Everything about this Lawrence Wright piece is baller, but this demonstrates how intelligence professionals who mean business go about searching for proxies:
In 2004, I visited Gul—a short man with a rigid, military posture and raptor-like features—at his villa in Rawalpindi. He proudly asked his servant to bring me an orange from his private grove. I asked Gul why, during the Afghan jihad, he had favored Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven warlords who had been designated to receive American assistance in the fight against the Soviets. Hekmatyar was the most brutal member of the group, but, crucially, he was a Pashtun, like Gul. As I ate the orange, Gul offered a more principled rationale for his choice: “I went to each of the seven, you see, and I asked them, ‘I know you are the strongest, but who is No. 2?’ ” He formed a tight, smug smile. “They all said Hekmatyar.”
The only thing that could make that quote better is if DJ Drama put a gangsta grillz drop right after it.
Beyond that, the point Wright makes about the path dependency and security dysfunction forged by U.S. aid illustrates the wicked problem Pakistan represents. You give them all this cash to help hunt bin Laden while you're in Afghanistan? Then they're never going to find him and never going to forge a path to extrication from the war. You pull the money out and the intransigence escalates. This is a stick-up. The answer might be more unilateralism in counterterrorism, papered over with a lot of diplomatic bullshit. At least until the U.S. decides that al-Qaida is degraded to the point that we no longer have to fear them and underwrite Pakistan's security state.
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