Pakistan said on Tuesday it would retain diplomatic ties with Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, the only country in the world still to do so, in order to give them a window to the outside world. "We should maintain contact, at least there should be one country who ought to be able to have an access to them, to be able to engage them," President Pervez Musharraf told reporters.
A campaign to smash the global terror network has already clashed head-on with Pakistan's two states within a state — the Islamist clergy and the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). By any measure, Pakistan has long been a state sponsor of terrorism ... Successive Pakistani governments turned a blind eye to militant groups and shrunk from confronting them. When Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized power in October 1999, he decided to take on Islamist extremists, but ISI was against such a crackdown and the army was divided ... In fact, there are substantial army elements — especially among junior officers, noncoms and the rank and file — that favor the militant goals of the religious extremists. The two fathers of Pakistan's nuclear bomb are also anti-American fundamentalists ... Former high-ranking officers — such as Gen. Hameed Gul, a retired ISI chief — are also sympathetic to the mujahideen groups that were trained by Pakistan in the 1980s to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Taliban — plural for talib, or student of the Koran — was originally Pakistan's creation under the tutelage of Gen. Gul ... A steady stream of other visitors from Sudan, North Africa and the Middle East goes through his house ... The madrassas — or Koranic schools — were created in the early 1980s, mostly in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan, the two provinces bordering Afghanistan along the 1,300-mile Durand Line ... The madrassas eventually spread to the entire country. One million children now study at these schools. Arguably the most important Koranic institution is the University for the "Education of Truth" in the town of Khattak. Taliban's nine top leaders, with the exception of "Supreme Leader" Mullah Mohammad Omar, graduated from Khattak. ISI and wealthy Saudis have been funding the university for the past two decades. Every Muslim country is represented in its 2,500 student body. Two retired generals told UPI that each graduating class provides recruits for ISI ... A former army corps commander said, not for attribution, that ISI continues to help Taliban with communications and safe houses in Quetta and Peshawar to this day ... Gen. Gul now heads a NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) called Service for All (SFA). A former military intelligence officer, now in the private security field, told UPI it should be called CFA, or Cover for All. The officer said SFA organizes Afghan refugee volunteers for "a wide variety of conflicts in which guerrillas fight for Muslim causes." Gen. Gul wants for Pakistan what Bin Laden wants for his native Saudi Arabia: Destruction of established governments and their replacement by an Islamic state. His friends say he has political ambitions.