CNN: I want to talk about the recently released Wikileaks documents. Among many incidents of your name being mentioned in those documents, it’s said that you met Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan in 2006 and told them, and I quote, to “make the snow warm in Kabul, to set Kabul aflame”. Is that true?
HAMID GUL (HG): Not at all – I’m not that kind of a man – I am a clean soldier. I was a cavalry soldier all my life — I served only two years and a quarter in the ISI, and the ISI is not the one who carry out such kind of activities. All soldiers are, you know, fighting for your cause, for a good cause, for your country’s defense. That is very noble. But killing civilians, or killing innocent people, has never been my line of thought.
CNN: Wikileaks also allegedly suggested that, in January 2008, you directed the Taliban to kidnap high-level personnel in Afghanistan. True or false?
HG: All of this is disinformation — a deliberate attempt to misguide. Therefore, don’t pay any heed to it. It is not intelligence – please – it is not processed, and I think the documents themselves say as much. Intelligence is a very different matter altogether.
CNN: Let me ask you this question — If it is false, as you say, why are so many people in the West convinced that the Taliban does take orders from you?
HG: I think they want to bash the ISI, and I’m being used as a bogeyman. Now they want to shift the blame of their failures in Afghanistan — the intelligence failure, the military failure. And they have to find a scapegoat.
CNN: You are critical of the US performance in Afghanistan. What would you say they are specifically doing wrong?
HG: They are dependent on a long line of communication, the logistic support is coming through Pakistan, and Pakistan is being destabilised by India — their ally. This is one problem, and you know now the floods have cut off the lines of communication. The Karachi riots are creating another problem, so you cannot depend on this logistical tail. And the second is the intelligence input. If Wikileaks is any reflection of the kind of intelligence input that the American forces are getting, then I can already conclude what would be the outcome.
CNN: Ok, I want to talk about Pakistan’s focus on India. At a briefing with Pakistani journalists in February this year, Gen Kayani (Pakistan army chief) admitted that Pakistan’s military remains India-centric. Why is that?
HG: It is for two reasons. One is the Kashmir movement, and the Indian state terrorism in Kashmir, and the second is because of the wrongful occupation of Afghanistan by the allied forces. I think that proud nation is being really ravaged, which is very wrong. So, this is the root cause — unless you address the root cause, you are not going to find the solution. As far as Pakistan’s orientation towards India is concerned, that is a reality, and Indians themselves are making it a reality.
CNN: Do the people of Pakistan really care about India or Afghanistan at the moment? They’ve got water shortage; they’ve suffered from the worst floods in a generation. They don’t have power or electricity in many places. Yet, they have a nuclear weapons programme. Does Islamabad have their priorities straight at this point?
HG: It is amazing that India continues to aim at Pakistan and considers it the enemy. The Kashmir dispute is still going on; the Kashmir movement is very much on the boil and, at this time, it is expected that Pakistan should shift forces from the Eastern border and transfer them to the Western border — it is not possible, we don’t have the resources.
(Former ISI chief, Gen Hamid Gul, in an interview to CNN’s Becky Anderson in CNN International’s ‘Connect the World’ on August 11)
