There's an old article in Dawn that seems to indicate that Charlie Wilson, a former Congressman from Texas whose major client was Israeli defense contractors, who had been heavily involved in aiding Pakistan and the Mujahadeen, succeeded Abramoff:
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/pak_strategic/pak_lobby.htmlDAWN - Features; 10 January, 1998
Shaheen Sehbai
VERY FEW eyebrows have been raised or questions asked about the main Washington lobbyist for Israeli arms industries who was hired by Islamabad last year as the main lobbyist for Pakistan but all hell is ready to break out if attempts by some influential Pakistani-Americans to replace him with an Indian Government lobbyist are even considered by Islamabad.
The Israeli lobbyist, working for Israeli Military Industries Ltd., is none other than Pakistan's beloved and darling Democrat from Texas, Charlie Wilson, who retired from Congress last year and then waited for a year to begin his lobbying job for Israel and Pakistan in October, despite some high-profile strong-arm efforts by some Pakistani-Americans to push him aside and themselves takeover the job, lucrative both politically and financially.
Charlie's Israeli connection was revealed recently but another of his key connections that went unnoticed was his prized client-lobbyist relationship with Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giant and maker of F-16 aircraft against which Pakistan has claims of over $650 million dollars for not delivering the purchased planes or returning the money.
That may possibly explain why Islamabad and its representatives in Washington were eager to hire Charlie as their man on the Hill, as in one move they would be able to secure both their past and their future.
The past could be guarded by having their own paid man entrenched deep in the enemy camp once the F-16 issue goes for the marathon court battles after Pakistan sues Lockheed and the US. Future security could be ensured by keeping the channels to the Israelis open for any future military and weapons trade, once the politics of the Middle East was out of their bilateral relations. And Charlie fitted the mould perfectly.
But Charlie is not having a smooth ride, despite his credentials. In the hurly burly of the grand judiciary-executive super thriller in Islamabad late last year, a small Washington crowd was quietly playing its game to oust Charlie and replace him with, believe it or not, a lobbying firm which works for India. This crowd did not get the attention it needed because of the turmoil of Titanic proportions sweeping Islamabad.
This set of well-placed Pakistanis in the US had taken with them a gentleman called Terry McAuliffe whose firm was given the Indian lobbying contract by Ambassador Ray in Washington in 1994.
TM, as he is called, is the guy who was high up in the Clinton- Gore presidential campaign of 1992, specially on the fund-raising side and many Pakistani supporters of Clinton had made their way to the White House through TM, one of them also getting the symbolic privilege of flying with the President on Air Force One from Washington to Chicago.
TM and his Pakistani-American sponsors were actually being hosted in Islamabad by Gen Zia's son Ejaz-ul-Haq who, it is well known here, was returning the compliment of the "Chicago Group", the name given to a host of rich Pakistani activists from that Illinois city who believe nothing in Pakistan-US relations moves without their consent and if Nawaz Sharif came to the US or Clinton would be visiting Pakistan, it is they who deserve the credit.
Here's a snip about Wilson's exploits described in the book, "Charlie Wilson's War":
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871138549/104-2615905-1675934?v=glance&n=283155Wilson, a six-feet-four-inch Texas congressman,liberal on social issues but rabidly anti-Communist, a boozer, engaged in serial affairs and wheeler-dealer of consummate skill. Only slightly less improbable is Gust Avrakotos, a blue-collar Greek immigrant who joined the CIA when it was an Ivy League preserve and fought his elitist colleagues almost as ruthlessly as he fought the Soviet Union in the Cold War's waning years. In conjunction with President Zia of Pakistan in the 1980s, Wilson and Arvakotos circumvented most of the barriers to arming the Afghan mujahideen-distance, money, law and internal CIA politics, to name a few. Their coups included getting Israeli-modified Chinese weapons smuggled into Afghanistan, with the Pakistanis turning a blind eye,and the cultivation of a genius-level weapons designer and strategist named Michael Vickers, a key architect of the guerrilla campaign that left the Soviet army stymied. The ultimate weapon in Afghanistan was the portable Stinger anti-aircraft missile, which eliminated the Soviet's Mi-24 helicopter gunships and began the train of events leading to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites. A triumph of ruthless ability over scruples, this story has dominated recent history in the form of blowback: many of the men armed by the CIA became the Taliban's murderous enforcers and Osama bin Laden's protectors.
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Alliance with Gus Avrakotos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wilson_(politician)
An argument can be made that, in terms of the Cold War struggle to neutralize and weaken the Soviet Union, the most important recruitment in the CIA’s 30-year career was made that April 1984 by Gust Avrakotos when he enlisted Charlie Wilson, during an unannounced and unauthorized visit to the Congressman’s office
From that moment on, the terms of engagement for the CIA's war with the Red Army began to shift. Avrakotos had made a recruitment of sorts. This was the opening shot in what was going to become a Wilson-Avrakotos conspiracy, one that would very shortly succeed in neutralizing the traditional checks and balances that had been so carefully put in place to guide and restrain U.S. covert warfare. Wilson didn't yet know it but he had just found the true rogue elephant in the CIA.
Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were America's surrogate soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet Union's Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the Communist empire. Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and won without debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not just the CIA's biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in history. In the course of a decade, billions of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of weapons were smuggled across the border on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys. At one point over 300,000 fundamentalist \Afghan warriors carried weapons provided by the CIA; thousands were trained in the art of urban terror. Before it was over, some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.
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P.S. - Gus Avrakotos died on December 5, 2005 at age 67.
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