For a covert spy agency, Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence has been attracting a lot of attention. It's been rebuked by the U.S. government for failing to curb terrorism, accused in The New York Times of involvement in an international bombing, and targeted by the government it's supposed to serve — first for increased oversight, and now for a purge of its more extremist elements.
After years of denials, Pakistan admitted yesterday for the first time what others have been saying: There are "probably" still agents of Inter-Services Intelligence who are sympathetic to the Taliban and "act on their own in ways that are not in convergence" with Pakistan's interests or policies, Pakistani government minister Sherry Rehman said. "We need to identify these people and weed them out."
Anyone who has tracked the history of the ISI knows this is not a revelation, but a half truth. It's not individuals in the ISI that are rogue and working with the Taliban, but the ISI itself. The ISI, and the Pakistani army it serves, don't want to see the United States, and the government of Hamid Karzai, win in Afghanistan because they believe it would fatally undermine Pakistan's own national security, analysts say. The army does not trust U.S. intentions in the region, and it does not trust the Karzai government, which is close to India, Pakistan's giant and hostile neighbour.
"Nobody in Pakistan wants to see America win," said Hameed Gul, a retired general who is the most infamous former director-general of the ISI. "That would spell danger to Pakistan in the long run. They, America, want to make us subservient to India."
Earlier in the week, it had emerged that that the deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Stephen Kappes, travelled to Pakistan in July, armed with documentary evidence of the ISI's role in supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. In particular, he confronted the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, with proof of the agency's continued links with the Haqqani network, the group spawned by jihadi veteran Jalaluddin Haqqani, who, back in the 1980s, was a favourite of the ISI [and the CIA at the time].
Mr. Haqqani is wreaking havoc in Afghanistan again, and it will be nearly impossible for the Pakistani government to curtail support for him and others like him from within Pakistan.
That was made clear last weekend when Pakistan's recently elected government tried to place the ISI under firm civilian control, ordering that it report to the Interior Ministry. When Gen. Kayani was told of it, he placed a furious call in the middle of the night to Prime Minister Yousuf Razi Gilani to demand that the announcement be stopped. At 3 a.m., a new notification went out, reversing the decision.
The episode demonstrates that the ISI is beyond the reach of the government, certainly the present administration, which is viewed as weak and looks fatally wounded by the army's show of defiance over the agency's reporting structure.
"The ISI is under the policy directive of the man who calls the shots," said Shujaat Ali Khan, a retired general who used to head the internal wing of the ISI. "It may not be the Prime Minister, it may not be the President, but the army chief is always kept in the loop."
For three decades, the ISI has used Islamic extremist groups to do its dirty work at home and abroad, especially in India and Afghanistan. Its most famous creations were the mujahedeen that defeated a superpower, the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Taliban, which seized power in that country in the mid-1990s. But after Sept. 11, 2001, the ISI was supposed to have cut ties after Pakistan sided with the United States in the "war on terror."
Only it didn't. The links were loosened, but they remain, for the simple reason these militants are viewed as vital pawns in a bigger game: Keeping Afghanistan unsettled to limit the United States's — and by extension arch-rival India's —influence in the region.
The Taliban is merely the tool of a policy aimed at keeping Afghanistan from falling into the hands of Islamabad's adversaries, as Pakistan would be left sandwiched between two enemy states.
