Trusting Musharraf was a strategic failure: Bruce Riedel

Since the treacherous politicians, media and judiciary want the head of Musharraf to roll, we want to set some record straight.

Before you comment on this post, read once again, what we have written about Musharraf yesterday , his blunders and failures. He is guilty on some counts and NOT guilty on some. We are NOT Musharraf supporters. Only an idiot would say that. We speak on truth and facts to remove the fog created by media.

Things are NOT as simple as they appear under media deceptions. These are sensitive matters of state, never shared with public, not with teenagers and politicians at least :))

While Musharraf did support US on many critical issues, he did not support them on many counts and resisted. That is why US decided to replace him. That is why Zardari was brought in who wrote the Memo and wanted to do all what Musharraf could not do.

We are not giving any comments here. Just want you to read what the CIA has to say about their failures in Afghanistan. They are holding Pak army responsible for US defeat and helping Afghan Taliban :).

Trusting Musharraf was a strategic failure: Bruce Riedel

 The Nation

September 08, 2011, 3:14 pm

Our Staff Reporter

2

 

 

The

Trending Discussions

biggest US mistake in the war against terrorism was to ignore al Qaeda in Pakistan to invade Iraq after the September 2001 terror attacks and trusting then president Pervez Musharraf to "fight on our side", according to a former CIA analyst. "This was the war that should have ended years ago," Bruce Riedel, now a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, wrote in an article on how the US enabled al Qaeda, the terror group behind the attack. "The 9/11 attacks revealed a ruthless and agile enemy, one demanding unrelenting focus and smart. Instead, we made major errors," said the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, who helped formulate President Barack Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy. Among the strategic mistakes made by the US, "The biggest was to ignore al Qaeda in Pakistan to invade Iraq, which, at that point, posed no serious threat," Riedel said. "The Bush administration underestimated Osama bin Laden's resilience, trusted the generals of Pakistan, and focused on the wrong battlefield." Trusting then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf "to fight on our side against bin Laden and the Taliban was another strategic failure," Riedel wrote. "'Our man' in Islamabad turned out to be helping the Taliban regroup while bin Laden hid out in his front yard, living in plain sight of Pakistan's most elite military academy for years," he noted. Now the death of Bin Laden and the revolutions sweeping the Middle East provide the United States with an opportunity to right its wrongs, he said but warned "Pakistan remains the epicentre of the global jihad." "Our enemy is still formidable, and the task isn't easy. But this time we have to get it right to avoid spending yet another decade fighting," Riedel said.