US Believed India, Pak Would Go To War In 2002, Says CIA Whistleblower
A former senior CIA officer, John Kiriakou, has made the stunning revelation that the US intelligence community was convinced India and Pakistan were on the brink of war in 2002 following the terror attack on the Indian Parliament. In an exclusive interview, Kiriakou, who led the CIA’s counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, disclosed that the threat was taken so seriously that American families were evacuated from Islamabad during the tense military standoff known as Operation Parakram.”Family members had been evacuated from Islamabad.
We believed India and Pakistan would go to war,” Kiriakou recalled, adding that the US Deputy Secretary of State had to shuttle between New Delhi and Islamabad to broker a de-escalation. He admitted that at the time, Washington’s singular focus on Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan meant India’s security concerns were largely overlooked. “We were so busy and focused on Al-Qaeda, we never gave two thoughts to India,” he said.Reflecting on subsequent events like the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Kiriakou said US intelligence correctly assessed that Pakistan-backed Kashmiri terror groups were responsible, not Al-Qaeda. He pointed to a larger issue of global inaction against Pakistan’s duplicity, stating, “Pakistan was committing terrorism in India, and nobody did anything about it.” He revealed that within the CIA, officials had coined a term for New Delhi’s measured response: “strategic patience.”
However, he assessed that India has now reached a point where it “can’t risk strategic patience being mistaken for weakness,” pointing to decisive actions like the 2016 surgical strikes, the 2019 Balakot airstrikes, and this year’s Operation Sindoor.Kiriakou also offered a stark warning to Islamabad, asserting that Pakistan would lose any conventional war with India and should abandon its confrontational approach. “Nothing, literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose,” he said. “There’s no benefit in constantly provoking Indians.”
Delving into his time in Pakistan, he described a fractured intelligence apparatus with “two parallel ISIs,” one professionally trained and another that created terror groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed. He recounted a 2002 raid that provided the first tangible link between the Pakistani government and Al-Qaeda but explained that Washington chose not to act because, at the time, “We needed the Pakistanis more than they needed us.”
