THE BOURNE ABSURDITY

I took my sons, Brandon and Jackson, to see the latest episode of Matt Damon's film franchise, The Bourne Ultimatum.  Like its predecessors, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, it's great edge-of-the-seat entertainment and extremely well-directed, a first-rate example of action-genre film-making craft.

For anyone who knows anything about the CIA, it is also totally absurd.

You probably know the films' premise.  Damon plays Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin who has suffered amnesia due to a botched hit attempt.  His efforts to recover his identity and memories arouse the suspicion of CIA officials running illegal secret programs, who then send out a succession of assassins to eliminate him.

The term "CIA assassin," of course, will bring an instant guffaw of cynical laughter to those familiar with Langley.  Proof that such folks do not exist is that Hugo Chavez is not dead.

Movies love to portray CIA "assets" (as the Bourne films call them) as incredibly skilled and deadly, ruthless professional Terminators – whose mission is to hunt down either each other or innocent civilians, never actual bad guys and real enemies of the US.

Why can't Hollywood make a spy-action flick with at least a semblance of reality to it – say about a super-agent faced with world-class incompetence and collusion of CIA operatives in Pakistan, who end-runs them and goes for the villains within the Pakistani government who run both the Taliban terrorists and the heroin smuggling in Afghanistan?

That's what's really going on – the CIA led around with a Pak ring through its nose, rather than the movie image of hyper-efficiency and competence – and Hollywood is as clueless about it as Barack Hussein Obama Junior.

Mitt Romney's spot-on witticism about The Obamarama's saying he'd have tea with the world's most evil leaders (Castro, Kim, Chavez, Ahmadinutjob et al) as president, then militarily attack Pakistan – "he's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week" – highlights his cluelessness.

But this is to be expected from some naïve amateurish freshman senator who nobody would pay any attention to if he weren't half-black. 

What is weird is the focused effort by the media to pretend to be clueless about the Pakistan-Taliban-heroin connection that is at the source of our difficulties in Afghanistan.

The connection has a name:  Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, the Pak intel agency.

For a background intro on the ISI and its involvement with the CIA in Afghanistan, see Gulbuddin and the CIA, which I wrote less than one month after The Atrocity of 9/11 (October 8, 2001) and posted in To The Point with an update in October 2005.

Now let's go deeper than that background.

The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) has been cultivated since the earliest civilization, Sumeria in lower Mesopotamia (southern Iraq) over six thousand years ago, where it was called hul gil, the plant of joy. 

It has been grown by tribal peoples in Afghanistan from time immemorial, but on a local use basis.  It was the brainstorm of Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, Director General of the ISI in the late 1980s, to sponsor the widespread cultivation of poppies and their processing into heroin which was to be smuggled into Soviet-controlled areas to make Soviet troops heroin addicts.

The CIA loved the idea and offered Gul its support.  He tasked Brig. Imtiaz Billa, head of ISI's Internal Political Division, with setting up the project.  Not only did it result in the addiction of thousands of Soviet soldiers, it also made the ISI a lot of money – so much money that the ISI generals had no intention of shutting it down when the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan in February 1989.

They were just getting started.  When their protégé Gulbuddin failed to seize power and turned Afghanistan into an anarchic mess instead, they switched their sponsorship to a group of crazed fundamentalists based in Kandahar calling themselves Taliban (students of Islam).

The arrangement became fantastically profitable, and not just for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to whom they had given sanctuary, not just for the ISI and the trucking/shipping companies it set up like "Afghanistan Transit Trade" – but for Moslem radicals in Pakistan.  They received a good share of the drug loot to set up fanatical religious schools (medressahs) and private armies to enforce strict Sharia Islam.

Being in business with the people who attacked America on September 11 was only a minor setback for the ISI generals.  All they had to do was convince their CIA stooges they were as shocked as Claude Rains and start feeding them Al Qaeda/Taliban scapegoats like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  All the while and up to this day making sure Osama Bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Omar remain safe and secure.

According to Interpol, Afghanistan today produces over 90% of the world's heroin.  Over 400,000 acres are under poppy cultivation, producing some 6,000 metric tons, or 13,200,000 pounds of opium, almost all of which is processed in Afghanistan into heroin at a 10:1 conversion.  That comes to 1,320,000 pounds of heroin a year.  The CIA has done nothing to stop it.

DARPA (the Pentagon's research outfit) has developed a genetically-engineered chemical that prevents poppy plants from germinating and is harmless to humans, animals, and other plants.  It can be sprayed at high altitude over large areas.  It will wipe out most all poppy production in Afghanistan within one growing season.  The CIA is making maniacal efforts to prevents its use.

There may be, however, some hopeful news to this shoddy story.  And that is the emerging political alliance between Pak leader Pervez Musharraf and a lady named Benazir Bhutto.

She's the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928-1979), founder of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and president then prime minister from 1971-1977.  He was overthrown in a military coup by Pak Army Chief of Staff Mohammed Zia ul-Haq who established himself as dictator and had Bhutto hung.  It was Zia who put Islamic radicals like Hamid Gul in charge of the ISI.

Bhutto's 26 year-old daughter (b. 1953) Benazir assumed the leadership of the PPP.  Zia placed her under house arrest, then in prison, then exiled her to London in 1984.  To intimidate her in not returning to Pakistan, Zia ordered ISI agents to assassinate her brother, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, in 1985.

She was not easily intimidated, for she has as much courage as brains – graduating cum laude from Harvard University, and elected president of the Oxford Union debating society at Oxford University where she earned a graduate degree in international law and diplomacy.

Zia was killed by the Soviet KGB, who blew up his plane in-flight on August 17, 1988.  Benazir immediately returned to her country to be elected, at age 35, Prime Minister.  One of her first acts was to fire Hamid Gul and Imtiaz Billa, trying to gain control of the ISI.

They quickly struck back, organizing a media and whisper campaign of "corruption" against her and the PPP, while pouring cash into an opposition party, the Pakistan Moslem League (PML), led by an obscure protégé of Gul and Imtiaz, Nawaz Sharif.

The PML won the next election round and in early 1991, Sharif replaced Benazir as PM, who quickly put Gul and Imtiaz back into the ISI.  Sharif was such an incompetent disaster that this merry-go-round repeated itself.  The PML lost and the PPP won in '93, Benazir back as PM whereupon she had Imtiaz arrested.

He was acquitted, the corruption charges began anew, by '96 she was out again and Nawaz Sharif back in with his ISI buddies. 

By now, a number of generals in the Pakistan Army were getting very sick and tired of the ISI.  Their leader was the Chief of Staff, Pervez Musharraf.  On October 12, 1999, Nawaz Sharif announced Musharraf's dismissal and ISI Director Khwaja Ziauddin in his place.  The generals rebelled, and Musharraf, who was out of the country, got on a Pakistan Airlines commercial flight to Karachi.

Sharif ordered the airport closed so the PIA plane couldn't land.  The generals, under Musharraf's instructions via the plane's radio, had their troops open the airport at gunpoint, the plane landed with a few minutes of fuel, and Musharraf assumed control of the government.

Musharraf had Imtiaz re-arrested and this time he was convicted.  He remains in jail today.  In court, the Pakistan National Accountability Bureau showed that he had foreign exchange bearer certificates worth US$20.08 million, a Pakistani Rupee account at the Union Bank of Switzerland of Rs. 2.13 billion (about US$35 million), and a US$ account with the Deutsch Bank of Germany of $19.1 million – his cut of the ISI-Taliban heroin business.

So you can see there is no love lost between Musharraf and the ISI, nor any between Benazir Bhutto and the ISI.  Unfortunately there isn't any between Musharraf and Bhutto either.

She's been in exile for ten years, living in London.  There have been "back-channel" negotiations between her and Musharraf for the last five.  On July 27, they personally met in Abu Dhabi to discuss how a power-sharing arrangement between them might work.  Cross your fingers.

Musharraf is always portrayed in Western media as having to "walk a tightrope" between America's support of him and placating the ever-ready-to-rage hordes of Moslem crazies in the Pakistani street.  Nonsense.  Musharraf's tightrope is strung by the ISI.  He's got to placate and not give in to them at the same time.  I don't know how he does it.

A deal with Benazir is the only way to get off the tightrope, because together they can put an end to the perfidy of the ISI.  And the drug-smuggling. 

Yet to put an end to the ISI means an end to the CIA's friendship with it.  One thing you can never overestimate is the CIA's capacity for betrayal.  Langley has to betray either the ISI or Musharraf.  Perhaps the best we can hope is for it to sit on the sidelines paralyzed and do neither.

For the only thing that exceeds Langley's capacity for betrayal is its capacity for incompetence.  Depending on that to not ruin the one chance Pakistan and Afghanistan may have to solve their horrible problems may be the ultimate Bourne Absurdity.