Hey, remember this guy? Mark Mazzetti, who has a book to sell, tells in the NYTimes “How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States”:
… Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up operations from a safe house in the city.
But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back…
More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power…
For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell represented solid proof of their suspicions that the C.I.A. had sent a vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of the covert American war in the country. For the C.I.A., the eventual disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–Sept. 11 reality: that the C.I.A. had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors — many of them with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world…
Forget it, Jake — it’s Pakistan…
dmbeaster
Davis was an effing contractor? This trend is killing us
aimai
Whatever happened to giving these guys cyanide capsules in the teeth? And what’s up with employing a guy who speaks no Urdu–its not that hard a language to learn in the first place (though reading might be a challenge). How can you employ a “spy” who doesn’t know how to actually understand anything that is happening around him?
Redshift
@dmbeaster: I remember him being a contractor. What I don’t remember is things being that great with Pakistan before that incident.
JoyfulA
@Redshift: That’s my memory, too. But I don’t remember anything about the two people he shot pointing guns at him.
RaflW
What a load of crap.
I mean, sure, any US agent (or contrator) that kills two nationals in their home country is going to make a bunch of people dislike the US.
But its because the US has been killing 100s, 1000s, and some times multiples of those numbers in various countries in their region, and inside Pakistan itself, that would set up a situation where by that particular killing might “Turn Pakistan Against the United States.”
Its of a piece with the camp that says that Timothy McVeigh was a lone mad bomber. One cannot ascribe to a larger context any causes of disaffection or motive.
So, in Pakistan, one contractor-spook fucked up an entire, otherwise flawless US foreign policy.
Sheer, utter revisionist, blame-shifting hogwash.
mai naem
@aimai: you go to spy with the language skills you have not the language skills you want. Also too, DADT is more important than some stupid language skill.
Pakistan is just a massive failed state. Gandhi/Nehru really should not have pushed for the 2 state solution. I’ve never understood the Kashmir situation either. It doesn’t seem like its some strategically important area and it’s not like it’s got oil or minerals. So many resources wasted there, beating each other up.
maya
Davis was just standing his ground. Those two suspected attackers had a brownish tinge about them and may have even been wearing hoodies.
Another Halocene Human
@RaflW: Really? Really? I suggest you review how the United States ended up in WWI. It’s pretty much just as dipshitted, with a group of elites already rooting for one side and looking around for an excuse.
And no, the US alliance with Pakistan was not a popular policy in Pakistan, nor was it favored (or even honored) by the ISI. But many countries pursue policies which are not popular.
The David affair would then not be the sole determining incident but more along the lines of the last straw.
Anne Laurie
@RaflW:
Raymond Davis is no more responsible for the massive State/CIA fustercluck in Pakistan than Lyndy England was responsible for authorizing torture at Abu Graib. But just as England became the “face” of American criminal behavior in Iraq, Davis has become the “face” of everything Pakistan (and not just Pakistan) loathes about American foreign policy.
The point is, when our Seamless World-Spanning Empire Ops can be monkeywrenched by one lowly undertrained peon in the wrong place at the wrong time, Foreign Policy, we are Doing It Wrong.
gene108
Considering Pakistan has decided to be a sponsor of terrorists, by officially lending terrorist groups “moral support” for 25 years, to fuel their eternal war with India, I’m not crying that the U.S. doesn’t have a buddy-buddy relationship with those thugs.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
This has all the sounds of an excuse, not the cause. I mean seriously, it’s not like this guy is a policy maker and everyone has idiots. It’s probably really the Pakistanis are pissed off the US flew in and killed Osama right under their nose, but they know they can’t get angry about that so they’ve latched on to this clown.
AA+ Bonds
And the Libyans are still asking about the CIA aspect of the Benghazi shootings. But, as usual, the Republicans are asking all the wrong questions on purpose – while the Democrats ask no questions at all . . .
AA+ Bonds
Personally I’m just surprised by the amount of liberals suddenly willing to go to bat for the CIA, which has become pretty much a dark warrior outfit instead of a spy agency.
I mean, you can live in denial that what the CIA does isn’t enraging people across the globe. But denial will bite you in the ass. Just a matter of time.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power…
It’s interesting the way that works. To the jaded low-information inhabitant of the hegemonic power, what happens overseas is a sensation for a few days and then fades into complete obscurity. But in the places it happens…
Consider Fallujah, where the locals inexplicably hauled four American contractors out and beat them to death. Obviously a sign of a sick sociopathic people, to do that for no reason. No reason whatsoever… – http://www.hrw.org/en/node/12318/section/4
And I still remember the Wellington street where my mother pointed and said “Right there is where the riot started, when the American troops in here during WWII tried to bar Maori from drinking in ‘their’ pub…”. She hadn’t even been born then.
Ramalama
@aimai: The same mentality that kicked out all those gay soldiers out of the Army at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. You know, that weird contingent of gay soldiers who all spoke Arabic when nearly no one else in our armed forces did?
Neddie Jingo
Thickets of beastly moral ambiguity… Thousands of subjectivities skewing judgment… Everybody’s right, and everybody’s wrong…
John le Carré to the emergency white phone, please… Paging John le Carré…
jefft452
“For the C.I.A., the eventual disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–Sept. 11 reality: that the C.I.A. had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors — many of them with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world… “
“The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.” – Machiavelli
The CIA is about 700 years out of date, apparently
Paul in KY
@aimai: Freedom!
lawguy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: You clearly didn’t read the linked article or your WayBack Machine is not functioning. In other words your time line is backwards.
Paul in KY
@mai naem: There was this guy… name of Jinzo, no Jinsomething…Jinnah! He had a big say in the partition.
Would not piss on a statue of him while in Pakistan.
Paul in KY
@Anne Laurie: Excellent point, Anne.
KXB
@Redshift:
Yeah – that seems to be the work of a clever editor. Our relationship with Pakistan has been screwy since the Cold War.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@mai naem: They didn’t really have a choice. It was that, or deal with Muslims and Hindus murdering each other by the thousands per week, forever.
Cluttered Mind
Ambassador Munter seems to me to be the one coming out of this looking the best. At least he had a good understanding of exactly what was going on here and tried to fix it, even if he was cut off at the knees by the CIA every time he tried.
cvstoner
We have our Gitmo; they have theirs.
Mike G
Yet another triumph for corporate outsourcing.
American management culture, going for the quick buck, commoditization, ostentatious cost-cutting and corner-cutting every time.
heckblazer
The problem is that the US and Pakistan have a fundamental clash of interests when it comes to groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, and negotiating that is hampered on both sides due to internal factionalism and popular politics. The whole situation is fraught enough that I’m not even certain that the CIA’s sandbagging of the ISI was wrongheaded given how they had a reasonable belief that their contractor had just survived an attempted ISI hit.
Jado
“Forget it, Jake – it’s Pakistan”
More like “Forget it, Jawarhalal – it’s America”
Our policies make no more sense to them than theirs do to us (a CONTRACTOR??!! With a PISTOL, authorized by the CIA in a city where he has no information about the culture or language??!! Yeah, Jawarhalal – it’s America)