Summarizing the ISI/CIA/Taliban connections, the Australian daily reported, “Trained by the CIA and the French SDECE, the ISI ‘ran’ the mujaheddin their decade-long fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, who headed the ISI's Afghan bureau for four years until 1987, says in his book The Bear Trap that the agency funneled US money and weapons to the mujaheddin. In the early 1990s the ISI provided logistic and military support for the Taliban, and helped them to seize power in Kabul five years ago. . . .

Intelligence sources said that the ISI-CIA collaboration in the 1980s assisted Osama bin Laden, as well as Mir Aimal Kansi, who assassinated two CIA officers outside their office in Langley, Virginia, in 1993, and Ramzi Yousef, who was involved in the failed bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in New York five years later. . . . .

Opium cultivation and heroin production in Pakistan's northern tribal belt and adjoining Afghanistan were a vital offshoot of the ISI-CIA co-operation.”