Posted on 05/05/2003 1:08:07 PM PDT by knighthawk
WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s top spymaster Ehsanul Haq, director of the Inter-Services Intelligence, better known by the acronym ISI, has begun a weeklong visit to Washington amid expectations that he will be asked to clean up the wanton ways of the agency and back the peace process with India.
Although no details are being released about the visit, Haq is said to be meeting top US officials dealing with security matters, including chiefs of the CIA and FBI, besides cabinet officials such as Homeland Security boss Tom Ridge, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who has just left for the sub-continent.
The range and level of meetings reflect the importance the Bush administration is attaching to reigning in the spy network that is often accused of being a state within a state in Pakistan.
Among the subjects on the table during these discussions will be the issue of infiltration and cross-border terrorism that has brought India to the brink of war with Pakistan. Despite routine denials by the Pakistani government, both Washington and New Delhi say on record that the incursions are continuing, sometimes at reduced levels.
Both sides have determined that separately, with the aid of technical means at their disposal and shared the data, according to sources familiar with the exchanges.
The issue is not just infiltration, but the widespread connections of Pakistani intelligence with the fundamentalist, jihadi, and ultimately the terrorist constituency, officials say.
In the most recent instance, it has come to light that David Hicks, an Australian who fought alongside the Taliban and is currently detained in Guantanamo Bay, told US interrogators that he 'joined' the Pakistan Army and went on missions inside Jammu and Kashmir. This could not have happened without official Pakistani complicity, they say.
Also last week, French philosopher-writer Bernard Henri-Levy charged in a BBC interview that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed after he discovered the involvement of the ISI with extremist elements.
In a new book to be released shortly, Levy says Pearl was lured and killed by British-born Islamic militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who he claims is a double agent working for the ISI. Sheikh incidentally surrendered to a former top official of the ISI, Brig Ejaz Shah, when he was governor of Punjab.
Such murky incidents have undermined the trust between Washington and Islamabad despite the public face both sides put on in describing as positive their operational cooperation.
Pakistan has unquestioningly turned over scores of terrorist suspects to the US, but where there are doubts about the suspects being able to squeal about their links to the ISI (as in the Omar Sheikh case), Islamabad has declined to deport or extradite them. Sheikh has in fact threatened to rat on the ISI if he is sent to the United States.
US officials in the background often express fears that the ISI, which is a spin-off from the Pakistan Army, has been overrun by the jehadis, although they say Gen Musharraf still appears to retain complete control over the organisation.
The CIA and the ISI worked hand-in-glove in the 1980s during the Afghan war and there is still plenty of residual affection for the Pakistani outfit among those in American spookdom who were on the beat then. Frank Anderson, a former American spook, wrote an impassioned op-ed article in the Washington Times last year protesting what he thought was the vilification of the ISI and reminding the Washington establishment that the agency was a “Valued helping hand in terror war.”
Although he agreed the ISI was promoting violence against India, Anderson wrote, “it is hard to identify an organisation anywhere in the world that has more positively contributed to US aims in both the Cold War against Soviet communism and, now, the war on terrorism.”
But there are others who feel that a lot changed during the 1990s when the ISI began using the jihadi elements for operations in Kashmir without too much concern about the wider and longer-term consequence of this, especially their commonality with other terrorist outfits like the al-Qaeda. The cooperation in the war on terror has also been spotty and selective, they say.
At least two former ISI chiefs, Hamid Gul and Javed Nasir, have openly backed the fundamentalist goals and means to the extent of coming under the US watchlist. One other ISI chief, Mahmoud Ahmed, who was ostensibly sent by Gen Musharraf to Kabul to counsel the Taliban against Osama Bin Laden, and instead ended by consorting with them, was fired at US instance. In the past, the agency has been accused, most notably by former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, of undermining and subverting governments.
With such a chronicle of dubious activity, the agency, notwithstanding the chronic hysteria it evokes in Indian circles, has also come under U.S scrutiny. Such is the mistrust of ISI in American intelligence circles that last year the FBI organised some former Pakistani army officers and others into a band known as the "Spider Group" to locate Taliban and al-Qaeda fugitives hiding in tribal areas along the Afghanistan border, because it believed the ISI had been compromised and was not cooperating fully.
Just how important the ISI has become in Islamabad’s scheme of things is evident in the fact that Pakistan’s foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri told reporters that both the Army and ISI are behind the political establishment’s peace initiatives with India. By engaging Ehsanul Haq so extensively, Washington appears to be making sure that is indeed the case.
In a new book to be released shortly, Levy says Pearl was lured and killed by British-born Islamic militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who he claims is a double agent working for the ISI. Sheikh incidentally surrendered to a former top official of the ISI, Brig Ejaz Shah, when he was governor of Punjab.
Who is this Levy guy and what's the name of his book? Sounds like hot stuff.
I continue to believe Pearl was about to deliver the goods on the ISI, or maybe even Pakistan's military. The tape showing his murder was more than a recruitment tool; it was also a warning. JMO.
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