Currently, the ISI is red faced, having been caught for its double-dealing ways and not having been able to explain the existence of Osama bin Laden since the last five years so close to sensitive Pak military establishments.
Though General Musharraf and the then Pak establishment vehemently denied the ISI and the establishment’s complicity in Benazir Bhutto’s violent death, lakhs of Pakistanis remain more than convinced of Musharraf and the ISI’s stratagem of removing an awkward albeit highly popular political opponent from their path, who surely would have returned to power had the elections been conducted. Benazir’s betrayal and brutal death symbolises poignantly Pakistan’s violent and unpredictable governance and the machinations of its sinister premier intelligence agency, the ISI. Finally, the machinations of the crafty general came to an end and Musharraf, owing to mounting impeachment pressure and with the reinstalled judiciary braying for his blood, had to resign as the Pakistan president and went into exile to the UK after the PPP under slain Benazir’s husband, Asif Zardari, came into power in October 2008. General Musharraf has been hyperactive in London since then, endeavouring to return to Pakistan for a larger political role despite the current dispensation in Islamabad threatening to jail him if he ever returns to Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the ISI has been figuring prominently on the Pakistani landscape, reinforcing its sinister image all over the world, including in its own country, for fomenting terror in the entire region. The U.S. raid and the killing of the terror chieftain and the U.S. enemy number one, Osama bin Laden in May 2011, in his hideout in the Pak garrison town of Abbottabad, has exposed, once again, the ISI’s duplicitous attitudes of handling of terrorists on a selective basis. Currently, the ISI is red faced, having been caught for its double-dealing ways and not having been able to explain the existence of Osama bin Laden since the last five years so close to sensitive Pak military establishments.
The ISI, through its terror groups, frequently targets U.S. logistical convoys to Afghanistan moving through the two land routes inside Pakistan to Afghanistan
The ISI came into existence in Pakistan in 1948, and ever since has played a prominent role politically and strategically with uncommon deviousness, ruthlessness and independence, which perhaps no other country’s intelligence agency can even, dream about. It is commonly referred to as “a state within a state,” and former Indian national security advisor, the late J. N. Dixit, aptly called them “a rogue elephant.” It is Pakistan’s Fifth Estate and has been the cutting edge of Pakistan’s terror as a state policy in India and Afghanistan for decades. The Americans, in their close and long professional association with them, have all along known of the shadowy ISI’s double-dealing ways, especially of the ISI’s continued linkages with anti–U.S. groups in the Aft-Pak region. Drone attacks and ground actions by both Pak troops and covert U.S. actions against the holed out al-Qaeda elements or the Afghani Taliban in the restive badlands astride the Durand Line and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the Waziristan belts or the Khyber Pakhtunwa area have not been very effective owing to the ISI’s stratagem of “tipping off” terrorists and their leadership much to American chagrin. The ISI, through its terror groups, frequently targets U.S. logistical convoys to Afghanistan moving through the two land routes inside Pakistan to Afghanistan, to keep reminding the United States of the ISI’s indispensability to the United States, which remains helpless owing to its logistical compulsions.
It is pertinent to note that ISI’s intense involvement in the domestic politics of Pakistan is a direct fallout of the dominance of martial rule in Pakistan since the 1950s. The power the Pakistan army has wielded in its country finds a natural resonance in the instrument of its “dirty tricks,” the ISI, and thus it is more than a coincidence that many Pakistan army chiefs have been former DG ISIs!
“¦the main preoccupation of the ISI and the Pakistan military is India centric and it sees the Afghan Taliban as tools to influence events and limit Indias role in Afghanistan”¦
The ISI continues to maintain very intimate links with myriad terror organisations it has helped raise, sponsor, fund and, train like the Jamaat-ul-Dawa and its terror affiliate, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohd (JeM), Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), the Sunni terror outfit Sipahe-Sabaha, the Afghani Taliban, anti–U.S. warlords like Gulbuddin Hekayatmar and the Haqqani network in Afghanistan, besides many others. Its links with Osama’s al-Qaeda are too well known to be related. The Mumbai blasts–accused David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Rana, during court hearings recently in Chicago, have only confirmed the ISI’s intimate links with the LeT and its masterminding the November 2009 Mumbai blasts. The ISI strongly feels that all these terror organisations are part of its strategic assets to be employed against India, Afghanistan, the United States., inconvenient Pakistani journalists (many having been killed, including recently Saleem Shazad), other liberal members of Pakistani civil society, et al. The recent assassinations of liberal Punjab governor Salman Taseer and minorities minister Bhatti can be traced to the nexus between Islamist hard-line groups and the ISI. It has failed to realise that its myopic terror-infested policies are primarily affecting Pakistan’s image abroad and wrecking its own stability inside. Those Frankenstein monsters it raised to execute its evil agendas in India and Afghanistan have now come back home to roost and Pakistani establishments and innocents are now suffering from near-daily blasts triggered by those the ISI had raised. The ISI HQ in Rawalpindi itself, apart from some of its offices in the provinces, have been targeted by Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP) elements. Most Western analysts opine that the main preoccupation of the ISI and the Pakistan military is India centric and it sees the Afghan Taliban as tools to influence events and limit India’s role in Afghanistan while utilising its indigenous terror outfits for India-specific terror activities.
Pakistan-China: Staunch Allies and a Strategic Embrace
One of the most enduring international relationships in the last many decades has been the China-Pakistan partnership. Pakistan was the first Muslim nation to break relations with Taiwan and recognise the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1950. Nevertheless, it joined the American-led military pacts the next year, namely the CENTO and the SEATO, which were established by the United States to contain the communist threat posed by the Soviet Union and the PRC. Being in the Western camp did not inhibit Pakistan from developing “an all weather friendship” with China over the years, which has sustained it militarily, economically and strategically.
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