A former Pakistani intelligence officer says he has a message for Canadian and NATO forces in Afghanistan: “Ultimately you will lose,” he told me a phone interview. “You are not bringing any peace here."
Khalid Khawaja, an English-speaking ex-spy, spoke from Lahore after I called him from Kanadhar, where I am an embedded journalist with the Canadian Forces. The idea was to try to suss out the views of a known extremist, one who might put regional events in a different kind of perspective.
“In [1980s] Afghanistan, when the Russians attacked, the Canadians and Americans and Europeans supported the jihad against the Russians,” Mr. Khawaja said. Foreign policies and foreign armies may shift over time, he said, but real Muslims stand firm.
" Our religion has not changed," he said. “If it was jihad then, it is jihad now.”
Mr. Khawja is the most accessible of Pakistan's rogue elements. The agency he once worked for, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), has been getting lot of press this week, amid allegations of complicity in the last week’s mysterious assasination of Benazir Bhutto and of continued ISI meddling in Afghanistan.
These events occurred after Mr. Khawaja's time. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was something of a regional power broker. Firmly ensconced within Pakistan's military-intelligence apparatus, he first served as an Air Force squadron leader, then as an ISI operative, while forging personal relationships with Afghanistan-based jihadists. He says he has met Osama bin Laden, Taliban Leader Mullah Omar, and just about every Afghan warlord of note.
He also is close to Canada's Khadr family, which is how I know of him. In his latest incarnation, he has been acting as a self-styled civil-liberties advocate, publicly criticizing the Musharraf dictatorship for arresting, disappearing, and killing allegedly dangerous fundamentalists -- people who include the Khadrs and himself.
NATO maintains it is in a war against the Afghan Taliban, but the conflict could be morphing into a broader struggle. Networks of religious extremists on both sides of the border have found a haven in Pakistan-Afghanistan border regions, with some seemingly powerful, if generally unseen, patrons.
Few in the West would have any sympathy for the views of Mr. Khawaja, which might not be all that widely held inside the agencies he used to work for. Even so, if the rogue elements of the ISI are a fraction as radical and as powerful as critics maintain they are, then his point of view may give an insight into a mindset that's crucial for the West to understand.
In other words, how does an extremist ex-spy in Pakistan see Afghanistan and the wider world?
Mr. Khawaja upholds that the world is divided into two: Pakistan’s friends and Pakistan’s foes.
Who are the foes? The "Americans are enemies of Afghanistan and they are enemies of Pakistan,” he said. “They are using even the Canadians now. And for what?”
Who are Pakistan's defenders?
"Topmost," he says, is Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. And the nukes, he said, are closely followed by:
2. The Army.
3. The ISI / intelligence
4. The "mujahedeen"
5. The Taliban
6. Insurgents in the tribal areas.
Mr. Khawaja doesn't appear to be saying that all these entities and the people that control them are necessarily in cahoots and conspiring together. Rather, they amount to powerful forces with common interests that Pakistan can steer and benefit from.
He makes no mention of al-Qaeda, per se. For him, there is no such entity. “Where is al Qaeda?” he asked rhetorically. “I have not met somebody who says ‘I am al Qaeda.’ They never used this word.” He describes the Arab fundamentalist fighters he knows, as “mujahedeen,” or literally Islamic holy warriors.
I had last spoke to Mr. Khawaja a year ago. (At the time, I was working on a strange story about how 1995-era exports of two-way radios from North America to the Pakistani Army seem to have figured into post-9/11 arrests of several Canadian and U.S. Arabs. First fingered by Western intelligence, most were accused of having links to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, but were ultimately let go, uncharged, after horrible ordeals in foreign prisons. )
