Col. David Lapan said Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, himself a former spy chief, was aware of US concerns about the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and shared some of them.
Here are some questions and answers about the ISI, the most powerful intelligence agency in Pakistan, a country the United States sees as indispensable to its efforts to tame a raging Taleban insurgency in Afghanistan.
The shadowy military intelligence agency has evolved into what some describe as a state within a state.
Widely feared by Pakistanis, it is believed to have a hidden role in many of the nuclear-armed nation’s policies, including in Afghanistan, one of US President Barack Obama’s top foreign policy priorities.
The ISI is seen as the Pakistani equivalent of the US Central Agency (CIA) — with which it has had a symbiotic but sometimes strained relationship — and Israel’s Mossad.
Its size is not publicly known but the ISI is widely believed to employ tens of thousands of agents, with informers in many spheres of public life.
Hard-line elements within the ISI are capable of being spoilers, no matter what position a Pakistani government might take, a reality the US and Afghan governments should take into account if they attempt to exclude Pakistan from negotiations with the Afghan Taleban.
Created in 1948, the ISI gained importance and power during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and is now rated one of best-organized intelligence agencies in the developing world.
The ISI along with the United States, nurtured the Afghan mujahedeen, and helped them win the war. It helped to plan many of their operations and was the main conduit for Western arms. It later helped create the Taleban.
Although Pakistan officially abandoned support for the Taleban after joining the US-led war against Al-Qaeda and Taleban, critics, including Western military commanders in Afghanistan, say it has maintained its ties with, and support for, the Afghan Taleban. The military denies supporting the Taleban but says agents maintain links with militants, as any security agency would do, in the interests of intelligence.
Analysts say the main preoccupation of the ISI, and the Pakistani military, is the threat from nuclear-armed rival India and it sees the Afghan Taleban as tools to influence events, and limit India’s role, in Afghanistan.
The ISI was heavily involved in the 1990s in creating and supporting militant factions that battled Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir region. Some of those groups have since joined forces with the Pakistani Taleban to attack the state, including the ISI. That militants alliance may be the biggest threat to Pakistan’s long-term security, analysts say.
Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha is the director general of the ISI and a close ally of Kayani. Pasha is seen as anti-Taleban, unlike some of his predecessors, and analysts suggest he is using the ISI to broker some sort of deal between factions of the Afghan Taleban and the Afghan government. Although he is seen as relatively moderate, the ISI is almost certain to come under a new wave of pressure as the United States gets increasingly frustrated with the army’s perceived reluctance to go after Afghan Taleban fighters who cross the border to attack Western forces in Afghanistan. But the strategic interests of the ISI, headquartered in a sprawling, well-guarded complex in Islamabad, will invariably come first, analysts say.
