Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 6, 2003
Washington: Pakistan's top spymaster
Ehsanul Haq, Director of the Inter-Services Intelligence, better known
by the acronym ISI, has begun a weeklong visit to Washington. There are
expectations that he will be asked to clean up the wanton ways the agency
is notorious for and back the peace process with India.
Although no details are being released
about the visit, Haq is said to be meeting top US officials dealing With
security matters, including chiefs of the CIA and FBI, besides cabinet
officials such as homeland security boss Tom Ridge, national security adviser
Condoleeza Rice, and deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who has
just left for the subcontinent.
The range and level of meetings
reflect the importance the Bush administration is attaching to reining
in the spy network that is often accused of being a state within a state
in Pakistan.
Among the subjects on the table
during these discussions will be the issue of infiltration and cross-border
terrorism that has brought India to the brink: of war with Pakistan. Despite
routine denials by the Pakistani government, both Washington and New Delhi
say on record that the incursions are continuing, sometimes at reduced
levels.
Both sides have determined that
separately with technical means at their disposal and shared the data,
according to sources familiar with the exchanges.
The issue is not just infiltration,
but the widespread connections of Pakistani intelligence with the fundamentalist,
jehadi, and ultimately the terrorist constituency, officials say.
In the most recent instance, it
has come to light that David Hicks, an Australian who fought alongside
the Taliban and is currently detained in Guantanamo Bay, told US interrogators
that he "joined" the Pakistan Army and went on missions inside Jammu and
Kashmir. This could not have happened without official Pakistani complicity.
Also last week, French philosopher-writer
Bernard Henri-Levy charged in a BBC interview that Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl was killed after he discovered the involvement of
the ISI with extremist elements.
In a new book to be released shortly,
Levy says Pearl was killed by British- born Islamic militant Ahmed Omar
Saeed Sheikh, who he claims is a double agent working for the ISI. Sheikh,
incidentally, surrendered to a former top official of the ISI, Brig Ejaz
Shah, when he was governor of Punjab.
The Pakistan government kept the
arrest under wraps and disclosed it to Washington only after Gen Musharraf
met President Bush here last year:
Such murky incidents have undermined
the trust between Washington and Islamabad despite the public face both
sides put on in describing as positive their operational cooperation.
