RUTHFULLY YOURS

He “been working closely with US Special Forces and the CIA before he was recruited by the Taliban.” How is it that the Taliban were able to recruit him? When he went to work for the CIA, didn’t they determine that he rejected the Taliban’s ideology and version of Islam? In fact, they almost certainly didn’t. To have probed in such a way would have been “Islamophobic.”

“Bodyguard who killed Karzai’s brother was trusted CIA contact,” by Julius Cavendish in The Independent, July 16 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):

The bodyguard who assassinated President Hamid Karzai’s brother had been working closely with US Special Forces and the CIA before he was recruited by the Taliban, raising fears over the Islamist movement’s increasingly sophisticated intelligence apparatus which has managed to threaten the inner circles of power in Afghanistan.Sardar Mohammad, who shot Ahmed Wali Karzai at his home in Kandahar City on Tuesday, also held regular meetings with British officials, and had two brothers-in-law serving in a CIA-run paramilitary unit, the Kandahar Strike Force, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

Yet evidence is emerging that the Taliban recruited Mohammad – who was believed to be a friend, confidant and trusted lieutenant of Ahmed Wali Karzai – in an infiltration of the Afghan government’s security apparatus.

“Our investigation shows that for the last three months he was acting out of character, not normal, erratic,” said Mahmoud Karzai, another Karzai brother. “He wasn’t sleeping, he was nervous, he was getting phone calls in the middle of the night, and our information shows he made a trip to Quetta [in Pakistan] and met with some Taliban. His father was a mullah. So all these things combined, plus the Taliban claim of responsibility… but our preliminary investigation indicates this was the work of the Taliban.”…