A Law Unto Its Own: Time Has Come to Clean Up Pakistan’s Notorious ISI Intelligence Service?

Can General Rizwan Akhtar clean up Pakistan’s notorious ISI spy agency? 

Jon Boone 

The Guardian , September 30, 2014 

Gen Rizwan Akhtar with India’s border force. He has urged Pakistan to ‘aggressively pursue rapprochement with India’. Photograph: Hindustan Times/Getty 

Pakistan’s new spy chief, who takes up his post this month, comes to the job of running one of the world’s most notorious intelligence agencies after two years trying to bring order to one of Asia’s most troubled cities. Former colleagues have nothing but praise for General Rizwan Akhtar’s stint commanding the paramilitary Rangers during the internal security force’s crackdown on the criminal mafias, armed wings of political parties and religious militants that dominate the teeming port city of Karachi. 

“Before the start of the operation there was no fear of law-enforcement agencies,” said Ahmed Chinoy, head of Karachi’s citizen police liaison committee. “With Akhtar, the fear was restored that they would be killed in an encounter, arrested or face the consequences.” 

Akhtar has been praised for backing decent police officers against politicians who were anxious to protect their network of street thugs, and for making morale-boosting appearances on the streets during firefights and enhancing the Rangers’ intelligence gathering capabilities. 

His supporters say this will all be invaluable when he takes over as director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), the powerful military spy agency. 

“For him, a terrorist is a terrorist,” said Nasir Aftab, a senior Karachi policeman. “There is no impression of good terrorism or bad terrorism, or that some are working for Pakistan.”

Such moral clarity is not usually associated with the ISI, an organisation accused of conspiring to overthrow civilian governments and backing regional insurgencies. 

The ISI has faced calls for it to be branded a terrorist organisation because of its habit of drawing a distinction between militants trying to topple Pakistan and those whose interests are confined to Afghanistan and India. 

Frustrated western officials claim that only this year the Taliban-allied Haqqani network was assisted in moving to safety before the launch of a long-awaited military operation in North Waziristan, a tribal agency neighbouring Afghanistan that had been allowed to become a terrorist hub. 

Sceptics say the ISI is beyond reform. Director generals only serve for a couple of years, hardly enough time to get to grips with a sprawling organisation that includes some officers who, it is feared, share the ideology of the militants that they handle. There has even been speculation that the ISI has slipped from the control of the army itself. 

“[Under Akhtar] there will be no change in objectives but only in how he handles things,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, an analyst who specialises in military affairs. “He will try to make the army look neutral, but we are not going to see less intervention in politics, or changed perspectives on India or Afghanistan.” 

But other analysts believe Pakistan’s military has been forced by the blossoming of domestic terrorism in the last decade to rethink its approach to militancy. After Pakistan was forced to side with the US and its allies in the military operation against the Taliban in 2001, jihadis who had been nurtured over decades for export to India and Afghanistan turned their guns on their former patron. 

The army, for so long prepared and indoctrinated for war against India, had to transform itself into a force capable of fighting an internal insurgency, which has claimed the lives and limbs of thousands of soldiers. 

For many, the experience of serving on the new front line has helped to inoculate them against the romantic illusions of Islamist jihad. 

“Everything had to change to fight an enemy that is invisible and where the battle lines are not clearly drawn,” said a retired army officer whom Akhtar served under while working in South Waziristan – another militant haven where the military launched a milestone operation in 2009. “Personally I feel he will bring about profound difference in the ISI.” 

Many of the themes in the military’s thinking are reflected in a 2008 dissertation that Akhtar wrote while attending a course at the US Army War College on the subject of the “US-Pakistan trust deficit and the war on terror”. 

While the US was blamed for making numerous mistakes in the way it handled Pakistan, the dissertation also identified the need to “confront and eliminate Islamic extremism, and create a more tolerant society” as being among the country’s most “critical strategic challenges”. 

“Most important, [Pakistan] must aggressively pursue rapprochement with India,” he wrote. 

Kamran Bokhari, an analyst at the private intelligence company Stratfor, said Akhtar’s impact was likely to be incremental. “We overrate the importance of individual ISI chiefs, but ultimately he is part of a trajectory where the army does not want to directly govern Pakistan, even if it still wants to rule from behind the scenes,” he said. 

“And the enthusiasm for developing non-state militant actors as instruments of foreign policy has gone because it has blown up in their faces.” 

The ongoing relationship with groups such as the Haqqani network, Bokhari believes, is simply the ISI’s way of managing a group it is unwilling to pick a fight with. 

The immediate hope for the government is that the new ISI chief will dispel the widespread belief that it has tried to undermine Nawaz Sharif, the embattled prime minister, who has been weakened by street protests in the capital led by opposition politician Imran Khan and Tahir-ul-Qadri, a cleric with a committed following. 

Javed Hashmi, the former president of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, accused the former cricketer of attempting to topple Sharif’s government under the direction of ISI spies. 

Sharif’s relationship with the ISI soured dramatically this year when Geo News, the country’s most popular television station, accused the incumbent director general, Zaheer-ul-Islam, of attempting to kill its star journalist during an April shootout in Karachi. 

The government chose not to challenge the unprecedented public attack on the ISI and Sharif even made a point of rushing to the bedside of the wounded journalist. 

Back in 2008, Akhtar wrote that “the role of the military should be limited to ensuring the nation’s security from external threats”. Sharif can only hope that he meant it.