CIA gets a whiff of ISI in Afghan jihad, sulks

by Indranil Banerjie

(August 03 , New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Murree, a picturesque hill station barely an hour’s drive from Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, is a favourite weekend destination. Last Sunday witnessed the country’s two most powerful men sojourning at the hill station. Teeing off at Murree’s top-notch Bhurban golf course were the country’s President, Pervez Musharraf, and the Army Chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. As they played a relaxed game of golf, the crowds, including the ever-present military aides, kept at a safe distance.

They conferred quietly and by all accounts it was not just their handicaps they were discussing. For even as they sauntered across the greens, Pakistan’s northwest region was burning. The Army was slogging it out against militants in various parts of the Frontier while Washington was going ballistic about the Pakistani Army not doing enough. That very day, media reports suggested that over 50 soldiers and militants had been killed in the previous day’s fighting in different parts of the country. More worrying, perhaps, to the generals was an extremely damaging article which had appeared that very morning in the New York Times on the purported deviousness of Gen. Kayani.

Why was Washington so annoyed with the generals? After all, it was not them but the elected civilian government that seemed stuck on negotiating with the Islamists rather than fighting them. Gen. Musharraf, on his part, has been maintaining that there was no choice but to take the militants head-on. Gen. Kayani too was supposed to be “close” to the Americans. So what was wrong? Why was Washington peeved at Pakistan’s Army brass?

If the New York Times article was to be believed then the problem lay in the worsening relations between the CIA and the Pakistani military’s covert operations directorate, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The more likely reason is that the Americans have got some inkling of the Pakistani military establishment’s continued assistance to Islamists fighting in Afghanistan. For, as one key leader from the North-West Frontier Province belonging to the ruling Awami National Party (ANP) claimed last week, the government was still being run by the military, which was covertly assisting the jihadis fighting in Afghanistan. Abdul Lateef Afridi, the ANP leader in charge of tribal areas, said Americans had shown him documents proving fighters were streaming into Afghanistan from the tribal areas of Pakistan. Mr Afridi maintained that peace would continue to elude the tribal areas as long as the establishment persisted with its current policies.

The Pakistani military establishment’s policies and core doctrines remain rooted in the ideas propounded and codified by the late dictator, Gen. Zia-ul Haq, who believed that it was Pakistan’s manifest destiny to emerge as an Islamic republic and the vanguard of the Muslim ummah. He viewed jihadi organisations as natural partners of the Islamic state and unflinchingly used them as instruments of his country’s foreign policy. As the role of conventional forces diminished in the nuclearised atmosphere of South Asia, Zia realised that Islamists being non-state actors could be used with impunity as a military instrument as well. While Zia was sanctifying this policy, the Americans looked the other way. It was after all Washington which had defined the struggle in Afghanistan as a jihad.

Today, it is jihad once again in Afghanistan. As one key Islamist, Sami ul-Haq, head of Pakistan’s Darul uloom Haqqania, put it: “When the red forces of the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan, it was a war of independence and we all agreed that it was jihad. Even the United States had said that the Russians must be ousted from Afghanistan. When Russia left, the United States committed the same aggression. So the situation is the same. One infidel force replaced another. No difference at all. Whether it is Russia or America, it is a jihad.”

The Pakistani military establishment has not jettisoned its basic doctrine on Islamists and continues to believe that they would be critical to both the Kashmir and the Afghan jihad. Sami ul-Haq, who was also a founder of the six-party Islamic alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, in a rare interview in May last year, pointed out: “Lashkar-e-Jangvi and similar organisations are the continuity of the Kashmir problem. These jihadi forces were patronised by the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, with full state support for their activities in Kashmir. But when Pakistan came under immense pressure, then this whole drama was wrapped up and that is why a ban was put on these jihadi organisations.”

The ban did not affect these groups in the least. They merely changed their names, adopted a lower profile or went underground. While the Indian intelligence establishment has all along pointed this out, the Americans and other friends of Pakistan have refused to accept this view. They and their friends in the media concocted the theory about “rogue elements” in the ISI being involved with Islamists and not the Army itself. This is wishful thinking at best, and delusion in fact. The ISI, far from being an independent entity, is merely a directorate in the Pakistani Army, like the infantry or the medical corps. The Pakistani Army itself remains a highly disciplined force, tightly controlled by its headquarters in Rawalpindi. The Army Chief maintains complete authority over its various constituents and it is unthinkable that some undefined rogue elements in the ISI would last a day without official concurrence.

To the Pakistani establishment, the US intervention in Afghanistan is an ephemeral phenomenon. They do not accept that a fundamental realignment of regional geopolitics has taken place. In their unchanged perspective, India is still the principal enemy and Islamists their natural partners. If Gen. Musharraf has taken on the Islamists, who are fighting the Western forces in Afghanistan, it is because the Americans have put a gun to his head.

The problem is that some Islamists, especially the tribal elements, do not seem to understand what is going on and have declared war on the Army. These are the “bad” Islamists the Pakistani Army will have to take out. The “good” Islamists will remain hidden in the deeply grained woodwork of Pakistan’s frontiers.

Indranil Banerjie is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi
- Sri Lanka Guardian