Payback time: ISI's terrorists turn against Pak

New York: Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence has lost control of some of the networks of militants it has nurtured since the 1980s and is now suffering the violent backlash of that policy, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency have admitted to the US daily that the ISI has also supported militants in Kashmir although at the behest of its political masters, confirming what New Delhi believed all along and repeatedly complained about to Islamabad in vain.

Despite the crackdown on all militants ordered by President Pervez Musharraf, some officials in the government and the ISI thought the militants should be held in reserve, as insurance against the day when US and NATO forces abandoned the region and Pakistan might again need them as a lever against India, the daily writes in a detailed full-page report.

As the army has moved against them, the militants have joined hands with other extremist groups to battle Pakistani security forces and carried out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto, the paper says.

The growing strength of Pakistani militants, many of whom now back al-Qaeda's global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan's security as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan, forcing US officials to consider covert operations in the lawless border areas in the northwest.

One disclosure about the ISI is bound to raise fears among opposition parties of rigging of polls scheduled next month.

The newspaper’s sources acknowledged that the ISI manipulated the country's last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Musharraf. He has, however, ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, says the newspaper.

After September 11, 2001, though Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan.

After the agency unleashed hardline Islamist beliefs, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading. Worse, dozens of ISI officers had come to sympathise with the militants cause and had to be expelled from the agency, the Times reports, quoting former Pakistani officials.

"We could not control them," said a former senior intelligence official. "We indoctrinated them and told them, 'You will go to heaven.' You cannot turn it around so suddenly."

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The newspaer’s report confirms that in the 1990s, the ISI supported the militants as a proxy force to contest Indian-controlled Kashmir and to gain a controlling influence in neighbouring Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, the US too supported Islamic fighters, battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan, through the ISI, vastly increasing the agency's size and power.

Musharraf has dismissed criticism of the ISI's relationship with the militants. He cited the deaths of 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers in battles with the militants in recent years - as well as several assassination attempts against himself - as proof of the seriousness of Pakistan's counterterrorism effort.

But some former American intelligence officials have argued that Musharraf and the ISI never fully jettisoned their militant protégés, and instead carried on a "double-game." They say Musharraf cooperated with American intelligence agencies to track down foreign Qaeda members while holding Taliban commanders and Kashmiri militants in reserve, the Times reports.

"I think he would make a decision when a situation arises," Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani military analyst, told the Times referring to militants openly confronting the government. "But before that he would not alienate any side."

The ISI is, however, in no sense a rogue agency acting contrary to the policies of the leadership. If the ISI was covertly aiding the Taliban, the decision would come from the top of the government, a Western military official in Pakistan told the Times.

But former Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that Musharraf's crackdown on militants was never fully carried out because of opposition within his government and within the ISI.

Some senior ministers and officials in the government sympathised with the militants and protected them. Inside the ISI, one part hunted down militants, while another continued to work with them.

The Times cites the case of militant leader Maulana Masood Azhar to illustrate how extremists once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency's control. His Jaish-e-Muhammad received support from the ISI in 2000 to fight Indian forces in Kashmir, according to Robert Grenier, who was then stationed as CIA chief in Islamabad.

Musharraf banned Jaish and detained Azhar after Indian officials accused Jaish and another militant group of masterminding the attack on the Parliament building in New Delhi in December 2001.

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Soon, a British-born member of Azhar's group kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, who was eventually beheaded. Pakistani officials arrested more than 2,000 people in a crackdown, but within a year, Azhar and most of the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed.

"I never believed that government ties with these groups were being irrevocably cut," Grenier told the Times.

Musharraf and the US are ruing their policies today, the Times says, as Pakistan's tribal areas have become host to a lethal stew of foreign Qaeda members, Uzbek militants, Taliban, ISI-trained Pakistani extremists, disgruntled tribesmen and new recruits.

The groups carried out a record number of suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan last year and have been tied to three major terrorist plots in Britain and Germany since 2005.

"There are groups they know they have lost control of," a Western diplomat told the Times. But the government moved only against those groups that have attacked the Pakistani state, he added.

Before stepping down as army chief last month, Musharraf appointed a loyalist to run the ISI and appears determined to retain power over the agency, the Times says. The new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who headed the ISI from 2004 to 2007, is also a loyalist.

The new civilian prime minister who emerges from February's elections is likely to have far less authority over the ISI. Opposition political parties already accuse the agency of meddling in next month's election.

Since Bhutto's assassination, members of her party have accused government officials, including former ISI agents, of having a hidden hand in the attack or of knowing about a plot and failing to inform her.

Nearly half of Pakistanis too said in a recent poll that they suspected that government agencies or pro-government politicians had assassinated Bhutto.

Pakistani analysts and Western diplomats argue that the country will remain unstable as long as the ISI remains so powerful and so unaccountable. The ISI has grown more powerful in each period of military rule, the report says.