THE “agencies” may be doing some good work of which little is known beyond their own walls, but they have gained notoriety for messing up the country’s political system, and for gross violations of human rights. The more notable of them are the Intelligence Bureau (IB), Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and Military Intelligence (MI). I propose to take a look at the first two.
IB began as a segment of the intelligence bureau in British India that came to Pakistan’s share upon partition. It focuses on domestic politics, monitors the current government’s adversaries, and watches suspected terrorists and foreign agents. Its operatives may intercept the targeted person’s telephone calls and even inspect his mail. They harass opposition parties when their political superiors ask them to do so.
In the past, the Bureau has prepared assessments of the domestic political situation, state of public opinion and the levels of esteem in which the government and the ruling party were held. It also estimated the electoral prospects of the party’s candidates in various constituencies.
Formally, it formed part of the central government’s cabinet division and its director, usually a senior police officer, reported directly to the prime minister. During periods of military/presidential rule he reported to the president and probably does the same at the present time.
IB worked to promote Ayub Khan’s candidacy and engineered Miss Fatima Jinnah’s defeat in the presidential election of 1964. In conjunction with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of which we will say more shortly, it tried to ensure that no political party would win a clear majority in the 1970 election. IB played an even larger role in the election of March 1977. Its officers examined reports coming in from the district officers concerning each aspirant’s financial position, local standing, biradari connections, and reputation and passed their assessments on to Rao Abdul Rashid, a high-ranking police officer, who headed an election cell in the prime minister’s office.
Other intelligence agencies also submitted their evaluations. Mr. Bhutto made decisions on the award of party “tickets” partly on the basis of these assessments. So spectacular, and therefore incredible, was the result of its and the other agencies’ exertions (155 of the 192 general seats in the National Assembly) that it brought down Mr. Bhutto’s government.
It may be safe to assume that IB rendered similar assistance, perhaps a bit more discreetly, to the present regime in connection with the 2002 election, and that it is poised to do the same as the election scheduled for 2007 approaches.
Major-General Robert Cawthome, deputy chief of staff in the Pakistan army, founded the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence in 1948 to gather information relating to national security and defence. It was expected to concentrate on India, particularly Indian-occupied Kashmir. Ayub Khan expanded its role to include monitoring of opposition politicians.
Consisting of seven divisions, its tasks include collection of domestic and foreign intelligence; coordination between the intelligence agencies of the three armed services; surveillance of domestic media, and political activists; surveillance of foreign residents and diplomats in Pakistan and Pakistani diplomats serving abroad; covert offensive operations (e.g., destabilizing a foreign government), maintenance of listening posts and devices along the border; preparation of threat assessments; maintenance of technologies relating to explosives and chemicals.
The ISI’s workforce is said to consist of about 10,000, including hundreds of military and civilian officers. Its funds are not limited to those visible in its budget. It made a great deal of money while it served as a conduit for the supply of American funds and weapons to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet forces in the 1980s. It worked closely with the American CIA. The two of them cooperated, among other things, in exporting drugs and, in the process, became immensely wealthy.
We are concerned here with the ISI’s domestic operations. It served as Ayub Khan’s eyes, ears, and “muscle” in dealing with his political opponents. It did the same for Yahya Khan. Over the years, it has put together and broken up political parties and coalitions. Following the Islamic revolution in Iran it is believed to have encouraged the formation of the anti-Shia Sipah-i-Sahaba. When the MQM became troublesome in the urban centres of Sindh in the late 1980s, the ISI armed some of the Sindhi nationalist groups to fight the Mohajirs, and it also managed to create a split within the MQM itself.
It brought two factions of PML back together and placed them in an alliance with the Islamic parties and some other groups (the combination called IJI) to oppose the PPP in the 1988 election. General Mirza Aslam Beg revealed during a hearing at the Supreme Court (June 16, 1997) that the ISI had received Rs 140 million from a bank, which it disbursed to parties opposing the PPP candidates in the election held in October 1990.
In September and October of 1989 the ISI attempted to bring about a split within the PPP: it tried to persuade a number of its MNAs to support a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sponsored by the opposition parties. This move failed.
The ISI keeps tabs not only on opposition politicians but also on the ruling party and its leading men. It can put pressure upon them, and resist their pressure, by confronting them with the records of their alleged misdeeds and threatening to expose them. Once one of Mr. Bhutto’s ministers told me that he had personally checked some of the telephones at the prime minister’s residence and found that they were bugged. Intelligence agencies are said to have bugged the room in which Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi (the Indian prime minister) held their private conversations in December 1988 and July 1989.
Far more abominable than intervention in political organizations and the electoral process is the ISI’s alleged mishandling of individual citizens. Numerous reports have recently appeared, saying that men belonging to the “agencies” have forced their way into homes and abused the residents, picked up persons, taken them away, held them incommunicado for months, and in some instances tortured and killed them.
Allow me to refer here to a particularly scandalous event that took place in the first week of July. An ISI officer reportedly sent a bunch of his operatives to break into the house of an 80-year old retired brigadier, twice recipient of the second highest military award (SJ) for bravery on the field of battle. They insulted him, roughed up his daughter-in-law, seized his two young grandsons (who had apparently had a fight with the ISI officer’s boys at school), and took them away.
Attempts to make the ISI accountable to the government’s political head have accomplished nothing other than further alienating the agency from her/him. The prime minister hoped to rein in the ISI by appointing a man of her/his choice as its director, but this move did not produce the desired result. Disregarding the army chief’s advice, Ms Benazir Bhutto appointed a retired major general, Shamsur Rahman Kallu, as the ISI’s head in May 1989 to replace Lt. General Hameed Gul. This did not go well with General Aslam Beg who shunned her appointee.
Nawaz Sharif appointed Lt General Javed Nasir to the post without consulting General Asif Nawaz, the army chief at the time. The latter would seem to have accepted this appointment, albeit, reluctantly. During his second term in office, Nawaz Sharif appointed Lt General Ziauddin as the ISI’s director general, overriding General Musharraf’s objections. Ziauddin was not well received at GHQ. His appointment made for friction between Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif which, as we all know, caused the prime minister a lot of grief.
The ISI is often referred to as “a state within a state,” an “invisible government,” and a “law unto itself,” for in matters of its own choosing it is accountable to no one, not even to the army chief. Writing in a Lahore newspaper (August 17, 1997), the late Mr. Altaf Gauhar once observed that, national security being an inclusive concept, a great many happenings at home as well abroad could be said to have a bearing upon it. The resulting ambiguity opened the door to ISI’s interventions in the country’s domestic politics. Mr. Gauhar gave an account of its domestic undertakings during the 1960s, when he served as information secretary in the central government. His narrative need not be repeated here, for we have already covered its salient points above.
But surely noteworthy is his finding that the ISI and other intelligence agencies had been so occupied with domestic politics that they had failed to gather adequate information regarding the state of public opinion in Indian occupied Kashmir in the weeks preceding the 1965 war. Mr. Gauhar, having watched their performance both during his own tenure as federal secretary and later, would appear to have become greatly disenchanted with them.
He concluded his article with the observation that the “involvement of the ISI and MI in domestic politics is seen as the biggest threat to the security and solidarity of Pakistan.” Observations to the same effect have also appeared in newspaper editorials, columns, and other forums from time to time.
The ISI and the other intelligence agencies did not know much about the state of affairs in Indian held Kashmir, or the deployment of Indian forces during the war in 1965. It is hard to say to what extent their knowledge of India’s political dynamics, objectives relating to Pakistan, and levels of military preparedness have improved since then. But we do know that their competence in investigating terrorism and sabotage within Pakistan, identifying and apprehending the culprits and their sponsors, remains abysmally low. One may then wonder if they are earning their keep, and if they are worth having, if all they can do “well” is to distort and disrupt our political system, and scare, harass and torment our citizens.
The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.
Email: anwarsyed@cox.net
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