While congressional investigations of the Bush administration’s wrongdoing focus on the practice of torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere, there is a much wider range of activities which need to be brought to light. In this week’s article by Steve Coll at the New Yorker, its reported that Pakistan’s Intelligence Agency (ISI) has armed and funded Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is the group blamed for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The ISI is the foreign arm of the Pakistani army which has received $10 billion in U.S. funds as a part of the war on terror.
More after the flip:
Indian government’s dossier concludes that the Mumbai attack was coördinated by Lashkare- Taiba, or the Army of the Pure—a Pakistan-based, Saudi-influenced Islamist terrorist and guerrilla force that fights mainly in Kashmir. A decade ago, Lashkar’s emir, Hafiz Saeed, announced his intention to destroy India: "We will not rest until the whole [of ] India is dissolved into Pakistan." After the Mumbai attack, Saeed delivered a public sermon in Lahore in which he spoke approvingly of a new "awakening" among Indian Muslims, and described his coreligionists as "second to none in taking revenge." A satellite-telephone conversation between one of the Mumbai terrorists and a supervisor in Pakistan, intercepted independently by the United States, also points to Lashkar’s involvement in the raid.
After many weeks of prevarication, Pakistani officials conceded that the Mumbai attackers appear to have come from their country. Pakistan has detained and filed criminal charges against at least one senior Lashkar commander named in the Indian dossier. But it remains unclear how far Pakistan will go to dismantle Lashkar. Since the early nineteen-nineties, Pakistan’s principal military-intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., has armed and funded Lashkar to foment upheaval in Indian-held Kashmir. Although many of Pakistan’s generals are secular or apolitically religious, they have sponsored jihadis as a low-cost means of keeping India off balance.
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In the face of Indian complaints, American officials have sometimes taken a protective posture toward the I.S.I. and the Pakistan Army. Pakistan’s generals have become adept at pursuing both peace talks and covert war simultaneously, and at telling American interlocutors what they wish to hear. After September 11th, in particular, the Bush Administration did little to challenge the dualities in Pakistan’s policies. Bush’s counter-terrorism advisers decided that Kashmir-focussed jihadi groups posed no direct threat to the U.S. The Administration delivered close to ten billion dollars’ worth of military aid to Pakistan, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda, without real oversight and without requiring that the I.S.I. break with regional Islamist groups. "On Al Qaeda, there was nothing we asked them to do that they wouldn’t do," Bob Grenier, who was the C.I.A.’s station chief in Islamabad during 2001 and 2002, recalled. As for groups such as Lashkar, "There was a tremendous amount of ambivalence." I.S.I. leaders seemed "concerned about backlash" if they cracked down too hard on the Kashmir groups, Grenier said.
In addition to Lashkar, the ISI has been accused of supporting other jihadist groups including al-Qaeda.
Critics of the shadowy Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), believed to have worked closely with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, say it is a "rogue agency" - functioning as an "invisible government".
"Politicians have always viewed the ISI in a doubtful light... especially when the ISI was reporting that they were plundering the country," said former ISI director-general Hamid Gul.
"Our foreign office created the impression that the ISI was a rogue agency out of control," General Gul
But because of ISI support for the Taleban, the agency is reported to have developed links with Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Afghan Interior Minister Younis Qanooni has accused the ISI of helping Bin Laden to flee from Afghanistan.
Asked whether the ISI was sponsoring attacks in Kashmir, General Gul said: "I would say it's the freedom movement... They are fighting Indian occupation."
Recent air strikes in Pakistan were called in after messages were intercepted showing coordination between the ISI and the Taleban.
The US decision to launch air strikes in Pakistan was taken after intercepted messages suggested close coordination betweeen the rogue spy agency ISI and the Taliban.
Excerpts of the book, "The Inheritance: The world Obama confronts and the challenges to American power", were published by a Pakistani newspaper on Sunday.
The author claims that American intelligence agencies were intercepting telephonic conversations of army officers and the decision to attack Pakistan through drones was taken after one such high-level conversation was intercepted claiming the Taliban as a ‘strategic asset’ for Pakistan.
According to the daily, the book also claimed that the Americans were in "full knowledge of the facts on the ground and they started attacking territories inside Pakistan as they thought the Pakistan army and intelligence agencies were no more interested in fighting the Taliban."
It also speaks of a two-star general as saying that supporting Taliban was absolutely necessary as "Indians will rein when Americans pull out".
It appears that the Obama administration will be continuing the Bush policy of supporting the Pakistani army. It was reported last week that funding will be increased including an upfront $5 billion package on top of the annual $1.5 billion commitment.
The United States is lining up billions of dollars in new economic and military aid to Pakistan despite reports that Islamabad is using American tax-payer money for deals with the Taliban and accounts of US arms ending up in the hands of the extremists.
More recent accounts from Pakistan have described how high end US military equipment is ending up with extremists through arms bazaars in the country's frontier. Earlier this week, reports from Pakistan detailed $ 6 million paid through back channels to the Taliban in the latest truce in Swat with more in the pipeline.
"Not only is the United States paying the Pakistani government to abdicate territory to the Taliban, we get to fund the Taliban as well," said Bill Roggio, an expert in the war on terror, questioning the Kerry-Lugar proposal aimed to tripling military aid to Pakistan.
"It's time for the US. government to ask if it is getting a good return on its investment. Considering that more than $3.8 billion of $5 billion of US. aid to Pakistan has gone unaccounted for and the Taliban is being funded by the US, perhaps the answer is no," Roggio, who runs the blog Long War Journal, added.
This all begs the question, "Why is the U.S. funding both sides of the war on terror?"