South Asia: On the high ground - F/T

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Memories in the US embassy in Islamabad are long and unhappy. Its officers shiver when they recall accounts of their mission being stormed and burnt to the ground in 1979. A mischievous radio report out of Iran that the US had attacked the holy city of Mecca triggered the assault by radical arsonists. The terrified diplomats survived only by locking themselves into the safe room.

This year, the arrest in Lahore of Raymond Davis, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and a former special forces soldier, has stoked up the old fears amid a welter of anti-American protests. It has also laid bare the divisions between the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart: the Directorate General of Inter-Services Intelligence.

The two organisations, which found common cause in the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s and later in rounding up al-Qaeda suspects after the 2001 terror attacks on the US, appear increasingly at odds in the fight against Islamist extremism.

The ISI is the “deep state” in Pakistan that has resisted civilian control and has forged long-standing alliances with militant groups. It operates with menace and near-impunity. Yet its co-operation with western intelligence agencies is viewed as crucial to bringing greater stability to the region, an end to the Afghan war and a better understanding of global terror.

Lionised by some in Pakistan as the country’s security backbone, the ISI is loathed by Pakistan’s neighbours, who see it as the inspiration behind militant attacks on India, Afghanistan and possibly further afield.

Founded shortly after the 1947 establishment of Pakistan, the intelligence agency has a presence throughout society, monitoring developments from high command and immigration to lowly informants watching the lobbies of the country’s hotels. Often described as a “state within a state”, the common perception is that almost nothing happens without its say-so.

Talaat Masood, an Islamabad-based security analyst, describes the ISI as “dominating the scene” to ensure Pakistan is a “security state”.

The organisation, which falls under the control of General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the army, has a domestic and international remit that over the decades has helped the military to tighten its grip on the country. It played a role in training and supporting militants in Afghanistan, during the Soviet occupation, and insurgents in Kashmir. Military rule during much of Pakistan’s short history encouraged its political wing to expand its role deeply into domestic affairs to secure the co-operation of leading politicians.

“The ISI in the eyes of the ordinary Pakistani is a very powerful entity. India’s repeated reference to the ISI’s role in this or that has created an image of an agency which has a dominating presence across Pakistan,” says Ghazi Salahuddin, a commentator for The News, a Pakistani daily.

The January incident, in which Washington accepts Mr Davis shot dead two Pakistani gunmen, has fanned lurid suspicions that Pakistan is peppered with American spies doing the “devil’s work”. US officials insist that Mr Davis was no more than a CIA contractor providing security for local staff and visiting dignitaries. But in spite of Washington’s denials, stories put about by retired senior Pakistani military staff say that he was a super-spy controlling as many as 3,000 CIA operatives.

AFGHANISTAN INVOLVEMENT

An operation driven by the droctrine of ‘strategic depth’ against India

If one man embodied the intricacies of Pakistan’s spy game in Afghanistan, he was the late Brigadier Sultan Amir Tarar – the “godfather of the Taliban”.

Best known by his nom de guerre of Colonel Imam, Tarar starred in a covert campaign by the Inter-Services Intelligence to propel Afghanistan’s Taliban to power in the mid-1990s.

In more recent years, he became an emblem of the ambiguities of the ISI’s relationship with militants. Western intelligence agencies suspected him of serving in a network of retired spies who helped the ISI to continue supporting the Taliban while maintaining a veneer of deniability.

Tarar struck up friendships with a generation of Afghan fighters while running CIA-funded training camps for mujahedin rebels battling the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He went on to funnel ISI cash and weapons to the Taliban as they marched on Kabul in 1996. He was particularly close to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement’s leader, who played host to Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda.

The arrival of US troops in 2001 should have marked the start of a quiet retirement for Tarar, as Pakistan’s military insisted it had cut its protégés loose. Instead, diplomats believe Pakistan played a double game by accepting US military aid while continuing to back Afghan militants.

Bearded and known for his paratrooper jacket – a souvenir of younger days spent training in the US – Tarar denied helping the Taliban. But he cheered their successes. Pakistan’s military is also close to the Haqqani network, a potent strands of the Afghan insurgency, and has resisted US pressure to dismantle its bases in Pakistan’s border province of North Waziristan.

The ISI’s romance with Afghan militants is rooted in its fixation with India. Under Pakistan’s doctrine of “strategic depth”, it sought to prevent New Delhi gaining influence in Afghanistan by sponsoring the Taliban as a proxy to run Kabul.

Ann Patterson, until last year US ambassador to Pakistan, warned in 2009 that US aid would not convince the Pakistani army to stop backing militants as long as it felt threatened by India, according to a diplomatic cable. But the scope of the support is contested. Some in Afghanistan believe the ISI plays a central role in arming and directing the Taliban. Yet Pakistani experts tend to believe the relationship has been increasingly complicated by mistrust on all sides.

ISI agents arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s military commander, in collaboration with the CIA last year, implying at least a degree of dissonance. Some say the ISI has recognised the futility of trying to run Afghanistan by remote control and would instead prefer to broker an eventual peace deal that would brake Indian influence. Pakistani officials say relations with the government of Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, have warmed in the past year.

The emergence of a new generation of militants has meanwhile blurred the line between “good” Afghan Taliban fighters and “bad” Pakistani insurgents battling the state. But that is a lesson Col Imam appears to have learnt too late. He was abducted in North Waziristan last spring. Last month, Pakistani television aired clips of a video that showed him evidently being shot dead by members of Pakistan’s Taliban, whose Afghan cousins he had once mentored. Matthew Green
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Two years ago, fuelling a similar bout of fearfulness, local newspapers reported that Blackwater, a US security company, was snapping up Islamabad properties to house a massive influx of foreign security personnel.

“The public perception is that Pakistan faces increasing security challenges from the US, possibly with the help of some Afghans and Indians,” says Moinuddin Haider, a former interior minister. “In this situation, it is possible the ISI may have become more important” as a defence against the US.

Washington argues that Mr Davis has diplomatic immunity and wants his swift release. But Pakistan’s security establishment – smarting that the CIA has been operating beyond its control on home turf – is seeking to extract the maximum price from its ally before Mr Davis is freed.

The CIA insists that it works closely with its Pakistani counterparts “on a wide range of security challenges, including our common fight against al-Qaeda and its terrorist allies”. George Little, a CIA official, adds: “The agency’s ties to ISI have been strong over the years, and when there are issues to sort out, we work through them. That’s the sign of a healthy partnership.”

Indeed, Pakistan continues to give its permission for the CIA to launch and carry out drone strikes against targets in western Pakistan. But the strategic importance of that push also means that the US depends on Islamabad – and its spies – as never before. Gen Kayani, himself a former head of the ISI, knows that the spy drama surrounding Mr Davis will pay dividends at home and abroad. The fact that high-level talks needed to be held last weekend over Mr Davis’s fate – involving Leon Panetta, the CIA chief, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, his ISI counterpart – shows the gap that has opened up on the ground between the intelligence services.

For Pakistan, the high-profile embarrassment for the CIA is a power play to bring the ISI on to more equal terms with its American partner, and forms part of a familiar pattern to extract support from Washington.

Within India’s security establishment, some say that the recent friction is no surprise. The ISI has grown much closer to Chinese intelligence in recent years, they say, as ties with the US grow more distant. India suspects an ISI role in the 2008 bombing of its Kabul embassy, when 41 people were killed, and a role in the planning of the devastating attacks on Mumbai that November. Islamabad denies involvement in either incident.

Pakistani intelligence has also not hesitated to use repression on its own people, particularly in the restive south-western province of Baluchistan, where human rights groups say the force has been involved in years of torture and extra-judicial killings. In the past four months alone, at least 90 activists, teachers, journalists and lawyers have disappeared or been murdered in Baluchistan, according to Amnesty International. “Human rights abuses attributed to the security agencies have created a climate of fear for the families of the disappeared,” says Sam Zarifi, Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific director. “They are terrified to speak out in fear that security agents will kill their loved ones or abduct other family members.”

So long a shadow does the ISI cast that civilian leaders talk about it in hushed, foreboding tones. Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the recently axed foreign minister and a politician close to the military, once described it as “a precious national institution”. Asif Ali Zardari, the president, once used the analogy of heavy earrings to describe the burden Pakistan carried with its support for militants. Explicit references to the ISI at home are rare; journalists fear reprisals if they discuss its activities.


T he agency was the invention of Major General R. Cawthome, a British army officer who served in Pakistan and became the ISI’s second director. Its early years were accompanied by frequent criticism for failures surrounding Pakistan’s wars with India. Even today, the army has yet to come to terms with the intelligence failure surrounding India’s shock military intervention in 1971 in the former East Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh.

“After that humiliating military defeat, which also led to more than 90,000 Pakistanis prisoners of war being taken by India, Pakistan’s military establishment decided ‘never, never again’,” says one former Pakistani general. “To this day, the military’s thinking and that of the ISI is driven by 1971.”

The agency’s fortunes improved when, under military rule, it began to monitor Pakistan’s political scene. But its heyday – and international links – came at the end of the cold war, when it backed militant groups in the US-backed bid to force Russian troops from Afghanistan. “The ISI’s clout grew during the Afghan war. Through close collaboration with foreign militaries and foreign intelligence agencies, the ISI became extremely powerful. The ISI’s clout remains intact,” says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military and security scholar.

In the 1990s, though a succession of civilian governments came to rule over Pakistan, the ISI under a succession of serving military lieutenant generals who served as its director general emerged as the country’s pre-eminent kingmaker.

Although officials say the agency has now relinquished any formal role in politics, analysts say the ISI remains a key determinant of Pakistan’s security and foreign policy interests. “The ISI has split politicians and political parties through its past activities. Its work has weakened political parties and exposed them in all sorts of ways,” says Mr Rizvi.

At the organisation’s headquarters in Aapbara in Islamabad, senior officials like to cast the ISI as an intelligence service like any other. Hamid Gul, a former head of the ISI who in the 1980s oversaw its work as a conduit for mujahedin and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, sees the agency as a vital part of Pakistan’s defence, particularly against arch-rival India. “The ISI is Pakistan’s first line of defence which is dedicated to warding off threats to our country. Given our surroundings, it is important to note, the smaller the country, the more important will be the role of its intelligence network,” he says.

Other high-ranking officials boast of the ISI’s links with powers ranging from the US and UK to China and Saudi Arabia. They view their agency as highly effective in having corralled al-Qaeda militants even as it continued to back other Islamist groups. In spite of official denials, diplomats suspect the ISI has continued to support Afghanistan’s Taliban movement as it fights Nato troops.

“In the past decade, we have collaborated with 50 intelligence agencies from all over the world, which is more than the support any other agency anywhere has offered,” says one official. “We have aided in the arrest of more than 700 al-Qaeda militants including prominent ones like Khaled Sheikh Mohammed [planner of the attacks on the US]. We have also led the arrests of more than 600 Taliban militants. Is there any other agency which has been similarly successful?”


Right at the top of the ISI’s current task list is to find out more about Mr Davis. One ISI official says the agency wants to retain its relationship with the CIA but as “equal partners”, adding: “Don’t make us look like fools in the eyes of our people. Help us fight this war rather than go behind our backs.”

Another official explains that popular opinion, sometimes radical, is becoming more and more important for the agency: “Public opinion does matter a lot more. Given the adverse publicity surrounding the Raymond Davis case, the ISI wants to make certain that such an episode is never repeated.”

To many, the ISI’s role has shifted from counter-intelligence or counter-espionage to troublemaking in the region and maintaining links to militant outfits, such as Lashkar e-Taiba and the Haqqani network in Afghanistan, which now operate with a degree of autonomy. Yet some western diplomats, impressed by the direct style of Gen Pasha, like to give the ISI the benefit of the doubt. They view the flurry of contacts that take place between the ISI and militant groups not so much as collaboration but an attempt at regaining tighter control. “People know well that the game in town is with the army and the ISI. That’s why, it’s important to get those people on board,” says one. “The ISI may be part of the problem but it could be part of the solution too.”

Whatever happens to Mr Davis, the public controversy surrounding a usually highly discreet business has already confirmed, in the words of Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the US Senate intelligence committee, that the partnership is not where it was at the end of the cold war and is now “something less than whole-hearted”.

The ISI prefers the head over the heart. “Even though the Americans may have the finest intelligence and large numbers of people in Pakistan, they appear to be clueless,” says Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani diplomat. “The Americans can simply not succeed without a partnership with the ISI.”