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PAKISTAN, CHAIRMAN OF the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen reflected in a recent interview, is “the most complicated country in the world.” The bin Laden/ISI connection had been made during the Afghan war against the Soviets, when the CIA—working with the ISI and Saudi intelligence—spent billions arming and training the disparate groups of fighters. Once the short-term goal of rolling back the Soviets had been achieved, the United States had walked away from Afghanistan. Pakistan had not.

It saw and still sees Afghanistan as strategically crucial, not least on account of an issue of which many members of the public in the West have minimal knowledge or none at all. Pakistan and India have fought three wars in the past half-century over Kashmir, a large disputed territory over which each nation has claims and that each partially controls, and where there is also a homegrown insurgency. Having leverage over Afghanistan, given its geographical position, enabled Pakistan to recruit Afghan and Arab volunteers to join the Kashmir insurgency—and tie down a large part of the Indian army.

The insurgents inserted into Kashmir have by and large been mujahideen, committed to a cause they see as holy. As reported earlier, the man who headed the ISI in 1989, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, himself saw the conflict as jihad. Osama bin Laden made common cause with Gul and—in the years that followed—with like-minded figures in the ISI. ISI recruits for the fight in Kashmir were trained in bin Laden camps. Bin Laden would still be saying, as late as 2000, “Whatever Pakistan does in the matter of Kashmir, we support it.”

Such action and talk paid off in ways large and small. The ISI at one time even reportedly installed the security system that protected bin Laden in one of the houses he used in Afghanistan.

The tracks of the ISI and al Qaeda converged in other ways. Months after the Taliban had begun hosting bin Laden in 1996, they had been, as Time magazine put it, “shoehorned into power” by the ISI—thus ensuring Pakistan’s influence over most of Afghanistan. The need to keep things that way, and to fend off rebellion on its own border, a Pakistani official told the State Department in 2000, meant that his government would “always” support the Taliban.

So powerful was the ISI in Afghanistan, former U.S. special envoy Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 Commission, that the Taliban “actually were the junior partners in an unholy alliance”—ISI, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. As it grew in influence, the ISI liaised closely with Saudi intelligence—and the Saudis reportedly lined the pockets of senior Pakistani officers with additional cash.

The ISI over the years achieved not only military muscle but massive political influence within Pakistan itself—so much so that some came to characterize it as “the most influential body in Pakistan,” a “shadow government.”

The United States, caught between the constraints of regional power politics and the growing need to deal with bin Laden and al Qaeda, long remained impotent.

By the late nineties, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Thomas Simons has recalled, American efforts to bring pressure on the Pakistanis and the Taliban over bin Laden resulted only in “a sense of helplessness.” Concern about the tensions between India and Pakistan loomed larger at the State Department than Islamic extremism—not least after both those nations tested nuclear weapons.

In 1999, then–Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif held out the possibility of working with the CIA to mount a commando operation to capture or kill bin Laden. Nothing came of it, the National Security Agency reported, because the plan was compromised by the ISI. In early 2000, though, after General Pervez Musharraf seized power, Washington made a serious effort to ratchet up the pressure.

President Clinton insisted on making a visit to Islamabad, the first by an American head of state in more than thirty years. He did so in spite of CIA and Secret Service warnings that a