Image courtesy of orudorumagi11

As Spencer notes, there is not too much surprising here:

Now, obviously, it’s not news that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligences has ties to the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. That’s something that pretty much every observer of the Afghanistan war and the Pakistani intelligence apparatus has known for the better part of a decade.

But as the early-viewing New York Times reports, WikiLeaks presents a new depth of detail about how the U.S. military has seen, for six years, the depths of ISI facilitation of the Afghan insurgency. For instance: a three-star Pakistani general active during the 80s-era U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi sponsorship of the anti-Soviet insurgency, Hamid Gul, allegedly met with insurgent leaders in South Waziristan in January 2009 to plot vengeance for the drone-inflicted death of an al-Qaeda operative. (Gul called it “absolute nonsense” to the Times reporters.)

I’m old enough to remember a time when Russia’s ill-fated invasion, six year occupation and long slow retreat from Afghanistan was considered to be a contributing factor to the eventual dissolution of Soviet Union. “Russia’s Vietnam” it was called, I believe. I’m not sure why , having had our own Vietnam (it was in all of the papers) we thought we could do a better job.

Personally I’m waiting on an internal document dump from a Halliburton/KBR or Blackwater/Xe wherein we find that they have been slipping the insurgents a little cash and some weaponry just to grease the wheels of the profiteering gravy train. It’ll probably be listed as a “marketing expenses” like giving out those little sample packs of cigarettes.

It’s hard to believe that sometimes I think I’m not cynical enough.