In USA Tactics Replaces Strategy:
USA is exposed again. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou spent 2002 running counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan. His revelations expose something worse than policy failures. They show a complete absence of strategic thinking, where immediate tactical gains consistently override long-term coherence. The result? America produced the very instability it claimed to prevent.
America’s Pakistan Contradiction
Kiriakou describes how the USA “essentially purchased” President Musharraf. Washington funneled tens of millions of dollars in cash to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI. This wasn’t alliance building. It was renting cooperation. The CIA knew the ISI operated a dual life. One faction helped hunt Al-Qaeda. Another created and directed terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba that attacked India. Rather than confront this contradiction, the White House made a deliberate choice. It would “strategically ignore this terrorism problem vis-à-vis India” because America needed drone bases in Balochistan and CIA positions along the Afghan border. The term itself reveals the inversion. Acknowledging reality became the thing to avoid, while denial became policy.
The Lahore Raid
In March 2002, Kiriakou’s team raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Lahore. They recovered an Al-Qaeda training manual. This was the first documentary proof connecting Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorists with the enemy America was fighting globally. The CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence confirmed what this meant. It linked the Pakistani government itself to Al-Qaeda. The US response? Nothing.
The relationship was deemed “bigger than India-Pakistan” because tactical needs outweighed inconvenient truth. America needed those drone bases, that border access. So it accepted that its ally was operationally integrated with its enemy.
Nuclear Games
The tactical pattern extended to nuclear policy. Kiriakou claims he was told the Pentagon controlled Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in 2002. Musharraf had handed it over, fearing terrorist access. This solved one immediate problem but created deeper instability and dependency. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan ran a nuclear proliferation network. He spread weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. The US couldn’t act because Saudi Arabia intervened. The Saudis asked Washington to “leave him alone.”
America prioritized Saudi relations over non-proliferation. It allowed the very proliferation crisis it would spend decades trying to contain. Each decision made tactical sense in isolation. Collectively, they represent strategic chaos.
The Unraveling
The consequences compounded exactly as predicted.
India learned that American partnerships are transactional and unreliable. When Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked Mumbai in 2008, killing 166 people including six Americans, the US had already spent six years ignoring this threat. India responded by pursuing strategic autonomy. It strengthened Russian ties, hedged with multiple powers, and refused to become a dependent ally.
Pakistan learned different lessons. Nuclear brinkmanship and terrorism provide leverage. Evidence doesn’t matter if you’re strategically located. American money flows regardless of behavior. These lessons encouraged precisely the instability the US feared.
The mission itself collapsed. The 20-year Afghanistan campaign, for which Pakistani cooperation was deemed indispensable, ended in complete failure in 2021. The Taliban retook control. They too had ISI support. The drone bases and CIA picket lines accomplished nothing lasting.
Impossible Strategy
The root cause isn’t incompetence but structural. When you’re managing simultaneous crises in dozens of countries, you can’t do strategy. You’re in permanent emergency mode. Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader War on Terror, North Korea, Iran, Middle East peace processes. Each demanded immediate attention. None were reconciled into coherent regional strategies.
America’s immense tactical capabilities became the problem. Unlike powers operating under constraints, the US could keep paying off problems rather than solving them. Each administration inherited the previous one’s tactical decisions as strategic crises, then added its own short-term fixes for electoral purposes.
Real strategy would have looked different. It would have meant confronting Pakistan with evidence and demanding verifiable changes. Choosing between Pakistan and India rather than pursuing both halfheartedly. Accepting short-term complications for long-term stability. Most importantly, it would have meant asking the right question. Not “what do we need today?” but “what region do we want in twenty years?”
The Pattern Persists
When confronted with proof that its ally supported its enemy, America chose convenience. That’s not realpolitik. It’s tactical addiction. Like all addictions, it required progressively larger doses to maintain while causing cumulative damage. The damage eventually becomes impossible to ignore, but by then it’s too late.
Kiriakou himself became part of this pattern. He blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007. He stated publicly that torture was official US government policy. For this, the Obama administration prosecuted him on five felony charges including espionage. He served 23 months in federal prison for confirming a colleague’s surname in an email. The people who designed and implemented the torture program faced no charges.
The pattern holds. Tactical success feels like vindication in the moment. Strategic failure reveals itself only years later, on someone else’s watch. So the cycle continues, producing one catastrophe after another while solving nothing fundamental.
America found evidence its ally was connected to its enemy and decided the relationship was too convenient to jeopardize. That choice in 2002 reverberates today in India’s strategic autonomy, Pakistan’s instability, Afghanistan’s collapse, and China’s expanding influence across South Asia.
This is full video of Kiriakou interview: