President Musharraf had earlier told a visiting US Senator, Chuck Hagel, that “the deal had created a strategic rift with Washington that overshadowed personal trust and affection”.
As per Iqbal, by 2008, both civilian and military commentators on national security began identifying the US—often referred to as “extra regional forces”—as a direct political and military threat to Pakistan, and he writes about the responses which included deterrence through a “wide range of solutions including the threat of launching nuclear warheads”.
Incidentally, the author reveals that in the October 2005, earthquake in POK “wreaked havoc on KRL destroying one third of the centrifuges” and “released clouds of UF6 and partially enriched uranium”.
He also writes about a clandestine nuclear procurement network through Humayun Khan and Asher Karni, an Israeli businessman based in South Africa, and how US customs were able to switch “the spark plugs for harmless components”. But later, the US State Department effectively derailed the investigation.
According to the author, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had led Osama bin Laden and his followers away from US troops through the Tora Bora Mountains into Pakistan in November 2001.
This is where they lived under ISI protection. In 2010, the US managed to track a courier of bin Laden called Kuwaiti, and traced his SUV to a compound in Abbottabad. But, this information was restricted to only a few officers outside its top echelons. Iqbal then unravels details of how they established surveillance on the compound and carried out data profiling through locals including Lieutenant Iqbal Saeed Khan who ran a private security company.
With regards to drugs, the author exposes the links between the ISI, Taliban and also the brother of then President Hamid Karzai. The drug problem, and related issue of corruption, were crucial due to the resurgence of opium cultivation in Afghanistan that mushroomed after 2001.
Soon, Taliban Commanders transitioned from merely protecting poppy cultivation and logistics to actively operating morphine labs on Afghanistan. For some reason, the US had connected war strategy in Afghanistan with its drug policy.
Why was Pentagon resisting this? And why was the role of ISI in narcotics production and distribution overlooked? At the Pentagon, Mary Beth Long relentlessly countered DIA and CIA arguments by presenting evidence showing that US troops were encountering narcotics in the same Taliban areas where they found weapon caches resulted in President Bush adapting Plan Colombia for Afghanistan in 2005.
But, in spite of this, the Afghan-Opium economy continued to set new records and “Lieutenant General Pasha and his superiors laughed all the way to the bank”.
There are many other parts of this book to include the role Mexican drug cartels, the rise of the Quetta Shura of the Taliban under Haqqani the concealing of the death of Mullah Omar in April 2013, and the Afghan elections in 2014 in which Dr Abdullah lost to Ashraf Ghani mainly because he was a Tajik and that his strongest ally, Mohammed Fahim, unexpectedly died of a heart attack in March 2014.