Corpses have been showing up on roadsides in North and South
Waziristan for years. Some of the time they are headless; almost all of
the time they display a note alleging that the deceased was a spy.
Khalid Khawaja’s death was no different, except that he never hid the
fact that he had once worked for Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency,
the ISI. The association gave him credibility in many circles.
Khawaja’s generation of spooks, after all, trained local and foreign
jihadis in Afghanistan during the 1980s, frequented Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan during the 1990s, and continued -- at least unofficially -- to
support some insurgents in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) throughout the
past decade. Between his intel background and his continued devotion to
the cause, Khawaja was an important, outspoken player on the jihadi
scene.
It was shocking, then, to hear that a previously unknown faction of
militants calling themselves the Asian Tigers had kidnapped Khawaja,
along with a British reporter and another retired ISI officer, a month
ago in North Waziristan. Two weeks later, Khawaja appeared in a hostage
video, confessing to have been secretly working for the ISI throughout the crisis at the Red Mosque, the
hyper-radical mosque in Islamabad that was stormed by commandos in July
2007. And on Friday, Khawaja’s dead body appeared on a roadside in
North Waziristan, along with a note claiming that he was an American
spy.
So how could someone like Khawaja -- a self-described confidant of Osama
bin Laden who relished affiliations with the Taliban of old -- have ended
up dead in a ditch, murdered by the kind of people he was previously
accused of aiding? And what does that say about the dramatic cultural
changes underway in Pakistan?
To read the rest of this piece, visit the New Republic, where this was originally published.
Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the
author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous
Years in Pakistan.
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