Revamp of Pakistani Intelligence
A revamp of the Pakistani
intelligence community is underway.
On October 12, 1998, five days after
the resignation of Gen.Jehangir Karamat as the army chief following a controversial
talk delivered by him on the post-Chagai situation in Pakistan, Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif replaced Lt. Gen.Nasim Rana by Lt. Gen. Ziauddin, till then
the Adjutant-General, as the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI). Lt. Gen. Rana was subsequently posted as Master-General Ordnance.
Lt. Gen. Ziauddin of the Engineering
Corps, who was promoted as Lt. Gen. on February 25,1996, is due to retire
on February 2,2000.After the recent resignations of Lt. Gens. Ali Quli
Khan and Khalid Nawaz following their supercession by Gen. Pervez Musharraf
as the new army chief, Lt. Gen. Ziauddin has moved to the No.2 slot in
the seniority list of Lt.Gens. Thus, after Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who was
appointed as the DG, ISI, by the late Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and removed by Benazir
Bhutto in February,1989, after his Jalalabad fiasco, Lt. Gen. Ziauddin
has become the seniormost Lt.Gen. to occupy the post of DG, ISI. Lt.Gen.Rana,
who was appointed by Benazir as the ISI chief in 1995, was a Major-General
at the time of his appointment and was subsequently promoted as Lt. Gen.
Maj.Gen. Muhammad Aziz Khan, a Director
in the ISI in charge of Afghan operations including overseeing the activities
of the Taliban, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (formerly Harkat-ul-Ansar) and
the Arab mercenaries under Osama alias Osman Bin Laden, has been promoted
as Lt.Gen. and posted as the Chief of General Staff in which capacity he
would, inter alia, supervise the work of the Directorate-General of Military
Intelligence. In addition to these changes, there has been a number of
reshuffles at the senior and middle levels of the ISI, many of them in
the Afghan section. These reshuffles have been carried out by Lt. Gen. Ziauddin.
On November 5,1998, Col (retd) Iqbal
Niazi, till then the Principal Staff Officer in the Prime Minister's Secretariat,
was appointed as Additional Director-General (ADG) of the Intelligence
Bureau ( IB), with an indication that he would soon be appointed as the
DG. The post of DG has been lying vacant following the removal of Manzoor
Ahmed, the previous DG, by Nawaz Sharif for submitting an incorrect report
that one of the Cruise missiles fired by the US Navy towards Afghanistan
on August 20,1998, had hit a target in Pakistani territory killing many
people. After taking over, Col. Niazi has carried out a re-shuffle of officers
in the Afghan and Sindh sections of the IB. Seven senior Police officers,
two of the rank of Inspectors-General and five of the rank of Deputy Inspectors-General,
who were dealing with Afghanistan and Sindh, have been reverted back to
their parent cadre.
Simultaneously, Lt.Gen. (retd) Javed
Nasir of the Tablighi Jamaat, who was removed as DG, ISI, by Nawaz Sharif
in 1993 under US pressure because of the CIA's displeasure over his alleged
non-cooperation in the re-purchase of the unused Stinger missiles from
the Afghan mujahideen, and Brig. (retd) Imtiaz, Director of the internal
Political Division of the ISI under Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, have started working
as principal intelligence and security advisers to Nawaz Sharif. According
to the "Frontier Post " of Peshawar ( October 16,1998), the two work from
Nawaz Sharif's residential office.
After coming to power in 1988, Benazir
abolished the internal Political Division of the ISI and dismissed Brig. Imtiaz. Nawaz
Sharif, then Chief Minister of Punjab, took him as his security
adviser and made him responsible for assisting the Sikh extremist elements.
When he became the Prime Minister in 1990, he appointed Brig. Imtiaz as
the Director (the post has since been upgraded as DG) of the IB. On returning
to power in 1993, Benazir again dismissed Brig. Imtiaz and had him arrested
and prosecuted for illegal activities during his tenure in the ISI, including
the alleged murder of a member of a leftist party. He was acquitted by
the court last year.
The Pakistani intelligence community
consists of the ISI, which is the external intelligence agency, the IB,
the internal agency, and the Directorates-General of Intelligence of the
Army, the Navy and the Air Force. The ISI, which is a totally military
agency, however, works under the Prime Minister and its budget is part
of the budget of the Defence Ministry as in France and Germany. The IB,
which is largely officered by police officers, but increasingly headed
by retired or serving military officers, comes under the Interior Ministry
and its budget is part of the budget of that Ministry.
Till 1989, the ISI was always headed
by a serving army officer and had primacy in the intelligence community.
Even though its charter describes it as an external intelligence agency,
successive Pakistani leaders have used it for internal intelligence too,
particularly in the non-Punjabi minority provinces of the erstwhile East
Pakistan, Balochistan, Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)
as they did not trust the police officers of the IB belonging to the non-Punjabi
communities.
In 1989, Benazir decided to restore
to the civilian IB its primacy in the intelligence community and remove
from the ISI internal intelligence tasks. To carry out her decisions, she
appointed Maj.Gen.(retd) Shamsur Rahman Kallue, a close friend of her father's,
as the ISI chief. Her decisions to restore primacy to the IB and to break
with the past practice of appointing a serving Maj.Gen. as the ISI chief
marked the beginning of her differences with Gen.Mirza Aslam Beg, the then
Army chief, and led to her ultimate dismissal in August,1990.
On becoming Prime Minister in 1990-end,
Nawaz Sharif reversed her orders, appointed Lt.Gen. Assad Durrani, a serving
officer, as the ISI chief and restored to the ISI its primacy in the intelligence
community . The position was again changed by Benazir on returning to power
in November,1993. She not only restored the primacy of the IB and made
it exclusively responsible for internal intelligence, but also transferred
many sensitive Afghan operations from the ISI to the IB. She made her Interior
Minister, Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babar, who as a Colonel had headed
the ISI's Afghan Division under her father, exclusively responsible for
Afghan operations. Maj.Gen. Babar, with the assistance of the USA's Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), was the creator of the Taliban and helped it
in capturing Kabul in September,1996.
Benazir and the CIA had each their
own reason for creating and backing the Taliban. A company with which Asif
Zardari, her husband, was connected , had the exclusive contract for the
import of cotton from Turkmenistan for Pakistan's textile industry and
the Taliban protected the cotton convoys from attacks by other mujahideen
groups. The CIA was interested in using the Taliban for its operations
against Iran and for facilitating the construction of oil and gas pipelines
by UNOCAL, the US oil company, from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.
When the Sudan asked Bin Laden to
quit its territory in May,1996, Maj.Gen.Babar persuaded Benazir to agree
to a request from Burhanuddin Rabbani, then in power in Kabul, to let Bin
Laden travel to Jalalabad via Pakistani territory on condition that he
would not act against the US and Saudi Arabia from Afghan territory. Maj.Gen.
Babar, through the IB and the ISI and with the support of the Taliban which
had reasons to be grateful to him, ensured this.
The caretaker Government of Meraj Khalid, which came to power after her dismissal in November,1996, and Nawaz
Sharif who returned to power after the elections of February,1997, restored
the primacy of the ISI once again, transferred all Afghan operations back
to the ISI, dismissed and arrested Masood Sharif, DG,IB, under Benazir,
for his alleged involvement in the murder of her brother Murtaza Bhutto
in September,1996, and replaced a large number of Police officers of the
IB with serving and retired military officers, many of them deputed from
the ISI. However, Nawaz Sharif did not disturb Lt.Gen. Rana even though
he was an appointee of Benazir and allowed him to continue as the DG of
the ISI.
Maj. Gen.Rafiullah Niazi, who had
been appointed by the caretaker Government as the DG, IB, in place of Masood
Sharif, was replaced by Nawaz Sharif with Manzoor Ahmed in September,1997,
following the assassination of some Iranian military trainees at Rawalpindi
by the Sipah-e-Sahaba, a Sunni extremist organisation. Manzoor Ahmed himself
was removed after the US bombing of Afghanistan on August 20,1998.
Four reasons are attributed for
Nawaz Sharif's decision to remove Lt.Gen. Rana from the ISI and to revamp
the ISI and the IB.
* Nawaz's displeasure over the
failure of the agencies to effectively control the Taliban and Bin Laden,
both of whom are fast becoming Frankensteins. Nawaz was reportedly unhappy
with the failure of the two agencies to prevent the press conference of
Bin Laden at Khost in Afghanistan on May,26,1998, in which he called for
a jihad against the US and Israel. Pakistani analysts also say that the
Iranian diplomats and a large number of Shias of Mazar-e- Sharif were massacred
not by the Deobandi Pashtoons of the Taliban as was initially believed
but by the Deobandi Punjabis of the Sipah-e-Sahaba of Pakistan who had
also joined the Taliban and the Arab mercenaries of Bin Laden in the assault
on the town.
* His annoyance with both the
agencies and particularly with Lt.Gen. Rana over their perceived failure
to keep him correctly informed of the proceedings of a Corps Commanders
conference held on September 19,1998, in which some participants with Lt.Gens.
Ali Kuli Khan and Khalid Nawaz (since superseded) in the forefront, allegedly
criticised Nawaz Sharif's erratic style of governance and inept handling
of the economy which, they feared, could neutralise whatever advantages
Pakistan might have acquired through its nuclear explosions. It is their
criticism which later on impelled Gen. Karamat to make his controversial
statement.
* The failure of the ISI to collect
timely intelligence about India's plans to carry out nuclear tests in May.
* The poor performance of the
IB in Sindh and Punjab.
It has been reported that after India's
nuclear tests, Lt.Gen. Javed Nasir had commissioned a study by two of his
trusted officers in the ISI on the failure to forecast Pokhran-II. They
were reported to have strongly criticised the functioning of the intelligence
set-up. Extracts from the report as published by the "News" of Islamabad
(September 27,1998) stated as follows: " The national intelligence apparatus
has considerably lost its usefulness in fulfilling the intelligence needs
of the policy-makers and the entire intelligence network suffers from a
grave disconnection between military and civilian efforts, leading to what
may be described as undercover anarchy."
It added: " For any significant
improvement in the Pakistan intelligence community, it has to be controlled
by a single incontestable authority, with its funds cut by half, making
business-as-usual impossible to sustain. The time has come to realise the
need and importance of unclassified government information, research and
open sources and integrate them with classified national intelligence.
These expanding new avenues are a must to understand the context of all
classified information. Unclassified sources provide you the required data
base for intelligence analysis. And since most of our intelligence community
does not know what is already available from unclassified sources, it lacks
the context and precision and is generally busy discovering what is already
discovered. Unfortunately, at present, we have no system for connecting
the classified intelligence analysts to the wealth of open sources ; nor
even, for that matter, to the vast quantities of unclassified information
available to the rest of the Government."
One of the priority tasks of the
reshuffled ISI is going to be to pressurise the Taliban to throw Bin Laden
out of Afghanistan. Nawaz Sharif is under tremendous pressure from the
US to make the Taliban moderate its anti-woman policies and to hand over
Bin Laden to the US, failing which the US reportedly wants the ISI and
the IB to co-operate with the CIA and the FBI in having him captured from
his hide-out in Kandahar and flown to the US in a Noriega-style operation.
Nawaz is apparently in a dilemma.
Bin Laden is a hero figure to large sections of Pashtoons not only of Afghanistan,
but also of Pakistan. Any suspicion that he colluded with the US in the
capture of Bin Laden could turn the Pashtoon public opinion in general
and the Islamic extremists in particular against him. At the same time,
failure to act on the repeated US requests could delay the lifting of the
US sanctions against Pakistan even if he gives satisfaction to the US on
the non-proliferation issue.
Pakistani authorities, therefore,
seem to be trying to explore the possibility of helping Bin Laden to escape
to the Southern Philippines where the Abu Sayaaf group might give him shelter
in the territory under its control or to Chechnya. No Government of any
Islamic State would accept him lest they fall foul of the US. The only
way out, in Pakistani calculation, is to help him flee to a country where
Muslim insurgent elements control some territory.
B.RAMAN
18-12-98
(The writer is Additional Secretary
(Retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and presently Director, Institute
For Topical Studies, Chennai.)
