Pakistan’s ISI from the inside

[muse]

come on everybody, lets move beyond these meaning "is" is ---

 

[53fd]

We also have to remember the fact that several double agents & informers have in the past infiltrated into the CIA & the R&AW. Even if we choose to overlook this fact for a second, the fact that a high ranking Indian Army official played a significant role in the Samjhota Express bombings show that 'inside jobs' in agencies are not an uncommon phenomena, & are not necessarily a result of mutinous behavior.

 

[muse]

You are reaching now - and not persuasive -- what then is mutinous behavior?


Listen, what's the point of defending something that can't be defended -- Is it more patriotic to let the army self destruct like some twisted teenager OR is it more patriotic to help it reform itself and regain it true role ??


Please remember Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.

 

[53fd]

You are reaching now - and not persuasive -- what then is mutinous behavior?

Listen, what's the point of defending something that can't be defended -- Is it more patriotic to let the army self destruct like some twisted teenager OR is it more patriotic to help it reform itself and regain it true role ??

Please remember Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.

The people (the ex-Navy guy) that were responsible for the PNS Mehran inside job got arrested, the Brigadier who had Hizb-ul-Tahrir links was arrested, & other mutineers have been arrested as well. I call this the cleansing process. The fact is that the Pakistan Armed Forces have not had their moral down fighting the terrorists in FATA, & been supported by the Pakistani people. Things are actually getting better in Pakistan now, the problems you are mentioning were actually a lot more severe 6 months to a 2/3 years ago. I very much doubt the Army will self-destruct, especially when it is claiming victory against the terrorists with the support of the tribal people in Kurram, South Waziristan & Mohmand, & when the morale & the will of the Pakistani soldiers to eliminate the terrorists is high. The morale of the NATO/US Forces in Afghanistan is quite the contrast: it is quite low, & it is quite evident & easily seen.

 

[muse]

Bilal

The self destruct is built in -- one of these things is bound to happen - either Islam will come to be seen as devoid of meaning or the army leadership will be seen as morally bankrupt ---- See, you can't tell Abdul that Jihad is his way and then set him up against jihadis, not without giving Abdul a serious case of dissonance.

All of this can be avoided by reorienting the army -- and you know, whether that's what they will call it or not, if they any brains at all, you know they will do exactly what we are suggesting.

More and more reliance on police and the creation of new units to fight insurgency suggest that we are correct in our suggestion of dissonance

 

[53fd]

Bilal

The self destruct is built in -- one of these things is bound to happen - either Islam will come to be seen as devoid of meaning or the army leadership will be seen as morally bankrupt ---- See, you can't tell Abdul that Jihad is his way and then set him up against jihadis, not without giving Abdul a serious case of dissonance.

All of this can be avoided by reorienting the army -- and you know, whether that's what they will call it or not, if they any brains at all, you know they will do exactly what we are suggesting.

As I see it, the 'Jihadi' support days of the Pakistan Army are over, & they realize that. There is no way Pakistan can get the type of 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan that it did in the 90s, Pakistan has burnt all its bridges there. There is also no chance of the Pakistan Army aiding Kashmiri groups in India either, India itself has admitted that Pakistan's attitude has changed, & I'm hopeful fruitful talks can take place for an amicable solution of the Kashmir issue, as well as all outstanding issues between the two nations.

 

[muse]

I concur entirely - yet another success brought to you by Pakistan army -- got into something that it ran poorly, stupidly, messed about with ideas that it dd not understand and created misery for millions and degradation and shame for the Pakistani nation - It's time for the Pakistan army to be reconstructed as a national army - nothing more.

 

[53fd]

More and more reliance on police and the creation of new units to fight insurgency suggest that we are correct in our suggestion of dissonance

More & more reliance on the newly created units has resulted in a significant decrease of violence all over the country over these past few months, & shows the resolve of the Establishment to tackle the problem head on, which is the elimination of the terrorists & their terrorist networks in the tribal areas.

 

[muse]

More & more reliance on the newly created units has resulted in a significant decrease of violence all over the country over these past few months, & shows the resolve of the Establishment to tackle the problem head on, which is the elimination of the terrorists & their terrorist networks in the tribal areas.

Yes, and it suggests that the army being deployed against Islamists has been "problematic"

 

[53fd]

Yes, and it suggests that the army being deployed against Islamists has been "problematic"

I have not seen any evidence that suggests that. In fact, the collaboration of the Lashkars formed by the tribal people with the Pakistan Army, in conjunction with the US drone strikes, is proving to be quite effective, & not "problematic" as you suggest.

 

[muse]

The evidence is that new units are required - that the Pakistan army cannot handle a bunch of tribals is ridiculous, however, the point is that it is unwilling -- why else would new units and especially the police be required to do the job ?

It will be argued that the army is oriented to the Indian threat -- and of course it will be countered by "there you again", the horrible Hindu threat, the army's not so secret weapon and of course how we need to islamize so that we can keep things to together, much like it worked in Bangla.

Wrong ideas, bad ideas --- a hallmark of the Pakistan army

 

[muse]

And now for something completely different:



Pakistan's ISI from the Inside
By Steve Clemons

The best places to meet the world's most interesting national security and foreign policy personalities are no longer Washington or London or Paris. Rather, highest on the list are Beijing, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha.

Many years ago, I met Lt. General Asad Durrani in Beijing thanks to a conference organized by Australia's Monash University. We have been acquainted and communicating since. I remember arriving late to the conference and rushing in as the brash, younger-than-I-am-now upstart and sitting down at one of the lunch tables of ten. I quickly met everyone and heard that Durrani was a general from Pakistan. That's all I knew.

I asked him quickly not having known that he was essentially Pakistan's Karla, or George Smiley, depending on your perspective, "Do you think President Musharraf really doesn't control the ISI?" Several faces went white at the table. A jaw dropped. Durrani's eyes narrowed and he slowly said, "It may be in General Musharraf's interests to pretend he has little control over the ISI." This is pure Durrani -- layers, meaningful, informed, and no one's flack.

Then I realized looking at bios that he was the former chief of the ISI -- and our accidental bluntness and candor has glued us together since.

Tonight, General Durrani sent me an essay he wrote, with very light editing by me. These are his words, his insights into how Pakistan sees the Taliban and Afghanistan -- as well as its competition with the US in the region.

I have permission to post the entire essay which I am doing. I think that those interested in understanding the other side of the complex and stressed US-Pakistan relationship need to read a bit about the history of the ISI in the words of one of their own.

When I last met General Durrani at a conference organized by Al Jazeera in Doha, he said to me:

Steve, it is very hard for me to overstate to you the enthusiasm for which Pakistan's generals have for the Taliban.


Durrani is not a booster for the Taliban; he is a hard core realist -- and his view is that Pakistan's generals prize the Taliban for its ability to give them "strategic depth". Whether you agree or not, his assessments are very much worth reading in full.

So, the rest from Lt. General and former ISI Chief Assad Durrani:

The ISI: AN EXCEPTIONAL SECRET SERVICE
by Lt. General Asad Durrani

When Smashing Lists, a relatively unknown website, declared Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, the best of its kind, it gladdened my heart but also had me worried.

Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I met an old colleague, a Special Forces officer recently inducted in the ISI. He whispered in my ears: "we have decided to support the Afghan resistance". Understandably. With the "archenemy" India in the East and now not a very friendly Soviet Union on our Western borders, Pakistan had fallen between "nutcrackers".

We therefore had to take our chances to rollback the occupation; but did we have any against a 'superpower', and the only one in the region at that? Soon after the Soviet withdrawal, as the Director General of Military Intelligence, I was assigned to a team constituted to review Pakistan's Afghan Policy. That, followed by a stint in the ISI, provided the answer.

The Afghan tradition of resisting foreign invaders was indeed the sine qua non for this gamble to succeed. American support took two years in coming but when it arrived, US support was one of the decisive factors. The ISI's role -- essentially logistical in that it channelled all aid and helped organise the resistance- turned out to be pivotal. In the process, from a small time player that undertook to punch above its weight, rubbing shoulders with the best in the game, the Americans, catapulted the Agency into the big league. Unsurprisingly, the ISI became a matter of great concern not only for its foes.

Cooperation amongst secret services, even within the country, is not the norm. It took a 9/11 for the US to create a halfway-coordinating mechanism. Between the CIA and the ISI, however, communication and coordination worked out well as long as the Soviets were in Afghanistan. The shared objective -- defeat of the occupation forces -- was one reason; respect for each other's turf, the more important other.

The CIA hardly ever questioned how its Pakistani counterpart dispensed with the resources provided for the Jihad or for that matter how it was conducted. And the ISI never asked if the American providers were over invoicing the ordnance or undermining the Saudi contribution. It did not mean that they trusted each other.

Differences, however, surfaced as soon as the Soviets withdrew. To start with, some of the key ISI operatives were vilified, allegedly for having favored the more radical of the Afghan groups. The charge that the Agency was infested with rogue elements is thus an old one. Twice these vilification campaigns led, under American pressure, to major purges of ISI's rank and file. If these episodes ever led to changes in policy is another matter. In the early 1990s, we in the ISI understood this shift in American attitude as a big-brother's desire to establish hegemony, but more crucially -- now that the Soviet Union after its withdrawal from Afghanistan had ceased to exist -- to cut this upstart service to size.

The CIA was clearly at odds with our declared objective to help the Mujahedeen lead the new dispensation in Kabul, especially if individuals like Hikmatyar were to play an important part in it. And the US was indeed unhappy with Pakistan's efforts to seek Iran's cooperation after the Islamic Republic had made peace with Iraq. But what seemed to have caused the most anguish amongst our American friends were the prospects of an increasingly confident ISI, vain enough to throw spanners in the work of the sole surviving superpower.

These apprehensions were not entirely ill-founded as the Iraq-Kuwait crisis of 1990-91 was soon to show.

Sometimes in 1992, General Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to US Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, reportedly conceded that the ISI's assessment of Saddam's forces was closer to the mark than their own, which highly exaggerated Saddam's capacity. Now, if anyone else in the business too was to broadcast its account every time the CIA "sexed-up" a threat to suit American objectives (next time on Iraq's WMD holding for example), some pre-emption was obviously in order.

Soon thereafter the ISI was cleansed of the old guard, most of them ostensibly for their infatuation with the "Jihadists" in Afghanistan and Kashmir. These purges must have served a few careers but when it came to taking decisions and making policies, the new guard had no choice but to put its shoulder behind the Taliban bandwagon. The Militia was now, like it or not, the only group with a chance to reunify the war torn country; the inviolable and in principle the only condition for Pakistan's support for the "endgame", with no ideological or geo-political caveats.

Initially the Americans and the Saudis too had wooed Mullah Omar, though for a different reason: their interest in a pipeline that was to pass through territories under the Taliban control. If Pakistan should have ceased all support when this militant regime rejected its advice -- on accommodating the Northern Alliance or sparing the Bamyan Statues, for example -- remains a moot point.

After all, post 9/11 the Taliban did agree to our request to extradite Osama bin Laden, albeit to a third country. That was rejected by the US for reasons not for me to second-guess.

The ISI was thereafter subjected to another purge in the hope that the refurbished setup would put its heart and soul behind the new decree: 'chase anyone resisting the American military operations in Afghanistan all the way to hell'. That came to millions on both sides of the Pak-Afghan borders; likely to be around long after the US troops had gone home, with some of them turning their guns inwards as one must have noticed. Under the circumstances, neither the ISI nor other organs of the state had any will to operate against groups primarily primed to fight "foreign occupation". If they also had the right to do so, or how this intrusion was otherwise to be defined, can be discussed ad-infinitum. Pakistan in the meantime has to fight a number of running battles.

So, this time around as well, it is not any "rogue elements" in the ISI but the complexity of the crisis that necessitates selective use of force; essentially against the "rogue groups", some of them undoubtedly planted or supported by forces inimical to our past and present policies. (Thanks to the Wikileaks, we now know a bit more about the "counter-terrorism pursuit teams".)

If our political and military leadership also had the gumption to support the war against the NATO forces -- in the belief that some of the present turmoil in the area would not recede as long as the world's most powerful alliance was still around -- does not seem very likely. If, however, a few rebels in the ISI had in fact undertaken this mission, they may be punching above their weight, once again.

Indeed, the ISI suffers from many ailments, most of them a corollary of its being predominantly a military organisation and of the Army's exceptional role in Pakistani politics. But that is of no great relevance to this piece which is basically about the Agency's role in the so-called "war on terror"; a euphemism for the war raging in the AfPak Region.

Epilogue: I do not know what all the ISI knew about Bin Laden's whereabouts before he was reportedly killed, or when the Pakistani leadership was informed about the US operation on that fateful night. But the fact that we denied all knowledge or cooperation -- even though the military and the police cordons were in place at the time of the raid, our helicopters were hovering over the area, and the Army Chief was in his command post at midnight -- explains the Country's dilemma.

If its leadership was to choose between inability to defend national borders and complicity with the US to hunt down one person who defied the mightiest of the worldly powers, it would rather concede incompetence.

The most important takeaway from this fascinating snapshot of the ISI, the Taliban, and Pakistan's view of America and its strategic choices is that Pakistan will never be a predictable puppet of US interests.

This article available online at:

Pakistan's ISI from the Inside - Steve Clemons - International - The Atlantic

 

[VCheng]

Huh? Back to square one!

Pakistan’s ISI from the inside​

By STEVE CLEMONS

The best places to meet the world’s most interesting national security and foreign policy personalities are no longer Washington or London or Paris. Rather, highest on the list are Beijing, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha.

Many years ago, I met Lt General Asad Durrani in Beijing thanks to a conference organised by Australia’s Monash University. We have been acquainted and communicating since. I remember arriving late to the conference and rushing in as the brash, younger-than-I-am-now upstart and sitting down at one of the lunch tables of ten. I quickly met everyone and heard that Durrani was a general from Pakistan. That’s all I knew. I asked him quickly, “Do you think President Musharraf really doesn’t control the ISI?” Several faces went white at the table. A jaw dropped. Durrani’s eyes narrowed and he slowly said, “It may be in General Musharraf’s interests to pretend he has little control over the ISI.” This is pure Durrani - layers, meaningful, informed, and no one’s flack.

Then I realised looking at bios that he was the former chief of the ISI - and our accidental bluntness and candour has glued us together since.
On Sunday night, General Durrani sent me an essay he wrote, with very light editing by me. These are his words, his insights into how Pakistan sees the Taliban and Afghanistan - as well as its competition with the US in the region.

I have permission to post the entire essay which I am doing. I think that those interested in understanding the other side of the complex and stressed US-Pakistan relationship need to read a bit about the history of the ISI in the words of one of their own.

When I last met General Durrani at a conference organised by Al Jazeera in Doha, he said to me:

Steve, it is very hard for me to overstate to you the enthusiasm for which Pakistan’s generals have for the Taliban.

Durrani is not a booster for the Taliban; he is a hard core realist - and his view is that Pakistan’s generals prize the Taliban for its ability to give them “strategic depth”. Whether you agree or not, his assessments are very much worth reading in full.

So, the rest from Lt. General and former ISI Chief Assad Durrani:

The ISI: AN EXCEPTIONAL SECRET SERVICE

By Lt. General Asad Durrani

When Smashing Lists, a relatively unknown website, declared Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, the best of its kind, it gladdened my heart but also had me worried.

Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I met an old colleague, a Special Forces officer recently inducted in the ISI. He whispered in my ears: “we have decided to support the Afghan resistance”.

Understandably. With the “archenemy” India in the East and now not a very friendly Soviet Union on our Western borders, Pakistan had fallen between “nutcrackers”.

We therefore had to take our chances to rollback the occupation; but did we have any against a ‘superpower’, and the only one in the region at that? Soon after the Soviet withdrawal, as the Director General of Military Intelligence, I was assigned to a team constituted to review Pakistan’s Afghan Policy. That, followed by a stint in the ISI, provided the answer.

The Afghan tradition of resisting foreign invaders was indeed the sine qua non for this gamble to succeed. American support took two years in coming but when it arrived, US support was one of the decisive factors. The ISI’s role - essentially logistical in that it channelled all aid and helped organise the resistance - turned out to be pivotal. In the process, from a small time player that undertook to punch above its weight, rubbing shoulders with the best in the game, the Americans, catapulted the Agency into the big league. Unsurprisingly, the ISI became a matter of great concern not only for its foes.

Cooperation amongst secret services, even within the country, is not the norm. It took a 9/11 for the US to create a halfway-coordinating mechanism. Between the CIA and the ISI, however, communication and coordination worked out well as long as the Soviets were in Afghanistan. The shared objective - defeat of the occupation forces - was one reason; respect for each other’s turf, the more important other.

The CIA hardly ever questioned how its Pakistani counterpart dispensed with the resources provided for the Jihad or for that matter how it was conducted. And the ISI never asked if the American providers were over invoicing the ordnance or undermining the Saudi contribution. It did not mean that they trusted each other.

Differences, however, surfaced as soon as the Soviets withdrew. To start with, some of the key ISI operatives were vilified, allegedly for having favoured the more radical of the Afghan groups. The charge that the Agency was infested with rogue elements is thus an old one. Twice these vilification campaigns led, under American pressure, to major purges of ISI’s rank and file. If these episodes ever led to changes in policy is another matter. In the early 1990s, we in the ISI understood this shift in American attitude as a big-brother’s desire to establish hegemony, but more crucially - now that the Soviet Union after its withdrawal from Afghanistan had ceased to exist - to cut this upstart service to size.

The CIA was clearly at odds with our declared objective to help the Mujahedeen lead the new dispensation in Kabul, especially if individuals like Hikmatyar were to play an important part in it. And the US was indeed unhappy with Pakistan’s efforts to seek Iran’s cooperation after the Islamic Republic had made peace with Iraq. But what seemed to have caused the most anguish amongst our American friends were the prospects of an increasingly confident ISI, vain enough to throw spanners in the work of the sole surviving superpower. These apprehensions were not entirely ill-founded as the Iraq-Kuwait crisis of 1990-91 was soon to show.

Sometimes in 1992, General Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to US Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, reportedly conceded that the ISI’s assessment of Saddam’s forces was closer to the mark than their own, which highly exaggerated Saddam’s capacity. Now, if anyone else in the business too was to broadcast its account every time the CIA “sexed-up” a threat to suit American objectives (next time on Iraq’s WMD holding for example), some pre-emption was obviously in order.

Soon thereafter the ISI was cleansed of the old guard, most of them ostensibly for their infatuation with the “Jihadists” in Afghanistan and Kashmir. These purges must have served a few careers but when it came to taking decisions and making policies, the new guard had no choice but to put its shoulder behind the Taliban bandwagon. The Militia was now, like it or not, the only group with a chance to reunify the war torn country; the inviolable and in principle the only condition for Pakistan’s support for the “endgame”, with no ideological or geo-political caveats.

Initially the Americans and the Saudis too had wooed Mullah Omar, though for a different reason: their interest in a pipeline that was to pass through territories under the Taliban control. If Pakistan should have ceased all support when this militant regime rejected its advice - on accommodating the Northern Alliance or sparing the Bamyan Statues, for example - remains a moot point. After all, post 9/11 the Taliban did agree to our request to extradite Osama bin Laden, albeit to a third country. That was rejected by the US for reasons not for me to second-guess.

The ISI was thereafter subjected to another purge in the hope that the refurbished setup would put its heart and soul behind the new decree: ‘chase anyone resisting the American military operations in Afghanistan all the way to hell’. That came to millions on both sides of the Pak-Afghan borders; likely to be around long after the US troops had gone home, with some of them turning their guns inwards as one must have noticed. Under the circumstances, neither the ISI nor other organs of the state had any will to operate against groups primarily primed to fight “foreign occupation”. If they also had the right to do so, or how this intrusion was otherwise to be defined, can be discussed ad-infinitum. Pakistan in the meantime has to fight a number of running battles.

So, this time around as well, it is not any “rogue elements” in the ISI but the complexity of the crisis that necessitates selective use of force; essentially against the “rogue groups”, some of them undoubtedly planted or supported by forces inimical to our past and present policies. (Thanks to the Wikileaks, we now know a bit more about the “counter-terrorism pursuit teams”.)

If our political and military leadership also had the gumption to support the war against the Nato forces - in the belief that some of the present turmoil in the area would not recede as long as the world’s most powerful alliance was still around - does not seem very likely.

Indeed, the ISI suffers from many ailments, most of them a corollary of its being predominantly a military organisation and of the Army’s exceptional role in Pakistani politics. But that is of no great relevance to this piece which is basically about the Agency’s role in the so-called “war on terror”; a euphemism for the war raging in the AfPak Region.

The most important takeaway from this fascinating snapshot of the ISI, the Taliban, and Pakistan’s view of America and its strategic choices is that Pakistan will never be a predictable puppet of US interests. –The Atlantic

Pakistan’s ISI from the inside | Pakistan | News | Newspaper | Daily | English | Online

 

[VCheng]

Thank you for explaining what conjecture means, I had no idea what it meant, & I don't know how to use google either .

Again, as you so aptly put, conjecture relates to possibilities or something capable of developing into reality; it isn't reality or fact at the present moment. Keep talking about possibilities, you're good at it, & I'll talk about the possibilities about how the world will end on December 31, 2011.

Definitions are important so that there are no misunderstandings. Who is this Googlie you speak of? Is he Billu's or Bablu's cousin?

BTW, the world is supposed to end in 2012, not 2011. You really should work on getting your "facts" right!

 

[mughaljee]

Problem with people is, especially western ones, they tend not to or don't want to see the reality.

Things in this part of the world are not in black &white, there are lot of factors involved with extreme complications in them.

And above all, we can't trust the Americans.

Very rightly said sir,