DIA Says Pakistan Backed Al Qaeda
DIA says Pakistan backed al Qaeda
http://washingtontimes.com/world/200...3843-8110r.htm
(Gold9472: Reminds me of that scene from the Godfather, when they "Clean House"... Killing off anyone who would oppose them.)
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Pakistan helped al Qaeda launch its operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s and secretly ran a major training camp used by Osama bin Laden's terror network, according to U.S. intelligence documents.
The documents, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 and declassified in a censored version this week, also indicate that legendary Afghan guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Masood may have been killed two days before the September 11 attacks because he had learned something about bin Laden's plan and "began to warn the West."
The secret dispatches were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research organization in Washington. The DIA warned that the documents are only raw intelligence.
They nonetheless paint a complex picture of factional rivalry in which Pakistan had tried to use the Taliban and al Qaeda to promote its influence in war-torn Afghanistan — only to eventually lose control over both of them.
"Taliban acceptance and approval of fundamentalist non-Afghans as part of their fighting force were merely an extension of Pakistani policy during the Soviet-Afghan war," said one of the DIA dispatches among U.S. government agencies after the September 11 attacks but before U.S. troops began their operation to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It said Pakistani agents "encouraged, facilitated and often escorted Arabs from the Middle East into Afghanistan."
To make them a more viable fighting force, Pakistan even built a training camp outside the Afghan village of Zahawa, near the border between the two countries.
According to the DIA, the camp, target of a U.S. missile strike, was built by Pakistani contractors funded by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), and protected by a local and influential Jadran tribal leader called Jalalludin.
"However, the real host of the facility was the Pakistani ISI," said one of the documents, which added that this arrangement raised "serious questions" about early ties between bin Laden and Pakistani intelligence.
The U.S. military fired a volley of cruise missiles into the camp in August 1998 in retaliation for the terrorist bombings earlier that year of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 257 persons dead.
