NYT: Pakistan Allows Taliban to Train, a Detained Fighter Says

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/international/asia/04afgh.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

For months Afghan and American officials have complained that even while Pakistan cooperates in the fight against Al Qaeda, militant Islamic groups there are training fighters and sending them into Afghanistan to attack American and Afghan forces.

Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations, saying they are unaware of any such training camps. Now the Afghan government has produced a young Pakistani, captured fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan three months ago, whose story would seem to back its complaints about Pakistan.

The prisoner, who gave his name as Muhammad Sohail, is a 17-year-old from the Pakistani port city of Karachi, held by the Afghan authorities in Kabul. In an interview in late July, in front of several prison guards, he said Pakistan was allowing militant groups to train and organize insurgents to fight in Afghanistan. Mr. Sohail said he hoped that granting the interview would increase his chances of being freed. Mr. Sohail described his recruitment through his local mosque by a group listed by the United States as having terrorist links, his military training in a camp not far from the capital, Islamabad, and his dispatch with several other Pakistanis to Afghanistan.

He did not give all the details that intelligence officials said they gleaned from him in interrogations, but he talked easily about his party and its leaders, and said they had high-level support from within the establishment. He said he was recruited and trained within the past eight months by Jamiat-ul-Ansar, the new name for the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen party, which was designated a terrorist group by the State Department and banned by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in January 2002. Under its new name it is functioning, if more discreetly, and its leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, moves around freely.

[Old and In the Way]

1. It's so damn obvious that Pakistan plays both sides.........

we just forgave them $500MM in loans.....even though we know the ISI is deep into Al Qaeda and sending nuclear missle technology to North Korean. We know a Pakistani ISI general was a conduit for money to Atta....yet we keep acting like they are some kind of friend in the fight against terror.

I'm beginning to think that Musharref also has the goods on the Bush family.

[starroute]

3. It all goes back to the 1980's

It was 1979 when the CIA started pouring into Pakistan to arm the Afghan mujeheddin against the Soviets. The CIA paid for this by building up the heroin trade in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and money-laundering the profits through BCCI (which had been founded in Pakistan.) BCCI in turn used its own share of the drug profits to help fund the development of Pakistan's nuclear program in the 1980's.

The Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is still all tangled up with the CIA, and CIA figures like Richard Armitage are intimately connected with ISI. Not only that, but General Mahmood -- the one who was directing the tranferral of money to Atta -- was meeting on the morning of September 11 with Bob Graham and Porter Goss, chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

I don't know what's at the center of it all, but it seems to go far deeper than anything as simple as blackmail. I've been trying to get a line on it for the last month, and it's driving me crazy that I can't. It seems as though whoever is responsible for letting Pakistan get away with these things (supporting the Taliban, supporting al-Qaeda, supporting anti-Indian terrorists, nuclear proliferation) must have something so enormous in mind that all this other stuff looks petty by comparison. But I can't even imagine what that might be.

[goforit]

2. Why not!!!.....Bush trains all of Saddam's soldiers. No difference.

[struggle4progress]

4. kick

:kick: