The Gitmo Files: (Shocker!) Mullah Omar meets with Pakistan’s ISI

A recently leaked threat assessment authored at Guantanamo contains this piece of intelligence:

As of February 2005, Mullah Satter attended a meeting with Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, PK. The meeting included high-level Taliban leaders Mullah Abdul Bari, Mullah Mohammed Nabi, Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, representatives from the Pakistani government and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID). Mullah Omar told the attendees that they should not cooperate with the new infidel government (in Afghanistan) and should keep attacking coalition forces.

This is not a real shocker, of course, as we know that the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment has sheltered Mullah Omar for years.

The file does not say how this was learned. And it would be most interesting to find out who the “representatives from the Pakistani government,” in particular, were.

Another leaked Gitmo file says that former detainee Abdul Hafiz, who quickly rejoined the Taliban's jihad after being transferred in December 2009, was part of an insurgency group that “consisted of 40 to 60 Taliban and HIG fighters who were ordered by a Quetta-based Taliban commander on a mission to conduct attacks against Westerners and Afghans sympathetic to the Afghan Transitional Authority.”

The same file says that in January 2003:

Three Pakistani military officers provided one month of training for the group in explosives, bomb-making, and assassination techniques. This training was conducted in preparation for a planned spring campaign to assassinate Westerners.

In March 2003, this Pakistani-trained Taliban/HIG group kidnapped and assassinated a Red Cross worker.

It is no wonder, then, that yet another leaked Gitmo file includes the Pakistani ISI on a list of “terrorist and terrorist support entities” associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The US officials who authored the document wrote: “Through associations with these groups and organizations, a detainee may have provided support to al Qaeda or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against U.S. or Coalition forces.”