The dramatic incident that unfolded in Lahore last month, when a mysterious consular employee, later revealed to be a CIA contractor, gunned down two equally shadowy assailants in broad daylight, has become a major issue of dispute in-between Islamabad and Washington.
Beyond the broader diplomatic and legal squabbles revolving around the issue of his diplomatic immunity and the contested decision of the Lahore High Court to keep Raymond Davis in custody, the incident has shed light on a murky underworld where the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, have been playing out an increasingly deadly form of shadowboxing, rife with deception and mistrust.
Pakistan’s ISI, or Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, is the largest intelligence service in Pakistan. Founded in 1948, the agency only really came into its own during the decade long-war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which pitted the Soviet invaders against US funded jihadists. During that brutal period, the ISI acted as an intermediary for the CIA, training tens of thousands of mujahedeen and smuggling them across the porous Afghan border. In return, the ISI was flooded with funds, sophisticated arms and equipment, and several of its officers were trained by CIA handlers.
Since then, the organization has become sadly notorious for the extent of its influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy, as well for its long history of meddling in the nation’s internal politics. The ISI is a military organization, led by a Director General, and as such is expected to act in concordance with the army’s overarching strategic objectives. These have been consistent over the years and can be broadly summarized as the following:
- Preserve Pakistan’s fragile unity by combating ethnic and separatist movements.
- Weaken India by instrumentalizing non state actors and using them as proxies to wage its ‘war of a thousand cuts’ against its more powerful neighbor.
- Bolster Pakistan’s influence in the region by attempting to obtain a form of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, most notably by supporting the Taliban.
When the United States decided to go after Al Qaeda and their Taliban associates in 2001, the ISI was thus 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? The ISI has striven to extricate itself from this quandary by pursuing an elaborate double-track policy, or what experts such as Professor Sumit Ganguly have adequately phrased as “hunting with the hounds and running with the hares.”
This has largely consisted in the ISI finding means to covertly support its Afghan Taliban allies, while attempting to occasionally placate the US and its NATO allies by periodically handing over foreign Al Qaeda operatives. Pakistan’s long-term vision of its national interests means that while it may engage in combat operations against militants that threaten its own security, it will be highly reticent to do so against groups that are seen as aligned with its strategic objectives.
One of these groups is the Lashkar-e-Taiba or “Army of the Pure”, spawned in the late 1980s, and which conducted the brutal massacre in Mumbai in 2008. Since then, extensive investigations and interrogations of the organization’s captured or defected operatives have detailed how ISI field officers would be detached to train militant recruits, screen new additions, and then provide them with crates of weapons with filed off serial numbers . Some leading counterterrorism experts also believe that the youthful Sajid Mir, who directed the Mumbai attacks over the phone from a safehouse in Pakistan, may be an army officer.
At the time of his arrest, Raymond Davis had been scouring the bustling streets of Lahore looking for ties in-between the ISI and LeT. The two armed men tailing the burly ex Special Forces were attempting to forcefully demonstrate that he, as well as the rest of his task force, was crossing an invisible, but deeply etched, red line. This had already been signaled in December when the CIA station chief in Pakistan was compelled to suddenly leave the country after his identity was mysteriously made public. US officials have speculated in private that the leak was the Pakistan’s intelligence community’s response to a recent civil lawsuit filed in New York by the families of the six American victims of the Mumbai carnage, and in which the ISI and its chiefs are named as plaintiffs. Since the Davis shooting, the ISI has continued to vociferously express its dissatisfaction, even going so far as to send an irate letter to the Wall Street Journal and demanding detailed data on every CIA contractor working in Pakistan.
While the ISI’s labyrinthine nature means that its top brass’s official sanctioning of Mumbai cannot be absolutely certified, the recent clear revelation of the links in-between certain ISI officers and the tragedy is a watershed moment in the US-Pakistan relationship. More specifically, it should lead to an urgent reassessment on the wisdom of channeling millions of US taxpayers’ dollars into an organization that has not only stubbornly continued to abet the Taliban, but has also more directly coordinated attacks in which both American and British civilians lost their lives.
Unfortunately, necessity requires that the US and its partners continue to rely on Pakistani cooperation in order to establish a modicum of stability in Afghanistan. It is clearly only by encouraging a major overhaul of the Pakistani intelligence apparatus, from the bottom up, and by influencing the perennially Indo-centric military’s mindset that any form of lasting success can be achieved. However, these tasks will require great finesse, as well as much time and effort. In the meantime, the US should not only display resolve by withholding the funding that has flooded the ISI’s coffers, but should also behave more tactically by encouraging the emergence of a rival intelligence apparatus affiliated to the civilian government rather than to the military. For example, Washington could henceforth gear most of its efforts towards bolstering the Federal Investigation Agency of Pakistan, and its Special Investigation Unit, which was founded in 2003 in order to deal with counter-terrorism. This would probably prove more effective in strengthening civil society’s hold on power than a host of other more direct initiatives, and would hopefully help prize the future of Afghanistan away from the clutches of a group of profoundly paranoid and murderous generals.
No comments:
Post a Comment