The ISI - Pakistan's Invisible Government
The real terrorist behind New York attacks
A secret report obtained by The Newspaper Today's Pradeep Thakur reveals the ubiquitous role played by the ISI
in the governance of Pakistan. The following is the transcript of a classified Indian government assessment on
the role of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
The role of the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI) of Pakistan in its proxy war against India has
been well documented and hence is well known to the public. What is not so well known is the ubiquitous role
played by the intelligence agencies in the internal affairs of Pakistan.
The intelligence community of Pakistan, which was once described by The Frontier Post of Peshawar (May 18,
1994) as its invisible government, consists of the Intelligence Bureau and the ISI. While the IB comes under
the Interior Minister, the ISI is part of the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Each wing of the armed forces also has
its own intelligence Directorate for tactical military intelligence. The IB is the oldest dating from 1947.
Its unsatisfactory performance in the first Indo-Pak war of 1947-48 over Kashmir led to the decision in 1948 to
create the ISI to specialize in the external intelligence, with the main focus on India. The IB, which was
patterned after the IB of British India, used to be a largely police organization, but the post of Director
General (DG) IB, is no longer tenable only by police officers as it was in the past. Retired and serving army
officers are in recent years being appointed in increasing numbers to serve posts in the IB, including the post
of DG.
General (retd) Imtiaz, who had served as the head of IB, during the regime of late General Zia-ul-Haq and was
sacked by Mrs Benazir Bhutto after she came to power for the first time in 1988, was appointed by Mr Nawaz
Sharif as Director IB, after he came to power in 1990. He was dismissed again and arrested by Mrs Bhutto after
her return to power in 1993 and prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating funds and trying to organize a revolt
against her in her Pakistan People's Party(PPP).
He was latter discharged by the court for want of evidences. Mrs Bhutto appointed Mr Masood Sharif, a retired
Major and a personal friend of her husband Asif Ali Zardari, as Director, IB, and upgraded the post to DG.
Suspicious of the role played by the ISI in her dismissal in 1990 and in allegedly rigging the subsequent
elections to ensure the victory of the Islamic Democratic Front (IDF) headed by Mr Nawaz Sharif, Mrs Bhutto
initiated a number of steps in 1995 to strengthen the role of the IB in the collection of internal intelligence
and to divest the ISI of its self-assumed responsibility in this regard.
Steps to strengthen IB
These steps included: a four-fold increase in its budget, creating of 20 senior posts of the rank of Joint
Directors (Inspector General of Police) and above and a three-fold increase in the staff at the lower levels,
the opening of IB offices in Tehsil (township) headquarters and all police stations (PS) jurisdictions so that
she could have a continuous flow of intelligence from the PS upwards, computerization of IB offices, and making
the ISI share with the IB the responsibility for liaison with foreign intelligence agencies in matters relating
to terrorism, narcotics and organized crime instead of leaving it an exclusive responsibility of the ISI as in
the past.
Mrs Bhutto also made the IB, under the supervision of Maj Gen Nasirullah Babar, her Interior Minister,
exclusively responsible for dealing with the revolt of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Karachi and other
areas of Sindh and made the ISI share with the IB the responsibility for operations in support of the Taliban
in Afghanistan. Maj Gen Babar had served in the ISI during the regime of her father and was the head of its
Afghanistan division. He is thus extremely knowledgeable on Afghanistan and knows personally most of the Afghan
Mujahideen leaders.
In fact, according to the Pakistani press, it was he who drew up the plan for the use of Pakistan army and ISI
officers for the capture of Kabul in September 1996, under the cover of the Taliban. The dilution of the role
of the ISI in internal intelligence and its being forced by Mrs Bhutto to share with the IB the responsibility
for Afghanistan operations led to considerable resentment against her in the ISI.
This resentment played an important role in its supporting President Farooq Leghari's action in dismissing Mrs
Bhutto in November 1996. Since then, the ISI has seen to it that the IB's role, was once again diluted with the
organization brought under greater military control through the induction of more army officers. The ISI has
again assumed exclusive responsibility for the operations in Afghanistan in support of the Taliban.
ISI is the organization which made it possible for Osama bin Ladin to build his terrorist network from
Afghanistan.
Pakistan's ISI 'Fully Involved' in 9/11
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Editor at Large
The Washington Times and for United Press International.
Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2004
The Sept. 11 Commission has found troubling new evidence that Iran was closer to al-Qaida than was Iraq. More importantly, and through no fault of its own, the commission missed the biggest prize of all: Former Pakistani intelligence officers knew beforehand all about the September 11 attacks.
They even advised Osama bin Laden and his cohorts how to attack key targets in the United States with hijacked civilian aircraft. And bin Laden has been undergoing periodic dialysis treatment in a military hospital in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province adjacent to the Afghan border.
The information came to the commission's attention in a confidential report from Pakistan as the commission's own report was coming off the presses. The information was supplied with the understanding that the unimpeachable source would remain anonymous.
Pakistan still denies that President Pervez Musharraf knew anything about the activities of A.Q. Khan, the country's top nuclear engineer who spent the last 10 years building and running a one-stop global Wal-Mart for "rogue" nations. North Korea, Iran and Libya shopped for nuclear weapons at Mr. Khan's underground black market. Pakistan has also denied the allegations by a leading Pakistani in the confidential addendum to the September 11 Commission report.
After U.S. and British intelligence painstakingly pieced together Mr. Khan's global nuclear proliferation endeavors, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage was assigned last fall to convey the devastating news to Mr. Musharraf. Mr. Khan, a national icon for giving Pakistan its nuclear arsenal, was not arrested. Instead, Mr. Musharraf pardoned him in exchange for an abject apology on national television in English.
No one in Pakistan believed Mr. Musharraf's claim he was totally in the dark about Mr. Khan's operation. Prior to seizing power in 1999, Mr. Musharraf was — and still is — army chief of staff. For the past five years, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence chief has reported directly to Mr. Musharraf.
Osama bin Laden's principal Pakistani adviser before Sept. 11, 2001, was retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief who, since the 2001 attacks, is "strategic adviser" to the coalition of six politico-religious parties that governs two of Pakistan's four provinces. Known as MMA, the coalition also occupies 20 percent of the seats in the federal assembly in Islamabad.
Hours after Sept. 11, Gen. Gul publicly accused Israel's Mossad of fomenting the plot. Later, he said the U.S. Air Force must have been in on it since no warplanes were scrambled to shoot down the hijacked airliners.
Gen. Gul spent two weeks in Afghanistan immediately before Sept. 11. He denied meeting bin Laden on that trip, but has always said he was an "admirer" of the al-Qaida leader. However, he did meet several times with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader.
Since Sept. 11, hardly a week goes by without Gen. Gul denouncing the United States in both the Urdu and English-language media.
In a conversation with this reporter in October 2001, Gen. Gul forecast a future Islamist nuclear power that would form a greater Islamic state with a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia after the monarchy falls.
Gen. Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when he was ISI chief. He was "mildly" fundamentalist in those days, he explained after Sept. 11, and indifferent to the United States. But he became passionately anti-American after the United States turned its back on Afghanistan following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal and began punishing Pakistan with economic and military sanctions for its secret nuclear buildup.
A ranking CIA official, speaking anonymously, said the agency considered Gen. Gul "the most dangerous man" in Pakistan. A senior Pakistani political leader, also on condition of anonymity, said, "I have reason to believe Hamid Gul was Osama bin Laden's master planner."
The report received by the Sept. 11 Commission from the anonymous, well-connected Pakistani source, said: "The core issue of instability and violence in South Asia is the character, activities and persistence of the militarized Islamist fundamentalist state in Pakistan. No cure for this canker can be arrived at through any strategy of negotiations, support and financial aid to the military regime, or by a 'regulated' transition to 'democracy.'"
The confidential report continued: "The imprints of every major act of international Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan, right from September 11 — where virtually all the participants had trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistan — to major acts of terrorism across South Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as major networks of terror that have been discovered in Europe.
"Pakistan has harvested an enormous price for its apparent 'cooperation' with the U.S., and in this it has combined deception and blackmail — including nuclear blackmail — to secure a continuous stream of concessions. Its conduct is little different from that of North Korea, which has in the past chosen the nuclear path to secure incremental aid from Western donors. A pattern of sustained nuclear blackmail has consistently been at the heart of Pakistan's case for concessions, aid and a heightened threshold of international tolerance for its sponsorship and support of Islamist terrorism.
"To understand how this works, it is useful to conceive of Pakistan's ISI as a state acting as terrorist traffickers, complaining that, if it does not receive the extraordinary dispensations and indulgences that it seeks, it will, in effect, 'implode,' and in the process do extraordinary harm.
"Part of the threat of this 'explosion' is also the specter of the transfer of its nuclear arsenal and capabilities to more intransigent and irrational elements of the Islamist far right in Pakistan, who would not be amenable to the logic that its present rulers — whose interests in terrorism are strategic, and consequently, subject to considerations of strategic advantage — are willing to listen to. ...
"It is crucial to note that if the Islamist terrorist groups gain access to nuclear devices, ISI will almost certainly be the source. ... At least six Pakistani scientists connected with the country's nuclear program were in contact with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden with the thorough instructions of ISI.
"Pakistan has projected the electoral victory of the fundamentalist and pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaeda Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in the November elections as 'proof' the military is the only 'barrier' against the country passing into the hands of the extremists. The fact, however, is that the elections were widely rigged, and this was a fact acknowledged by the European Union observers, as well as by some of the MMA's constituents themselves. The MMA victory was, in fact, substantially engineered by the Musharraf regime, as are the various anti-U.S. 'mass demonstrations' around the country.
"Pakistan has made a big case out of the fact that some of the top-line leadership of al Qaeda has been arrested in the country with the 'cooperation' of the Pakistani security forces and intelligence. However, the fact is that each such arrest only took place after the FBI and U.S. investigators had effectively gathered evidence to force Pakistani collaboration, but little of this evidence had come from Pakistani intelligence agencies. Indeed, ISI has consistently sought to deny the presence of al Qaeda elements in Pakistan, and to mislead U.S. investigators. ... This deception has been at the very highest level, and Musharraf himself, for instance, initially insisted he was 'certain' bin Laden was dead. ...
"ISI has been actively facilitating the relocation of the al Qaeda from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the conspiracy of substantial segments of serving Army and intelligence officers is visible. ..."
"The Pakistan army consistently denies giving the militants anything more than moral, diplomatic and political support. The reality is quite different. ISI issues money and directions to militant groups, specially the Arab hijackers of September 11 from al Qaeda. ISI was fully involved in devising and helping the entire affair. And that is why people like Hamid Gul and others very quickly stated the propaganda that CIA and Mossad did it. ..."
"The dilemma for Musharraf is that many of his army officers are still deeply sympathetic to al Qaeda, Taliban militants and the Kashmir cause. ... Many retired and present ISI officers retain close links to al Qaeda militants hiding in various state-sponsored places in Pakistan and Kashmir as well as leaders from the defeated Taliban regime. They regard the fight against Americans and Jews and Indians in different parts of the world as legitimate jihad."
The report also says, "According to a senior tribal leader in Peshawar, bin Laden, who suffers from renal deficiency, has been periodically undergoing dialysis in a Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and approval of ISI if not of Gen. Pervez Musharraf himself."
The same source, though not in the report, speculated that Mr. Musharraf may plan to turn over bin Laden to President Bush in time to clinch Mr. Bush's re-election in November.