Telling Secrets

One can rest assured that if the US intelligence services do not want something to reach the media, it is more than likely that it won't. Therefore, it is not the news in today's 'New York Times', "Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say"1, per se that surprises me but it is the fact that the information and evidence reached the newspaper through American officials. How convenient it is today for these same officials to forget that the CIA collaborated with Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) to facilitate the Taliban's rise to power. However, the hypocrisy doesn't surprise me and I am more interested in the motives for and consequences of the conclusions that the Americans deemed necessary to make public.
54 people, including the Indian Defence Attache, died in the bombing on July the 7th; confronted with this new evidence from a third party it will be more worrying than interesting to see how the Indian government might react. At the very least this is hardly going help improve an already precarious relationship between the two countries. Of course, the Americans have much more immediate aims; with the ISI under control they will be able to operate on Pakisani soil and in Islamabad they will have a staunch ally that tows the line. Nevertheless, in pursuing this "vabanque" foreign policy they are provoking a confrontation between the civilian government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and the Pakistani military establishment and this in a country that might very well already be on the edge of civil war, a country that is a nuclear power. Moreover, there might also be a very angry India to contend with. However, there is another factor in the equation for the evidence would seem to suggest that in the ISI the CIA has more than met its match.2 That though, is another story and for the time being, "que serra, serra" and the future is not ours to see!
1 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/world/asia/01pstan.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
2 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/weekinreview/20mazzetti.html?pagewanted=2&ref=asia