We first featured this video report on March 15, 2007. It focuses on a documentary excerpt from years before: June of 2001.

The sordid history of U.S. bungling and deception in Pakistan, its fractious, untrustworthy “ally” in the Afghan wars, goes back to the early 1980’s.

Still today Washington is flummoxed by the scheming colonels of the I.S.I., the Pakistan military’s intelligence service, who continue to support the Afghan Taliban as a means of playing The Great Game by proxy.

True, the C.I.A. has used a couple of dozen Predator attacks to make life more challenging for a handful of al Qaeda and Taliban notables, but only in certain parts of Pakistan’s tribal areas. The U.S. hasn’t laid a glove on Mullah Omar’s rump Taliban leadership, based in Baluchistan province, just across the border from war-ravaged Kandahar and Helmand.

In this way, Washington and its NATO allies continue to expose the Afghan people, and their own troops, to the fangs of the Taliban in Afghanistan, while the head of the snake nestles in the bosom of its Pakistani patrons, in towns like Kushlak and Chaman, and nearby Quetta, Baluchistan’s capital.

Fact is, Mullah Omar and his cronies are so closely intertwined with Pakistan’s spy agency that the C.I.A. can’t target them without inflicting casualties in equal measure on Pakistani officers and troops.

And so the war grinds on, and with it, the stream of lies from Islamabad and Washington – accompanied by fresh blasts of blowback, the stock and trade of U.S. foreign policy.