CIA leaves U.S. soldiers blind against terrorists.

"Two former CIA allies in Afghanistan are now fearsome warlords responsible for killing scores of American troops in the escalating border war," the New York Daily News reported in a December 2 article. The article, entitled "Ex-CIA allies leading Afghan fight vs. G.I.s," focuses on Afghan warlords Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the principal jihadist leaders carrying out attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Both are reportedly receiving generous financial support from al-Qaeda-linked Arabs, as well as steady infusions of Arab recruits and advisers.

The CIA has extensive files on Hekmatyar and Haqqani, which is not surprising since both were favored "clients" of the agency during the 1980s and '90s. Hekmatyar, especially, was a major recipient of CIA cash, weapons, and supplies. However, this historical relationship between U.S. intelligence and the terrorists is news to many of the young U.S. Special Forces soldiers who are tasked with hunting terrorists in Afghanistan's forbidding mountain terrain. Understandably, some of them are upset to learn that the CIA has withheld this information from them. The Daily News quotes one unidentified U.S. soldier in Afghanistan as being "shocked" that our government has denied this intelligence to our men on the ground. "The information would have been extremely useful," he said.

One of the CIA's former Afghan hands, Michael Scheuer, argues that it's critically important for U.S. commanders to have access to this intelligence. "You'd know the whole lay of the land if you reviewed the information we had," Scheuer told the Daily News. Another ex-CIA agent, Vince Cannistraro, who says he "broke bread with Hekmatyar," agrees with Scheuer. "Know thy enemy. If you don't factor in that knowledge, you're fighting blind," Cannistraro said.

Of course, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) brain trust that essentially runs our CIA (as well as the White House and the State Department--virtually all of the executive branch, for that matter) would prefer blind soldiers to an enlightened public. It wouldn't do to remind the American people that the so-called "experts" directing our "war on terror" are the same policy elites who trained, financed, and supplied our terrorist enemies.

For years, the CFR/CIA elites justified funneling millions of dollars in aid to Hekmatyar with the patently false claim that he was the Mujahadeen leader who was most effectively fighting the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. The opposite was true: Hekmatyar was actually allied with the Soviets and Afghan Communists much of the time and was responsible for betraying and murdering many of the genuinely anti-Soviet Afghan leaders. Hekmatyar had become a Marxist when he was a university student in the 1960s and had participated in the 1973 coup that toppled King Zahir Shah and put the pro-Soviet dictatorship of Mohammed Daoud in place. Although he is now referred to as an Islamic fundamentalist, he has not shed his Marxist roots. Russian columnist Misha Pozhininsky, who served in the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, says he learned from Soviet military intelligence that "Hekmatyar was sometimes cooperating with us." According to Pozhininsky, Hekmatyar "thought he could go about ... using Islam, to build a socialist system."