This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 6, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Back from a two-week stint in Afghanistan, U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk said Tuesday that he is convinced that Pakistan is now the primary threat to Afghan stability -- and that the U.S. should reconsider its aid to Pakistan.
"Pakistan has become the main threat to Afghanistan. Pakistan's intelligence service is the biggest danger to the Afghan government," Kirk, R-Ill., said in a speech in Chicago. "It is also a tremendous threat to the lives of American troops. Let me be clear: Many Americans died in Afghanistan because of Pakistan's ISI."
The ISI is Pakistan's intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, which has been accused of maintaining contacts with Islamist militants in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border who have attacked U.S.-led forces.
Kirk served for two weeks in Afghanistan as a Naval Reserve Intelligence commander, focusing mostly on counter-narcotics efforts. He had high praise for the U.S. military's work, which he said had "reduced al-Qaida in Afghanistan to a shadow of its former shadow." But he warned that "the most dangerous, lethal and cancerous force" in the country is the relatively new Haqqani network, which Kirk said is "backed and protected by Pakistan's own intelligence service."
The Haqqani network, the senator said, "kills Americans, attacks the elected government of Afghanistan and remains protected in its Pakistani headquarters of Miriam Shah. Without that Pakistani safe haven, it would suffer the same fate as al-Qaida."
Now considered the most dangerous threat to U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, the Haqqani network -- affiliated with the Taliban -- has been blamed for several deadly attacks, including a suicide mission at an American base in Khost in 2009 that killed seven CIA operatives. Pakistan's government has denied ties to the network.
Given the alleged Pakistani protection of the Haqqani network, as well as the need to cut U.S. spending to trim the budget deficit, Kirk said, "Aid to Pakistan seems naive at best and counter-productive at worst. I am seriously reconsidering and rethinking how well aid to Pakistan served us."
Kirk's two-week stint this summer was his third such assignment in Afghanistan. When he first served as a reservist in that nation in 2008, Kirk said he "believed that Pakistan was 'complicated,' that 'we have many interests there' and that we must advance 'diplomatically.'" But now, he said, "I no longer agree with that."
During his brief stint in Afghanistan, Kirk said he helped update and rewrite the counter-narcotics plan of NATO's International Security Assistance Force.
Stopping the heroin and opium trade is crucial, Kirk said, because the proceeds fuel the Afghan insurgency and lead to corruption in the Afghan government. He said the assistance force's efforts in 2009-10 to interdict and eradicate the drug trade did not work, "and the size of the Afghan poppy crop is likely to go up."
The new approach, Kirk said, is to use the assistance force's military assets -- including intelligence, helicopters and special operations -- to support Afghan operations to arrest the top drug lords, starting with the ones who financially back the insurgency.
"I strongly backed an Afghan counter-narcotics ministry idea to announce a top 10 drug lord list," Kirk said. "In our remaining two years in Afghanistan, we can do a lot to cripple the insurgency . . . by removing key, bad actors from the battlefield."