistan had lost Bangladesh -- one wing of the country -- in 1971. They were very worried that if this impulse returned in Kabul, and especially if it linked up with the Indian government, they would be caught in a squeeze by which the Afghans would be pushing to pursue a reclamation or --

Yeah. So they were afraid of Pashtun nationalism?

Yeah.

And they [thought] instead they could make a deal with the Taliban: Respect the Durand Line and the borders that the British had put down and cause less trouble?

Well, it's probably more religious here. The umma is the Muslim faithful, and they don't recognize political boundaries. If you're an extremist especially, that Durand Line means nothing. What matters is the unity of Muslims.

That fit into the second main reason why the Pakistani general staff supported the Islamists: to create . strategic depth to face India .

So that all of Afghanistan would be a client state of Pakistan , a large Muslim resistance to Indian encroachment.

Hindu Indians, that's right. And that has been, of course, the major geopolitical goal of Pakistan since partition is to confront India .

Because they're worried India 's going to come back and retake them?

Exactly. And Afghanistan has another 20 million Muslims. If Afghanistan were in the sphere of influence of Pakistan , or a puppet state of Pakistan , Pakistan would be in a better position to confront India .

Let's talk about Haqqani a little bit. Haqqani is a guy we're fighting now?

Yes.

But yet he was our client.

Right. He was also the ISI client.

So the ISI knows these guys -- knows Haqqani, knows Hekmatyar?

Yeah.

And these relationships, what are they today?

Today ISI knows exactly where Hekmatyar is, and Hekmatyar, as you know, is like the Taliban, and Haqqani, leading anti-American and anti-Afghan operations inside Afghanistan , killing Americans, killing Afghans. Hekmatyar is operating from that . area just below Chitral, [ Pakistan ], and he has influence in Nuristan and in Kunduz, [ Afghanistan ], where he's from. .

So they know where he is?

They know exactly where he is. . A Pakistani ambassador, bitter about the military policy on Afghanistan, told me in 1990 that Hekmatyar, when he was a student in Kabul during the 1960s, he was an ISI agent who had come around to the Pakistani Embassy, where this ambassador used to work as a young diplomat, and collect his monthly paycheck.

Once the ISI officer was gone, and he asked this particular diplomat -- the ambassador who I met in Islamabad -- to pay off Hekmatyar for that particular month. So from that period, Hekmatyar was working for ISI, which explains volumes as to why ISI and the Pakistani military in subsequent decades tried so hard to put him in power. It also explains why they don't go out and pick him up today and hand him over to the coalition or hand him over to the [Hamid] Karzai government.

Why not?

. Probably the first reason is that they still see Hekmatyar as an asset. Many, I think, in the Pakistani military and in the ISI think that America does not have much staying power, and eventually it's going to leave the region once more, which will open the way for Pakistan to reassert this Islamist dynamic inside Afghanistan, and to re-establish a sphere of influence much like it had in most of Afghanistan during the Taliban period. .

Musharraf claims that he is firmly on the side of the Americans, that he is battling hard. He talks all the time about the great sacrifices that the army has taken, the hits they've taken. They've lost hundreds of men in western Pakistan fighting the Taliban. What are we to believe?

Well, they haven't been fighting the Taliban, because the Taliban have an open Web site in Pakistan . It's in Pashtu, and it doesn't include Dari, which is the main language spoken by most Afghans. The Taliban leaders wander around in Pakistan clearly organizing offensives into Afghanistan .

They wander around freely? Where?

You can find them in tea shops in Quetta .

Can you find them in Peshawar ?

Yes, you can find them in Peshawar , but the former ministries and major commanders in the Taliban are mostly from the south, from the Durrani tribes. .

Musharraf says he's out to get him.

Yes, but they don't get him, and the reason is that they don't want to get him. The reason is that Musharraf is following still a two-track policy. There's no doubt that he's done a great deal, especially in cooperation with us, against Al Qaeda.

But he doesn't pick up -- I mean, assuming Haqqani is close to bin Laden. There's no question, is there, that Haqqani has some knowledge about where bin Laden might be?

Yes, but most knowledge is in the hands of ISI, not only about where Osama bin Laden is, but where [Ayman] al-Zawahiri is and where other Al Qaeda elements are along the frontier. Now granted, it's more difficult to get at them because of the unrest in the tribal agencies today. However, they know exactly where they are.

The ISI knows --

The ISI knows exactly where Osama bin Laden is, al-Zawahiri is. They know exactly where Hekmatyar is, and they know where Haqqani is.

Wait a minute. How can you say that the ISI knows exactly where bin Laden is?

Because it's ISI's job to know where bin Laden is. It's also because of the history of ISI's relationship with bin Laden, which is 30 years old.

Let me give you an example: Gen. Mahmood [Ahmed], a lieutenant general in the Pakistani army, he's from a very distinguished Pakistani military family. He's very well known and respected in Pakistan . He was in charge of ISI at the time of 9/11. Musharraf made the commitment to President Bush to cooperate against terrorism and to cooperate with us in Afghanistan , to go after the Taliban. However, there are numerous media reports that he was dismissed during the offensive against Taliban by the United States because he was still allowing weapons and materiel to go to the Taliban from the Quetta area up into Kandahar...

You believe that he was continuing to support the Taliban?

I think so.

And Musharraf would have known that?

Yes, he would have known that. He had to fire him when everybody else knew it, that ISI was still under his leadership providing weapons to the mujahideen secretly or that ISI was still providing ordnance to the Taliban even after 9/11 and even after the so-called change in Pakistani policy. But today I understand that Mahmood has returned to the Afghan section of ISI and is working there.

Hamid Gul is also somebody who's out there. He was formerly head of the ISI, and he's outspoken in his support for the Taliban and his anti-Americanism. I don't think that he's sitting at home in retirement. He's very active.

A double game is what the Afghans and the Americans might say?

I think that's absolutely correct, that he's attempting to keep in place ...

He keeps that together, on the one hand --

Yes.

And on the other hand he's receiving --

And on the other hand he's receiving $3 billion worth of American assistance.

Well, what sense does that make for the United States ?

It's not in our interest to permit this situation to continue, because American young men are dying in Afghanistan . Our policy in Afghanistan is more and more strained because of the hemorrhaging of violence that's coming out of northern Pakistan into Afghanistan . .

We seem to fall over ourselves, though. [Coordinator for Counterterrorism] Henry Crumpton from the State Department goes over to Afghanistan and he says that Pakistanis are not doing enough, and immediately he sort of tries to back off from that statement when he's criticized by the Pakistanis. Why are we so afraid of the Pakistanis?

I think there's a number of reasons. One is Musharraf personally, that he's very much respected in this country, in this administration, as a leader who's in a very difficult situation. We also have to take into account that Pakistan is strategically located in an important part of the world and that Pakistan is a nuclear power.

On the other hand, we have to realize that we can do a lot more to convince President Musharraf that his policy, this two-track policy, is unacceptable; that we've reached the end of the line, and he has to move against the extremist elements that are generating this violence inside Afghanistan. He will never be able to eliminate it altogether given the nature of the tribal agencies, but I think that he could remove the greater part of the violence that's emanating from Pakistan and upsetting the reconstruction and security and stabilization process.

Well, let me play his side of the argument a little bit. He's got 80,000 troops somewhere between Quetta and Peshawar . . How can he get it under control if 80,000 can't do the job? He's got far more people in there and is losing more men than the Americans are losing on the other side of the border.

I don't personally buy his statements that he's mobilizing 80,000 troops against the extremist elements that are operating from northern Pakistan into Afghanistan .

You don't buy it?

I don't buy it. In the offensive into South Waziristan , there were about 7,000 troops, and then they were withdrawn after a couple months...

. You're saying that the Americans, with all the aid -- the F-16 deal, for all of that -- they can't get Musharraf to go take out a Taliban training center?

That's correct. They could close it down overnight.

All we do is pick up number three. We pick up number three, and then we pick up number three again and then again. What about number one and number two?

Yeah, I think that would be a major boon, and I think we could do it fairly quickly --

If we had Pakistan 's help.

-- if Pakistan decided to help. My opinion is that so far, if they have not crossed that line, they'd rather not. As I mentioned, they want to keep this asset in place for a future time when the United States might leave the region, and then they can exploit the asset again to aggrandize the position in Afghanistan and Kashmir as well. It's a two-track policy.

Bush was just there. It's a remarkable kind of relationship.

Have you ever noticed that before every major visit, like President Bush or the secretary of state, there's a move against an Al Qaeda type, or there's a little offensive that's launched somewhere in the tribal agencies? This is episodic. It precedes visits from the West, especially from the United States , in advance. They could disarm the protests that are coming through that are going to be coming from foreign leaders coming to meet Musharraf about the continuing violence that's coming from Pakistan into Afghanistan ....
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