Former CIA officer John Kiriakou has revealed that the United States once believed India and Pakistan were on the verge of war in 2002, following the Parliament attack in December 2001 and the tense military standoff that ensued under Operation Parakram.
In an interview, Kiriakou, who led the CIA’s counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, said that Washington viewed the threat seriously enough to evacuate American families from Islamabad.
“Family members had been evacuated from Islamabad. We believed India and Pakistan would go to war,” Kiriakou recalled. “The Deputy Secretary of State shuttled between Delhi and Islamabad to negotiate a settlement where both sides backed off.”
He added that at the time, the US was deeply preoccupied with Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, leaving India’s security concerns largely ignored.
“We were so busy and focused on Al-Qaeda, we never gave two thoughts to India,” he admitted.
Kiriakou also reflected on later years, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, saying that US intelligence correctly assessed Pakistan-backed Kashmiri terror groups as being responsible.
“I don’t think this was Al-Qaeda,” he said. “I think this was the Pakistani-supported Kashmiri groups, and that turned out to be exactly the case.”
He said the larger issue was Pakistan’s duplicity and the global community’s silence. “Pakistan was committing terrorism in India, and nobody did anything about it,” he said.
At the CIA, Kiriakou said officials even coined a term for New Delhi’s measured approach: “strategic patience.”
“India showed restraint after the Parliament and Mumbai attacks,” he said. “But India has reached a point where it can’t risk strategic patience being mistaken for weakness.”
Kiriakou warned that Pakistan would lose any conventional war with India and urged Islamabad to abandon its confrontational mindset.
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“Nothing, literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose,” he said. “And I’m not talking about nuclear weapons. I’m talking just about a conventional war.”
He noted that Pakistan’s military imbalance with India remains overwhelming. “There’s no benefit in constantly provoking Indians,” he said. “They’ll lose — it’s as simple as that.”
Kiriakou pointed to India’s decisive responses to terrorism in recent years, from the surgical strikes in 2016 to the Balakot airstrikes in 2019, and Operation Sindoor in May this year, launched after the Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 people.
“India has shown again and again it won’t tolerate nuclear blackmail or cross-border terror,” Kiriakou said.
Recounting his experience in Pakistan, Kiriakou described the country’s intelligence apparatus as deeply divided.
“There really were two parallel ISIs,” he said. “One trained by Sandhurst and the FBI — and another made up of people with long beards who created groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed.”
He recalled a 2002 raid in Lahore that exposed the Pakistani government’s links to Al-Qaeda.
“We captured three Lashkar-e-Tayyiba fighters who had with them a copy of the Al-Qaeda training manual,” he said. “It was the first time we could attach the Pakistani government to Al-Qaeda.”
When asked why Washington didn’t act despite such evidence, Kiriakou said, “That was a decision made at the White House. The relationship was bigger than India and Pakistan. We needed the Pakistanis more than they needed us.”
Who is John Kiriakou?
John Kiriakou spent 15 years with the CIA, first as an analyst and later as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11. He tracked Al-Qaeda operatives across Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, and Quetta before becoming executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations.
In 2007, he went public on national television, exposing the CIA’s use of torture during interrogations and confirming that the agency had waterboarded prisoners in its custody. Kiriakou was later imprisoned for 23 months but says he has no regrets and no remorse.
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