Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [114]
Concerning the Afghan Taleban, the military and the ISI are at one, and the evidence is unequivocal: the military and ISI continue to give them shelter (though not much actual support, or the Taleban would be far more effective than they are). There is deep unwillingness to take serious action against them on America’s behalf, both because it is feared that this would increase Pathan insurgency in Pakistan, and because they are seen as the only assets Pakistan possesses in Afghanistan. The conviction in the Pakistani security establishment is that the West will quit Afghanistan leaving civil war behind, and that India will then throw its weight behind the non-Pathan forces of the former Northern Alliance in order to encircle Pakistan strategically.
In these circumstances, ‘It’s not that we like the Taleban, but they are all we’ve got,’ as Mr Hamid told me, reflecting the private statements of several officers. As these words suggest, in the great majority of Pakistani officers a willingness to shelter the Afghan Taleban does not indicate any affection for them – while on the Taleban side, the memoirs of the former Taleban official and ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, are filled with the most virulent hatred for Pakistan in general and the ISI in particular.
Concerning the Pakistani Taleban and their allies, however, like the military as a whole, the ISI is now committed to the struggle against them, and by the end of 2009 had lost more than seventy of its officers in this fight – some ten times the number of CIA officers killed since 9/11, just as Pakistani military casualties fighting the Pakistani Taleban have been more than double those of the US in Afghanistan.
Equally, however, in 2007 – 8 there were a great many stories of ISI officers intervening to rescue individual Taleban commanders from arrest by the police or the army – too many, and too circumstantial, for these all to have been invented. A senior civilian counter-terrorism officer told me that his agency has repeatedly arrested members of terrorist groups who have turned out to have ISI links. He also said that his counter-terrorism operations have received very little co-operation from the ISI – though that, he said, was often in his view more from institutional rivalry (so familiar from relations between the CIA and FBI in the US) than from a deliberate desire to protect terrorists.
It seems clear, therefore, that whether because individual ISI officers felt a personal commitment to these men, or because the institution as a whole still regarded them as potentially useful, actions were taking place that were against overall military policy – let alone that of the Pakistani government. Moreover, some of these men had at least indirect links to Al Qaeda. This does not mean that the ISI knows where Osama bin Laden (if he is indeed still alive), Aiman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders are hiding. It does, however, suggest that they could probably do a good deal more to find out.
Concerning the threat of terrorism against the West (as opposed to attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan), the Pakistani military and civilian intelligence services have been extremely helpful to Britain in particular, as British intelligence officers testify. Problems in this co-operation appear to be due to lack of co-ordination between Pakistan’s different agencies, and the lack of an overall counter-terrorism strategy by the Pakistani state, rather than to any ill-will towards Britain or sympathy for the terrorists.
However, on the