Dark deeds and dirty dealings from "the secret army'

30 Oct, 2001 06:44 AM4 mins to read

RAHUL BEDI looks at the seamy side of Pakistan's intelligence service.

NEW DELHI - Pakistan's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence, a main source of information for the United States-led fight against Afghanistan's Taleban regime, has long been linked with political assassinations, smuggling narcotics and nuclear and missile components and backing fundamentalist Islamic movements.

Locally called Pakistan's "secret army" and "invisible government", the counter-intelligence agency founded soon after independence in 1948 dominates the country's domestic and foreign policies.

The ISI also manipulates Pakistan's volatile religious elements, ethnic groups and political parties to ensure the army's omnipotence and continuance in office.

Modelled on Savak, the Iranian security agency and, like it, trained by the CIA and France's external intelligence service, the ISI "ran" the Afghan mujahideen in their decade-long fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who headed the ISI's Afghan Bureau for four years until 1987, says the ISI funnelled US money and weapons to the mujahideen to minister the guerrilla tactic of death by a thousand cuts on the Soviet "Bear", which collapsed soon after it was driven from Afghanistan in 1989.

"It was the only way to defeat a super power on the battlefield with ill-disciplined, ill-trained tribesmen whose only asset was an unconquerable fighting spirit welded to a warrior tradition," Yousef says in The Bear Trap, a fascinating book about the ISI's workings.

In the early 1990s, the ISI gave logistical support to the Taleban that grew from Pakistani madrassahs (religious schools) and helped it seize power in Kabul five years ago.

It then maintained a "formidable" presence across Afghanistan, helping the Taleban, who are mostly Pathans, consolidate their hold over the country through "Trojan horse "tactics, bribing the opposition and brutal military activity."

Intelligence sources said Osama bin Laden, held responsible by the US for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Mir Aimal Kansi, who assassinated two CIA officers in Langley, Virginia, in 1993, Ramzi Yousef and his accomplices in the New York World Trade Center bombing in 1998 and a host of international narcotics smugglers emerged from the ISI-CIA collaboration in Afghanistan of the 1980s.

Opium growing and heroin production in Pakistan's northern tribal belt and adjoining Afghanistan were also an offshoot of the cooperation.

This turned Soviet troops into addicts and offset the costs of the "unholy war" in Afghanistan by selling heroin in Europe and the US through an elaborate web of deception, transport networks, couriers and payoffs.

"The heroin dollars contributed largely to bolstering the Pakistani economy, its nuclear programme and enabled the ISI to sponsor its covert operations in Afghanistan and northern India's disputed Kashmir state," an intelligence officer said.

In the late 1970s, the ISI set up a division to procure military nuclear and missile technology, particularly from China and North Korea. It also smuggled in critical nuclear components and know-how from Europe.

A Director-General heads the ISI. Its leader for the past month, Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, has three assistants, major generals, heading the agency's political, external and administrative divisions.

Haq replaced Lieutenant-General Mahmood Ahmed who was dismissed, along with two other Islamist army commanders sympathetic to Afghanistan's Taleban regime, reportedly under US pressure.

The agency's sections include the Joint Intelligence North (JIN) which oversees Afghanistan and Kashmiri militancy.

JIN also controls the Army of Islam that includes organisations such ase Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, and the opium cultivation and heroin and smuggling.

The Joint Intelligence (Miscellaneous) runs covert operations aboard and procures nuclear and missile technologies

The Joint Intelligence Bureau looks after human intelligence col-lection.

The Joint Counter-Intelligence Bureau conducts counter-intelligence activities inside Pakistan and abroad.

The concern now for Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, is whether the ISI will remain loyal to him or pursue its own Machiavellian aims.

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