America's Shadow State in Pakistan

This article suggests that the US has developed and paid for counterterrorism sections of the Pakistani intelligence agency as well as some police agencies. These allies of the US would be more loyal than the rest of the Pakistani state. It's not the first time this has happened. As I discuss in some detail here, the US has established patron-client relations with intelligence services, or sections of such services, with a number of countries in the last decade. This typically occurs when (1) the country has valuable intelligence that the US wants, (2) the US cannot trust the country to share intelligence, and (3) the US has the interest and resources to persuade elements in the country to cooperate in ways that allow the US to directly assess the reliability of the intelligence it shares.