The late head of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, was fond of boasting that when Afghanistan’s history came to be written, it would record that the ISI, with the help of America, defeated the Soviet Union.
And next, he would slyly add, historians would state that the ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.
Gul’s boast was not the sort of empty rodomontade that military men are notorious for once they hang up their uniforms and recall their past as being more glorious than the details might warrant. He was right to argue that it was the ISI’s tactic of sponsoring militants and terrorists — amply armed, supplied and financed by the United States — against the Red Army in Afghanistan that forced the Kremlin to withdraw ignominiously.
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