by Shuja Nawaz
Intelligence Cooperation and Clashes
Some of the more successful examples of US–Pakistan cooperation over the years involved the ISI and the CIA, though both sides tried to maintain a subterranean operating system in each other’s country. Personal relationships between the various DGs of the ISI and the local CIA station chiefs in Islamabad as well as the director of the CIA played a huge role in the quality of cooperation, especially when things went awry. For example, during the tenure of then Lt. Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, according to a former CIA station chief, the relationship flourished. There was easy access, and local resolution of issues was swift and relatively cordial. At the start of the Afghan war, Robert Grenier also found easy access to his ISI colleagues. Many of these were initiatives aligned for tactical reasons due to pressures from the Department of State or the CIA.
As one CIA station chief, Kevin Hulbert, put it: paradoxically, Pakistan was ‘the best partner in the world on CT, and one of the worst partners on CT!’ He cited the cooperation that yielded the capture of Al-Qaeda operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Anas al Libi, describing the ISI as ‘forward leaning on Al Qaeda. But was it always perfect? No! Did it chase OBL? No!’
Hulbert’s frustrations were reflected in the views of other US intelligence experts who dealt with Pakistan. Most of the ISI’s successes in the CT field, they maintained, were based on provision of US intelligence. As one expert put it, ‘it was amazing how little they knew about AQ. Equally amazing was that the ISI did not know what was going on inside the city of Miram Shah.’ 24 This may not be entirely true. Perhaps the ISI knew but did not share that information with their CIA counterparts. After all the army’s 7 Division field headquarters lay just outside the city limits of Miram Shah. The Pakistan military chose to ignore the operations of the Haqqani Network in North Waziristan even after US officials provided them videos of Haqqani fighters going past Pakistani check posts without any let or hindrance.
Under Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, there were a number of road bumps largely due to the confluence of major issues of discord, especially in 2011. Pasha, a straight-shooting super-nationalist general had come into the world of intelligence at the insistence of Gen. Kayani. He became an activist and an aggressive head of the country’s largest intelligence agency, expanding its operations and remit virtually at will and demanding greater access to information on US operations and operatives inside Pakistan. CIA Director Leon Panetta, himself new to the world of intelligence, parried him at every step, and used the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad as a wedge to expose what he saw as Pakistan’s duplicitous behaviour. Pakistan shut down three joint intelligence fusion cells that had been recently established in Quetta and Peshawar and asked for the CIA-led drone programme to be cut back or be more coordinated with Pakistan. Pasha became the bête noire of the Americans he dealt with.
They found all kinds of ways to criticize and neutralize him. He was the subject of heightened US intelligence surveillance. His travels were monitored carefully, especially to Germany, where the Americans even tracked his extracurricular social activities. Such information could potentially be used as leverage against an official. They also noted, with some element of glee, his serious lapse of tradecraft when on one visit to CIA Headquarters in Langley VA he reportedly brought along and had to surrender his personal iPad. And, the US delegation noted with some amusement that Pasha showed up at a meeting along with Jalaluddin Haqqani’s brother Ibrahim in Doha, after having professed to have no deep connections with the Haqqani leadership. 25 By that time US intelligence had penetrated many Pakistani organizations, according to a now retired US intelligence official. Pakistan may well have suspected this. And only in 2019 it tried and convicted three senior officials for espionage, including two army officers and one doctor working for a ‘sensitive agency’, most likely a nuclear body. 26
Pasha also came under pressure from another quarter. Earlier, his name was mentioned in a civil case filed in a Brooklyn court by a US citizen affected by the 26/11 Mumbai attack:
The 26-page lawsuit accusing the ISI of aiding and abetting the Lashkar-e-Taiba in the slaughter of 166 people was filed before a New York Court on November 19, following which the Brooklyn court issued summons to Major Samir Ali, Azam Cheema, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Nadeem Taj and Major Iqbal of the Inter-Services Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Hafiz Saeed of the Jammat ud Dawaa.
‘The ISI has long nurtured and used international terrorist groups, including the LeT, to accomplish its goals and has provided material support to LeT and other international terrorist groups,’ said the lawsuit filed by relatives of the slain Rabbi. ‘Pasha, who has been director general of the ISI since September 2008, has been summoned, so is Nadeem Taj, the director general of ISI from September 2007 to September 2008. Major Iqbal and Major Samir Ali are other ISI officers who have been issued summons. 27
Pasha suspected the CIA was trying to tighten the screws on him. The government of Pakistan protested this action by a US court. Pasha refused to visit the US till the US government gave him immunity in that case, which it did by telling the federal court:
‘In the view of the United States, the ISI is entitled to immunity because it is part of a foreign state within the meaning of the FSIA (Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act).’
Stuart Delery, principal deputy assistant attorney general, said in a 12-page affidavit submitted to the court on December 17 : ‘Furthermore, the department of state has determined that former (ISI) directors-general Pasha and Taj are immune because the plaintiffs’ allegations relate to acts that these defendants allegedly took in their official capacities as directors of an entity that is undeniably a fundamental part of the Government of Pakistan.’ 28
Then there was the publication of the CIA Station Chief Jonathan Banks’s name in a drone attack–related court case (something that the US believed would have only happened with ISI connivance). 29
Pasha was an influential voice inside the Pakistani government, especially when it came to the passive Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who rarely ever asked for a briefing from his ISI chief. As a rule, Pasha and other ISI chiefs had to essentially force briefings on the prime ministers. A few weeks before the bin Laden raid, Pasha accompanied PM Gilani to Kabul to meet Karzai in order to set up an Afghanistan–Pakistan Joint Commission to speed up the peace process under Afghan aegis. According to the Wall Street Journal, Gilani used the meeting with President Karzai to persuade Karzai to align Afghanistan more with Pakistan and China than the US, despite Afghanistan’s deep dependence on the United States.
The pitch was made at an April 16 meeting in Kabul by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who bluntly told Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the Americans had failed them both, according to Afghans familiar with the meeting. Mr Karzai should forget about allowing a long-term US military presence in his country, Mr Gilani said, according to the Afghans. Pakistan’s bid to cut the US out of Afghanistan’s future is the clearest sign to date that, as the nearly 10-year war’s endgame begins, tensions between Washington and Islamabad threaten to scuttle America’s prospects of ending the conflict on its own terms. 30
Needless to say, as was often the case of such ‘secret’ exchanges with a divided Afghan officialdom, the story was leaked to the US media by some Afghan officials, perhaps even Karzai himself.
One week after bin Laden’s death, the name of another CIA station chief in Islamabad appeared in a Pakistani paper, The Nation. Though the name as published was incorrect, it was close to the name of the official in the US embassy. 31 The official, Mark Kelton, had been at loggerheads with Ambassador Cameron Munter on approval of drone strikes that Munter felt undermined his efforts to build confidence in the US–Pakistan relationship. After the bin Laden raid, the DG-ISI reportedly was furious with Kelton, with whom he had had a frosty relationship. But the US embassy maintained that Kelton would remain in Islamabad.
/> Yet, Kelton left Pakistan in a hurry soon after the raid, under mysterious circumstances that were only revealed publicly five years later:
Two months after Osama bin Laden was killed, the CIA’s top operative in Pakistan was pulled out of the country in an abrupt move vaguely attributed to health concerns and his strained relationship with Islamabad.
In reality, the CIA station chief was so violently ill that he was often doubled over in pain, current and former US officials said. Trips out of the country for treatment proved futile. And the cause of his ailment was so mysterious, the officials said, that both he and the agency began to suspect that he had been poisoned.
Mark Kelton retired from the CIA, and his health has recovered after he had abdominal surgery. But agency officials continue to think that it is plausible—if not provable—that Kelton’s sudden illness was somehow orchestrated by Pakistan’s ISI.
The disclosure is a disturbing postscript to the sequence of events surrounding the bin Laden operation five years ago and adds new intrigue to a counterterrorism partnership that has often been consumed by conspiracy theories. 32
Despite these apparent conflicts, many US intelligence experts valued Pakistan’s cooperation in this field. As one put it, ‘the Predator program is a joint program’, though the Pakistanis may disagree. They wanted targeting control, and at one time Gen. Kayani was prepared to base the control centres in Pakistan, but only if Pakistan was to become involved in targeting decisions. This was not acceptable to the Americans. At the personal level, though, even intelligence operatives from the US had one-year tours, in general, in Pakistan. This did not allow them to develop relationships with their counterparts. When they did, they produced the kind of positive results that Kevin Hulbert recalled. Pakistan went after the militants hiding in the Shaqai Valley in 2004, aided by US intelligence. Hulbert remembered being with his ISI counterparts one evening after the Shaqai operation. ‘Good day today?’ they asked him. ‘Yes!’ he replied enthusiastically. It was a ‘huge event for them to go into Shaqai’, he maintained.
After Pasha, the new ISI head, Lt. Gen. Zahir-ul-Islam, was consumed by domestic issues as the turmoil following the 2013 elections enveloped the political system, producing public sit-ins or dharnas by Imran Khan’s PTI and allies against the government. Both Pasha and Islam’s names were associated with the street opposition to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, though no solid evidence came to the surface. Islam was also a former head of one of the ISI’s wings or directorates, and then had been in the hurly burly of Karachi politics as the corps commander there. 33 Islam’s earlier experience at the ISI had been in monitoring Pakistani internal politics.
Zahir’s activism was not lost on the US embassy. Ambassador Olson recalled during the dharna of Imran Khan when the Grand Trunk Road and the Islamabad Motorway were blocked,
We received information that Zahir [-ul-Islam, the DG-ISI] was mobilizing for a coup in September of 2014. [Army chief] Raheel [Sharif] blocked it by, in effect, removing Zahir, by announcing his successor . . . [Zahir] was talking to the corps commanders and was talking to like-minded army officers . . . He was prepared to do it and had the chief been willing, even tacitly, it would have happened. But the chief was not willing, so it didn’t happen. 34
US surveillance of the ISI and its head was also ongoing. Islam’s successor, Rizwan Akhtar, was a US-trained officer and maintained a good relationship with his US counterparts. But he did not impress all his interlocutors, especially when it came to matters of detail in discussions about the Afghan War. Their criticism was brutal. One US official recalled that in a meeting on Afghan reconciliation efforts Akhtar did not even remember the names of the leading Taliban field commanders. He was a hands-on DG-ISI and reportedly showed up in Karachi, where he had earlier served as DG Rangers, and took over an operation without even informing his brigadier who was the ISI’s sector commander in that city. This kind of criticism did not serve him well in the ISI or even the army. In the event, Akhtar failed to win the confidence of the new army chief, Gen. Bajwa, and resigned by taking early retirement. He was succeeded by another US-trained officer. 35
Lt. Gen. Naveed Mukhtar, who took over from Akhtar, had been a successful and active corps commander in Karachi. He was a graduate of the Army War College at Carlisle, PA. Earlier, he had served on the staff of Army Chief Gen. Jehangir Karamat. In his tenure in Karachi, he had developed a sophisticated understanding of the broader landscape of the city and the terrorism and militancy that had engulfed that city of close to 25 million. Aided by an able and activist commander of the Rangers, then Maj. Gen. Bilal Akbar, they brought the city under control and put the MQM party on the skids. Both of them also supported the few professional senior police officers who were considered honest and not in the pay of the politicians of Sindh. But the military was unable to fundamentally alter the political landscape of Karachi, given the deep-seated roots of both the MQM and the PPP. Despite lip service to support police operations, the military continued to garnish most of the resources and foreign aid for COIN and CT.
Mukhtar, whose father had been a brigadier, was also an alumnus of the ISI, having been DGCT (director general counter terrorism) as a major general, in which capacity he had interacted often with the CIA at home and in the US. Ambassador Olson called the CT Wing or Directorate of the ISI the ‘good ISI’. Mukhtar had a low-profile approach to things and helped keep an even keel during a period of declining US–Pakistan relations.
He was succeeded by the former DG of Military Intelligence at army headquarters, Lt. Gen. Asim Munir. He had also served in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and had the reputation of being a tough officer rooted in Islamic tradition. He was rumoured to have become a Hafiz ul Quran, having committed the Quran to memory. More importantly in the context of the civil–military tensions, he was reported to have been behind the sacking of a high court judge who had been critical of the ISI.
Within Army ranks Asim Munir has the reputation of a ‘hardliner’. His subordinates maintain that his strictness has a cult status among the troops he has managed. Observers have expressed concern that Munir will bring a similar hardline approach as the spymaster, increasing the involvement of the intelligence agency in civilian matters even more than it already has.
A recent [example] of this ‘over-reach’ can be seen in the Supreme Court’s sacking of Islamabad High Court judge Justice Shaukat Aziz on Thursday for criticizing the ISI and noting its involvement in the disqualification and imprisonment of former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.
The decision last week to expel 18 international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) from Pakistan was also taken at the behest of the ISI as well, well-placed sources in the Interior Ministry have confirmed.
Similarly, authorities on Friday arrested rights activist Gulalai Ismail, who is a member of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM)—a Pashtun nationalist movement that is critical of the Pakistan Army.
Military sources say that Munir is a no-nonsense ideologue, who will not tolerate any dissent or spreading of narratives that don’t toe the line defined by the Army. 36
How he would translate his activism on the domestic front to the external relationship with the US was unclear during a period of tension between the two countries. Within eight months of his appointment, he was replaced by another former DG of the ISI. Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, who had been recently promoted and assigned as DG I, T & E at GHQ, was sent back to the ISI to take over as DG from Lt. Gen. Munir. He had been active earlier in the exchanges with a radical Islamist group that had blockaded the Rawalpindi–Islamabad main road at Faizabad and authored and signed the deal with the protesters. An unusual step for an army officer during a civilian government’s rule. At the same time, another major general, in charge of the Punjab Rangers was seen distributing funds to the protesters, ostensibly to cover their travel expenses. This provoked much commentary and questions about the military’s sympathies for such groups. Lt. Gen. Hameed accompanied PM Imran Khan on
his maiden visit to the United States in July 2019 to renew a relationship with the Director CIA.
At the heart of the US–Pakistan relationship was a strong military relationship, built on nearly two decades of intensive training and collaboration since 9/11. Though not always perfect, it provided the basis for dialogue and debate, both. Much better than disengagement, the ill-informed path seemingly chosen by the Trump administration in its early days, at a critical juncture in the Afghanistan conflict. It set aside earlier serious efforts at dialogue that had been launched by well-meaning persons in both the US and Pakistan to reset the relationship on a sustainable path. Only in July 2019 was an attempt made to repair the relationship when President Trump attempted to win over PM Khan with fulsome praise in a hastily organized White House visit, transparently linked to the need for Pakistan to assist the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s help in getting the Taliban to the table. But many efforts were made in this direction in the decade preceding that visit, with the two militaries carrying the weight.
10
Standing in the Right Corner
‘Pakistan would like to remain a part of the solution and not the problem. At the end of the day, we would like to be standing in the right corner of the room.’
—Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani 1
The core of the US–Pakistan relationship over 2008–16 continued to be the direct link between the two militaries. Aiding this was the fact that the Obama administration relied on two military men to handle key relations with Pakistan during its early days. Gen. James Jones, the NSA, took advantage of his earlier experience as SACEUR and head of NATO forces to build on his knowledge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his contacts there to reopen the engagement. He was assisted by the Senior Director for the Region at the NSC, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, a holdover from the Bush administration who had endeared himself to the Obama White House with his diligence and willingness to work even with the most difficult partners at the Department of State. Jones recalled how he requested that the Pakistani team meeting him on his first visit to Pakistan as the NSA should be a combined group of civilians and military men. He felt this would be more effective than meeting them separately. When he got there, the Pakistanis came in a jovial mood, smiling and bantering among themselves, but then some confusion ensued as they tried to sort out who would sit where! They were not used to being in the same room in a large group. 2