Pakistan's jihad makers

Faith, Unity, Discipline

The Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan

Hein G. Kiessling

HarperCollins 

Pages 307, Rs 599

Although we have had some good books on various aspects of Pakistan's history, politics, armed forces and national ethos, the German scholar Hein Kiessling has done a great service to South Asian studies by providing us with this excellent work devoted to the history, leadership, and political and intelligence activities of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, the clandestine organisation that has single-mindedly waged war on India, promoted jihad across the region and subverted the democratic order at home.

The ISI plays a major role in domestic politics, deciding the ascension and downfall of civilian governments, subverting parliamentarians and judges through blackmail and intimidation, cowing the media, and even physically eliminating critics of the service.

The ISI was set up in 1948 by an Australian military officer, Major General Walter Cawthorne. After he retired, he returned to Pakistan as the Australian High Commissioner in 1954. The ISI was not just meant to promote better coordination among the various wings of the armed forces; it was, as the author says, also meant to promote British interests in central and west Asia.

With the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1948 and the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951, there was a dearth of competent politicians in Pakistan, which enabled the armed forces to take control of national politics, beginning with martial law in 1958. From that point onwards, the ISI became involved with manipulating domestic politics to subserve army interests and to initiate anti-India activity by backing militant groups in the north-east.

But the emergence of the ISI as the influential national force it is today began with the presidency of Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88), who used this organisation against political opponents at home and gave it a central role in organising the "global jihad", holy war, in Afghanistan through the ISI's powerful Afghanistan Bureau. Weapons worth billions of dollars were received by the ISI, which alone handled their distribution, ensuring that Islamic extremist groups were given preferential treatment. Observers believe that 15 to 40 per cent of the resources delivered by the United States remained in Pakistan and were later used in Kashmir or were sold in the black market; suspicions remain that almost all the top generals enriched themselves, including the ISI chief and his president.

Besides corrupting the body politic, the shaping of the Afghan struggle as a jihad had its impact on the Pakistani political ethos as well: large sections of the national population and the armed forces, including the officer cadre, became what Kiessling calls "born-again Muslims". General Javed Nasir, who became ISI chief in 1991, actively promoted the participation of Pakistani jihadis from home-grown jihadigroups and Al-Qaeda in terrorist activity in Bosnia, Kashmir and later in Mumbai in 1993. Not surprisingly, a group of officers, in association with Islamic groups, attempted a coup d'etat in 1994 to overthrow the political and military leaderships and set up a joint "Pakistan-Afghanistan caliphate".

Mr Kiessling provides a detailed account of the ISI's anti-India activity in Kashmir, the north-east and Punjab. Though he fails to note that ISI had already begun the indoctrination and training of jihadis for Kashmir during the Afghan jihad, he does point out that the mobilisation included battle-hardened Afghan veterans and young recruits from Kashmir and Pakistan's Punjab and North West Frontier Provinces provinces, who then joined the various jihadi organisations set up by ISI, such as: Harakatul Mujahedeen, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The Punjab saga is equally sordid: Here ISI had a three-point plan to promote alienation, subvert state machinery and perpetrate a reign of terror in the state. With supply of AK-47 rifles and modern explosives, Mr Kiessling says, the ISI "contributed to the high number of fatalities in Punjab", estimated at 21,500 by Indian sources. In the north-east, too, the ISI generously armed and trained the militant groups, creating new bodies and encouraging communal tension.

The Mumbai attacks mark the apogee of ISI-directed assaults on India; Mr Kiessling asserts that the operation was carried out with the full knowledge of the ISI and the armed forces leadership. He quotes the report of David Headley, who did the reconnaissance of the targets, that the Lashkar operatives were in regular contact with ISI "at each and every stage of the operation", and that Lashkar leaders avoided the participation of more experienced Al-Qaeda personnel in the Mumbai project since they saw it "as a marketing opportunity for their brand of terrorism", and thus to obtain increased financial assistance and more new recruits.

The ISI’s fingerprints are apparent in almost every major terrorist activity in recent years. After promoting the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISI operatives facilitated the participation of Pakistani and other cadres in jihad in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan and even Nagorno-Karabakh. Mr Kiessling concludes that, through the operative Omar Saeed Sheikh, ISI had a connection with the 9/11 attacks, as also the kidnapping and subsequent killing of the journalist Daniel Pearl. The ISI was, of course, the guardian of Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad and of Mullah Omar in Quetta.

The past few years have not been good for the ISI or the Pakistani army: the jihadis it spawned have turned their guns on their sponsors, attacking ISI and army targets with considerable frequency. The ISI, however, continues to control the Kashmir, Afghanistan and nuclear files, while its anti-India agenda also remains intact, as affirmed by the recent upsurge of violence in Kashmir.

The narrative of the ISI reads like a saga of medieval conspiracies, blackmail, briberies, betrayals and assassinations, with this organisation corrupting venal politicians and eliminating opponents, even as the generals themselves remain corrupt, backstab each other with tedious regularity and wreak murder and mayhem in the region. Its activities have made South Asia the most crisis-prone area in the world, while Pakistan itself lies broken and at war with itself. It is difficult to see how Pakistan’s interests have been served by this murderous and self-serving organisation.

(The reviewer is a former diplomat)