Pakistan: Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) - a collection

[davidbfpo]

This report was discussed today on BBC Radio Four's PM programme, with Bruce Reidel and he stated:

It is an extraordinary document..with quite good vintage wine...we've known for a long time that Pakistan supports the Afghan Taliban...it is a pretty massive indictment of Pakistan support for the Afghan Taliban...

Link to podcast, his remarks are 40:40 to 43:30:http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01bb7jy

Even the Daily Telegraph comment is pithy:

..There is little in the report which marries with Nato claims the insurgency's momentum has been broken.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ommanders.html

[Entropy]

It's groundhog day folks. From the December 24, 2006, Los Angeles Times:

Confidential documents obtained by The Times show that for at least two years, U.S. military intelligence agencies have warned American commanders that Taliban militants were arming and training in Pakistan, then slipping into Afghanistan with the help of Pakistani border control officers....

Intelligence warnings have for months documented U.S. worries about Pakistan's role in providing a haven for Afghan insurgents.

A map prepared in early 2005 for a U.S. Army Special Operations task force warned that officers at Pakistani border control posts were "assisting insurgent attacks." It showed militants' infiltration routes from Pakistan, several of which crossed from North Waziristan to Khowst province, where members of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network who have long been based in Afghanistan are still active.

On Jan. 19 of this year, a report from the U.S. military's Joint Intelligence Task Force said that Al Qaeda continued "to provide expertise and resources, such as weapons, training, and fighters to anti-coalition groups including the Taliban" and its allies, among which is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami militia.

In a separate report the same month, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, identified six eastern provinces, including Khowst, as "Al Qaeda strongholds."

"These locations allow Al Qaeda members easy entrance and exit over the Afghanistan/Pakistan border," it added.

The document identified Al Qaeda's commander in Afghanistan as Khalid Habib, and said "Al Qaeda maintains close ties to the Taliban and has received technical support and training from Pakistani militant groups."

It warned that armed Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis who might attack U.S. forces were in Afghanistan. And it said that Pakistan's ISI directorate posed "a HIGH intelligence threat to U.S. and Coalition forces."

There have been dozens and dozens of "leaks" about this going back to at least 2006 and I remember the first serious reports from way, way back in 2003. It's been six-plus freaking years of this crap and it's still reported in halting, serious tones by "officials" as if this were some great revelation. That Pakistani's must be laughing their asses off - "look at the Americans - they've known for years we're helping the Taliban and all they seem to do is complain to the media."

/rant off. Time to pour myself a drink.

[Fuchs]

...and that's why having nukes is so attractive.

Without them, you run risk of getting even your fertilizer factories bombed - with them you can do whatever you want, even house the U.S.'s arch enemy.
You may even get subsidies by the U.S. in the meantime.

Seriously, who could have made this up?

[Entropy]

...and that's why having nukes is so attractive.

Without them, you run risk of getting even your fertilizer factories bombed - with them you can do whatever you want, even house the U.S.'s arch enemy.
You may even get subsidies by the U.S. in the meantime.

Seriously, who could have made this up?

So, you're suggesting nukes are why the US looks the other way with regard to Pakistani support for the Taliban?

[Dayuhan]

So, you're suggesting nukes are why the US looks the other way with regard to Pakistani support for the Taliban?

I doubt the nukes have much to do with it. The Pakistanis know too well what the consequence of pointing one of those the wrong way would be.

A simpler answer is that as long as the US presence in Afghanistan is large enough to require land supply via Pakistan to sustain it, te Pakistanis hold a trump card in their dealing with the US. The US can't use its substantial economic leverage until it's capable of supporting the Afghanistan venture without Pakistani cooperation. Counterintuitively, the US may gain more leverage over Pakistan, and thus over the Taliban, by reducing its presence.

I personally wonder if it wouldn't be possible to scale back the overall presence substantially without reducing combat capability, by adjusting the teeth-to-tail ratio in favor of teeth. Of course I'm not in a position to know, but it does seem like there's a whole bunch of tail on the ground there. Would appreciate informed commentary on that question...

[Bob's World]

Pakistan has always had a working relationship with the Taliban to my knowledge; why would that change simply because the US decided to jump into the region and begin working to shape things to our liking??

Pakistan had little choice but to "align" with the US in this effort officially, or risk being caught between a growing US-Indian alliance; but that did not change how they viewed their interests from their perspective and the role of the Taliban in managing the aspect of those interests that requires influence with the Pashtun populace shared by Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I see nothing surprising or new about this report. Well, I guess to me it is surprising that anyone thinks this is surprising.

And yes, I think we would have been as deep in Pakistan as we are currently in Afghanistan if they did not have nukes. Countries that have nukes receive a different status of treatment than those that do not, that is why so many countries seek them today. Afghanistan and Iraq did not have nukes, so we ignored their sovereignty. Pakistan has nukes, so while frustrating, we respect their sovereignty. NK and Iran are seeking a little respect of their own. Perhaps if we gave it to them they would not feel compelled to pursue nuclear programs quite so aggressively.

[omarali50]

I think what Fuchs meant (correctly) was that having Nukes makes Pakistan "too big to fail" and guarantees that bailouts will be forthcoming while also guaranteeing that any strategy of bombing or intervening directly will appear too risky. It also provides a very very valuable potential export item, to be used (i.e. sold to Saudi Arabia) if all else fails.
The only reason I am not jumping on board the "ISI is brilliant" bandwagon is because there was another choice and for the people of Pakistan (as opposed to its military-bureaucratic elite) that choice would have been much better ..to dump its "India-centric", nuke-protected-jihadi-based interventionist foreign policy and think about improving living standards and governance via the old-fashioned route (trade, industry, culture, etc). But as long as you buy the nationalist BS surrounding these matters, Pakistan's "core professionals" have played the US brilliantly and will continue to do so.
Groundhog day indeed.

[carl]

Counterintuitively, the US may gain more leverage over Pakistan, and thus over the Taliban, by reducing its presence.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

I personally wonder if it wouldn't be possible to scale back the overall presence substantially without reducing combat capability, by adjusting the teeth-to-tail ratio in favor of teeth. Of course I'm not in a position to know, but it does seem like there's a whole bunch of tail on the ground there. Would appreciate informed commentary on that question...

My uninformed commentary is physically. absolutely. Culturally, impossible.

[carl]

I only last week got around to reading in the December Atlantic Magazine an article about our friends in Pakistan:http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...rom-hell/8730/

I am now very optimistic after reading the article. This is the last sentence.

A senior US intelligence official told us that General David Petraeus, the new director of the CIA, says he believes he can rebuild relations with the ISI, because he has "a good personal relationship with these guys.

See. A new day has dawned.