A revolving CIA door in Pakistan
By Amir Mir
ISLAMABAD - The ever-growing mistrust between the military and intelligence establishments of the two key allies in the "war on terror" - Washington and Islamabad - has widened to such an extent in recent months that their damaged ties are unlikely to reach the same level at which they were prior to the American military raid in Abbottabad on May 2 that killed the most wanted al-Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden.
As Pakistan-United States military and intelligence ties continue to deteriorate following the January arrest of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor Raymond Davis for having killed two Pakistanis, Mark Carlton, the station chief of the CIA in Islamabad who oversaw the intelligence team that found the al-Qaeda chief, has been made to leave Pakistan prematurely.
This is allegedly under the pressure of the country's all-powerful
military and intelligence establishment that has been stung by the embarrassment and humiliation of the Abbottabad fiasco. It is the second time since January that the CIA's top-most officer has been compelled to leave Pakistan ahead of time due to the ongoing spy war between the CIA and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The station chief - one of the CIA's most important positions in the world - had been posted to Pakistan only in February. His unceremonious exit shows that the ISI and the CIA are still far from recovering the tense relationship they had last year when the previous station chief also had to leave due to "unavoidable circumstances".
The CIA declined to comment on the matter. "The chief of the Islamabad station is a respected, senior officer who had the full faith and confidence of folks back in Washington," a senior US official told Agence France-Presse on July 30 on condition of anonymity. "Most people will agree the officer's role in one of the greatest intelligence victories of all time (Bin Laden's killing] means this person was pretty darn effective, no matter what the Pakistanis may think."
However, well-informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad say Carlton had to leave after it transpired in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid that he had been running a clandestine network of American and Pakistani intelligence agents without the knowledge of the ISI.
They claimed that the CIA chief had an extremely contentious relationship with his ISI counterparts, as had been the case with the previous station chief, Jonathan Banks, who was made to leave the federal capital after his security cover was blown and his identity revealed. This was allegedly done by the Pakistani intelligence establishment as a reaction to the summoning of the ISI chief by a US federal court to defend his alleged involvement in the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, allegedly carried out by the Pakistani outfit, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
A US federal court issued a summons to sitting and former director generals of the ISI, as well as a number of senior office bearers of the LeT for their alleged involvement in the Mumbai attacks, asking them to appear before it. The court was hearing a law suit filed by relatives of Gavriel Noah Holtzberg, an American Jew who was killed along with his wife during the attacks. The petitioners alleged that the ISI had a role in the incident that killed their loved ones.
The development deeply upset the Pakistani military establishment, causing strains in the already shaky CIA-ISI ties.
On December 16, 2010, almost a month after the issuance of the summons for the ISI chief and others, Islamabad police moved to register a murder case against Banks who was reportedly supervising the deadly drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The complainant in the case was Kareem Khan, a journalist and resident of the Mirali area in the North Waziristan tribal agency. He claimed that his son and brother were innocent civilians who were killed in a December 31, 2009, US drone attack. Banks was charged in the case with providing operational guidance for the strike.
Khan's application to register the case against the CIA chief stated: "Jonathan Banks is operating from the American Embassy in Islamabad, which is a clear violation of diplomatic norms and laws, as a foreign mission cannot be used for any criminal activity in a sovereign state."
Khan also alleged that Banks was in the country on a business visa, which would give him no diplomatic status and thus not protect him from prosecution. Few legal experts expected the case to succeed, but the lawsuit blew Banks' cover and led to threats against his life.
That was the first time since the American drone campaign was launched in the tribal areas in 2004 that any victim of a missile strike had sought legal action against a CIA official.
The Barack Obama administration subsequently decided to withdraw Banks from Islamabad, citing security threats following the lodging of Khan's complaint against him. But diplomatic circles in the federal capital were of the view that the case against the CIA station chief could not have been lodged without the consent of the Pakistani military establishment, whose mood had changing ever since the ISI chief was summoned by a US court.
Therefore, the filing of the case against Banks was largely seen as a tit-for-tat move, in a bizarre battle of one-upmanship between the ISI and the CIA. Quoting intelligence sources, the US media subsequently alleged that the ISI was involved in blowing the cover of the CIA station chief, especially at a time when Washington was pushing Islamabad to expand a new CIA effort to help target al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on the trouble-stricken Pakistan-Afghanistan border belt.
Before being made to leave, Pakistani authorities blew, in a subtle way, the security cover of Carlton, despite the fact that it was a breach of both protocol and trust. His identity was revealed through a press release to Pakistan's print and electronic media (a few days after the May 2 raid to kill Bin Laden), stating, "The ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had met CIA station chief Mark Carlton in Islamabad to protest the American incursion into Abbottabad. The exposure of his identity might have been another reason for Mark Carlton's premature exit from Islamabad because the CIA station chiefs always remain anonymous and unnamed in public although the host government is told."
The departure of two station chiefs in a short span of six months clearly threatens to upset a vital intelligence office that is supposed to play a key role in the region to ensure the success of the US-led "war on terror".
The CIA and the ISI, two long-time partners since the days of the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, have never had a trouble-free relationship since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US and Pakistan's subsequent decision to join hands with the US in the "war on terror".
Ties have long been rocked by apprehensions over the Pakistani intelligence establishment's alleged backing of jihadi groups active in India and Afghanistan. The CIA alleges that many of these terrorist groups are linked to anti-US elements, especially al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Therefore, while key American government officials admit during their visits to Pakistan that Islamabad has helped Washington kill and seize dozens of the most wanted al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, they adopt a totally different stance back home - often accusing the ISI of having double standards while dealing with al-Qaeda and the Taliban-linked militants who are operating from the AfPak tribal belt. The fact that Bin Laden had been hiding in an army town close to the federal capital only reinforced suspicions in Washington that Pakistan was an unreliable partner in the fight against al-Qaeda.
At the same time, however, their wobbly ties hit an all-time low following the unilateral US raid in Abbottabad, mainly because it was conducted without the knowledge of Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, and that too by secretly recruiting Pakistani agents to help find Bin Laden.
As Pakistan's all-powerful military establishment and the civilian leadership reacted strongly to the covert US operation that had breached Pakistan's territorial sovereignty, the Obama administration decided to withhold $800 million US military assistance to Pakistan. Reacting angrily, the Pakistani military establishment launched a counter-offensive by asking Washington to reduce the number of US troops in the country besides closing all three military intelligence liaison centers in Pakistan.
American special operations units had relied on these three facilities, two in Peshawar and one in Quetta, to help coordinate anti-al-Qaeda and anti-Taliban operations on both sides of the AfPak border. These units have now been withdrawn the centers are being shut down.
The two intelligence centers in Peshawar were set up in 2009, one with the Pakistani army's 11th Corps and the other with the paramilitary Frontier Corps, which are both headquartered in Peshawar city, capital of troubled Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa province. The third fusion cell was opened in 2011 at the Pakistani army's 12th Corps headquarters in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province that is allegedly being used by Taliban fighters to carry out cross-border ambushes in the southern provinces of Afghanistan.
The closures have effectively stopped the American training of the Pakistani Frontier Corps; a force that Washington had hoped could help halt infiltration of al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants into Afghanistan.
On June 10 the United States officially confirmed having withdrawn troops from Pakistan after it was asked to reduce the number because of the growing tensions over the Bin Laden episode. Vice Admiral Michael LeFever, US defense representative in Pakistan, said the decision to pull out troops had been taken after a request from Islamabad. "We recently received a written request from the government of Pakistan to reduce the number of US military personnel here, and we have nearly completed that reduction," said LeFever.
As if the closure of the American intelligence centers and the withdrawal of the US troops were not enough to tease Washington, the Pakistani establishment further decided to impose travel restrictions on US diplomats based in Pakistan.
Although the Foreign Office had notified all diplomatic missions, including the US, in June that diplomats would require a no-objection certificate (NoC) while traveling to other parts of Pakistan, things came to a head when the US ambassador, Cameron Munter, was stopped at Benazir Bhutto Airport in Islamabad on July 30 and asked to furnish the document permitting his travel to the southern port city of Karachi. Cameron Munter, who in fact possessed the document, took strong exception to having been asked and strongly protested to the Pakistan government.
In one case, US officials were stopped at a toll booth and a group of Pakistani journalists was waiting for them to arrive. In another case, CIA officials were stopped at a check point in Peshawar and held long enough for the media to show up and take their pictures while producing their travel NoCs.
The Americans see the NoC requirement as a violation of Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR), which obligates the host state to "ensure to all members of the mission freedom of movement and travel in its territory".
But Pakistani officials contest the US Embassy's view, saying that under the VCDR, movement can be regulated for national security purposes. The Foreign Office in a rejoinder to the US claim said, "Pakistan is fully mindful of its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations." The statement denied that the curbs were US specific and insisted that the requirement was for the security of the diplomats.
However, the Pakistani media subsequently quoted an anonymous official in the country's security establishment as saying that the travel restrictions on diplomats were enforced because of the travel of undercover US intelligence agents, who have been assigned to Pakistan as diplomats.
"No sovereign state can allow spies of another country to operate within its boundary on their own, irrespective of their mutual relations," the official added. Even though, the official did not explicitly say the checks were meant to counter the movement of the CIA officials, it wasn't difficult to judge from his statement that he was referring to CIA sleuths, who are still believed to be operating in Pakistan on their own while ignoring the revised terms of engagement between the ISI and the CIA.
The breakdown of Pakistan-US military and intelligence ties is more worrisome for the US, which is anxious to reach a settlement in Afghanistan before withdrawing US-led forces from the war-stricken country. US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen stated on July 25 that Pakistan-US military-to-military ties were at a "very difficult" crossroads, and that a path to progress on that front was not yet clear.
Mullen said at a press briefing in Washington: "We are in a very difficult time right now in our military-to-military relations. Despite the strain, I don't think that we are close to severing those ties. I hope the two nations would soon find a way to recalibrate those ties. But still, we need to work through the details of how this recalibration is going to happen."
Almost a week after Mullen's statement, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari underlined the need for clear terms of engagement that should be agreed on beforehand between Pakistan and the US in the "war on terror" so that conflicting positions and unilateral actions do not affect bilateral relations.
During his meeting with Marc Grossman, the US special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, who called on him at the presidency, Zardari said that in the absence of well-defined and documented terms of engagement, wrong plugs might be pulled at the wrong times by any side that could undermine bilateral ties.
The president said that the terms of Pakistan-US military and intelligence engagements should be clearly defined and specified so that disputes could be settled amicably through available institutions.
Nevertheless, many in Pakistan believe that even after terms of engagement are agreed, it would be hard for those sitting in general headquarters in Rawalpindi and the Pentagon to regain the lost buoyancy.
Amir Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist and the author of several books on the subject of militant Islam and terrorism, the latest being The Bhutto murder trail: From Waziristan to GHQ.
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