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mujahedin to help fight India. Over the decades the "S" Department
of ISI established close connections with scores of jihadi groups,
becoming a state within ISI, which in turn is a state within the army.
The army decides national-security policy with little or no input from
the political establishment. General Nadeem Taj exemplifies the
story. Taj was former dictator Pervez Musharraf's right-hand man.
They were together in 1999 when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif fired
Musharraf as chief of army staff while he was returning by plane
from a visit to Sri Lanka. Taj orchestrated the coup that put
Musharraf in power from the plane and was rewarded with several
key jobs including in 2006 command of the Kakul Military Academy
in Abbottabad, Pakistan's West Point or Sandhurst. It was on his
watch as commandant of the academy that bin Laden moved into his
hideout less than a mile away. Was Taj clueless or complicit?
In September 2007 Taj became DG/ISI replacing General Ashfaq
Kayani who was promoted chief of army staff (COAS). Taj lasted
less than a year before he was removed under intense pressure from
Washington. The Bush administration had concluded that Taj's ISI
was directly involved in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul
in 2008 and was undermining the new drone program to attack Al
Qaeda targets inside Pakistan by warning the terrorists before attacks.
Taj was regarded as either unable to rein in the S Department or
complicit in its duplicity. Nonetheless, Taj was promoted to
command a key corps in the army, the highest command level short
of COAS. Now he has been accused of complicity in the planning of
the Mumbai attack by several family members of the American
victims of the terror rampage in a New York court case. It was on
Taj's watch as DG/ISI that the attack was carefully planned by the
LeT and the targets, including the Chabad house where most of the
Americans died, were selected. David Headley, an American of
Pakistani origin, has testified that the ISI was directly involved in the
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