Not only on Wall Street are those who made the mistakes tasked with cleaning them up

It was lost on no one during a recent crunch of Afpak meetings in the Situation Room that as the No. 2 at the C.I.A. in the late 1980s, Mr. Gates helped funnel covert Reagan administration aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Islamic fundamentalists who ousted the Russians from Afghanistan.

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