Ahmed Rashid on the ISI’s failure to control the Taliban

I heard Ahmed Rashid speak a year or so ago at the wonderful venue Town Hall Seattle. Although I had previously met him several times and read his authoritative 2008 book Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia as well as many of his articles, I was mightily impressed anew by his command, in person in front of a live audience, of events past, present and future in the region he covers.

This is to say that, while he is fallible like any of us, I take – and we all should take – any assessment or prognostication by him quite seriously as part of the conversation on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Below is part of what he says now about the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and what its involvement in Afghanistan might portend for the region. Especially damning is his claim about the ISI and the Taliban – i.e. not the well-attested truth that it was involved in nurturing the Taliban in the first place, but his subtler but equally disturbing point that the ISI has never, at any crucial moment, been able to control the Taliban.

The quote below comes from Ahmed Rashid’s July 14 post “Petraeus’s Baby” on the New York Review of Books blog:

“The ISI knows it is holding more cards than any of the other regional powers—Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and there is little they can do about its interference in Afghanistan for the moment. Still, most of these countries would not tolerate an ISI-Taliban dominated government in Kabul, and eventually they will gang up against Pakistan, creating still more turmoil in the region.

“Moreover it is highly unlikely that the ISI will ever be able to control the Taliban. It failed to control the outcome of the fall of Kabul in 1992 or the rise of the Taliban in 1994, and it lost all control of the Taliban just before September 11. …”

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