Bush buried Musharraf's al-Qaeda links - Gareth Porter

One of the major reason for withdrawing support from Musharraf is/was to bring ISI under US control. As long as Musharraf was at the helm, that was not a possibility. This raises the possibility that Kayani is a genuine "democrat" and does not object to ISI under civilian (read CIA if you will). Or he is just playing the ball, putting a reasonable distance and letting civilian bungling and misgovernance get out of hand. The downside to this is the talibans may beat him to this. Read on this analysis and read between the lines also:


The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist nexus with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September, al-Qaeda "was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army". If there was a state sponsor of al-Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.