Ex-Pakistan General: Wikileaks Docs Part of US Plot

Documents showing his ties to the Taliban were leaked as part of a White House plot, insists former Pakistani general Hamid Gul, who told the Washington Post yesterday that the accusations against him are "fiction." The leaked documents depict Gul, a former head of the Pakistani spy agency, as a terrorist agent who has provided the Taliban in Afghanistan with bombs, suicide attack plans, plots to kidnap UN workers and assurance that Pakistan would shelter them.

Gul claims that President Obama leaked the documents as the first step in a clever plot to extricate the US from Afghanistan without taking the blame for American defeat—a plot also involving the troop surge, which Gul says Obama knows will fail. Gul's theory illustrates one of the key challenges the US faces in Pakistan, writer Karin Brulliard notes: Conspiracy theories and suspicion abound in the region, where "Americans detect Pakistani and Iranian involvement in attacks in Afghanistan, Afghans see the ISI under every rock, and Pakistanis sense nefarious Indian designs all around them." (More Hamid Gul stories.)