Prejudice In Pakistan

When I got Maj. Gen. Hamid Gul on the telephone at his home to ask if I could interview him, his reaction was guarded at first. "What's your nationality?" he asked. "American," I said. "Are you a Jew?" When I said I wasn't, he agreed to the interview. "I'm sorry to ask you that," he added. "It's just that Jews wouldn't understand what I have to say."

Indeed they wouldn't, and nor would most people. General Gul's basic message is that Osama bin Laden is innocent, and that the attacks on New York and Washington were an Israeli-engineered attempt at a coup against the government of the United States. He rattled off the proof: "You must look inside. F-16s don't scramble in time, though they had 18 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Radar gets jammed. Transponders are turned off. A flight to Los Angeles turns to Washington and is in the air for 45 minutes, and the world's most sophisticated air defense doesn't go into action. I tell you, it was a coup [attempt], and I can't say for sure who was behind it, but it's the Israelis who are creating so much misery in the world. The Israelis don't want to see any power in Washington unless it's subservient to their interests, and President Bush has not been subservient."

If General Gul were anyone else, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crackpot. But here in military-ruled Pakistan, he remains an influential figure, even in semiretirement. And as the former head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), its intelligence service, he had a key role in making Afghanistan what it is today. Gul is widely considered the architect of the Afghan jihad: the man who, with financial and logistical support from the CIA, engineered the fight of the mujahedin against the Soviet Union and its proxy government in Kabul in the 1980s. Now, he's a big fan of the country's ruling Taliban, even though they're fighting his former mujahedin allies.

And he's wondering why the CIA no longer comes calling to his comfortable home in an exclusive compound for top military brass in Rawalpindi. "Why don't these people talk to me?" Perhaps because they don't appreciate his view that all those Arabic names emerging as suspects are CIA inventions?

"Not your State Department, but the CIA and DOD [Department of Defense], he says. "They're the ones who count. Why don't they talk to me? They know me. They can trust me."

Putting our trust in Pakistan will take, at best, a mighty leap of faith. The country claims to be a partner in the war against terrorism, and the current military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has made such lip service ritually and repeatedly. After Tuesday's attacks, he condemned them as "brutal and horrible acts of terror" and called for the world to "unite to fight against terrorism in all its forms." But the Pakistani government has so far made no effort to bring any real pressure to bear on the Taliban to turn over bin Laden, and it has encouraged and facilitated Islamic extremist groups in the disputed territory of Kashmir, as well.