Praveen Swami: How the West was conned by its Pakistani 'allies'
Praveen Swami is the Telegraph's Diplomatic Editor.
In December 1979, at the end of a meeting in which Pakistan decided to embark on a United States-backed, Saudi Arabia-funded secret war that could well have ended in its annihilation by the Soviet Union, the military dictator who ruled Pakistan offered his spymaster a Zen-like maxim. "The water in Afghanistan," Gen Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq told Lt Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, the director general of the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), "must boil at the right temperature."
Ever since 9/11, the ISI has been seeking to keep the jihad inside Afghanistan and Pakistan warm, nurturing allies it gave birth to in the years after that meeting, while also joining the West's war against terror – the source of billions of dollars in aid and military patronage.
But Osama bin Laden's killing may mark the point where the water boiled over – destroying Pakistan's relationship with the West, and setting off a chain of events no one can predict...