Payback time: ISI's terrorists turn against Pak

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence has lost control of some of the networks of militants it has nurtured since the 1980s and is now suffering the violent backlash of that policy, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency have admitted to the US daily that the ISI has also supported militants in Kashmir although at the behest of its political masters, confirming what New Delhi believed all along and repeatedly complained about to Islamabad in vain.

Despite the crackdown on all militants ordered by President Pervez Musharraf, some officials in the government and the ISI thought the militants should be held in reserve, as insurance against the day when US and NATO forces abandoned the region and Pakistan might again need them as a lever against India, the daily writes in a detailed full-page report.

As the army has moved against them, the militants have joined hands with other extremist groups to battle Pakistani security forces and carried out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto, the paper says.

The growing strength of Pakistani militants, many of whom now back al-Qaeda's global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan's security as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan, forcing US officials to consider covert operations in the lawless border areas in the northwest.

One disclosure about the ISI is bound to raise fears among opposition parties of rigging of polls scheduled next month.

The newspaper’s sources acknowledged that the ISI manipulated the country's last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Musharraf. He has, however, ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, says the newspaper.

After September 11, 2001, though Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan.

After the agency unleashed hardline Islamist beliefs, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading. Worse, dozens of ISI officers had come to sympathise with the militants cause and had to be expelled from the agency, the Times reports, quoting former Pakistani officials.

"We could not control them," said a former senior intelligence official. "We indoctrinated them and told them, 'You will go to heaven.' You cannot turn it around so suddenly."

News Source : Samachar