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The Bush administration's ally in the war on terror, Pakistani's ISI. Via Democracy Arsenal, Kandahar-based Sarah Chayes writes of the recent riots in Afghanistan in the New York Times:
Go read the rest of Chayes' interesting analysis of riots not spontaneous, but organized, and by whom....For me, after three years in southern Afghanistan, something felt not quite right about the more virulent demonstrations across the country. The instant tip-off was that they were initially led by university students. Afghans and Westerners living in Kandahar have often wondered at the number of Pakistani students in what passes for a university here. The place is pathetically dilapidated, the library a locked storeroom, the medical faculty bereft of the most elementary skeleton or model of the human body. Why would anyone come here to study from Pakistan? Our unshakable conclusion has been that the adroit Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, is planting operatives in the student body. These students can also provoke agitation at Pakistani officials' behest, while affording the government in Islamabad plausible deniability.
In both Kandahar and Kabul, alert Afghan government officials were able to calm demonstrations by holding discussions with student leaders, an indication of the degree to which protesters' actions were manipulated and not the result of spontaneous outrage.
In other words, it's a mistake to focus on the Newsweek article as the cause of the recent demonstrations in Afghanistan. Instead, the reason was President Hamid Karzai's May 8 announcement that Afghanistan would enter a long-term strategic partnership with the United States.
Such an alliance discomfits Afghanistan's neighbors. Pakistan, for one, is used to treating Afghanistan as an all but subject territory...