U.S. 'playing with devil'
in Pakistan

Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says the U.S. is "playing with the devil" in its alliance with Pakistan – having been lied to about the circumstances of journalist Daniel Pearl's death as well as collusion between the secret police and al-Qaida agents.

According to Hersh, U.S. forces in Afghanistan surrounded Pakistani ISI operatives and "the cream of the crop" of al-Qaida near Konduz during the early phase of the war. The U.S. allowed the ISI to escape, supposedly to prop up Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf – and thousands of top-level al-Qaida operatives went with them, said Hersh in a PBS broadcast this weekend.

By letting them go, "the U.S. is playing a losing game, because Musharraf is certainly much more interested in his own survival than ours," Hersh said.

He added that the U.S. military allowed 3,000 to 4,000, perhaps 8,000, ISI and al-Qaida men to get away, and the al-Qaida who escaped are now in Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir.

The U.S. allowed the trapped ISI men in Afghanistan to get away, said Hersh, because "we believe Musharraf was under pressure to protect the intelligence people from the military.

"If we suddenly seized in the field a few dozen military soldiers, including generals, and put them in jail, and punished them, he would be under tremendous pressure from the fundamentalists at home," he noted.

The initial plan, said Hersh, was to take out the Pakistani military from the trap in Afghanistan.

"What happened is that they took out al-Qaida with them. And we had no way of stopping it. We lost control. Once their planes began to go, thousands of al-Qaida got out. And we were not able to stop it and screen it," he said.

The intent was not to let al-Qaida out, but to protect the Pakistani military, he added.

He said the reality in Afhanistan today "is that probably from Kandahar to Jalalabad and all of the southern part of Afghanistan is ... ISI, it is Taliban. ... Afghanistan is smoking today."

Noting that there aren't many U.S. troops in northern territories, he said, "We are really at square one even in Afghanistan. We have about 8,000 (American troops) ... facing some of the heaviest fighting they have seen in a year."

Hersh also said that the Saudis have put a lot of money into Pakistan's religious establishments.

"Saudis are still a supplier of a great deal of funds to Pakistan. We have got a country that is teetering on the edge -- we don't want Pakistan to go Islamic. We don't want the [nuclear] weapons to get out of control," he said.

He also estimated that Pakistan at present has up to 40 nuclear warheads.

The U.S., said Hersh, also knew that Musharraf was "deceiving us" when he said that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was alive though he knew the journalist had been killed by terrorists.

"He came to America when there was tremendous concern about the fate of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter," said Hersh. "And he was here about a week or so before it became known that Pearl was dead. And the whole time, we later learned, that he was here, when he was saying, you know telling us that he was doing everything he can. He was sure he was alive. He knew that Pearl was dead. We now know that. We know he was deceiving us."

Hersh said during the trial of those apprehended for the murder, evidence showed the Pakistani government knew Pearl was dead when Musharraf was telling U.S. officials otherwise. In addition, a man facing execution in the crime is connected to the ISI, Hersh said.

"There's no question he has some connection," he said. "There's no question he had some deep standing – long-standing connection to Pakistani intelligence."