Question about America's enemies

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

The Featured American Enemy of the Week is the Haqqani network in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border region. The New York Times warns in a headline today: "Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan," and reports that military officials want "the group [put] on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations." Adm. Michael Mullen this week accused Pakistan's intelligence service (ISI) of aiding the Haqqani clan in carrying out Terrorist attacks on U.S. troops and a U.S. embassy in Afghanistan. Earlier this morning, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested that a U.S. military attack on Pakistan might be needed in response, predicting that such an attack "will have a lot of bipartisan support on Capitol Hill" (does anyone doubt that?).

Needless to say, the villain mastermind who heads this network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, has, as the NYT put it, "allied himself over the years with the C.I.A." It quoted "one former American intelligence official" who "worked with the Haqqani family in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s"; that official "said he would not be surprised if the United States again found itself relying on the clan: 'You always said about them, ‘best friend, worst enemy'." Earlier this year, Reuters described:

Former U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson, whose relentless fund-raising for the Afghan resistance was depicted by Tom Hanks in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War," once called Jalaluddin "goodness personified." [Jalaluddin] even visited the White House when Ronald Reagan was president.

(More here.)