Why the U.S. mistrusts Pakistan’s spy agency
Chris Allbritton and Mark Hosenball:
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The Pakistan Army’s humiliating surrender to India in Dhaka in 1971 led to the carving up of the country into two parts, one West Pakistan and the other Bangladesh. The defeat had two major effects: it convinced the Pakistan military that it could not beat its larger neighbor through conventional means alone, a realization that gave birth to its use of Islamist militant groups as proxies to try to bleed India; and it forced successive Pakistani governments to turn to Islam as a means of uniting the territory it had left.These shifts, well underway when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, suited the United States at first. Working with its Saudi Arabian ally, Washington plowed money and weapons into the jihad against the Soviets and turned a blind eye to the excesses of Pakistan’s military ruler, General Zia ul-Haq, who had seized power in 1977 and hanged former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.
Many Pakistanis blame the current problems in Pakistan in part on Washington’s penchant for supporting military rulers. It did the same in 2001 when it threw it its lot with Musharraf following the attacks on New York and Washington. By then, the rebellion in Indian Kashmir had been going since 1989, and U.S. officials back in 2001 made little secret that they knew the army was training, arming and funding militants to fight there.
That attitude changed after India and Pakistan nearly went to war following the December 2001 attack on India’s parliament, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militant groups — a charge Islamabad denied. Musharraf began to rein in the Kashmiri militant groups, restricting their activity across the Line of Control which divides the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir. But he was juggling the two challenges which continue to defy his successor as head of the army, General Ashfaq Kayani — reining in the militant groups enough to prevent an international backlash on Pakistan, while giving them enough space to operate to avoid domestic fall-out at home.
The ISI has never really tried to hide the fact that it sees terrorism as part of its arsenal. When Guantanamo interrogation documents appearing to label the Pakistani security agency as an entity supporting terrorism were published recently, a former ISI head, Lt. General Asad Durrani, wrote that terrorism “is a technique of war, and therefore an instrument of policy.”