A state within a state: Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence:
Pakistan's ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence, has become notorious for the extent of its influence over the country's foreign policy, as well as for its history of meddling in Pakistan's internal politics.
In a country plagued by chronic instability, ethnic and religious divides , and which has historically oscillated between weak civilian governments and brutal military dictatorships, the ISI has become a sort of state within the state, which conducts operations in accordance with its own strategic goals; goals which are frequently at odds with those of impotent civilian governments, and even, sometimes and more disturbingly, with those of its military overseers.
Based now in Islamabad ( the HQ was previously located in the garrison city of Rawalpindi), the ISI is the largest intelligence service in Pakistan, some experts estimating that the organization contains more than 10 000 officers and operatives. Founded in 1948, the agency only really came into its own during the decade long war in Afghanistan, which pitted the Soviet invaders against the US funded djihadis. During that period of time, the ISI acted as an intermediary for the CIA, training tens of thousands of mujahideen and smuggling them across the Afghan border. In return, the ISI was flooded with funds, sophisticated arms and equipment, and several ISI officers received training from CIA handlers.
Since then, the ISI has cast its shadow over the entire region, operating from countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh; supporting the Khalistani movement in Punjab in the 1980s, waging a war of attrition against Indian security forces in Kashmir, and aiding and abetting the Taliban throughout Afghanistan's non-ending factional strife.
The ISI is a military organization, led by a Director General, who is required to be a serving Lieutenant General in the Pakistani Army. The 'DG' answers to the Army Chief of Staff, not to the President or Prime Minister. Various attempts by elected governments to place the ISI under civilian control have, until now, as we shall see, met with failure.
Understanding the strategic reasoning behind the ISI's double-track policy:
The ISI's overarching objectives over the years have been the following:
-Preserve Pakistan's fragile unity by combating separatist movements, such as the Balochi or Sindhi movements.
-Weaken India in Kashmir and the region by instrumentalizing non state actors and then using them as proxies to wage its war 'of a thousand cuts' against its more powerful neighbour.
- Bolster Pakistan's influence in the region by attempting to obtain a form of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan.
The notion of strategic depth is popular amongst the Pakistani military establishment. The idea is that when confronted with a far stronger and larger neighbour, it is necessary for Pakistan, a far smaller and narrower country, to be able to counter an eventual Indian invasion by retreating into the Afghan hinterlands, and call on allied friendly forces in order to continue the fight. In order to do so, Islamabad needs to rely on a friendly regime in Kabul. As I pointed out in a previous entry, Pakistan was a fervent supporter of the Taliban during the long period of factional struggle that followed the Soviets' departure from Afghanistan.
When the United States decided to go after Al Qaeda and their Taliban associates in 2001, the ISI was confronted with a seemingly intractable dilemma: how could it appear to support its American allies in the war on terror, while not severing its ties with its Taliban allies?
As Tariq Mahmud Ashraf demonstrates in a recent Terrorism Monitor Volume Issue:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7513649/Taming-the-ISI-Implications-for-Pakistans-Stability-and-the-War-on-Terrorism
" From the Pakistani perspective, supporting the Taliban stemmed from the country's security imperative of strategic depth, predicated on having a friendly regime on the north-western frontier. President Musharraf's decision to withdraw all support for the Taliban created a quandary that left ISI stuck in the middle-it could neither go against what Musharraf wanted not could it allow its influence and linkage with the Taliban to be completely broken. As such, a dichotomy crept up in Pakistan's posture towards Afghanistan in general and its support for the US led war on terrorism in particular. It is highly probable that Musharraf went along with this duplicitous policy of simultaneously supporting the United States without compromising the ISI's links with the Taliban."
In fact, the ISI has done far more than simply refusing to sever links with the Taliban; it has provided them with financial and logistical support, and sometimes even with covering artillery fire when they creep over the porous Afghan border to attack NATO troops. The frontier town of Quetta, in Balochistan, has become the Taliban movement's unofficial headquarters.
Renowned Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explains in great detail the intricacies of Pakistan's double-track policy in his latest book Descent into Chaos, The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
"By 2004 they (NATO intelligence agents) had confirmed reports of the ISI running training camps for Taliban recruits north of Quetta, funds and arms shipments arriving from the Gulf countries, and shopping sprees in Quetta and Karachi in which the Taliban bought hundreds of motorbikes, pickup trucks, and satellite phones. In 2003 and 2004, American soldiers at firebases along the border in eastern Afghanistan and U.S drones in the skies watched as army trucks delivered Taliban fighters to the border at night to infiltrate Afghanistan and then recover them on their return a few days later". (p.223)
Since 2001, the ISI has therefore pursued its pro Taliban policy under the glare of Western Intelligence agencies, while attempting to placate them from time to time by periodically handing over Arab or foreign Al Qaeda operatives. This enables the Pakistani military to openly claim that it is a partner in the war on terror while conserving the Taliban as a strategic reserve force.
ISI operatives have a long term vision of Pakistan's national interest, and many do not believe that the United States will maintain a permanent presence in the region. The election of Barack Obama, however, who has placed a renewed emphasis on Afghanistan, may have proven them wrong. As I detailed in a previous blog entry "The Indo-Pakistani silent war in Afghanistan", the ISI is exceedingly concerned by the growing friendliness of the ties in-between New Delhi and Kabul, and as Tariq Mahmud Ashraf once again points out, "...the possibility of an unfriendly Northern Alliance-dominated and pro-Indian regime in Kabul is certainly not in line with Pakistan's national aims and objectives. From the Pakistani perspective, the war in Afghanistan must end with a favorable and supportive regime in Kabul, even if this is made up of the Taliban. From the U.S point of view, the possibility of the Taliban being allowed to come into power is not considered. It is against this backdrop that one must view the involvement of the ISI with the Taliban-not as abetting terrorism but as protecting Pakistan's national interest."
A certain level of plausible deniability has been maintained by creating a new form of intelligence structure, which is composed of retired ISI operatives and military officers rehired on contract and working undercover as NGO workers in Afghan refugee camps, bureaucrats or professors with an "untraceable system of command and control".
A powerful but increasingly fragmented institution:
Mounting Western aggravation over ISI's nefarious policy towards NATO forces in Afghanistan have led, as we shall see in more detail later on, to a reshuffling of the top brass.
But, all in all, these changes are little more than cosmetic in nature, as the ISI is an enormous structure, which is increasingly fragmented and riven by the actions of different lobbies, groups, and rogue operatives.
In the following article, journalist Mark Urban claims that there is both a generational and an ideological divide in-between younger, junior field officers, who have been in direct contact with militant Islamic outfits, and their senior, more pragmatic commanders.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/12/pakistans_dept_for_reconciling.html
He says the following; "The view of some of those in Western organisations that liaise professionally with the ISI is that there is an educated, politically sensitive, senior management who have become de-coupled from some of the foot soldiers-the captains or majors who have trained insurgents or run sources in Lashkar-e-Taiba or the Taleban."
Andrew D. Bishop, in the Asia Sentinel, agrees with this analysis, claiming that the problem lies not so much with the top brass, which is periodically reshuffled, but with the "middle and lower ranks of the agencies" which "still have Islamist militant sympathies and which will be hard to dislodge."
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1633&Itemid=180
Any proper reform of the ISI will therefore have to be bottom up rather than top down.
The ISI is not only riven by ideological divisions, but also by the diverse ethnicities of its field agents, which can sometimes lead to conflicting loyalties. In his book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia", Ahmed Rashid recounts how the ISI relied heavily on intelligence officers of Pashtun origin to act as intermediairies in-between Islamabad and the Taliban throughout much of the 1990s. He suggests that these field agents have formed a sort of "Pashtun lobby" in the midst of the Punjabi dominated military, a lobby which is more sympathetic to the idea of a "greater Pashtunistan" upheld by their fellow Pachtun brothers, the Taliban, than to the idea of Pakistan as a unified nation.
The ISI is thus a very fragmented institution, and this became brutally apparent in December 2003, when Pakistani president Musharraf's armoured convoy was targeted twice by suicide bombers in the space of a week. As Ahmed Rashid details in Descent into Chaos, "these attacks shocked the world because they demonstrated the worst-case scenario: disaffected military personnel on the inside linked to terrorist groups on the outside. Only a handful of military officers knew the route and timing of Musharraf's travel plans or which of his several identical armored-plated cars he would be using." (p.231)
These assassination attempts suggested that rogue elements in the ISI, angered with Musharraf's alignment with Washington against Al Qaeda, had decided to act of their own accord.
The 'Frankenstein' or 'magical broom' syndrome:
Indeed, by its consorting with terrorist groups over the years, the ISI has created a cancer that risks consuming it from within, as the militants it took under its wing gradually wean themselves from its influence.
The ISI has helped create, fund and has provided safe haven for South Asian terrorist groups such as HuJ ( Harkat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islami) or LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), the group that carried out the recent massacre in Mumbai, for several decades. Experts say that LeT, for example, "received instruction and funding from Pakistan's intelligence agency , the Inter-Services Intelligence, during the 1990s, in exchange for a pledge to target Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir and to train Muslim extremists on Indian soil."
For more information on the alleged links in-between the ISI and LeT see this CFR backgrounder on the subject:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/1164/isi_and_terrorism.html
Recently, however, the ISI has been losing control over South Asian Islamic terrorist outfits, which have been falling under the sway of Al Qaeda. The goals of LeT or HuJ militants are becoming more panislamic, more ambitious. Whereas before they were almost exclusively focused on the Kashmir issue, and therefore in sync with the strategic vision of the ISI, they are now increasingly aligned with Al Qaeda's vision of global dijhad, which means that they cannot tolerate Pakistan's cooperation, however limited in scope, with the United States in the war on terror. It is this realignment which explains, in part, the LeT's explicit targeting of British, American and Israeli citizens during the recent tragic events at Mumbai.
The 'emancipation' of these groups has been likened by some analysts to the story of "Frankenstein", in which an artificially created monster attacks its creator, or more recently, in this article by Sumit Ganguly and S.Paul Kapur, to the magic brooms in Goethe's tale, "The Sorceror's Apprentice".
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/15/ED7K...
" During the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Pakistani government created terrorist organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba as tools of asymmetric warfare against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir. In recent years, however, the jihadis, like the magic brooms on Goethe's tale, "The Sorceror's Apprentice", have taken on a life of their own; along with the government, the army and the intelligence services, such groups now compris one of the main centers of gravity within Pakistan.(.....) The question, then, is not whether the Pakistani government was responsible for the Mumbai attacks, but who will play the role of sorceror and rein in the jihadis."
Pakistan, conclude the authors, has no choice put to act against these terrorist groups and "recognize that the costs of supporting militancy outweigh its benefits."
Reforming the ISI: a nigh on impossible task:
Pakistan's new civilian leadership realises the utmost importance of a revamping of the ISI, and has been struggling over the past few months to bring the unruly behemoth under its control. So far, however, as we shall see, its efforts have been only moderately successful , and the reforms that have taken place seem to be the result either of factional struggles in the army itself, or of mounting American pressure.
The United States has been showing signs of exasperation over Pakistan's double-track policy in Afghanistan, as well as over its lack of resolve in confronting homegrown terrorism. In the summer of 2008 the Bush Administration signed executive orders authorising covert commando strikes in Pakistan's militant infested tribal areas ,and on the 12th of July several high ranking American intelligence officials went to Islamabad to confront their Pakistani counterparts with evidence of collusion between the ISI and militants. Similarly, when Prime Minister Gillani visited the United States, he was reportedly put under a lot of pressure to curtail ISI's links with terrorist groups. It seems obvious that the United States believes that the advent of a new civilian government in Islamabad provides it with the perfect opportunity to cut the ISI down to size and put an end to its nefarious double dealing. This may be, however, a serious overestimation of the strength of the Zardari-Gillani government in a country where the military has always called the final shots.
As Tariq Mahud Ashraf points out " Beset as it is with enormous internal challenges ranging from soaring inflation to extreme insecurity to crippling energy shortages, the Zardari-Gillani government truly finds itself in a bind. While the US Administration might incorrectly assume that the civilian government is now in a strong enough position to take on the Army by attempting to transform the ISI, the truth is that the ever-present danger of yet another military take-over is precisely what must be giving the Zardari and Gillani sleepless nights."
So far, the civilian government's attempts to wrest control of the ISI from the military have been largely unsuccessful. Shortly after Gillani's visit to Washington in the summer of 2008, the government declared that the ISI would be placed under the control of the Interior Ministry, which would mean that it would be removed from the military's purview. In a humiliating reversal of position, the PPP government was forced, under pressure from General Kayani, the Chief of Army Staff, to withdraw its declaration only a day later. The impotence of the civilian government was further demonstrated more recently, when Prime Minister Gillani had to go back on a promise he had made to send the ISI chief, Lt.Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India as a sign of good will after the Mumbai terror attacks.
It would be unfair, however, to say that absolutely no progress has been made in the reforming of the ISI. Its current director general, Lt.Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, was the former leader of counter-terrorist operations in the restless Federally Administrated Tribal Areas and there is hope that his anti-Taliban views will influence the future conduct of the ISI. There is speculation amongst some experts that he was appointed in September 2008 under American pressure, in order to replace his predecessor Nadeem Taj, who was viewed with a great deal of suspicion by most Western Intelligence Agencies. It seems more likely, however, that it was a shrewd move by Kayani to solidify his influence in the military (Pasha is a close friend of the Chief of Army Staff) and rid himself of remaining Musharraf loyalists such as Nadeem Taj.
In a recent article in Asia Times, Syed Saleem Shahzad points out that even though the civilian government has not established full control over the ISI, its "wings have been clipped", and this is largely due to informal interactions in-between American and Pakistani military officials, rather than efforts from the the Zardari regime.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL25Df01.html
The political cell of the ISI, which used to dabble in Pakistan's elections, has reportedly been shut down and a mysterious new group, the '909 Intelligence Group' , which works directly under the military command, has supposedly been formed in order to take over issues of cross-border intelligence. Reliable information on these reforms is, however, somewhat scarce, and only time will tell whether they are indicative of any real desire on part of the military to engage in a profound revamping of their intelligence structure.
One thing remains certain however- in the absence of a massive overhaul of the Pakistani intelligence apparatus- which amounts to more than a simple reshuffling of the top brass, and of an unfeigned foreswearing of the ISI's tradition of wet nursing militancy, there will never be a long- lasting peace in the region.
