Pakistan: Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) - An Analytical Overview

[davidbfpo]

An Indian article from the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses (October 2011), by Rana Banerji, a former senior intelligence officer with RAW; following a hat tip from Hamid Hussain, our occasional contributor and for the moment this deserves its own thread.

Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) feature regularly in posts, either in the South Asia arena or in OEF, but IMO rarely in such detail.

Hamid has added his commentary, with his text in red and is on the attachment - alas minus the charts, diagrams etc.

He starts with:

This is one of the most comprehensive articles written about ISI. It is an Indian perspective but not an amateur one. Respected author probably has access to database kept by Indian intelligence agencies about their rival intelligence agency of Pakistan. Author has used Mr. Shuja Nawaz’s encyclopedic work on Pakistan army and also used some of my own very limited work on Pakistan army.

Link to article:http://idsa.in/system/files/jds_5_4_rbanerji.pdf

The article is very comprehensive, the charts are a bonus.

[jcustis]

Thanks for pulling this one in David. I have wracked my brain for a long time to be able to understand why ISI does what it does. I haven't started this, but I imagine that it will only stand to expand my base of knowledge significantly.

[davidbfpo]

Hamid Hussain our regular contributor has written a short paper 'The Beginnings – Early Days of Intelligence in Pakistan' and is attached.

Fascinating to see an Australian soldier played such a role; the Notes do have a link to his on-line biography. I was aware that a British General Gracey served as the first Army CinC, but not that an Australian general was Chief of Staff.

[SWJ Blog]

The Pakistani Godfather: The Inter-Services Intelligence and the Afghan Taliban 1994-2010

Copied here as prelude to next post

[davidbfpo]

The SWJ article linked above, by two Swiss authors, led to Carl commenting:

This is quite an excellent monograph and I congratulate the authors. It does two very good things.

First, it gathers together and presents in one place an overwhelming body of evidence confirming Pakistani perfidy. It is sort of a one stop shop when looking for references and evidence of murderous double dealing by the Pakistani government.

Second, the authors don't mince words. The "Pakistani establishment" takes American money and uses it to support people who kill American and NATO troops, blowing off their legs and genitals among other things. They kill Americans. And without Pakistani help, Taliban & Co could not be in the favorable position they are now in. I wish we could be so plain spoken.
That we have allowed this to go on for a decade will forever be a puzzlement to historians. It is as if Western Approaches Command had had liaison officers from the U-boat Waffe attached to and working closely with them to coordinate activities and distribute Lend-Lease aid (to the U-boat Waffe); and Churchill kept wondering why the merchantmen continued getting sunk.

Pakistan and ISI often appear in posts, not always in South Asia threads, but the U-Boat comparison is - well - powerful.

[Firn]

I rarely comment on this stuff but I posted once a rather similar comment which I want to reframe.

To me it seems that the ISI suffers from a clear case of groupthink and institutional imperative. They seem to be so impressed by the way they are playing the US&Co that they focus all their energy to do so while they are arguably harming their countries 'true' interest very much. In short they do the wrong thing in such a smart&successful way that they must be congratulating how clever they are. We will see if the slipped dogs of civil war can still be controlled...

[carl]

David:

We could carry the analogy further with the U-boat Waffe liaison officers giving up an Italian submarine occasionally, Coastal Command VLR Liberators (the disruptive technology of the day) going after Russian subs in the Baltic and maybe Brooke making public pronouncements about how good a buddy Doenitz was.

I really think what we have been doing in Af-PAK, for 12 YEARS (!), is as mad as the impossible to conceive analogy I presented.

We know and have known how insane this situation has been for years. The monograph does an excellent job of pulling all the open source evidence together. The problem may be that we may never see official documents confirming how bad the situation has been. Computer files may be a lot easier to 'disappear' than paper. The powers that be have a huge incentive to erase official evidence about how their impregnable personal pride, naivete and arrogance has played right into the hands of the grifters in 'Pindi, and how that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of Americans and thousands and thousands of Afghans.

Firn: The thing that interests, and enrages, me is our behavior. The feudal elites/Pak Army/ISI are destroying their country for their own short term benefit and nothing can stop them now. Ironically I think, us being such fools has robbed Pakistan of any chance it may have had. If we had stopped their game 10 years ago they may have been discredited and maybe Pakistan would have had a chance. Not now though. The thing with the game they run on us is they run it on us. It can only work on such titanic fools such as the American elites. Nobody else has the proper combination of narcissistic pride and ignorance. It is no accomplishment besting a fool but they won't remember that and will have very great trouble because the guys in their neighborhood are no fools.

But like I said, the thing that interests me is our behavior. It is beyond reason.

(David: I like my analogy but I am not sure how many people get it on this side of the pond. There may not be many people familiar with the Battle of the Atlantic anymore.)