Hamid Gul Former head of Pakistan's powerful spy agency dies

[88m3]

Former head of Pakistan's powerful spy agency dies
Hamid Gul, who was instrumental in the formation of the Taliban, died of brain haemorrhage at the age of 79.

16 Aug 2015 04:46 GMT | War & Conflict, Politics, Pakistan, Military, Asia

• Hamid Gul: Taliban is the future
  
  
  
  Gul recently attended funeral prayers for Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Omar [Getty Images]
  
  
  Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency who strongly backed the Taliban, has died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 79.
  
  Gul, who was a military commander in the Pakistani Army in the 1980s, died on Saturday night at a military hospital in Muree, 50km northeast of the capital Islamabad.He served as the head of the country's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency from 1987 to 1989.
  
  A controversial figure, he became a strong backer of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and often blamed the US and India for instability in Pakistan.
  
  Hamid Gul: Taliban is the future
  
  Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif extended his condolences over Gul's death.
  
  Professor Akbar Ahmed, the chair of Islamic Studies at the American University, and also a former Pakistani Ambassador to the UK, told Al Jazeera that it was Gul’s career in the army that gave him the credibility to become such a politically renowned figure.
  
  He was also renowned for his anti-US rhethoric
  
  "He still talked about the Taliban perpetrators of crimes and violence as saviours, but in reality we now know these people only produce violence and bloodshed," Ahmed said.
  
  "His career in the army gave him the credibility he needed to become such a huge player in radical Islamic movements."
  
  Ahmed said Washington and Delhi would be relieved over Gul's death, as they regarded him as a "hostile force".
  
  During the Bush administration, the US sought to put Gul on a UN list of international terrorists but their efforts were blocked by the Chinese delegation.
  
  Former head of Pakistan's powerful spy agency dies

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

A shame the US didn't take him out...

Backstabbing POS

 

[Solomon Caine]

^ This nikka posting again?

What I miss over the weekend?

 

[88m3]

News Desk
August 18, 2015
Postscript: Hamid Gul, 1936-2015
By Lawrence Wright

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Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY METIN AKTAS/ANADOLU/GETTY
Hamid Gul, the wily and mendacious former head of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, died on Saturday of a brain hemorrhage. Gul was the architect of so much that has gone wrong in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He fanned the Taliban into a roaring flame, and congratulated his countrymen for harboring Osama bin Laden. He hated the United States and fed the rabid anti-Americanism in his country many lurid conspiracy theories. Under his direction, Pakistan financed insurgencies, including the Taliban, to carry out attacks in India and Afghanistan; his irregulars would later turn their guns on Pakistan, which has lost an estimated sixty thousand people to terrorist violence since 2007, largely on the part of the Pakistani Taliban.

Gul served only two years as the head of the I.S.I., ending his career there in 1989, after igniting a catastrophic military campaign to drive Soviet-backed Afghan government troops out of the provincial capital of Jalalabad. But his meddling never ceased.

I visited General Gul once in his villa in Rawalpindi, the military city outside of Islamabad. He was a gracious host. He had an orange brought in from his grove for me to enjoy. He entertained me with fanciful tales, including an unlikely account of bumping into bin Laden at cocktail parties at the American Embassy during the jihad against the Soviets. I was interviewing him for my book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” I was particularly interested in his response to one question. During the jihad, Gul had been the conduit for U.S. and Saudi funding for the Afghan mujahideen. There were seven principal warlords, known to the C.I.A. as the Seven Dwarves. Gul favored the most radical Islamist of the seven, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

“Why did you favor Hekmatyar?” I asked Gul. He had claimed to be a moderate Islamist himself.

“Well, Mr. Wright, I’ll tell you,” the general said, as he expertly peeled his orange. “I went to each of the seven, and I said, ‘I know you are the strongest, but who is No. 2?’ They all said Hekmatyar.”

The journalist Peter Bergen estimates that as much as six hundred million dollars in American aid went to Hekmatyar, who waged most of his attacks on fellow Afghans. Islamic extremism in the region was financed by American taxpayers, largely thanks to Gul.

According to Milton Bearden, who was the C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan during the Afghan jihad, the “plucky little general” had been a valuable friend of the U.S., but he soured when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan because of its nuclear program without imposing the same penalty on India. Like much of the Pakistani military class, Gul embraced an unbounded, and sometimes unreasoning, suspicion of the country’s eastern neighbor. In 1988, Gul’s patron, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the sixth President of Pakistan, died in a mysterious plane crash. “Gul, deadly serious, told me the Indians were behind it,” Bearden recalled. “I said, ‘General, there’s absolutely no evidence of Indian involvement in the crash.’ Gul smiled, put his hand on my arm, and said, ‘That’s just the point, Mr. Bearden. The Indians would never leave any evidence! That’s proof enough that they were behind the crash!’ Later, he gave up on the Indian angle and settled on the belief that I was behind the crash. But I still got invitations to weddings in the family!”

Postscript: Hamid Gul, 1936-2015 - The New Yorker