Quotes About I.S.I.

Zardari mentioned that once, his presidential plane wasn't airworthy and he had an urgent trip to make. "The only person I could call was I.S.I. And I said, 'Ahmed, I'm going to ask for your airplane, but only on one condition, which is that you have to fly with me.

Yet the failure to solve the riddle of I.S.I. and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war. —

Either I.S.I. was complicit in sheltering a mass murderer, or it was incompetent. Yet it seemed clear that much or most of the Pakistani public was more offended by the fact that the SEALs had been able to penetrate the country's borders undetected than by the possibility that I.S.I. had sheltered Bin Laden.

The C.I.A. subcontracted its aid to the Afghan rebels through Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I. By 1989, the service had grown into a powerful, corrosive force within Pakistan, a shadowy deep state that manipulated politics on behalf of the army and increasingly promoted armed groups of Islamists, including the Arab volunteers we had learned to approach cautiously. I.S.I. officers were not easy to meet, but not impossible to track down, either.

Pervez Musharraf forced I.S.I. director-general Mahmud Ahmed to retire about two hours before the American war began. He did not explain his decision. As to the way ahead, Musharraf told the Americans what they wanted to hear: He was going to "clean up" I.S.I. He appointed Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq as his new spy chief.

The Afghans primarily blamed Pakistan. The sanctuary the Taliban enjoyed in Pakistan as they regrouped empowered them. Afghans wondered, reasonably: How could the United States fail to see that I.S.I. was up to its old tricks?

Panetta dined with Pasha and Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widow, who shared authority uneasily with the army. Zardari made jokes about I.S.I.'s pervasive surveillance of him—jokes that sounded paranoid but were grounded in fact. "Ahmed knows everything I think and everything I say," Zardari remarked of the I.S.I. chief sitting near him. "I walk into my office every morning and say, 'Hello, Ahmed!

This was I.S.I. in microcosm: an institution well practiced at manipulating the C.I.A. and the Taliban simultaneously.