In a secret meeting with a Taliban commander, I learned how Bush administration aid to Pakistan helps fund insurgents who kill U.S. troops.

Editor's note: Research support was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

By Matthew Cole

A Pakistan army garrison in Chitral. Insurgents were driven to this outpost in Pakistan army trucks like the one shown, given weapons, and then sent across the border into Afghanistan to attack U.S. targets.

March 10, 2008 | KABUL, Afghanistan -- On a recent bitterly cold winter day, I sat huddled on a red Persian carpet in an unheated Kabul office, waiting for a visitor who, I was told by a trusted friend, would help me understand why America is not winning its war in Afghanistan.
...
Over the course of several hours in the Kabul office, "Haji Muhammed," as we agreed he would be called, spun a gemstone ring absently around his finger and ran his hands through his thinning hair as he described for me his firsthand experience of an American foreign-policy debacle. The U.S. is paying for both sides of the war in Afghanistan. As is becoming increasingly clear, for at least two and a half years, and perhaps far longer, the Pakistani government has been receiving massive U.S. aid while its intelligence agency and elements of its military have been pursuing their own anti-American agenda within Afghanistan...
...