President Donald Trump’s aggressive “new strategy” to convince Pakistan to stop harboring terrorists has not worked so far, CIA Director Mike Pompeo suggested over the weekend.
Pompeo was seated next to former CIA Director Leon Panetta at the Reagan National Defense Forum Saturday when Panetta went on a lengthy diatribe against the Southwest Asian nation’s purported duplicitious terrorism “policy” and its failure to listen to U.S. demands to shape up.
“Pakistan has always been a problem,” said Panetta, who was at the spy agency’s helm when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. “On the one hand, yes, they don’t like terrorism or the attacks from terrorists in their country. But at the same time, they don’t mind using terrorists as leverage to deal with Afghanistan and to deal with India. That’s the policy that they’ve been involved with.”
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Featured image courtesy of AP
We have been involved with the Pakistani ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) since 1979 if not earlier, and the CIA knew that Pakistan was using it's favorite warlords during the Russian invasion to further their political agendas in Afghanistan. Warlords that became part of the Taliban, and to some degree Al-Qaeda. We are just now getting around to worrying about it or trying to change it . . . or it is a thing again, with no real teeth. Either way, frustrating to read about.