ISI cleansed of extremist supporters?

[S-2]

"Where exactly did I argue that America created Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban?

Blowing in the door half-cocked or what?"

Your reaction is justified. I was actually supportive of your earlier comment to that end and just phrased it really, really poorly. Forgive me.

 

[ajpirzada]

ISI recruits army personals and army recruits pakistanis. so to answer this old question one must think if pakistan has been cleansed of ppl who are against this WoT?? look at any survery and ull find majority in pakistan against war on terror and also american presence in the region. knowing this makes it quite impossible to achieve such a thing

 

[mhacsan]

In my view this is a candid admission that ISI did support extremist elements.

"Without ISI's help you could not have apprehended the 700 or so al-Qaeda operatives. ISI has done more than any other organization has done," the foreign minister said.


And I am really not sure how this so called 'cleansing' of ISI is going to work out. Its like taking the soul out of ISI's body.

u r right mate, u took the word out of my mouth, this is stripping ISI of his functional organs, and probably u can see it in present circumstances where these suicide attacks are prevailing.

this also means that we are open to more Alqida and Taliban penetrations, not only that but also the CIA+RAW nexsus can be more effective at the same time.

and also what i feel that strategies which are made with -Bottom-up - approach are more effective as they take care of 360 degree angel input from all the stakeholders, and stripping ISI off from Bottom-up approach strategy(where more of these links exist as suspected by western media) means we have the option of Top-down approach left only.

i am definitely not in favor of Cleansing of any kind of ISI, this is one of the two institution i m proud of as Pakistani, and they deserve to be state within (and the reason for this i gave in other post siting incompetence's, knowledge and education, ability to root cause and strategy making etc) they repeatedly defeat American and Raw interest, and if we are to leave with such an ISI which can not give reasons for its own existence then we will have trouble remaining as a nation

and i know it wont happen, sorry for disheartening

 

[Energon]

Allow me to rephrase my point. Top level Administration, defence and military officials use this 'ISI is a State within a State' rhetoric to influence opinion, including legislators and 'analysts' (that depend upon whatever information the Administration feeds them).

The foundation of distrust is laid in the form of the US Admin and media trumpeting this rogue intelligence agency acting counter to both US and Pakistani (government) interests. What this allows the US Admin. to do is avoid any serious analysis of the legitimate concerns Pakistan has, how Pakistan's national security concerns drive its policies (including what the ISI does) and therefore present a more 'palatable' picture of everyone (US and Pakistan) being on board, and the 'ISI/PA playing spoilsport. It seeks to suggest that even within Pakistan there is a large body of support for US policies, and only one 'rogue institution' opposes it.

The 'dual structure' of the ISI implies that the ISI is a 'rogue', which leads us back to the original argument.

This is not purely rhetoric or a concerted US/Western media campaign to shift the blame needlessly unto Pakistan. You'll be surprised how much time, effort and resources are being spent on researching the nuances of this issue, not just by the influential intelligence communities (global), but also other governmental agencies and academic institutions. Rest assured, the comments being made by US officials (particularly Holbrooke) are on the basis of analyses from large caches of data; a lot of it by Pakistani scholars (who are also among the unnamed sources for obvious reasons). The ISI's status as a rogue agency is really nothing new. Here too there is ample intelligence and information which has been factored into policy for quite a few years. The caveat of course is that none of this information can be discussed or released publicly because the consequences would be catastrophic and the primary objective of strengthening a Pakistani governmental structure would be rendered inert.

 

[Energon]

I agree with you here, but that is not how the debate is typically characterized in the West, indeed it is almost always about how the ISI is acting alone

It's actually better this way. This ISI issue is very, very sensitive because it implicates quite a few members of the military elite by default. As I mentioned before, tackling that topic publicly would be catastrophic to this entire venture.

I do not doubt that at the higher level Administration and military officials do see the situation more clearly, in all its complexity (and on rare occasions have hinted to that effect in the last month or so), but that is not how they choose to articulate it and 'sell' it.

I realize that this communication issue has always troubled you, and probably many other Pakistanis, particularly ones who are well educated and either live in or interact heavily with the west. Here's my take on it:
The first thing to realize here is that there isn't yet a consensus how to 'sell' this topic to the public, in fact there are a whole lot of differing opinions and even internal conflicts regarding this issue. The voicing of the US point of view is by no means a monolith and certainly isn't a conspiracy to tarnish the image of Pakistan. It's just that this problem is extremely complex, and inherently dichotomous. It is clear to the US (after much deliberation and information review) that Pakistan is the source of the problem in the current Af-P@k scenario, but at the same time there is nothing that can be actively done to resolve the situation because any more pressure on Pakistan will lead to a dissolution of the state's establishment which then exponentially worsens the situation.

Us policymakers are also well aware that not all the members of Pakistan's ruling elite (civilian and military) are crooks. Some of them even have the best of intentions; but most of Pakistan's establishments are also dichotomous by design and cater primarily to ambivalence, a philosophy that runs deep without much consideration for the overall picture and/or long term implications. Americans (and most countries/societies around the world) simply aren't used to dealing with such a complex and frustrating situation; and that only makes articulating the issues all the more difficult and messy.

Also, this is a new administration which has only recently started pursuing their policies with full force, it will take some time to establish a rapport. There is a great need to infuse the state's apparatus and the people of Pakistan with some much needed dignity. This will also go a long way in reverting many of the dangerous self destructive mechanisms of the society which is at the very core of the general threat; but trying to conduct a rapid-infusion by faking another call for an equitable friendship will merely bring us back to square one a decade from now, and this should be avoided at all costs.The axiomatical basis of this relationship is that the US and Pakistan are not equals (never have been). The US foreign policy machine has always been good at creating a short term illusion of equitability, but eventually reality catches up leading to a bitter transition from 'buddy-in-need' to 'patron state'. I hope this vicious cycle is avoided altogether this time around. Voicing serious concerns and frustrations in limited scope from time to time may actually be a good thing.

There is no dichotomy between the contacts that the ISI continues to retain amongst some of the Taliban, and GoP/PA policy of keeping Pakistan's bets hedged WRT the developing US strategy in Afghanistan.

Could you please elaborate upon this a bit further?

Ok, out of time again, have to bounce.

 

[Patriot]

Why the Pakistan intelligence agency's close ties with the Taliban should not be condemned by Robert........
No matter how much leverage you hold over a country, it is rare that you can get it to act against its core self-interest. The United States has struggled with this dilemma for decades in regards to its relations with Israel and South Korea. Self-interest based on the facts of geography is what makes America’s relations with these two close allies particularly fractious. Israel has long refused to scale back settlements in the occupied territories, frustrating U.S. efforts at peacemaking, even as American soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conversely, South Korea has, in certain periods, extended an olive branch to the North Korean communists, frustrating U.S. efforts to erect a strong, united front against the Pyongyang regime. Now the U.S. faces the same problem with another of its ostensible allies, Pakistan.

The U.S. demands that Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its spy agency, sever relations with the Taliban. Based on Pakistan’s own geography, this makes no sense from a Pakistani point of view. First of all, maintaining lines of communications and back channels with the enemy is what intelligence agencies do. What kind of a spy service would ISI be if it had no contacts with one of the key players that will help determine its neighbor’s future?

This is particularly the case when one considers the long and unruly land border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how both countries form one organic region. Indeed, Sugata Bose, a history professor at Harvard, in 2003 described the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier area as “historically no frontier at all,” but the very “heart” of an “Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic economic, cultural, and political domain that had straddled Afghanistan and Punjab for two millennia.” The fact, which we all keep repeating, that there is no solution for Afghanistan without a solution for Pakistan, is itself an indication of the extent to which both countries are joined. This makes it even more crucial for the ISI to maintain contacts and highly developed networks with all principle Afghani political and guerrilla groups.

We've done the same thing ourselves. In 1976, U.S. special envoy Talcott Seelye was able to effect the evacuation of American diplomats and their families from war-torn Beirut only because of contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a group that we weren’t supposed to be talking to at the time. And all agree it was a grave mistake on our part to have abruptly left the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region after the fall of the Berlin Wall, letting our own carefully constructed networks there wither on the vine.

Remember, it wasn’t radicals burrowed deep within the ISI who made the decision to help bring the Taliban to power in the mid-1990s: it was the democratically elected government of the western-educated Benazir Bhutto who did that, on the theory that the Taliban would help bring stability to Afghanistan. This history indicates the degree to which talking to the Taliban has broad support within the Pakistani political establishment.

The Pakistani military and political establishment both view Afghanistan through the lens of their conflict with India. When they look to the west they envision an “Islamistan” of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with which to face off against Hindu-dominated India to Pakistan’s east. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, with his pro-western and pro-Indian tendencies, gets in the way of this Pakistani vision. But even if Pakistan were to come to terms with Karzai, it would still need to have lines of contact with all Afghan groups, including the Taliban.

Of course, we can and should demand that Pakistan cease helping the Taliban to plan and carry out operations. But cutting links to the Taliban altogether is something the Pakistanis simply cannot do, and trying to insist upon it only worsens tensions between our two countries.

So what do we do? There are those who say we should abandon the Afghanistan enterprise altogether, with the exception of direct strikes against al-Qaeda. But President Barack Obama has already decided against that, and is adding both troops and civilian experts to the campaign, which amounts to Afghan nation-building in all but name. The hope is that by turning the tide of the war in our favor, the Pakistanis will, for the sake of their own self-interest, cut a better deal with the pro-western Karzai, even as they continue to maintain less-harmful, low-level links with the Taliban. That is the best we can expect.

As in Iraq, we may find that in order to make progress and find an exit strategy, we will have to engage in negotiations with some of the very people we’ve been fighting. At some point we may even end up negotiating with elements of the Taliban ourselves. The one thing that we cannot afford in this messy situation is to issue very public, cut-and-dried ultimatums to our purported friends.
Talking to the Taliban - The Atlantic (April 6, 2009)