This perverted defence and ‘strategic’ thinking sums up the mindset and attitude of the Pakistani military establishment, which is dominated by the ISI. The two-decade -old proxy war against India has been driven by this ‘strategy" of Pakistan, apart from being afflicted with the anti-India syndrome. The ISI-sponsored terrorist attacks on the Red Fort (December, 2000), Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly (October 1, 2001) and Indian Parliament (December 13, 2001) mark a paradigm shift in the ISI strategy of fanning terrorism in India. To appreciate the ISI philosophy, it would be better to trace the history of Pakistan’s hostility against India.

The genesis of Pakistan’s stoking fires of insurgency and terrorism can be traced back to as early as 1957. During this period, the Pakistani intelligence services assisted the Naga rebels by providing them with sanctuaries in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of the then East Pakistan. The Pakistanis trained them in use of arms and ammunition along these hill tracts. The Naga gangs used to exploit the Myanmar soil for their activities, particularly the Chin Hills Special Division. New Delhi took up the matter with the Ne Wing government in Myanmar as a result of which the Myanmarese Army started intercepting the Naga gangs. The Naga rebels now felt the heat being turned on to them and by 1965 they had to virtually abandon the use of Myanmarese route to Chittagong hill tracts.

This forced the Pakistani intelligence agencies to change their strategy. From 1965 onwards, the Pakistani intelligence put the Nagas in touch with the Chinese intelligence. In 1968, the Chinese intelligence opened training camps for Naga rebels in Yunnan. Kachin Independence Army (KIA) started helping the Nagas in going to China through Myanmar and the Myanmarese authorities could do precious little to prevent this as their writ did not prevail in the Kachin areas.

The Chinese ordered a major reversal of their policy when in 1979 the Chinese supremo Deng Xiaoping ordered discontinuance of Beijing’s assistance to the North-East Indian insurgents.

But by this time, the Pakistanis had found another Indian state to foment trouble in — Punjab. The common perception is that the ISI started its subversive activities in Punjab around 1980. But the reality is really chilling and speaks volumes of the ISI’s anti-India mindset. Very few people would be knowing that it was soon after the Indo-Pak war of 1965 that the ISI had started playing its dirty game in Punjab.

After the 1965 war, the ISI established contact with Charanjit Singh Panchi of the UK and his accomplices who encouraged the activities of the Sikh Homeland Movement. Dr Jagjit Singh Chohan, who was a minister in the United Front government in Punjab which came to power in 1967, proved to be a willing and key pawn in the hands of the ISI. After the fall of the UF government, Chohan went to London in 1970, hijacked the leadership of Sikh Homeland Movement and renamed it as the Khalistan movement. The very next year, the now London-based Chohan visited Pakistan where the military ruler Yahya Khan lionised him as the "Father of the Sikh Nation." Before the1971 war erupted in December, Chohan visited New York, courtesy the ISI. There is credible information available with the Indian agencies that the office of Henry Kissinger, then National Security Adviser of the US, aided and abetted the activities of Chohan in the US during this visit when he held a press conference and made allegations of violations of Sikhs’ human rights in India. The main objective of Pakistan and Kissinger was obviously to divert attention from the alarming situation in East Pakistan.

When General Zia ul Haq seized power in 1977, the ISI redoubled its activities to cultivate Indian Sikhs spread all over the world and started subverting them. Gen Zia could not jell with Chohan. As a result, Chohan was dropped like a hot potato by the ISI. In his place, Ganga Singh Dhillon of the Nankana Sahib Foundation, Washington, was cultivated and promoted by the Zia regime. Dhillon’s second wife and Zia’s wife were school-time friends since their days in Nairobi. The Zias were so thick with the Dhillons that the General’s daughter, who was mentally challenged, used to stay with the Dhillons whenever she travelled with her father to Washington.

The ISI started its infamous campaign of giving arms training to misguided Sikhs when it set up its first training camps in 1980 for Dal Khalsa activists. Soon, recruits from other organisations were roped in — the most prominent being Babbar Khalsa and the Khalistan Commando Force. The ISI training soon produced results. The Dal Khalsa hijacked as many as five aircrafts of the Indian Airlines between 1981 and 1984.

The next watershed came in the late eighties when the ISI started the training of cadres of extremist organisations of Jammu and Kashmir too in large numbers in camps in Pakistan -Occupied Kashmir. By now, the ISI was enjoying the status of a government-within-a government, thanks to its success in fighting America’s proxy war with the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. By 1989, when the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was complete, the ISI-supported Afghan Mujahideen groups were literally left unemployed, and more importantly, without any ideology to pursue. The ISI now started its Operation K-2 (named after Pakistan’s highest mountain, but in intelligence parlance standing for "Kashmir-Khalistan"). The theory of making India bleed through "a thousand cuts" was implemented by the ISI with full vigour from 1990 onwards.

The footloose soldiers of Afghanistan were diverted to Jammu and Kashmir. They were lured by the ISI to J&K with two things: ‘jehad’, which cloaked their bloody activities with a spiritual cause, and beautiful girls to satisfy their physical needs. During early nineties, Kashmir was literally raped by the ISI’s mercenaries brigade led by the Afghans. It was during this period that abortion clinics mushroomed like barber shops in Jammu and Kashmir.

Till 1990, the ISI trained whoever went to PoK from Jammu and Kashmir, irrespective of the organisaton to which he belonged. Arms and ammunition were freely distributed and the red carpet was rolled out for anybody crossing the Line of Control (LoC). After the fiasco of an ISI-mounted operation against the troops of the Najibullah government of Afghanistan in Jalalabad in February 1989, the then Pakistan premier Benazir Bhutto appointed Major-General Kallue — who died later — as the new ISI chief in place of Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul. She asked General Kallue to stop assisting the Sikh extremists while continuing to train the Kashmiri groups. Nawaz Sharief, then chief minister of Punjab, ordered the Special Branch of the Punjab Police, to take over the responsibility of training Sikh terrorists and for the supply of arms and ammunition to them. Many ex-ISI officers were inducted into the Special Branch for this purpose. After Benazir’s dismissal in August 1990, the ISI resumed its control over training of Sikh terrorists.

When Benazir returned to power at the end of 1993, she cooperated with the USA as far as acting against narco-barons and terrorists, in whom Washington was interested, was concerned. She went back on her assurance to the White House to stop the ISI’s support to terrorism in India and other countries. She did three things:

* First, she asked the ISI to interact with the terrorist groups indirectly through cut-outs such as the JEI, the Hizb ul Mujahideen, the Lashkar-e-Toiba, and not directly as was done in the past.

* Second, she shifted the terrorist training camps of HUM, the LeT and Harkat ul Mujahideen to Afghan territory under the control of the ISI.

* Third, she entrusted Maj.- Gen. Nasirullah Babar (retd), her Interior Minister, who had headed the Afghan Division of the ISI when her father was the Prime Minister, with the responsibility of overseeing the ISI activities so that unauthorised rogue actions like the ISI helping the LTTE did not recur.

In February 1999, the then Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharief, found a way to get out of a tricky situation he faced— Washington was pressuring him to act against Osama bin Laden and the terrorist groups operating from Afghan territory. Significantly, the plan was submitted by none other than General Pervez Musharraf, the then Pakistan Army chief and now the military ruler and President of Pakistan. According to this plan, terrorist cadres of outfits like HUM, LET and Al Badr were to be shifted from their camps in Afghanistan to the Northern Areas. Shortly later, these terrorists were used by the Pakistan Army for capturing ridges in the Kargil area.