http://www.newyorker.

com/magazine/2011/05/16/the-double-game
The very next month, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. President
Jimmy Carter, in a panic, offered Zia four hundred million dollars in
economic and military aid. Zia rejected the offer, calling it peanutsthe
term often arises in Pakistani critiques of American aid, but it must have
rankled the peanut farmer in the White House. Zia was smart to hold out.
Under Carters successor, Ronald Reagan, U.S. aid nearly quintupled: about
three billion dollars in economic assistance and two billion in military aid.
The Reagan Administration also provided three billion dollars to Afghan
jihadis. These funds went through the sticky hands of the Inter-Services
Intelligence directorate, the spy branch of the Pakistani Army. Starting in
1987, the I.S.I. was headed by General Hamid Gul, a cunning and bitterly
anti-American figure. The I.S.I. became so glutted with power and money
that it formed a state within a state, in the words of Benazir Bhutto, who
became Pakistans Prime Minister in 1988. She eventually fired Gul, fearing
that he was engineering a coup.
Milton Bearden, a former C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan, once described Gul to me
as having a rococo personality. In 2004, I visited Gula short man with a rigid,
military posture and raptor-like featuresat his villa in Rawalpindi. He proudly
asked his servant to bring me an orange from his private grove. I asked Gul why,
during the Afghan jihad, he had favored Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven
warlords who had been designated to receive American assistance in the fight against
the Soviets. Hekmatyar was the most brutal member of the group, but, crucially, he
was a Pashtun, like Gul. As I ate the orange, Gul offered a more principled rationale
for his choice: I went to each of the seven, you see, and I asked them, I know you
are the strongest, but who is No. 2? He formed a tight, smug smile. They all said
Hekmatyar.
Later, Gul helped oversee the creation of the Taliban, reportedly using mainly Saudi
money. The I.S.I. openly supported the Taliban until September 11, 2001. Since then,
the Pakistani government has disavowed the group, but it is widely believed that it
still provides Taliban leaders with safe harbor in Quetta, where they stage jihad
against Western forces in Afghanistan.
After the September 11th attacks, Pakistan abruptly became Americas key ally in the
war on terror. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. gave billions of dollars to
Pakistan, most of it in unrestricted funds, to combat terrorism. Pervez Musharraf,
who served as President between 1999 and 2008, now admits that during his tenure
he diverted many of those billions to arm Pakistan against its hobgoblin enemy,
India. Whoever wishes to be angry, let them be angrywhy should we bother?
Musharraf said in an interview on the Pakistani television channel Express News.

We have to maintain our security. Since Musharraf left office, there has been little
indication that U.S. aid$4.5 billion in 2010, one of the largest amounts ever given
to a foreign countryis being more properly spent.
The main beneficiary of U.S. money, the Pakistani military, has never won a war, but,
according to Military Inc., by Ayesha Siddiqa, it has done very well in its
investments: hotels, real estate, shopping malls. Such entrepreneurship, however
corrupt, fills a gap, as Pakistans economy is now almost entirely dependent on
American taxpayers. In a country of a hundred and eighty million people, fewer than
two million citizens pay taxes, and Pakistans leaders are doing little to change the
situation. In Karachi, the financial capital, the government recently inaugurated a
program to appoint eunuchs as tax collectors. Eunuchs are considered relentless
scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to
take the place of audits.

Pakistan has indeed suffered for its official alliance with the U.S. In 2006,
there were six suicide bombings in the country; the next year there were
fifty-six, with six hundred and forty people killed. Last year, twelve hundred
people were murdered by suicide bombers. More than three thousand
Pakistani soldiers and officers have been killed in the war, including eightyfive members of the I.S.I. Yet many of these wounds have been selfinflicted, for the military and the I.S.I. created and nurtured the very
groupssuch as the Talibanthat have turned against the Pakistani state.
And the money used to fund these radical organizations came largely from
American taxpayers.