Word: binning
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This is how bad it was for terrorist-hunters before Sept. 11. After weeks of dangerous surveillance work along the Afghan border, Egyptian investigators finally tracked down their quarry, a close associate of Osama bin Laden named Ahmed al-Khadir who was wanted for bombing the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995, killing 15 people. The Egyptians had surrounded the safe house in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar where al-Khadir, an Egyptian Canadian, was hiding. All that remained was to notify Pakistan's then chief spymaster, General Mehmood Ahmed, so that his spooks could burst in to arrest...
...that hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives are still hiding in Pakistan. To hunt them down, American investigators need the ISI. Last week, according to tribal elders, about 40 U.S. commandos set up base in the Pakistani tribal town of Miramshah near the frontier with Afghanistan, following intelligence reports that bin Laden might be holed up nearby. Officially, Pakistan denies that U.S. special forces crossed into its tribal borderlands. Whether American troops are on the ground or not, Washington must depend, at least in part, on Pakistani intelligence to flush out remaining fugitives...
...Meanwhile, Musharraf must also resolve some knotty issues that go beyond the hunt for bin Laden. To ensure Pakistan's stability, he must rely on the ISI to crack down on sectarian extremists, who have killed more than 70 people this year. Yet elements in the agency are believed to have maintained shady connections with these groups. Then there's the matter of the Pakistani leader's own survival. Many Pakistanis are angry with America these days, over the civilian bombing casualties in Afghanistan and Washington's support of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians, who like most Pakistanis...
...More worrying than these outbursts was Ahmed's sympathy for the Taliban. When the President sent him down to Kandahar last Sept. 17 to persuade Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over bin Laden, the spymaster instead secretly told Omar to resist, an ex-Taliban official told Time. Word of this double-talk reached Musharraf, who replaced him as ISI boss with General Ehsan ul-Haq, a trusted friend and ex-military intelligence chief who shares Musharraf's more Westernized views. His orders were to weed out "the beards," as the Islamic extremists are nicknamed inside the agency...
...side effects were devastating. These militants sowed terror inside Pakistan, too. The blowback started when these holy warriors shifted their training camps over to Afghanistan. There, these Islamic extremists, recruited from radical mosques and seminaries around Pakistan, fell in with al-Qaeda. For them, bin Laden's apocalyptic vision of Islam was compelling?plus he had lots of cash. As one Western diplomat explains, "There was this large militant pool, with men drifting from one outfit to another...