New Delhi, July 23
Some two decades ago, the then Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had told her Indian counterpart Rajiv Gandhi that the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) was going ahead with exporting terror to India despite her instructions to stop it.
The dramatis personae in the two countries have changed, several governments have come and gone in the two countries, but the ISI continues to be the same.
The latest example of this came on July 11 when Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence informed the Sindh High Court that it had no operational control over the ISI and the Military Intelligence (MI). The Defence Ministry’s representative, Lt Col Mohammad Iqbal Sahboo, in a matter of six detention petitions, said the ISI and the MI were only under the administrative control and therefore could not enforce the court’s direction on both agencies in detention matters.
This led to a stinging editorial published on July 13 in The Dawn, tellingly titled “ISI’s Pervasive Role”, in which the daily said even men like Saddam Hussein or Hafez al-Assad would not allow their intelligence operatives to interfere with foreign policy.
“But in Pakistan, the ISI has over-stepped all limits. During the weak political governments (1988-1999), the ISI refused to give up the position and privileges it had acquired during the Zia regime and pursued its own policy in Afghanistan,” the newspaper said. “This had disastrous consequences. It had access to unlimited financial resources and it perpetuated the military's alliance with religious parties forged by Zia-ul Haq.”
The Dawn editorial mentioned the specific example of the misuse of the Mehran Bank money by the ISI to create the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, an anti-PPP alliance. “Even though Gen Mirza Aslam Beg, the then army chief, went public with this scam, it is a measure of the ISI's hold over the state apparatus that the National Accountability Bureau has not found the Mehran Bank case fit enough for a probe. Until the ISI is reined in and its activities are made strictly professional, its conduct will continue to militate against the growth of democratic institutions in Pakistan,” the newspaper said in a damning comment.
