CIA-ISI fail to split Taliban
PTI
(Washington, October 27)
hindustantimes.com
The strategy jointly formulated by the US Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence to lure defectors from the Taliban with a view to enable them take over Afghanistan has failed.
The CIA-ISI strategy "has failed to engineer any significant defections from Taliban military ranks, The Washington Post today reported.
The effort was "hobbled by weak contacts and deep distrust," the paper said quoting officials familiar with the task.
The failure to lure defectors, the Post said, is a major setback for the central aspect of the strategy to topple the Taliban.
Intelligence operatives trying to undermine the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern and eastern provinces have met "stiff resistance " from even the most ardently anti-Taliban tribal leaders, Pakistani intelligence officials told the paper.
Washington's expectations that some key tribal leaders and moderate Taliban military commanders would be willing to turn against the Taliban soon after the bombs began to fall on Afghanistan were "horrendously naive," the report quoted one western official monitoring the intelligence agencies' attempts, as saying.
Pak and western officials, the Post said, blame the failures also on powerful religious and cultural bonds between the most marginal commanders and the Taliban leadership.
The failure to persuade even the most vulnerable leaders to sever their ties with the Taliban, coupled with the militia's resilience and factional squabbles for the post-Taliban government point at "a long and messy" US intervention in Afghanistan, the daily said.
Part of the problem, said the paper, stems from the abrupt shift last month of ISI's agenda. It was the ISI which played a major role in creating the Taliban in 1994 and has sustained it since, the report said.
But under pressure from Washington to purge his government of Taliban sympathisers, General Pervez Musharraf revamped the ISI leadership and ordered the agency to switch almost overnight from overt operations supporting the Taliban to covert attempts to overthrow it, it added.
"As a result, the Taliban and its supporters developed an immediate distrust of their former patrons, said the paper.
ISI operatives who previously had worked openly in Afghanistan had to be pulled out of Taliban territory for their safety. |
