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Taking on the ISI

With the latest attempt by an elected government in Pakistan to rein in the Inter Services Intelligence running into a brick wall, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is likely to face tough questions during his visit to the United States. A notification issued by the government on July 26 placing the ISI under the control of the Interior Ministry had to be revoked reportedly following protests from the office of President Pervez Musharraf and army headquarters. As a result, the intelligence outfit retains its capacity to function as an autonomous entity — or, as some would say, a ‘state-within-a-state.’ This does not, quite obviously, bode well for the campaign against terrorism. The government of Afghanistan has long maintained, with a high degree of credibility, that the ISI collaborates with, instead of combating, the terrorists who operate from the eastern side of the Durand Line. The U.S. Defence Department and many members of Congress now endorse this assessment. The Central Intelligence Agency appears to be the only arm of the administration that has not turned against the ISI. Mr. Gilani might have been received warmly in Washington had he succeeded in his attempt to curb the notorious intelligence outfit. Now that the plan has fallen apart, the U.S. is likely to re-focus on the stop-and-go approach the democratic government headed by the Pakistan People’s Party has taken in its four-month effort to tackle terrorism. The policy of talking to militant groups instead of conducting military operations against them could come in for intensified criticism.

While the Gilani government’s approach has been faulty, experts on the subject just cannot understand the reason behind the Bush administration’s reluctance to press the Pakistan army to take more effective action against the militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). According to reports in the American media, the CIA station in Islamabad insists that it has to operate through the ISI since it does not have its own network of agents in the lawless area. In this situation, the Pakistan intelligence agency is free to play the double game that objective observers are convinced it is playing. As the largest donor of military and financial assistance to Pakistan, the U.S. surely has far more leverage than it is prepared to use. Instead it appears to be bending over backwards to keep Islamabad happy, recently allowing it to divert, for the purpose of upgrading its F-16 fleet, $230 million out of the $300 million annual assistance provided for the campaign against terrorism. Under the circumstances, the problem in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands will continue to fester.

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